OCHU

Why sign the Petition to Get the Drug Company Pfizer off the Canada Institutes of Health Research Board?

Canadians are being invited to sign a petition against the appointment of Dr. Bernard Prigent, a senior executive of Pfizer, to the Governing Council of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) So far, over 3,000 Canadians have signed, including senior health researchers, clinicians, ethicists, health policy experts, as well as ordinary Canadians who understand that this appointment represents a significant threat to the integrity of CIHR by entrenching an intractable structural conflict of interest.

To quote from one of the signatories, “You don’t put the rooster in charge of the hen house.” The duty of pharmaceutical companies (e.g., Pfizer) is to make money for their shareholders. The duty of CIHR is to promote the public interest. The interests of shareholders and the interests of Canadians are not one and the same.

One of the most vocal critics is Steven Lewis, a Saskatchewan health researcher and former member of the council, which has a $1-billion-a-year budget and funds the work of thousands of researchers across Canada.
Lewis noted in an essay to be published today that the pharmaceutical industry has engaged in "countless systematic transgressions" against scientific integrity and honest marketing over the last decade.

"The industry's greatest innovations have occurred outside the lab," he wrote. "Expensive junkets for docs-for-hire to shill for their products to their peers; the purchase of previously distinguished academics to affix their names to ghostwritten papers; the suppression of unfriendly clinical trials and adverse effects data; the publication of the same data in different journals to bias systematic reviews and metaanalyses; etc. ad infinitum."

Lewis said it is "hardly irrelevant that the company to which Dr. Prigent owes his livelihood and his allegiance has owned up to sleaze that stands out even among its shady peers."

Please sign the petition an circulate to others.

http://www.gopetition.com/online/32371.html