This I believe

New from The Bitter Southerner.

"A secret video surveillance system was installed to record interviews and employee discussions without their knowledge or consent. All this was done in an effort to discredit whistleblowers or find some wrongdoing to justify re-assignment, discipline or even termination.”

The CEO of the MiMedx Group called it "Project Snow White." 

"University investigations into research misconduct are often inadequate, opaque and poorly conducted."

This is news?

Is it time to shut down emergency research at Hennepin Healthcare?

It's hard to imagine how HCMC leaders could have made their forced ketamine study worse, but somehow they have managed to do it. A year ago, they calmly assured the public and county officials that, although concern about the study was overblown, they were voluntarily stopping the controversial study.

According to the FDA, they were lying.

Here is how the Star Tribune puts it:

Medical staff at HCMC continued to sedate people with ketamine and collect data for a study for months after the hospital’s leadership told elected officials they had voluntarily halted the research in response to questions over ethics and patient safety.

New inspection reports from federal regulators also say that doctors involved in the research failed to disclose incidents of patients suffering serious medical complications — such as trouble breathing or high blood pressure — to the committee in charge of keeping study subjects safe.

And that's not all. According to the Star Tribune, the FDA found other serious problems:

• In dozens of cases, researchers failed to inform patients of their enrollment in hospital studies, even after the subjects were sedated.

• Hospital staff did not always properly monitor patients’ vital signs after they’d been sedated.

• In one case, doctors did not report that a patient enrolled in a study died, despite a requirement to do so even if the death “is not thought to be related to the study treatment.”

• The researchers did not obtain permission from the FDA for a drug study deemed “investigational,” and did not appear to meet exemption from this approval.

You might understandably wonder why HCMC officials would simply defy the FDA and lie to county officials. To get some sense of what at least one ER physician at HCMC was thinking, check out this presentation by Dr. Nick Simpson in Austin last January, "Political Pitfalls: Enduring a Media Crisis Surrounding Ketamine Sedation and Research." (HT @LeighGTurner)

"The e-mails include no evidence that the task force intentionally excluded or twisted information to malign former President Lotus Coffman and the other former leaders, as some regents have charged. They do capture a scramble to finish a 125-page report on a tight timeline, acknowledgments that the report would be short of definitive — and frustration with U leaders who faculty felt bungled the process."

Shocking news from the Star Tribune: newly uncovered emails indicate that University of Minnesota faculty members don't trust university administrators and suspect they're incompetent.

Here's the latest on the task force to rename university buildings named for racist and antisemitic administrators.

Dr. John, 1940-2019

Another giant is gone. An obit is in The Advocate.

"In 1996, Dr. Husel pleaded guilty to improperly storing a destructive device or pipe bomb at Wheeling Jesuit College in Wheeling, W.Va. He was sentenced to six months in jail and one year of supervised release. He admitted that, after the device detonated in 1994, he attempted to falsely incriminate another person by placing a pipe and other items in the person’s car."

And now he is charged with killing 25 patients with fentanyl overdoses.