Dr David Tuller: The UK Health Research Authority’s Missteps on PACE and the Declaration of Helsinki

[Countrygirl]

https://www.virology.ws/2022/04/14/...QnJhs5SkodZZ1XEWQBfazUCzVUe2l-9JbrVf0_DLqfrNs

Trial By Error: The UK Health Research Authority’s Missteps on PACE and the Declaration of Helsinki
14 April 2022 3 Comments

By David Tuller, DrPH


*April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/31347

The PACE authors and their allies routinely cite the UK’s Health Research Authority as having given this boondoggle of a trial a clean bill of health. The HRA, which oversees research ethics processes and procedures, conducted a review of PACE and issued its findings in January, 2019. The agency assessed PACE as having been conducted properly, but it noted that its purview was limited to “whether the study was properly approved by the Research Ethics Committee (REC),” and questions about the “quality of the study” were beyond its scope.

Even within its remit, the report was deficient in multiple respects. It has therefore had the unfortunate effect of obscuring some of the trial’s unacceptable flaws.

These deficiencies are apparent in the report’s section on “conflicts of interest” and its analysis of whether the PACE investigators should be held to account for not disclosing their advisory and/or financial ties with major insurance companies to prospective trial subjects.

 

[BrightCandle]

While they failed to declare their funding conflict of interest I still don't think that is the big issue with PACE. The issue is they failed to adhere to their standard for recovery and didn't log the data they got from dropouts saying the treatment was making them worse. They falsified the results by ignoring the catastrophic side effects purposefully and that is the big problem with PACE. All the authors should have lost their license to practice as it was very much intentionally done.