The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Corruption of Genuine Science
Richard Gale & Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, June 10, 2021
Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left. — Aldous Huxley
For half a century, the pharmaceutical industry has shown near zero tolerance towards criticism against its unequivocal failures and medical catastrophes. Permanent disabilities and deaths due to unsafe drugs, such as Merck’s anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx, Pizer’s Bextra, synthetic hormone replacement therapy, thalidomide, and the earlier cellular pertussis and the 1976 influenza vaccines, are regarded as the collateral damage of getting unsafe medical products on the market. During the past two decades a tightly-knit and collaborative relationship has evolved between the pharmaceutical industry, federal health agencies, Congress, Silicon Valley, and the new culture of billionaire philanthropists such as Bill Gates. Due to the large web of funders favoring corporate financial interests and CDC-sponsored educational programs, the mainstream media is now the successful advertiser for pharmaceutical ambitions. As a consequence, modern medicine’s dire risks to public health are undermined. The broader picture and the darker players operating behind the tragic legacy of medical iatrogenic failures remain largely hidden from the public. In recent years those physicians, researchers and health advocates who dissent from the pharmaceutical narrative often face a formidable blowback resulting in censorship and destroyed reputations.
Over forty years ago, sociologist and philosopher Ivan Illich prophetically observed a conspicuous unfolding of modern medicine becoming divorced from itself and the ethical basis for treating illnesses. He wrote, “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” Illich was among the first poignant critics of the corporatization of medicine to address the problems of “medicalization,” the process by which very human non-medical conditions are redefined as medical diseases and then diagnosed and pharmaceutically treated as such. This has been a result of hardened scientific materialism’s ascendency as the final judge over national healthcare. Increasingly researchers, more often than not funded by private drug companies and backed by an army of lobbyists, are discovering ways to reevaluate health conditions with only flimsy clinical evidence into the actual etiology of disease — even infectious pandemics. Psychiatric practice, which today relies almost exclusively on a drug-based model, is the greatest serial offender. Yet systemic corruption throughout our national healthcare has been a boon for drug makers who can then develop novel medications for illnesses that could otherwise be treated by less expensive and safer drugless therapies “Modern medicine is a negation of health,” Illich wrote in his acclaimed book Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. “It isn’t organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.” It is a system that today depends upon volumes of flawed medical clinical trials, financial incentives, institutional bureaucracy, revolving doors between government and private industry, rampant conflicts of interests, and an aggressive propaganda machine that has had enormous success in marginalizing and ridiculing critics both within and outside the medical complex. Our medical edifice has violated every defining principle of scientific inquiry that should place uncompromising value on objective, unbiased inquiry and open conversation and debate over conflicting views. To invoke the precautionary principle is a personal confession of heresy. Over the years, the steady rise in the number of class action and criminal lawsuits against pharmaceutical firms, Freedom of Information Act submissions, and false testimonies by federal health officials before Congressional subcommittees have confirmed Illich’s warnings.
For Illich the dangerous consequence is that conventional medicine has become depersonalized. Whereas in the past malpractice was treated as a serious ethical issue – and iatrogenic death, or fatalities due to medical error, is now the US’s third leading cause of mortality – it is simply perceived as a technical glitch that can be corrected by further technical solutions. As a result of persistent self-denial over conventional medicine’s inherent failures, the dominant medical paradigm that now governs the nation’s health has succeeded in barricading itself behind a monolithic propaganda machine and a compliant media with the ability to marginalize criticism and to hermetically seal itself from being called to legal account. Even worse, it has usurped the sovereignty we have over our bodies and transferred this power to a technocracy that deeply believes it is upholding the integrity of science. However it is a science solely molded in the image of medical bureaucrats and their powerful allies who have been christened as experts.
And all of these past medical failures, the estimated 90 percent of junk pharmaceutical clinical trials published in junk medical journals, institutionalized hubris, and the drug makers’ capture of our health agencies is being openly staged in the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic on the global theater.
When we are being lectured to recite the pandemic mantra in unison with Joe Biden, Governor Andrew Cuomo, the UK’s Boris Johnson, and one of the church of Scientism’s head priests Neil DeGrasse Tyson — “Follow the Science” – whose science is being referred to? Is it the 19th century mechanistic science, which continues to be the foundation for modern evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychiatry and vaccinology? Is it the pseudo-science promulgated by the cult of Skepticism that pollutes hundreds of Wikipedia’s health entries? Is it corporate, pharmaceutical-based science; medical research and discovery motivated by astronomical commercial incentives to appease the hedonic financial appetites of shareholders? For Anthony Fauci, he has imagined himself as the incarnation of science. Replying to MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Fauci proclaimed, “what you’re seeing as attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.”
