Kenneth John Harvey AM is an Australian public health doctor, currently Honorary Adjunct Associate Professor at the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare in Bond University. Described by The Age as an "anti-quackery crusader", Harvey is an advocate of evidence-based medicine and a critic of pharmaceutical marketing and unproven diet products. He is the president of Friends of Science in Medicine. In 2017, Harvey was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his "significant service to community health and the pharmaceutical industry”.
Career Harvey graduated in medicine from the University of Melbourne. He developed an interest in the factors that influence the prescribing of antibiotics, especially where it involved unethical promotion. He worked at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and then as an adjunct associate professor in the School of Public Health at La Trobe University. Harvey took part in drawing up ethical criteria for the promotion of medicinal drugs for the World Health Organization, and served on a committee that formulated the Australian "Quality Use of Medicines" policy. He has also worked on medicinal drug policy in Southeast Asia, Croatia, and Jordan. He is Chair of the Governing Council of Health Action International Asia Pacific. He served on the TGA's Transparency Review Panel, the Medicines Australia Code Review Panel, the Working Group on Promotion of Therapeutic Products, and the Natural Therapy Review Advisory Committee. Another of his areas of interest is the application of information technology to optimise medicinal drug use. Harvey quit his job with La Trobe in 2014 after the university agreed to receive $15 million from Swisse Wellness to fund a new complementary medicine centre. He told the Australian Journal of Pharmacy that "in 2013–4 Swisse sought a research partnership with a number of Australian universities; all but one resisted on the grounds that, while such an association might give Swisse a fig-leaf of respectability, it would not reflect well on the reputation of the university involved." This followed legal action by Swisse against the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for defamation in a consumer advocacy show The Checkout, which criticised their research methods. In 2014 after leaving La Trobe, Harvey took a post as Adjunct Associate Professor of Epidemiology & Preventive Medicine at Monash University. Then in February 2021 he accepted an appointment as Honorary Adjunct Associate Professor in the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare at Bond University. He also set up a private advocacy and consultancy company, "Medreach".
Campaigning Harvey is a critic of drug promotion by pharmaceutical companies, and supports a campaign called "No Advertising Please" that calls on doctors to reject free lunches from drug company representatives (who selectively present evidence that goes in a new drug's favour), and instead to only prescribe drugs that they have independently researched, including reading critical evaluations. Harvey served as a consumer representative on Medicines Australia's transparency working group, which advocated for patients to be able to know whether their doctors had been given free flights to industry-funded conferences that promote new drugs.
Therapeutic Goods Administration Harvey has called on the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) "to ban inaccurate, misleading or unethical promotion of medicines", and is a strong critic of the way that therapeutic claims of complementary medicines are regulated. Harvey has criticised the TGA for not regulating body building products that contain synthetic amphetamines, which are instead regulated as food products despite making health claims. In 2016, he highlighted that Chemmart's consumer DNA testing was misleading and breached the TGA's Advertising Code because it was not able to deliver on the claims being made for it. Harvey had been appointed in 2018 by the federal Health Minister, Greg Hunt to represent the consumer organisation and magazine CHOICE on the advertising consultative committee of TGA, but in 2020, he resigned his position, citing a sense of frustration with the way the TGA upheld complaints against the promotion and sale of complementary medicines. He claimed that in 2018–19, the TGA did not issue sufficient penalties, in spite of having the power to do so. The TGA rejected this claim, noting the large number of fines handed out over dishonest advertisements during COVID-19, however, the Consumers Health Forum and CHOICE took Harvey's concerns very seriously.
Friends of Science in Medicine In 2019, Harvey became the president of Friends of Science in Medicine (FSM). He replaced Professor John Dwyer AO, the founding president. FSM, founded in 2011, is an organization which aims "to emphasise the importance of having health care in Australia based upon evidence, scientifically sound research and established scientific knowledge." It has grown to become a major critic of unscientific health practices and fraudulent health claims. It has advised governments and media, made numerous submissions to enquiries and provided extensive public advice concerning dubious health claims and practices. It successfully advocated the removal of private health insurance taxpayer-funded rebates from ‘natural’ therapies that lacked evidence of efficacy. FSM campaigns against the unethical promotion of therapeutic goods and services to consumers. Harvey originally joined the organization in 2016 and is a long-time executive member of FSM
Nurofen Harvey criticised the Reckitt Benckiser brand Nurofen for marketing identical ibuprofen products in different packages as "targeting" specific pain, which became the subject of an Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) investigation.
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