What's in the placebo? | We tried to find out what was in the “placebo pill” of one of the most controversial statin trials ever conducted.

https://maryannedemasi.substack.com/p/whats-in-the-placebo

... Drug regulators are expected to analyse the CoA to ensure the placebo and the experimental drug are appropriately matched, to eliminate an unknown variable. However, the details relating to the contents of a placebo are often unknown to independent researchers and remains proprietary information of the drug manufacturers. ...

Between the reproducibility crisis and the outright hiding of information like this, one has to take a lot of Big Science with a very large grain of NaCl.