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| Editorial: Bought research is suspect |
| Tuesday, 13 April 2010 12:32 |
 Jeffrey Eisenach, economist-for-hire, got a dozen other paid advocates for the carriers to sign off on a "report" that falls apart if you read as far as page 6. "With respect to market power, the evidence demonstrates that broadband markets are highly competitive and rivalrous" At high speed, nearly the entire U.S. has two or fewer suppliers, the local telco and cableco. Anyone who looks at their behavior can see they are very good at signaling each other. Costs of delivering broadband are coming down but prices in the U.S. are going up.
Co-signers Hal Singer, Bob Crandall, Bob Hahn, Wayne Leighton and Bob Litan all work with Eisenach at Empiris, a D.C. opinion-for-hire shop. A few minutes with Google determined co-signers Timothy J. Tardiff, William Taylor, and Len Waverman also have been funded by the carriers or their suppliers.
Because carriers pay for research doesn't mean it's wrong.
Eisenach is a very sharp economist. Litan is also an excellent economist. There's every reason to believe they support the general position because they are extremely skeptical of regulation, not just because they are paid. But without independent research or verification, I certainly wouldn't give this work credibility. The same caveat would apply if all the Net Neutrality advocates were paid by Google, as some claim.
Evidence-based medicine has pointed to the problem of "publication bias." The power pf money leads to a distortion of the public discourse. A dramatic example just published in the British Medical Journal concerns Avandia, a diabetes drug FDA experts believe "should be removed from the market" because of serious heart attack risk. NYT
"There was la strong association between favourable recommendations on the use of rosiglitazone and financial conflicts of interest (3.36, 1.94 to 5.83). These links persisted when articles rather than authors were used as the unit of analysis (4.69, 2.84 to 7.72), when the analysis was restricted to opinion articles (6.29, 2.15 to 18.38) or to articles in which the rosiglitazone controversy was the main focus (6.50, 2.56 to 16.53), and both in articles published before and after the Food and Drug Administration issued a safety warning for rosiglitazone (3.43, 0.99 to 11.82 and 4.95, 2.87 to 8.53, respectively)."
Nowhere in the "report" was there any disclosure that most of the signers received money from interested parties. Eisenach disingenuously told Cecilia Kang of the Washington Post, "none of the other co-signatories ... were compensated as co-signatories." (Emphasis added.) That they took Verizon money for other projects, and work for a company Verizon paid, should have been prominently disclosed.
"We need further changes in disclosure procedures in order for the scientific record to be trusted," the Mayo Clinic doctors conclude.
Association between industry affiliation and position on cardiovascular risk with rosiglitazone: cross sectional systematic reviewAmy T Wang, resident in internal medicine1,2, Christopher P McCoy, chief resident in internal medicine1, Mohammad Hassan Murad, assistant professor of medicine1,2,3, Victor M Montori, professor of medicine1,2,4 1 Department of Internal Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA, 2 Knowledge and Encounter Research Unit, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA, 3 Division of Preventive, Occupational and Aerospace Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA, 4 Division of Endocrinology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA Correspondence to: M H Murad murad.mohammad@mayo.edu |