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December 16, 2024 - February 7, 2025
Even most of your doctors don’t know that the medical journals they rely upon are filled with unreliable studies hopelessly tainted by drug industry interests—and that’s according to some of the journal editors themselves! Studies are ghostwritten by drug companies, then held out as independent. Researchers, under pressure to publish, can buy studies with fake data on the Internet and put their names on them.
In this artificial reality, success isn’t measured by the good health of the population. Quite the opposite. It’s measured by how many people are taking expensive drugs or getting vaccinated. It’s not about preventing illnesses; it’s about treating them indefinitely.
The CDC used to define “vaccines” quite simply as agents that “prevent disease.” But in 2021, that had to be changed. It became undeniable that Covid vaccines didn’t prevent the disease (or transmission, or even illness). Logic might suggest that the Covid vaccines would have to be withdrawn from the market. After all, they didn’t even meet the definition of a vaccine. Instead, the CDC quietly redefined the word “vaccine” to make the Covid shots seem successful after all. On the CDC’s vaccine web page, sometime between September 1 and 2, 2021, somebody removed a key phrase from the definition.
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There’s never ever been a weight loss drug that hasn’t been pulled from the market for safety reasons over time.
pharmaceutical companies are doing exactly what they were built to do: make money. The thought that they’re somehow different from other multinational corporations, that they are motivated by altruism and can be trusted to be honest about the failings of their own products, is a fallacy.
They don’t tell you what’s in the syringes they’re injecting you with now. And they don’t keep records of it.
against the known risks of the vaccine, which are substantial.”
The smallpox vaccine has a higher rate of serious side effects than routine vaccinations. It’s estimated that out of every million people who get the shot, at least one to three of them will die. That could translate to hundreds of deaths, and thousands of life-threatening illnesses caused by the vaccine. The vaccine actually makes some people contagious with smallpox for a time. Smallpox vaccination can be effective after exposure, which reduces the need to pre-vaccinate millions.
The government safety surveillance program has detected an unnerving trend: eleven cases of unusual heart inflammation among vaccinated military troops and three civilian deaths.
Each single reported adverse event, experts say, can imply anywhere from 10,000 to an astonishing 100,000 additional injuries that go unreported.
The combination of smallpox vaccine and the controversial anthrax vaccine, also given to military troops at the time, could magnify the risk of side effects.
Ladders are labeled. “Don’t fall off the ladder.” Plastic bags come with cautions. “Suffocation risk. A plastic bag is not a toy.” But when it comes to medicine that millions of people take, there’s an opposite approach. No potential risk seems big enough to warrant concern; no proof of adverse events is convincing, even when it comes to life and death.
“Mystery Blood Clots Felling US Troops,” UPI Investigations Editor Mark Benjamin
Appearing alongside her on NBC is Dr. Geno Merli. Merli happens to be a paid consultant to Sanofi-Aventis, which manufactures a deep vein thrombosis therapy and a smallpox vaccine.
In early 2024 came a stunning subversion of long-standing tenets of ethical human research. The FDA issued rules that clinical researchers no longer have to get informed consent from people they experiment on when they decide their research poses “no more than minimal risk.”
“There’s an anecdotal report of someone who died after experiencing brain edema, which is a not uncommon side effect of [Aduhelm],” says Dr. Alexander, the FDA advisor who voted against approval. In the early months of the drug being marketed, at least four deaths were reported among treated patients.
Yes, you’re reading correctly—it’s often left to the drug companies to determine whether their own drugs are responsible for deaths.
The deluge of TV drug ads began around 1997. By 2020, the pharmaceutical industry accounted for 75 percent of all televised ad spending in the US, adding up to about $4.58 billion. Written with all of the zeroes, that’s $4,580,000,000.00.
Dr. Carome of Public Citizen has studied the many conflicts generated by all the TV drug ads. “[They advertise] the newest drugs, so we often know the least about their safety,” Dr. Carome tells me. “And often there are older alternatives that may be equally effective and safer. But because those drugs aren’t advertised, because the generic drug industry doesn’t do this type of advertising, it can [hurt] the public health overall.”
Taking drugs as prescribed is a major cause of death. It’s said to be a factor in more than 300,000 fatalities a year in the US and Europe.
And even after getting caught once, Bayer later produced more Yaz commercials that failed to disclose any risks—including heart attack, stroke, gallbladder disease, blood clots, and death, according to the FDA.
It’s grown exceedingly common that when patients get sick during a study, instead of the drug company considering the illness to be a possible side effect—which is what should be the response—they seek to explain it away. They blame anything other than the experimental medicine.
Having high blood pressure to begin with doesn’t mean if you have a stroke after Covid vaccine, you can automatically rule out the vaccine as having an impact. In fact, you should immediately ask whether the vaccine might prove riskier to people with preexisting vulnerabilities.
In fact, a study isn’t considered legitimate unless the data is available so that it can be verified and replicated by others with the same results.
Think of the audacity. A private university can take our tax money for a study, then refuse to answer questions about it because they’re a private university. To me it looks like the CDC can legally launder taxpayer dollars to third parties to produce what amounts to propaganda, then cover their tracks under a shroud of secrecy.
When millions of adverse event reports were filed after Covid vaccination, the general approach was to insist none of them were related to vaccines. But with Havana Syndrome, a connection was assumed without any evidence whatsoever.
