How Misinformation Impacts Evidence-Based Science

Marty Makary is reportedly out as head of FDA. This comes during a turbulent time for health agencies in the US government. Since coming into power last year, the current administration has made significant changes to leadership roles, with entire committees being removed and replaced.

Pharmaceutical Executive recently spoke with author Dr. Jeremy Levin, who’s promoting his new book Biotech in the Balance: Saving a Strategic Industry in an Age of Distrust. During the conversation, he discussed issues caused by current leadership, along with other problems that have been developing for years.

According to him, the industry must address its relationship with the capital markets, address misinformation issues, and push back against the politicization of medical research and development.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How is misinformation impacting evidence-based medicine?
Jeremy Levin: There is really no doubt that misinformation plays a terrible role, and the media has a significant role to play in this. Instead of curating, they're simply repeating. And that is not a good thing where you have an enormous volume of different sources of information unparalleled in human history, and each one appears to be telling you the truth.

Quite frankly, the strength and power of this can be seen extremely simply when we go back to the publishing by The Lancet of a fact that they knew at the time to be questionable at best, and the editorial board did not want to publish it. That was saying that there was a link between MMR vaccines and autism.

It took them many years to retract that. That absolutely false article became magnified throughout the industry, and today we harvest this in the form of extraordinary vaccine hesitancy. And that was a magnification. It was one simple publication magnified out of many years.

Frankly, the really troubling part with this is the sad fact that The Lancet did not immediately retract it. When they knew that they had retracted it, they did not galvanize all of the other publications with them to simply say, This is nonsense. We know it was nonsense, and everybody out there better understand it's nonsense.

The very publications themselves are actually helping this by not wanting to go back and clarify that the statement they made was an error. They did it once, and that's it. They will never look back and say this again.

However, the consequence of that simple article is that we've seen measles return in this country. We're going to have a real problem with the next pandemic, because any kind of vaccine presented to large numbers of very well-meaning people who are getting all sorts of information problems, and they're not seeing it.