Experts raise concerns that fossil fuel industry is buying influence over researchers thanks to funding provided for medical studies
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New analysis has uncovered the extent to which fossil fuel companies are funding major medical journals, with 14 companies involved in more than 1190 articles in the last six years alone – highlighting the influence and involvement that these companies have on medical research.
More than 180 medical articles in the last six years have acknowledged funding from fossil fuel companies, with another 1000 articles feature at least one author who works for a fossil fuel company or related organisation.
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And although many of these articles and studies don’t directly link with fossil fuel interests, experts are all too aware of the ways in which associations with innovative medical research will enhance these companies’ reputations, buy influence amongst researchers – and in the words of research lead at the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health in Malaysia, David McCoy, give fossil fuel companies ‘social licence to continue and behave in the way that they behave.’
‘Fossil fuel industries are very politically active,’ McCoy adds. ‘They lobby governments. They have a huge amount of power in shaping energy policy and industrial policy.’
Which oil and gas giants are involved?
Saudi Arabia’s national oil company Aramco – the world’s largest oil and gas producer – was involved in around 600 articles, mostly those through a joint project between Johns Hopkins Medicine and the company, dubbed Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare (JHAH).
ExxonMobil – whose business ventures until recently included the drilling of oil for almost three decades in Equatorial Guinea, a country with a high risk of malaria – was linked to the second largest group of articles. This is the same company which has funded the WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network, which supports malaria research.
Employees of major fossil fuel companies were also found to have co-authored more than 1000 articles, often due to the involvement of hospitals or other recent institutes directly related to them, like Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s (KPC) Ahmadi Hospital.
However, there were 75 articles written by co-authors affiliated with fossil fuel companies – including Shell, ExxonMobil and the KPC – that did not have academic partners.
Looking to the future
Some experts believe that the fossil fuel industry should be treated akin to tobacco companies, due to the similar scale of harm that both sectors caused combined with ‘their tactics of deliberately distorting science’, according to director of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath Anna Gilmore.
Currently, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) is the only out of the world’s five leading medical journals to implement a policy banning fossil-fuel tied research. This has now been extended to other BMJ journals, as well as to within advertising: any banks which now fund fossil fuel companies are not permitted to advertise within the BMJ.
Calls have been made by medical organisations to entirely divest from the fossil fuel industry, as well as restricting researching and publishing with the industry as a whole. Doing so would mean that medical journals can untangle themselves from the ethical dilemma of involving themselves with planet-polluting companies that also produce products that are known to directly harm human health.
Pollutants released by fossil fuels are known to lead to respiratory disorders, strokes, asthma and other conditions.
‘I think [divestment’s] got to happen,’ said past president of the Faculty of Public Health John Middleton. ‘It does compromise the research as well as keeping us in the pay of an industry that we don’t want to be in the pay of. We are profiting from climate disaster.’