Often, academic institutions become beholden to the wants and desires of the federal government/Big Pharma complex that gives them so much money.
Critics say when companies fund academic research, it results in the “buying up” of academic institutions.
The campus scientists are likely to avoid doing studies that could unearth safety risks with their sponsors’ products.
away. Corporate funding is one of the two biggest factors involved in swaying today’s scientific research. The other is government. Each year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) doles out more than $33 billion in taxpayer-funded grants to over 58,000 entities. That purchases great control over America’s research landscape. NIH tends to give the most money to studies that will benefit its pharmaceutical industry partners. NIH is seen as less likely to fund big studies that could unearth inconvenient facts or harm sales of favored medical products.
partnership can apply with help from the media. As I wrote in The Smear, there’s an entire cottage industry made up of experts-for-hire, nonprofits, LLCs, super PACs, websites, foundations, PR companies, global law firms, and crisis management specialists who make their living destroying those who dare to come down on the wrong side.
This ignores the fact that Hayes had originally embarked upon the research at the behest of Novartis. Are we now to believe that Novartis had hired a bad scientist at a prestigious institution who, for reasons unknown, then developed an inexplicable desire to harm his sponsor and “scare the public”? And that his findings are only to be believed if they came down in favor of the herbicide?
Little to no research is self-funded by scientists or paid for by disinterested parties.
As my time with the frog professor at Berkeley draws to a close, I can’t resist addressing an elephant in the room. “Have you wondered,” I ask, “if [atrazine] is a hormone disruptor, if this can be playing any role in what we’re seeing happening in our youth today? When there are a lot of boys who say they feel like girls and girls who say they feel like boys?” “[It’s] very likely that chemicals like atrazine that can influence your hormonal balance—and we know it does so in humans—that potentially could influence things like sex or gender identity and orientation,” says Hayes.
“Atrazine is the poster child because we know what it does. We know it’s not good and it’s everywhere. [But] we have something like 80,000 human-made chemicals in the world. Most of them haven’t been studied in the level of detail that atrazine has. If you go through the literature right now, you’d get glyphosate or Roundup, metolachlor, atrazine, maybe one or two other compounds. Most of the other compounds we use in agriculture, we know nothing about what they do. So yeah. We’re missing a lot of information.”
I learned from all those things, and you know, I ask my students all the time, ‘If you get 100 percent on an exam, did you really learn anything?’ So you have to get a few things wrong in order to challenge yourself and actually learn something.”
When a scientific issue goes from zero to 60 practically overnight—grabbing headlines, political real estate, and funding priorities—you can bet there’s an invisible hand at work.
“People who think that this is a grassroots movement that is giving rise to the transgender culture in the United States, this transgender moment that people say that we’re having, do not understand that this is more of a top-down dynamic that is at play, where you have really just a handful of organizations and [lesbian gay bisexual trans] advocacy organizations that are driving the agenda. But because they have such sway and such money, they’re influencing everything from schools to politicians, to corporate America.”
AbbVie, the company that makes money selling Lupron, happens to generously support the transgender movement.
That adds up to a fantastically lucrative market for the makers of HIV medicine, like Gilead Sciences. Gilead has developed eleven HIV medications now on the market earning over $1.5 billion a month.
Gilead happens to be the single biggest known funder of trans activist groups,
a very good job reporting out the facts. In 2022, a large study of 200,000 men found that erectile disfunction drugs like Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, and Stendra can more than double the risk of conditions that can lead to blindness.
Lessons Learned: Don’t assume the experts will be first to alert the public about drug safety issues. The FDA isn’t necessarily monitoring or acting promptly on adverse event reports. Likewise with drugmakers, and even the prescribing doctors. There’s every chance that a curious reporter or physician who is outside the specialty will unearth crucial information before the inside experts do.
Ghostwriting is when a doctor who appears to be independent signs his name to a medical journal article promoting a drug or treatment. The article is actually written by the drugmaker or its agents. The signing doctor is more or less a hired hand who’s paid for his signature. Those who read the article are none the wiser about the true nature of the content because the source isn’t disclosed.
the articles were paid ads for Redux disguised as scholarly work.
Lessons Learned: Scientific literature in peer-reviewed, published medical journals may be conflicted. Some doctors are for sale.
I would learn years later that the CBS advertising division contacted the CBS Evening News executive producer on behalf of AstraZeneca to warn about my coverage exposing the dangers of Crestor and other statin drugs that had aired on the news. The executive producer told me that “one of the [CBS] sales bosses threatened” him “pretty harshly” and left him a “loud, angry voicemail saying ‘[Sharyl’s] stories could really harm [CBS’s ad] business.’” Back then, as now, CBS and the other news networks received tens of millions of dollars a year in ad money from the pharmaceutical industry. A news
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Nobody on the email thread, including the medical correspondent himself, seems to be aware that Dr. Offit isn’t an independent authority on this subject—he’s the inventor of the RotaTeq vaccine that’s at issue!
Lessons Learned: “Independent” doctors and researchers who defend or promote drugs are often working for the drugmaker without affirmatively disclosing their financial ties. Pharmaceutical companies spend unimaginable fortunes on public relations efforts to spin and influence news reporters, their bosses, and corporate news headquarters. News editors may block stories that are contrary to certain interests.
“The drug companies are always finding new ways to hide adverse events that happen in their clinical studies,” he explained. “So my job is to figure out what they’re covering up in their FDA applications.”
