The third example listed below is exactly what CDC whistleblower Dr. William Thompson admitted, as revealed in the Vaxxed documentary that exposed the blatant fraud and cover-up in the vaccine industy.
How to Massage Data and Feel Like a Winner
by Jeffrey E. Keller, MD | MedPage Today
March 07, 2019
https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/doing-time/78430
[snip]
Change the primary endpoint
Before a medical study begins, the researchers must identify exactly what it is that they are studying. This is called the "primary endpoint." For example, the researchers studying Drug X could initially decide that their primary endpoint is whether Drug X reduces mortality over five years. What happens, though, if the study shows that Drug X did not, in fact, reduce mortality? What now?
Well, often in that case, the researchers will scrutinize the study's data to find out if Drug X showed some other benefit that they were not initially looking for. Let's say that patients taking Drug X had fewer DVTs (deep vein thrombosis). This finding may have resulted purely by chance, but what the heck! They could publish a paper that says that Drug X reduces DVTs without, of course, mentioning that this was not the original primary endpoint of their study. It turns out that this practice is common in published research papers and is called "outcome switching." How common? Well, according to this recent survey, outcome switching occurred in over 50% of the papers studied.
Use composite outcomes
If a pharmaceutical researcher isn't sure if Drug X will get positive results in any particular primary endpoint -- like death, for example -- they may instead add multiple other endpoints, hoping to get a hit on at least one. The additional endpoints could include heart attacks, strokes, or anything else they can think of, like DVTs or even inpatient hospital days. If any one of the many composite outcomes comes up positive, then the whole study can be published as positive. Of course, a DVT is much less important than, say, death, but since both are listed as equals in the composite endpoint, you would have to really read the fine print to find out if the "hit" was death or DVTs. Composite endpoints are also common in the medical literature. However, according to this article in the BMJ, the practice of using composite endpoints "will leave many readers confused, often with an exaggerated perception of how well interventions work."
Simply don't publish the negative results
This has long been the easiest and best way to bury a negative trial. Simply don't publish it! Negative studies in the medical literature have long been much less likely to be published than positive studies. This "publication bias" has been such a big problem in pharmaceutical research that in 2004, many medical journals started requiring studies to be pre-registered in a clinical trial database. This ensured that negative studies could be tracked even if they were not published. So, is this requirement working? Not so much. According to this report, publication bias is still "alive and well."
Publish a positive study more than once
If a medical researcher has a positive study, it can be tempting to publish the results in more than one medical journal. That way, the researcher gets two citations in their resume for the price of one! There are two ways to do this. The first is to submit the same data to multiple journals without telling them you have done so. "Duplicate publication" like this is a form of fraud, but, as this medical journal editor says, "Duplicate publication is more common than you think."
Another way to get a study published multiple times is to publish only part of the study's data and then later publish the rest of the data in a second article. For example, in our study of Drug X, we could publish the data showing the effect of the drug on mortality first and then later publish the data showing the effect of Drug X on DVTs. If the study is large enough and if the researchers slice the data thin enough, they can get many publications out of a single drug trial.
