There are criminally greedy men running big Pharma! Homicidal maniacs in fact.
It’s the morning of the trial. The jury will shortly be sworn in.
The crux of the matter in Dolin Vs GSK is whether or not Paxil caused Stewart Dolin to kill himself whilst under Paxil’s influence.
Dolin’s widow, Wendy, intends to show the jury details of GSK’s prior knowledge of the Paxil suicide link. Furthermore, how GSK hid this link with skullduggery; ie; they carried out underhanded and unscrupulous behavior to keep the truth from healthcare professionals, regulators and, more importantly, patients.
In 1989, GSK submitted its “Integrated Summary of Safety Information” to obtain approval of Paxil to treat adult depression. Amongst other adverse event statistics, the Safety Summary reported the number of suicides and suicide attempts experienced by patients who took Paxil, a placebo or a comparator drug during GSK’s initial clinical trials.
In GSK’s presentation they compared the suicide attempts with patients in the Paxil group and those patients in the placebo group; and here’s how they hid the fact that more patients in the Paxil group had a far higher (significant number) of suicides and suicide attempts.
During the run-in period (which is also called wash-out), patients taking part in a clinical trial are taken off of any medications they may be taking and given a placebo (commonly known as a dummy or sugar pill) instead. In this way, a person’s system is “washed out” of other drugs and all patients start the trial on a drug-free basis at “baseline,” i.e. at the actual beginning of the clinical trial.
Because people who are stopping medications during this wash-out period may experience adverse events associated with withdrawing from the medication they were on, adverse events experienced during this period are not properly counted as occurring during the clinical trial. Adverse events that occur during run-in periods cannot be included when calculating adverse event ratios for clinical trials. This is standard practice for clinical trials.
The FDA’s Dr. Martin Brecher had mentioned in testimony that it is “scientifically illegitimate” to count placebo run-in/washout events. Furthermore, Michael Seika, another FDA medical reviewer, explained why run-in adverse events should not be counted. According to a December 8, 1999 GSK memo of a conversation with the FDA:
Specifically, I [Thomas Kline, Assistant Director of Regulatory Affairs at GSK] asked [Michael Seika] if a patient were to die during placebo run-in, i.e. prior to randomization, should that patient be included in the calculation for placebo deaths. He clearly stated that such a patient should not be counted in our analyses, since such a patient would not comprise the “controlled” portion of a trial.
Despite GSK knowing that counting adverse events during placebo run-in was improper they included them in their 1989 “Integrated Summary of Safety Information”.
When the 1989 “Integrated Summary of Safety Information” is properly dissected we see that patients taking Paxil were at an 8.9 times greater risk of experiencing a suicide event than those on placebo.
http://fiddaman.blogspot.com.au/2017/03/paxil-suicide-way-gsk-hid-link.html