At the House Appropriations Committee hearing on the NIH Budget, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins was grilled about the collusion between the NIAAA and the alcohol industry in planning a clinical trial to study the health benefits of alcohol use. Congresswomen Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) expressed concern about the fact that NIAAA violated NIH policy by soliciting funding from the alcohol companies and asked Dr. Collins who authorized the solicitation of funding. While Dr. Collins did not answe...
I have already explained why I think the Moderate Alcohol and Cardiovascular Health (MACH15) clinical trial should be immediately halted because of both scientific and ethical breaches in the way the research was planned. Today, I reveal what I believe is misconduct in the actual conduct of the trial: namely, in the communication of the research sponsors to the public. I believe that the public -- and especially research subjects -- have the right to know who is funding a clinical trial that is ...
Digging Deeper into the Harvard/NIAAA Solicitation of Alcohol Company FundingIn a previous post, I noted that I had reviewed materials obtained by the New York Times and shared with me for the article revealing that the NIAAA solicited funding from alcohol companies for the clinical trial of potential benefits of alcohol. A deeper examination of those materials allows me to now reveal that the real purpose of the clinical trial is not to conduct research to answer a question, but to help the alc...
I used to think of the National Institutes of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) as a highly-reputed, objective, science-based agency whose primary goal was to reduce alcohol consumption to improve the public’s health. The scientific integrity of the NIAAA is critical, as it describes itself as “the largest funder of alcohol research in the world.” The agency is funded by taxpayers to the tune of $480 million a year. But then one day, all of that changed. On January 16, 2015, I was called int...
Correspondence obtained as the result of my FOIA request to the NIAAA....
A new study presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT) concludes that vaping causes heart attacks, increasing the heart attack risk for dual users beyond that of smoking alone. The research has not yet been published but was presented as a poster at the conference.The study was a cross-sectional analysis of nearly 70,000 respondents to the combined 2014 and 2016 National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS), a nationally representative survey o...