Setting the record straight on setting the record straight: Response to the Light and Warburton rejoinder

In Light and Warburton’s (2005b) rejoinder (hereafter, Rejoinder) to our reply (DiMasi et al., 2005; hereafter, Reply), the authors reiterate some erroneous assertions made in their original comment (Light and Warburton, 2005a; hereafter, Comment) and add unsubstantiated insinuations of bias on the part of the now defunct US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) and of academics and others who served on the OTA’s Advisory Panel for its report on pharmaceutical R&D (OTA, 1993). We will address Light and Warburton’s points briefly here as they appear in the Rejoinder. Light and Warburton claim that the validation exercises in our R&D cost study (DiMasi et al., 2003; hereafter, DHG) did not address concerns about whether the data that we obtained were inflated by the survey respondents. Assessing whether our results were substantially too high or too low was the whole point of the validation efforts.1 We expanded our efforts in the recent study beyond those that the OTA used when assessing our previous study (DiMasi et al., 1991; hereafter, DHGL). We utilized results obtained by independent investigators,