The Father of Sunshine

Paul Thacker

By Christopher Robertson

Over at our sister blog for the Safra Center’s Institutional Corruption Lab, Paul Thacker has a great post about how the Physician’s Payments Sunshine Act came to exist. The new database created by the Act is just now going live, and its a good time to reflect on how we got here. Thacker was a staffer for Senator Chuck Grassley, and from that vantage, has rare insight into how the bill was conceived and how initial objections of Big Pharma were overcome. Thacker also outlines several complementary efforts, including pressure to reform NIH policies around conflicts of interest. That proposal went all the way to the White House, where it was gutted. Worth reading.