Johnson & Johnson has sued four doctors who published studies citing links between talc-based personal care products and cancer, escalating an attack on scientific studies that the company alleges are inaccurate.
Suing the doctors for pushing a false narrative is jarring enough, but they’re trying to get the patient’s names used for all studies. What a fun precedent they’re trying to set!!! I cannot foresee in long lasting issues coming from this if they win.
I’m pretty sure this is why they agreed to allow generics for their TB med. John Green made the issue high profile and they used it for some good PR just before doing this shit.
I mean, basically anything and everything can be linked to cancer. I’d be shocked if there wasn’t a study listing “life” as a cause of cancer.
However, suing a scientific study is not a good look. Especially for a business. Why wouldn’t they use the money theyre spending on lawyers to fund their own studies to prove accuracy or inaccuracy? Seems like the latter is the obvious better PR move.
This would be a dangerous precedent. If you disagree with scientific findings, you just conduct your own research to disprove the original study. If companies can sue researchers for publishing claims that damage them, it'll just result in researchers withholding studies in fear a multibillion dollar corporation coming after them. Scientists need to be able to publish their research without fear of retribution.
The only exception I would accept is if someone published knowingly false research, a la Andrew Wakefield.
While in general, I'd agree, look at the damage a single false paper on vaccination had. There were a lot of follow up studies showing that the paper is wrong, and yet we still have an antivax movement going on.
Clearly, scientists need to be able to publish without fear of reprisal. But to have no recourse when damage is done by a person acting in bad faith is also a problem.
Though I'd argue we have the same issue with the media, where they need to be able to operate freely, but are able to cause a lot of harm.
Perhaps there could be some set of rules which absolve scientists of legal liability. And hopefully those rules are what would ordinarily be followed anyway, and this be no burden to your average researcher.
There needs to be a distinction between "I did my science badly" and "I knowingly published false information". Wakefield's paper linking vaccines and autism faked its data to imply a causal relationship between the two for the purposes of financial gain. You should absolutely be able to sue that guy if his paper damaged you in any way. Fuck 'em.
On the other hand, if you publish a study in earnest, but that study is full of mistakes and comes to an incorrect conclusion, you should not be able to be sued. If the study is bad, it would be easy enough to publish a response pointing out flaws with the original study. This is especially true since so many papers are published with the caveat of "this requires future study to confirm".
In order to sue, you should be required to show some sort of malicious action behind the bad science, such as faked data.
Doubt the motivation here is disagreement with the studies, so much as hoping to be able to sell products regardless of whether they are safe or not.
The courts are unlikely to agree with J&J, but it will nevertheless make scientists (and journals) more wary of publishing if they fear having to defend themselves against lawsuits brought by massive corporations.
The only way this suit ends well for humanity is if at the end the judge has enough common sense to issue a multimillion dollar settlement back to the scientists named to absolutely chill this type of corporate behavior immediately.
It almost certainly won't happen and we're probably fucked... But hey, we can dream, right?!
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