ABSTRACT
In France, as in other countries, the issue of conflict of interest (COI) became increasingly salient during the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. Different measures to prevent COIs in the evaluation of medicines have been put in place. Medical experts who are sitting on committees have to disclose their links with firms. This disclosure procedure, combined with internal rules to prevent COIs in health agencies, is sometimes claimed to be responsible for a drop in the quality of experts and the eviction of the excellence among them. However, these effects are more often postulated than demonstrated empirically. This chapter offers an empirical analysis to examine the effects of these measures on the recruitment of experts who sit on one of the French committees responsible for the evaluation of medicinal products. Our analysis focuses on the experts who were members of the so-called “Transparency Committee” between 2000 and 2020. We examine the benefits they received from firms and their scientific publication record. First of all, our analysis shows that more recently recruited experts have fewer industry links, or at least fewer evident, declared links. They also tend to be recruited at an older age. Second, the collected data show that these professionals are not less “expert”, according to bibliometric criteria, than their predecessors. On the contrary, on entering the committee, their scientific reach appears broader. These transformations could contribute to restoring the resources of public institutions vis-à-vis the private sector in drug evaluation.
