After suppressing data on clinical trials for decades, drug companies now promise to tell all

It's like I've been saying all along: Big Pharma is a big con. Drug trials are routinely distorted, and the results that actually see the light of day are more often than not fraudulently scripted by the drug companies themselves. And that's not to mention all the bribery that goes on in the industry.

It's a wonder that Big Pharma has survived this long, and it just goes to demonstrate how creative the drug companies can be in censoring scientific truth, shutting up researchers who don't invent favorable results, and stifling the careers of anyone who isn't on the pro-drug bandwagon.

• The world's leading pharmaceutical companies will on Thursday undertake to publish more data about clinical trials of their drugs, in an effort to reassure patients about the safety of their medicines.
• The move, which is also designed to head off legislation demanding disclosure, comes as fresh allegations surface that US scientists manipulated trials of an anti-Aids drug in order to make it seem more effective, thereby endangering of patients.
• From Thursday, drug industry associations in the US, Europe and Japan will co-ordinate an industry-wide plan to publish on the internet detailed information on completed and current clinical trials of their drugs.
• The move comes as a legal group representing a former official of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) alleged it had uncovered widespread misconduct in clinical trials of Aids treatments funded by the agency.
• Lawyers for Dr Jonathan Fishbein, who has accused the NIH of endangering the lives of patients in an Aids trial in Uganda, said the allegations involved a number of trials, including some outside Africa.
• â¬oeWe will be presenting evidence that questions the validity of other trials and also shows a pattern of harassment and intimidation at the NIH of any employees who raise questions about those trials,⬠said Stephen Kohn, Dr Fishbein's lawyer.
• The US uses the results to help form its international policy on Aids, which has a $2.9bn (â,¬2.2bn) budget for this year.
• On Tuesday Dr Fishbein told investigators from the National Academy of Sciences the Uganda trials may have ignored thousands of serious side-effects and deaths among pregnant women taking the Boehringer Ingelheim drug, Nevarapine, to prevent transmission to their unborn children.
• Last month, South Africa's ruling party accused US officials of using mothers in the Ugandan experiments as guinea pigs.