"A number of scientists on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) flu advisory committee, which monitors pandemics and provides guidance for governments, for example, have disclosed links with the pharmaceutical industry.
But given that the media can influence demand for pharmaceutical products and perceptions of risk, we set out to examine whether health experts commentating on swine flu more generally were also more likely to have links to drug companies.
Analysing UK newspaper coverage of the swine flu pandemic between April and July 2009 – the period in which the UK government was taking decisions on how best to respond to the emerging pandemic, including providing the public with vaccine and antiviral drugs – we looked for how often scientists were quoted in articles on the pandemic from a wide range of publications.
We then looked at these comments in more detail to see if scientists made an assessment of the risk to the public from swine flu, and if so, we compared these against assessments made by official agencies such as the Department of Health."
"We found that half of the health experts that commentated on the use of antiviral drugs or vaccine had competing interests. And scientists promoting the use of antiviral drugs were eight times more likely to have a competing interest than those that didn’t comment on their use. We also found that health experts with competing interests were six times more likely than those without to predict a higher risk to the public compared to official assessments."
https://theconversation.com/health-experts-with-pharma-links-more-likely-to-talk-up-risk-20108
