Comment by dgacmu
17 hours ago
Dude. From the paper itself:
"Competing interests G.A.M. serves as a research consultant for Merck, GlaxoSmithKline/ViiV, and Gilead. M.J.C. serves as a scientific advisor for TruDiagnostic. V.D. and R.S. are employees of TruDiagnostic. All other authors declare no competing interests."
These are known risk factors. I've never said drug companies are bad. I literally take corporate funding for my own research. But you also don't get to stick your head in the sand and ignore the competing interests that all make the research more likely to show favorable results. Again for those in the back: These results probably _are_ correct! But do they generalize? Will they hold up on replication with a larger population? Do they matter, or is the proxy they're measuring not actually relevant for long term things in humans? Dunno. That's the thing about a _statistical likelihood of bias_ -- you have no idea exactly how to apply it to a single paper other than to say "ok, known possibility of bias, interpret accordingly."
From your cite, as you quote:
Sponsorship of drug and device studies by the manufacturing company leads to more favorable efficacy results and conclusions than sponsorship by other sources.
This isn’t that. It’s just FUD in this context. Nobody casts aspersions about Google authors on their latest database query optimizer paper with Stanford.
Because Google doesn't have much of a financial interest in that kind of paper. Drug companies have a financial interest in studies that evaluate their drugs.
If you want a CS analogy, the google-co-authored papers about internet policy do get a lot more scrutiny. And rightfully so! That doesn't make them bad -- many of these are written by friends of mine whom I hold in great esteem -- it means we have to be aware of the potential for all of us to be influenced by the money.