Tom Jefferson (epidemiologist)

Tom Jefferson is a British epidemiologist, based in Rome, Italy, who works for the Cochrane Collaboration. Jefferson is an author and editor of the Cochrane Collaboration's acute respiratory infections group, as well as part of four other Cochrane groups. He is also an advisor to the Italian National Agency for Regional Health Services.

In 1999 Jefferson was one of the founding members of the Brighton Collaboration along with Harald Heijbel, Ulrich Heininger, and Elisabeth Loupi. He has worked on Cochrane reviews examining the effectiveness of oseltamivir and the influenza vaccine.

Notable work

In 2009 Jefferson was hired by the governments of Britain and Australia to update a systematic review of oseltamivir. Initially he had a great deal of trouble getting results of the original trials. Previous researchers had published trials without seeing the underlying data and it appeared that some of the published papers used ghost writers. As the company, Roche, that did the trials refused to provide data for independent analysis, their conclusions in 2009 were that benefits could not be shown.

In 2011 Jefferson's team was provided 22,000 pages of data from the European Medicines Agency and Roche eventually provided 3,000 pages of data. In 2012, Jefferson was the lead author of another Cochrane review of this data which concluded that oseltamivir did not reduce the number of hospitalizations caused by influenza. Jefferson said that this review also found no evidence that oseltamivir stopped complications from the disease.

His views about the effectiveness of influenza vaccines are also controversial. Reviews led by Jefferson have concluded that there is insufficient evidence to show that influenza vaccines reduce mortality or infection rates. He has said that the studies claiming large reductions in mortality rates as a result of the influenza vaccine are flawed, and that "influenza vaccines are about marketing and not science".