Covid-19: How independent were the US and British vaccine advisory committees?
Experts who sit on national vaccine advisory panels are asked to disclose any industry ties and other conflicts of interest. But Paul D Thacker finds that disclosure standards differ widely, often leaving the public in the dark In the wake of lightning fast authorisations of covid-19 vaccines in the UK and the US, public health officials have worked hard to maintain confidence in these new products. British and American officials have emphasised the independence of the experts who authorise vaccines and those who issue advice on them. But an investigation by The BMJ has found that some of these experts have significant industry ties that government agencies do not always disclose. We looked at experts sitting on the covid-19 authorisation committees at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as well as those on the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises the government on vaccines. It was not possible to repeat the exercise with the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which licenses medicines and gave temporary authorisation for covid-19 vaccines, because the MHRA and its adviser, the Commission on Human Medicines, make almost none of their meetings or documents public.1 Both the FDA and the UK government require panellists to disclose conflicts only from the previous 12 months, which can miss significant financial payments that occurred in recent years. We also found examples where panellists disclosed to committees their grants, patents, and other industry relationships in their publications, but it seems that the committees did not find these matters worth making public, and they remained undisclosed until now. Most experts on the FDA and JCVI committees registered no conflicts of interest. From the JCVI’s December meeting on 22 December 2020, the minutes report that 18 of 19 members had “no registered conflicts …