The Pandemic Erased Boundaries Between Government and Corporate Interests. So Who Can the Public Believe?

Talk about foxes guarding the henhouse. Or, maybe, one fox raising and caring for the hens, another alerting the farmer when it’s time for dinner—and a third setting the farmhouse table for a feast. That is the highly murky and incredibly profitable world of contract research organizations (CROs), private companies that specialize in recruiting patients and running medical research trials.

April 1, 2023 | Source: The DisInformation Chronicle | by Paul D. Thacker

Talk about foxes guarding the henhouse. Or, maybe, one fox raising and caring for the hens, another alerting the farmer when it’s time for dinner—and a third setting the farmhouse table for a feast.

That is the highly murky and incredibly profitable world of contract research organizations (CROs), private companies that specialize in recruiting patients and running medical research trials. In the last handful of years, the US Food and Drug Administration contracted a CRO to work with the National Institutes of Health to determine how companies run some drug trials; Pfizer hired a CRO to run their COVID-19 vaccine trial; a CRO calmed fears about the safety of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine after the FDA and NIH raised safety data concerns; and just a few weeks back the federal government awarded a CRO a contract to run an anthrax vaccine trial to prepare for a biological attack.