Last October, [lberto Espay] posted the results of his team’s study online, writing that patients taking [Alzheimer’s drugs] Aduhelm and Leqembi were two to nearly three times as likely to die as those treated in the clinical trials. An official of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cast doubt on Espay’s findings last October, noting in a comment to the study that the medical data his team had used for its calculations was unreliable. But the information had come from the agency’s own unverified database of medication-related complications and deaths. When asked to provide the correct numbers, the agency refused. In response to two Freedom of Information Act requests filed this year by The Lever and the international medical journal The BMJ, a government official said the number of deaths associated with the drugs doesn’t have to be released. According to an obscure FDA regulation, the FDA could consider such data a trade secret, “even if such disclosure would be in the public interest.” Along with spending more than $3.6 billion over the last three decades lobbying Congress ... drug companies pay “user fees” directly to the FDA as part of their new drug applications. This money now accounts for 77 percent of the agency’s drug review budget. For every dollar the pharmaceutical industry spends on lobbying Congress and donating to campaigns, it devotes even more to influence physicians and patient advocacy groups.