Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients (57 page)

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Was that a mistake? The ‘transparency guidelines’ themselves are weak and confused: they give no deadline for reporting, for example. The EMA objected strongly when HAI’s report was published in 2010. You are mistaken, it said: patient groups tell
us
about their funding, they don’t tell the public, and neither do we. I think it’s fair to say that this is indicative of the EMA’s approach to transparency more broadly. The one thing that made these organisations declare their funding was HAI calling up and asking questions about it. That goes to show the power of embarrassment as a public-policy tool.

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The other reason is that court cases set precedents, and make future cases against a company much easier to fight. Because of this, companies settle before cases come to court when they think the result might go against them – meaning that they control the public legal discourse as well as the public academic discourse. A paper on this subject, called ‘Why the Haves Come Out Ahead’, is one of the most widely cited in legal academia.
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