The Tamiflu story, Tom Jefferson

Tom Jefferson at the Symposium about Scientific Freedom, Copenhagen, 9 March 2019.

Lecture: "The Tamiflu story".

Professor Tom Jefferson, Oxford, is a physician, researcher and campaigner for access to randomised controlled trial data.

For many years, Tom was denied access to regulatory data on which to base the Cochrane reviews he co-authors.

At present, Tom is the first author of the only Cochrane review based solely on unpublished regulatory data.

The review of Neuraminidase inhibitors for preventing and treating influenza was seen as a major methodological development in the field of evidence-based medicine.

The review challenged opinion across the regulatory, industrial and policy arenas, and has since been added as a landmark within the James Lind Library.

It was the most accessed review in the Cochrane Library in 2014. The review was published in April 2014, both on the Cochrane Library and the BMJ, and was the culmination of a 4-year campaign to obtain a complete set of previously unseen 107 clinical study reports.

This lecture is part of the Symposium about Scientific Freedom and the inauguration of the Institute for Scientific Freedom, which took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, 9 March 2019.

World renowned Danish scientist Peter C Gøtzsche is the founder of the institute.

The Institute’s primary area of focus is healthcare and the institute has three main visions:

- All science should strive to be free from financial conflicts of interest.

- All science should be published as soon as possible, and made freely accessible.

- All scientific data, including study protocols, should be freely accessible, allowing others to do their own analyses.