Pharmaceutical Companies Pay Billions of Dollars to Influence Medical Journal Reviewers
- by Natasha Hobley
- Published
- Bioethics
More than half of peer reviewers for four of the top medical journals received $1.06 billion in payments from the pharmaceutical industry during 2020-2022 alone, according to a research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The payments went to peer reviewers for four of the leading scientific journals—JAMA, the British Medical Journal (BMJ), The Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).1
The job of peer reviewers is a large part of what is designed to make a journal article reputable. Individuals who perform the task assess the integrity and quality of the articles, research, methodology, and findings to ensure that only the highest quality of work is published.
Payments to the peer reviewers included $1 billion to individuals or institutions for their research and $64.18 million in general payments including travel and meals. Consulting feeds accounted for $34.31 million and speaking compensation totaled $11.8 million.1
Statistics for the report were gathered from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Open Payments database from 2020 to 2022, demonstrating that peer reviewers were paid over $1 billion during the height of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
From 2013 to 2022, physicians in the United States received $12.1 billion from pharmaceutical companies.
Policies Not in Place for Conflicts of Interest in Peer Review Process
Conflicts of interests among journal authors and editors have been investigated but the conflicts of interest of peer reviewers may be harder to assess, according to the JAMA research letter published last month. Most journals have policies put in place for journal authors that require them to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, but these policies do not apply to peer reviewers.
Pharmaceutical Companies are Largest Purchasers of Scientific Articles
Pharmaceutical companies also largely affect what studies get published because they are the largest purchasers of preprint articles and advertise heavily in journals, according to Adriane Fugh-Berman, MD, director of the Georgetown University Medical Center project PharmedOut, which educates medical professionals about industry marketing practices.
“Obviously, pharma-critical articles are going to be published less often in journals supported by pharmaceutical companies, whose medical editors are supported by pharmaceutical companies, and whose peer reviewers are supported by pharmaceutical companies,” Fugh-Berman stated.1
Scientific Integrity a Prominent Issue in Health Care
From vaccine and drug prescribing incentive programs2 3 to the heavy influence of pharmaceutical companies on medical school textbooks and medical guidelines,4 ethically murky practices and skewed science are widespread issues throughout the healthcare and science industries—and it’s not something that escapes the critical eyes of some of the professionals within the profession.
Prominent physician and former editor of the NEJM Marcia Angell, MD has written books and given lectures regarding the consequential issue of faltering scientific integrity. In a 2009 article, she wrote:
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.5
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