Or is it science that is meticulously vetted by a range of independent professionals who aspire to arrive at the truth of a medical problem or to find a medical solution? It is this latter group who are most inclined to impartially review the pros and cons of scientific papers, the clinical trials of a drug, vaccine, medical device and diagnostic tool; then, based upon the empirical evidence, a medical intervention’s value, efficacy and safety is properly determined. Sadly this latter group is rarely if ever invited to sit at the regulatory table or to advise national health policy. Rather, the pursuit of medical facts about disease and pandemics has ceased to be a evidence-based methodology of objective inquiry and has become a means to institute authority and control over a population. “You can’t really follow the science,” states the philosopher of science Matthew Crawford, “because science doesn’t lead anywhere. It can illuminate various courses of action; for example by quantifying the risks that attend each. It can help to specify the trade offs… but it can’t make the choices for us.” Modern medicine’s failure to recognize this has, in Crawford’s opinion, led to “victimology joining hands with scientism.” That is, medicine as an ideology and not a science. The consequence is that those who question or challenge the dominant medical ideology are censored, cancelled and have their reputations destroyed
We must come to the conclusion that modern conventional medicine has lacked the enthusiasm to uncover scientific truths for many decades. The pandemic’s mantra, “follow the science,” has been waxed into a meaningless banality. It is an empty amoral platitude for bureaucrats and media pundits with MD and PHD decorating their names. Unlike the “hard sciences,” such as mathematics and physics, medical practice is “soft.” Medical certainty, as in the serious hard sciences, should have as its objective “value-neutral truth.” Medicine and medical discovery is equally an art form. It is supposed to be grounded upon scientific evidence in order to make reasonable decisions. The debate over whether the practice of medicine is an art or an empirically based science has raged for decades. Over two decades ago, the British Medical Journal published an article, “The Practice of Clinical Medicine as an Art and as a Science.” The authors spread out on the table the prime principle to govern medical research as a determining factor for publication.
“… scientific thinking should, must, be insulated from all kinds of psychological, sociological, economic, political, moral and ideological factors which tend to influence thought in life and society. Without those proscriptions, objective knowledge of truth will degenerate into prejudice and ideology.”
Unfortunately, none of the self-anointed captains now steering our global and governmental health agencies to confront the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the deeply worrisome escalation of Covid-19 vaccine injuries and deaths, has ever bothered to give this fundamental scientific axiom a moment’s worth of reflection. Reported Covid-19 vaccine injuries and deaths in the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System now dwarf those from all other vaccines during the past two decades combined. The “experts,” such as Anthony Fauci and the FDA’s new Commissioner Janet Woodcock – a 35-year careerist at one of our most discredited regulatory agencies, hold their high rank within the medical hierarchy because they were seduced to sacrifice “objective knowledge of truth” in return for prestige, power and wealth. They serve as the prejudiced and ideological protectors of authentic science’s antithesis: the pharmaceutical industrial complex
We do not need to stretch too deep into Western medicine’s history — back to the era of leeches, blood-letting and exorcizing neurological disorders — to find examples of medical consensus and treatments displaying humanity’s sheer stupidity. We have continued to inherit this madness up into the 21st century, and during the pandemic it blazes before our eyes.
Unfortunately, too many Americans and citizens in other nations are blindly willing to surrender their faith and trust to medical experts, the latest drug or vaccine on the market, and the federal regulators who are mandated to assure that these medications and vaccines have been scrupulously reviewed to evaluate their safety and efficacy profiles. We assume that medical interventions are evidence-based. We believe they are founded upon scientifically sound and reliable observation, data collection and analysis. Yet we only need to look at modern history to find many examples of Western medicine being categorically wrong.
In the 1940s and throughout the 1970s, millions of Americans smoked. In some households every adult smoked. Even physicians, who were viewed as the exemplars of health and knowledge, smoked regularly. Doctors would be featured on advertisements endorsing different cigarette brands. After a smoker reached 40, being diabetic, overweight, or having a cardiovascular illness and emphysema was considered normal aging. Medical leaders assured us that this could not possibly be associated with smoking. Their words were trusted because they were of course the “experts.” To speak out against cigarettes as the culprit behind these preventable conditions was taboo. Consequently several generations of Americans suffered and died prematurely and needlessly because the science accepted by the nation’s health officials was unconditionally false.
