Here’s a surprising reversal of roles: drug giant Pfizer is accusing the open access journal PLoS Medicine of failing to disclose a financial conflict of interest.
The accusation, which was covered by Pharmalot, revolves around a paper PLoS Medicine published this month accusing pharmaceutical company Wyeth (which Pfizer took over last year) of employing ghost writers to help understate the risks of its hormone replacement therapy Prempro in the medical literature. (See our coverage of the paper here).
The analysis, which was based on publicly available documents, was written by a Georgetown University Medical Center researcher, Adriane Fugh-Berman, who is also employed by the law firms suing Pfizer on behalf of patients who took hormone replacement therapy.
In a letter to PLoS, Pfizer complains that the paper’s disclosure form states that “Dr. Fugh-Berman was a paid expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs in the litigation referred to in this paper” (their emphasis), when Fugh-Berman is still an expert witness for the firms suing Pfizer (our emphasis).
When I spoke to Fugh-Berman about the paper before it came out, she was up front about her involvement in the lawsuit. Still it seems like PLoS could have easily made clear that Fugh-Berman is still involved in the lawsuits.
Pfizer also complains that PLoS failed to mention that the law firm that helped it and the New York Times make some of the ghost-writing documents available, Public Justice P.C., also represents some of the plaintiffs suing Pfizer/Wyeth. “The bottom line is that Dr. Fugh-Berman, her article, and PLoS Medicine serve the current and future interests of plaintiffs’ lawyers suing Wyeth,” Pfizer writes in their letter to PLoS.
On Pharmalot, PLoS Medicine’s editor Virginia Barbour responds: “We intervened in the Prempro case solely because of our interest in unmasking this practice. We have no professional, financial, legal or other relationship with the plaintiffs or their lawyers in any of the cases that Wyeth is defending, or in any other past or ongoing legal case.”