The well-being of patients - and sometimes also of healthy people, when it comes to vaccinations, for example - should be the focus of medical research.
However, one important consequence of this claim is that research should be independent of financial interests.
It is all the more irritating that well-respected specialist journals keep ignoring this principle by offering the pharmaceutical industry a stage for self-portrayal.
A current example are the results of a study published in the "New England Journal of Medicine" (NEJM) on the safety and effectiveness of the third corona vaccination with the vaccine from Pfizer/Biontech.
As the methods section clearly reveals, the responsibility for the study was entirely in the hands of the vaccine manufacturers.
The two companies did not even have to bother
On the contrary: the addressee for further questions as well as the majority of the authors of the study come from the companies.
The fact that the NEJM lends itself to such a marketing campaign marks a low point in clinical research.
Because, of course, if you have to satisfy your shareholders, you do everything you can to present your own products in the best possible light.
If the vaccine manufacturers had really been interested in the safety of their vaccine, they would not only have tested it on around 5,000 subjects, but on tens of thousands more.
With such a small test group, rare complications disappear into the background noise.
It is therefore not surprising that the authors did not find any indication of heart inflammation, as they announce in the first paragraph.