UC Davis chancellor resigns following probe on ethical violations; Los Angeles Times, 8/9/16

Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times; UC Davis chancellor resigns following probe on ethical violations:

"“Janet Napolitano is a serious administrator who sees Katehi’s actions as character flaws that harm the university and they have to stop," said William G. Tierney, an education professor and co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at USC. “She is very clear about how she sees the world. The appearance of impropriety is almost as big of a problem as an actual impropriety.”

“You don't want to wake up and find out that one of your campus leaders is in the news for alleged wrongdoings,” Tierney added. “At a time when UC is really having major financial issues and the Legislature and governor are asking for reforms, this gets in the way.”"

Addiction Treatment Industry Worried Lax Ethics Could Spell Its Doom; Huffington Post, 6/17/16

Ryan Grim, Huffington Post; Addiction Treatment Industry Worried Lax Ethics Could Spell Its Doom:

"The opioid epidemic, which just added Prince to its list of victims, has shoved the addiction industry into the spotlight, and many here at the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers conference worried aloud how the industry’s lax ethical standards would look in the new glare.

Nor is greater attention to ethics the providers’ only threat. Drug treatment is now big business, and a wave of consolidation is sweeping the industry, as private equity firms and publicly traded companies look to cash in on the surging rates of addiction. Federal regulators, meanwhile, are pushing to reform the very nature of the services offered by treatment centers...

For the first time, the industry’s leading trade group has rolled out an ethics policy that comes with an enforcement mechanism.

“We were nudged to do it by the fact that we look around and see ethical violations all over the place,” NAATP Executive Director Marvin Ventrell told the gathering."

Robert De Niro Defends Screening of Anti-Vaccine Film at Tribeca Festival; New York Times, 3/25/16

Pam Belluck and Melena Ryzik, New York Times; Robert De Niro Defends Screening of Anti-Vaccine Film at Tribeca Festival:

"In a decision that has dredged up the widely debunked link between vaccines and autism, the Tribeca Film Festival plans to screen a film by a discredited former doctor whose research caused widespread alarm about the issue.

The film, “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” is directed and co-written by Andrew Wakefield, an anti-vaccination activist and an author of a study — published in the British medical journal The Lancet, in 1998 — that was retracted in 2010. In addition to the retraction of the study, which involved 12 children, Britain’s General Medical Council, citing ethical violations and a failure to disclose financial conflicts of interest, revoked Mr. Wakefield’s medical license.

On the festival’s website, the biographical material about Mr. Wakefield does not mention that he was stripped of his license or that his Lancet study was retracted. Rather, it says that the Lancet study “would catapult Wakefield into becoming one of the most controversial figures in the history of medicine.”...

The plan to show the film has unnerved and angered doctors, infectious disease experts and even other filmmakers.

“Unless the Tribeca Film Festival plans to definitively unmask Andrew Wakefield, it will be yet another disheartening chapter where a scientific fraud continues to occupy a spotlight and overshadows the damage he has left behind in the important story of vaccine safety and success,” Dr. Mary Anne Jackson, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said in an email.

The documentary filmmaker Penny Lane (“Our Nixon”) published on Thursday an open letter to the festival’s organizers in Filmmaker Magazine, suggesting that including “Vaxxed” in the documentary section “threatens the credibility of not just the other filmmakers in your doc slate, but the field in general.”"