When I first investigated the PACE trail in 2015, one of the features most shocking to me was the investigators’ blatant violation of a core human rights document that they had promised in their protocol to adhere to. That violation of the Declaration of Helsinki involved their failure to tell study participants about their close ties with the insurance industry. For years, the lead investigators had advised disability insurers that the interventions being tested in PACE for efficacy were in fact effective and could get claimants back to work.
For reasons that I don’t quite understand, this breach of the Declaration of Helsinki has received relatively little attention in the PACE debate–perhaps because PACE has so many disastrous methodological problems that “mere” ethical ones have taken a back seat. However, Professor MIchael Sharpe has recently performed an act of public service–through his decision to blame Guardian columnist George Monbiot for causing Long COVID, he has redirected attention back to the PACE trial. So I thought it would be useful to repost my first piece about these insurance industry ties.
This topic is also relevant now, since Berkeley is once again crowdfunding to support my project. Professor Sharpe in particular has whined about this, charging that I am being paid to trash his work. As I have explained, I worked on this project for 2-3 years with no support, so that proves I was happy to trash his work for free. At this point, my project is about investigating problematic research in this field, and that’s what I’m doing. My crowdfunding is public and sponsored by Berkeley. Everyone knows about it–unlike the naive PACE participants, who were not informed of Professor Sharpe’s cozy relationship with UNUMProvident, for example................
