Sanjay Gupta: Links To Merck Create Bias?

A story cites a program sponsored by Merck as a conflict when Dr. Gupta touts the benefits of an incompletely tested vaccine for the papilloma virus produced by Merck which almost ended up as a mandatory vaccination for young girls.

This was pointed out in Julie Deardoff’s “Julie’s Health Club“, a blog which appears on the Chicago Tribune’s website, as well as being mentioned on Counterpunch:

“Eleven and twelve year old girls, the very target of proposed mandatory vaccination by Merck, were never tested at all for efficacy in pre-licensing clinical trials. Merck simply decided that the bodies of prepubescent girls would react the same as mature women to the vaccine.”

What also doesn’t sit well with Martens is that Gupta is co-host of a program called AccentHealth, a waiting room TV network that bills itself as “an integrated health education company” and reaches 132 million viewers. Merck is a financial sponsor.

“Given the incestuous nature of ‘integration,’ should Dr. Sanjay Gupta have revealed to his CNN viewers during his extolling of the virtues of Gardasil that its manufacturer, Merck, was a financial sponsor of this integrated marketing scheme he co-hosts at AccentHealth?” she asked. “Inquiring minds not yet ‘integrated’ want to know.

It is important that not only physicians lecturing and in a clinical setting need to be independent and to declare conflicts of interest, but those in the media need to state conflicts of interest both real and potential. It is not enough to think you are independent, but to be on the receiving end of financial benefits it should be noted in reporting on stories where such a conflict could exist. Corporate influence in media extends far beyond merely impacting medical stories.

In this case, a vaccine that had been called marginally effective by the pharmaceutical company manufacturing it was touted by Gupta and Laura Bush in far more laudatory terms than even the manufacturer did. The vaccine had only been tested for 5 years while it takes approximately 15-20 years for cervical cancer to develop. In spite of that congress was lobbied and urged to make this vaccine not optional, but a mandatory schoolgirl vaccination. Was this done in the name of business or medicine? To me, having it as an option, and having it optionally available through normal means via your insurance would have been a normal approach. Lobbying congress to make an incompletely tested vaccine for a disease that is not spread rapidly in an epidemic fashion, via airborne transmission or other simple transimission route, a mandatory vaccination is absurd.

This topic seems to generate heated opinions. It is important to remember that science and medicine needs to be evidence based and not emotion driven or driven by corporate interests and their lobbyists. No one is preventing anyone from having this vaccine. It is best to preserve freedom though in the absence of clear science indicating a distinct benefit. Don’t forget this vaccine, with uncertain efficacy, only handles one potentially sexually transmitted disease. It does nothing for Breast Cancer, Ovarian Cancer, genital herpes, or HIV. It is not a panacea. Why was there ever a lobby to make this mandatory? And yes, you can have it, your daughters can also, but I would not advise anyone in my family to have this barely tested vaccine, with no evidence that it is effective at what it is being proposed for.

Additional References and article: Alliance for Human Research Protection