CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Abbott
Labs Deletes Safety Info from Web
21 Corporate Crime Reporter 34, August 31, 2007
Let’s say you are a major drug company.
And let’s say that there is a report from a reputable medical journal that says that patients taking one of your drugs face an elevated risk of causing certain kinds of cancers.
And let’s say that Public Citizen says that another one of your drugs ought to be removed from the market.
And let’s say that you don’t like any of this on your company’s Wikipedia entry.
And let’s say your employees start deleting the safety information from the Wiki entry.
Welcome to the world of Abbott Laboratories.
There’s a web site – WikiScanner – that allows anyone to check and see who made anonymous changes to Wikipedia articles.
And Jeffrey Light, executive director of Patients not Patents, decided to see how some of the major drug companies were editing their Wiki entries. Light found out that someone at Abbott has been deleting information questioning the safety of its top selling drugs.
Light discovered that in July of 2007, a computer at Abbott Labs’ Chicago office was used to delete a reference to a Mayo Clinic study that revealed that patients taking the arthritis drug Humira faced triple the risk of developing certain kinds of cancers and twice the risk of developing serious infections.
The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2006.
The same computer was used to remove articles describing Public Citizen’s attempt to have Abbott’s weight-loss drug Meridia banned after the drug was found to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke in some patients.
Light says that the site’s editors restored the deleted information.
“But Abbott’s activities illustrate drug companies’ eagerness to suppress safety concerns,” Light said. “The argument that drug companies can be trusted to provide adequate safety information on their own products has been used by the pharmaceutical industry to fight against government regulation of consumer advertising. Clearly such trust is misplaced.
As Abbott’s actions have demonstrated, drug companies will attempt to hide unfavorable safety information when they think nobody is watching.”
The changes are part of over one thousand edits made from computers at Abbott’s offices, Light said.
Abbott’s Kelly Morrison did not deny that company employees made the edits.
“From time to time, Abbott does edit simple factual errors about the company or its products in Wikipedia to ensure that the general public has correct information – and we do so openly and transparently,” Morrison said in a statement sent to Corporate Crime Reporter. “Abbott does not, however, advocate the anonymous removal of safety information, scientific studies or controversial discussions from any site as a practice at our company. Any such action we take very seriously and will investigate fully. While we cannot account for the online activities of all of our 65,000 employees, we do expect them to use their computers appropriately and responsibly.”
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