https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ansparency
Now, "real world evidence" (buzzphrase that sounds so much better than boring old "observational studies" are big news lately. The reliability the outputs from these has improved greatly in recent years with the onset of things like propensity score matching, along with generally better design and analysis. They usually include people routinely excluded from RCTs, like the old and the ill, and regulators, payors and so on jes' love 'em because they shed valuable new evidence on drug effects from large populations (including safety after release of new drugs into the wild) that is just not available from RCTs alone.
You do them from databases. One such is a primary care database in the UK - the General Practice Research Datalink. This has been up and running for years, and studies have been published from authors all over the world from it for the foreseable past ever.
But now, Mr Helm tells us...
Millions! Farmer! Money! NHS! f.ck!Data about millions of NHS patients has been sold to US and other international pharmaceutical companies for research, the Observer has learned, raising new fears about America’s growing ambitions to access lucrative parts of the health service after Brexit.
US drugs giants, including Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly, have paid the Department of Health and Social Care, which holds data derived from GPs’ surgeries, for licences costing up to £330,000 each in return for anonymised data to be used for research.
At least he noticed that the data are "anonymised", which is an important part here, so Big Farmer aren't going to earn about your personal haemorrhoid problem from this. It has bugger all to do with the care provided by and/or destruction of the NHS, it's just one of many electronic patent record databases used for research. I would really expect someone experienced like Helm to have known this.