California State University bioethicist and author of The Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine, Prof. Leemon McHenry views the epidemic of bad medical research as similar to dirty money laundering. After reviewing thousands of clinical trial documents, he observed the means by which pharmaceutical companies intentionally design flawed clinical trials favoring their drugs and vaccines, generate dubious data and then wash it through a corrupt methodology to make the product look clean at the other end. During an interview, Prof McHenry said it was like throwing darts at a door and then later drawing a target on the door so the darts appear to have hit a bull’s-eye. Drug makers have mastered these tricks and our regulatory officials are consistently fooled and left none the wiser.
For those who grew up in the Great and Baby Boom generations, stress reduction was virtually unknown. Exercise was perceived as unnecessary after high school and college. A plant-based or vegetarian diet was viewed as extreme. The different iterations of the American food pyramid, starting with the Food for Young Children guide in 1916 and leading up to the 1979 Daily Food Guide, suffered from a serious lack of knowledge and a misunderstanding about nutrition. There was little bimolecular understanding about the dangers of sugar and excessive salt. Processed foods, preservatives and chemical dyes were being completely ignored. The only dietary supplement that was widely recommended was iron and to a lesser degree Vitamin C. Today we can look back upon these national dietary standards as medieval; yet the horrendous lack of science that supported our unhealthy American lifestyle was part of a scheme to indoctrinate people. And private corporations profited exorbitantly by sustaining these illusions. In the 20th century alone, leading medical journals and government agencies would promote electroshock therapy, bariatric surgery, mercury amalgams and dental fluoride, diethylstilbestrol, synthetic hormone replacement, artificial sweeteners such as saccharine and Monsanto’s aspartame and vaccine ethylmercury. However, today researchers frequently publish research papers identifying the very serious health risks for these products, which earlier were supported by reams of fraudulent corporate-sponsored research to court regulators.
But despite all of the reliable scientific data, it has failed to rein in national health policies and the conduct of the CDC, NIAID and FDA to lessen the health risks Americans are exposed to daily.
It is now 15 months since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11th of last year. The mainstream media has followed in lockstep with the government’s public relations narrative. It has lied about the reliability of PCR testing as a gold standard; injuries and deaths from the J&J, Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are either rejected or reframed as unfortunate anomalies. We may hear about the rare non-promising study against the use of inexpensive Covid-19 treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin; but the many dozens of studies recommending these drugs are flatly ignored. Nor are our health officials telling us the truth about the adverse effects of prolonged mask-wearing, social isolation and quarantines, the vaccines’ safety profiles, the inflated numbers of Covid-19 cases and mortalities, and approving expensive novel drugs shown to be questionably effective.
While many criticize Big Pharma’s abuse of public relations firms to whitewash their noxious public image, in 2015, The Hill reported that the federal government spent over $4 billion on public relations services and over half of that went to the world’s largest firms. Last September, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded the PR firm Fors Marsh Group $250 million to twist the handling of the pandemic in his favor. In 2012, Obama’s HHS gave $20 million to the Porter Novelli PR firm and $26 million to Ogilvy Public Relations for publicity damage control over controversies in his Affordable Care Act. Surely large PR firms have an enormous role within the cartel of governments’ health ministries, the World Health organization, the drug and vaccine industry, and billionaire donors who are now directing the pandemic.
Fortunately the faux scientific artifice upon which the authoritarians in power have defined the pandemic is crumbling. For the first time in medical history, tens of thousands of physicians and medical professionals are calling out our officials and the drug companies for vagrant acts of corruption and deception. Anthony Fauci’s control over the pandemic narrative is in jeopardy. The theory behind a natural origin of the virus is likely a sham; laboratory “gain of function” research to engineer pathogenic coronaviruses has been covered up with lies. We are discovering that health officials intentionally exaggerated SARS-CoV-2’s severity and sabotaged viable medical alternatives to curtail the progression of infection in a way that is scientifically sound, compassionate, and not jeopardized by pharmaceutical interests. ‘The deepest sin against the human mind,” Huxley warned, “is to believe things without evidence.” In the face of millions of unnecessary and preventable Covid-19 deaths due to the irresponsible authority handed to the Fauci-s, Gates-s, Tedros-s, and Matt Handcock-s of the world, a grave moral sin has been committed by allowing technocratic scientism to override medical evidence.
