This article was published on Tuesday, December 22, 2020 in ProPublica.
Dec. 22, 2:04 p.m. EST In 2018, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's chief medical officer, Dr. José Baselga, resigned under fire over his failure to disclose payments from health care companies in dozens of research articles he wrote.
Now, recent Internal Revenue Service filings show the nonprofit hospital paid more than $1.5 million in severance to Baselga in 2018 and 2019.
The revelations about the former executive led to significant changes governing Memorial Sloan Kettering's ties to the health care and pharmaceutical industries and prompted an overhaul of its conflict-of-interest policies. The disclosure failures, which were uncovered by The New York Times and ProPublica, also led to a broader reexamination of how medical journals enforce their conflict-of-interest policies as well as heightened scrutiny of the relationships between medical researchers and for-profit companies at cancer centers around the country.