Two interviews on withheld trials, NPR and ABC

April 27th, 2015 by Ben Goldacre in alltrials campaign, publication bias | 2 Comments »

Here are a couple of fairly detailed interviews I’ve done over the last two weeks, both on the problem of clinical trial results being withheld.

The first is with On The Media, an excellent NPR show, the clip is here.

The second interview is with ABC and has two striking features. One is my big, fat, red face. The second is that on Australian telly they give you a full ten minutes of detailed discussion to cover an issue. In an era of endless repetitive rolling news, depth is what makes a show worth watching, in my view.

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Anyway, both chats are different, the NPR one is good on audit (the topic of my PLoS Medicine paper), while the ABC one has a pretty detailed discussion on WHO, Tamiflu and disaster planning, health spend prioritisation, pharma, and the oddness of academia.

If you want more, the first 100 pages of Bad Pharma kicks off the trials transparency issue pretty thoroughly; my recent paper in PLoS Medicine is readable; there’s all this on the site; the AllTrials campaign news page is a goldmine of fine detail; and if you’re in a listening mood, here’s some other bits of me with NPR’s On The Media.


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2 Responses



  1. Jason Nevis said,

    April 27, 2015 at 6:28 pm

    Ha! That screenshot is priceless!

  2. kevin king said,

    May 30, 2015 at 2:55 am

    Off topic but what a numbskull Goldacre is. I’ve just read one of his posts on Aids. Clearly the guy is incapable of even remotely analysing an issue rationally. If he were he would realise that HIV cannot be the deadly virus it was and still is protrayed to be. Anyone who lived through the hysteria of the 1980s remembers what the leading geniuses in this field were predicting…nothing short of the Apocalypse….and what happened? Fuck all. Now instead of addressing the basic facts(where are the heterosexual bodies? There must be millions of them by now) cretins like Goldacre simply scream “Aids Denier!”.What a fucking moron.