Is this a common or a known practice in the pharmaceutical industry to want safety data for one of their drugs locked down?
Hiding the truth about your medication or healthcare practice?
1. Money is involved. You need no other reason, people like to get paid, it's comfortable, it buys nice things. In the case of Pfizer CEO he was an overnight billionaire.
2. A skilled scientist isn't just skilled because they come up with novel ways to address a problem. A skilled scientist is really a master of statistics and quality control. Most people don't know that the job of a scientist is really just number crunching, stats, stats and more stats. The ability to make problems go away......that's the work of a health based scientist.
3. Mastering Statistical quality control means you know how to twist the numbers, toss the outliers, be very selective of the data you want to include, carefully set up the way you collect data, tighten the data, tweak your numbers to bring them into range based on what is acceptable. In other words clean up the mess and hide the truth. You want a nice clean data set. You don't want a bunch of fucked up questionable data in your research or someone is gonna ask questions and shut you down real quick. This scientist that is in charge will be given numerous pay raises, he will be the golden boy that everyone looks up to because he's the guy that keeps those checks rolling in.
4. Once you're too big to fail, you have no choice but to keep the ponzi scheme going. You the lead scientist in charge have cold sweats at night, your mind is constantly working trying to cover up your coverups so you don't make a mistake that will show you've been cooking the books for years. Once you've had too much and the empire is starting to collapse you gotta gtfo of there and find some other place to go before it all implodes. You then hand it off to a fresh faced naive rookie that quickly realizes he's been handed a pile of shit and he can't figure out why everything isn't working according to the data he's been given.
Welcome to there real world of biological science.....part science and part Bernie Madoff.