Weird science
Tuesday, October 21 2008
This story is double trouble: a couple of academics wrote a paper critical of a major study published by the Journal of Healthcare Economics that estimates the cost of developing new drugs at $802 million. The critique pointed out conflicts of interest, methodological issues, and so on, casting doubt on the validity of that estimate. The critique was accepted, but then put through a horrific editorial process, which muted and omitted much of its criticism. Now the critique’s authors have an article about their ordeal in the Harvard Health Policy Review – but it’s been disappeared from that journal’s website.
If you have a sense of how academia is supposed to work, read the HHPR article and be appalled.
If you don’t think this matters, consider this: drug makers justify the high prices on patent medicines (and the ever-increasing terms of patents) by pointing to the costs they spend developing the drugs. If they can point to an objective academic journal that backs up their claims, that helps deflect criticism of their prices. If they can sneak a fraudulent article into the same journal, that’s more or less the same from their point of view.
In any case, the drug companies have a lot at stake here, and clearly they’re not above throwing their weight around. The downside for everyone else is higher drug prices and more expensive health care.
