TIP OF THE ICEBERG: Independent reviewers of clinical trial data have access to just a minuscule percentage of the actual information. PUSHART
A few weeks before Christmas 2009, the world was in the grip of a flu pandemic. More than 10,000 people had died, and roughly half a million people had been hospitalized worldwide; tens of millions had been infected. In the United States, millions of doses of Tamiflu, an antiviral medication, had been released from national stockpiles. “December 2009 was a point in the H1N1 outbreak where there was a lot of talk about a second or third wave of this virus coming back and being more deadly,” says Peter Doshi, now a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University and a member of an independent team of researchers tasked with analyzing Tamiflu clinical trials. “Anxiety and concern were really peaking.”
So it was no small blow ...
