Black Triangle

The Pharmawatch blog run by Dr Mike Lascelles has been “effectively censored”. Dr Lascelles has been monitoring the pharmaceutical industry, in what some might call a robust and challenging manner, for some months.

Sadly, he appears to have come under some pressure to remove the name of a particular drug company from his blog. This has effectively led to his decision to remove his archives and cease blogging. This sort of activity against a blog appears counterproductive; playing straight into the hands of industry critics (and conspiracy theorists, like the anti-vaccinationists) who perceive their influence as purely malign. Do they want to be seen as big bullies who crush any criticism?

I’m not sure of the type of pressure applied to Dr Lascelles, but threats of legal action against blogs have been seen before. I hope Pharmawatch will start again in the future.

More on this at “The Helix”, RangelMD, and Grunt Doc.