The Washington Post botched that story and soon retracted it.
Here is a good article by chemist-blogger Derek Lowe on the Pfizer story:
"It has to be emphasized as well that the data in the Pfizer presentation are not amazing. I’ve seen people on Twitter and the like going on about how Pfizer had a drug that was 64% likely to cure Alzheimer’s or some other crazy statement (two out of three, y’know), and that betrays an extreme lack of knowledge about clinical data and drug development. Not that that’s uncommon. But no, this is a noticeable-but-small signal, and by itself (I cannot state this strongly enough), it would not be enough for anyone to launch an Alzheimer’s trial."
https://blogs.scienc...ity-not-so-much
In 2016, Richard Chou, now at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and his colleagues published their own analysis of insurance records.
https://www.ncbi.nlm...pubmed/27470609
Of 300-odd people with rheumatoid arthritis, those on Enbrel were about a third as likely to get Alzheimer’s as those on other treatments.
The reason why Pfizer’s board of directors so decided:
Pfizer patented a new remedy for rheumatoid arthritis - Xeljanz, and invested heavily in its promotion.
Despite the fact that there are impressive statistics on hundreds of thousands of insurance claims about the effectiveness of this drug, Pfizer decided that it was not profitable for her.
Edited by Kentavr, 13 September 2019 - 08:00 PM.