What happened: When conducting a study looking at the benefits of moderate drinking, staff from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) violated federal policy by soliciting funding for the study from the alcohol industry and allowing alcohol industry representatives to give input on the study’s design.
Why it matters: By approving and supporting a study on moderate drinking that heavily incorporated the perceptive of the alcohol industry, the NIH undermined their science-based mission and failed to adhere to their conflicts of interest policies.
Staff from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) breached a conflicts of interest policy by actively soliciting funding and input from the alcohol industry for a study examining the health benefits of moderate drinking. The actions appear to violate the NIH’s policy on gift administration, which prohibits their staff from soliciting or suggesting donations, funds, or other resources to support NIH activities.
According to documents obtained from a Freedom of Information request by the New York Times in March 2018, scientists and officials from the NIH lobbied the alcohol industry to obtain funding for the study. Representatives from the alcohol industry – including Anheuser-Busch InBev, Heineken, and Diageo – paid for scientists to meet with them in 2013 and 2014. During the meetings, the scientists provided alcohol industry representatives with pertinent details on the moderate drinking study, including strongly suggesting that the study’s results would be beneficial to the alcohol industry by showing that moderate drinking was healthy. In 2015, the NIH chose the scientist heading these meetings to be the lead investigator for the NIH study.
An NIH advisory committee further investigated the claims and recommended shutting the study down due to numerous conflicts of interest issues that arose between NIH scientists and officials and representatives from the alcohol industry. The advisory group’s report stated that “the early and frequent engagement with industry representatives calls into question the impartiality of the process and thus casts doubt that the scientific knowledge gained from the study would be actionable or believable.” The advisory group also found evidence that NIH officials “hid facts” from their colleagues and alcohol industry officials were offered input into the design of the study. The advisory group found that these interactions appeared to “intentionally bias the framing of the scientific premise in the direction of demonstrating a beneficial health effect of moderate alcohol consumption.” The NIH director followed the advisory committee’s recommendations and shut down the study.
The study design was also criticized for only allowing an examination of the benefits of moderate drinking. In particular, it failed to examine two well-known adverse conditions associated with alcohol drinking, cancer and heart failure.
Studies conducted by the NIH should be built on robust scientific practices that limit potential biases in study design and follow conflicts of interest policies. By failing to do so, the NIH allowed industry to bias a large-scale study which, if published, could have undermined the scientific consensus on the health effects of alcohol and therefore could have had major consequences on the health of millions of people.