How Big Pharma continues to corrupt the evidence base
*Festive edition
This week I have been researching what I call ‘de-enlightenment’ specifically the corruption of the evidence base and connections with the mainstream or legacy media. Toby Rogers has published an impressive, but depressing, substack entitled ‘Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis are broken’ demonstrating how randomised controlled trials are gamed by the pharmaceutical industry to create favourable results using strategies such as selecting ideal research participants, unblinding researchers to the control group, and removing participants for nefarious reasons if they are not demonstrating the preferred outcomes. Rogers addressed the issues around conducting systematic and multi analysis reviews, the highest level of evidence, by using meta search engines that ban articles if they break ideological conformity.
This week’s ‘Mid Western doctor’ substack entitled ‘How Big Pharma Sold Depression and Its Treatment to the World’ contained similar insights into how large pharmaceutical companies have medicalised ‘feelings’ to convince the public that they are depressed and therefore need medication, and have worked tirelessly to expand diagnostic criteria.
Big Pharma - Undoing thousands of years of scientific progress
Plato's Academy mosaic. Roman mosaic of the 1st century BCE from Pompeii, now at the Museo Nazionale Archeologico, Naples.Source: Jebulon, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45896144
Natural reactions to bereavement, loss, disappointment, frustration, unhappiness, failure, anomie, and loneliness are medicalised as ‘depression’ and treated with drugs. Ultimately this robs people of their agency, their humanity, and the ability to contemplate or encounter the transcendental. If people are unable to work through problems and just take a pill instead, they will fail to develop the wisdom or resilience required to survive life. Primary care doctors, often under huge pressure to see more and more patients, dish out Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI)’s without the understanding possessed by psychiatrists.
I often teach George Engel’s Biopyschosocial Model (1977) to nursing students and explain how the reductionist biomedical model pursued by western medicine emerged from a gentleman’s agreement between the religious and medical establishment over ownership of the mind. The outcome of this discussion was that the church would permit doctors to use cadavers in their medical training if they left care of man’s mind and soul to the church. This arrangement appeared to work well for both parties until the age of secularisation when suddenly millions of people deserted the churches, and congregations began to shrink. Not only was this disastrous for the maintenance of church roofs across England, with belief in God around 50% of the population (Kings College 2022) but pharmaceutical companies have rushed in to fill the void left by the church.
It also explains why people are more vulnerable to mass formation and totalitarianism as described by Mattias Desmet, due to loneliness, atomisation, and lack of meaning. The power of the latter in enabling people to overcome all manner of deprivations was beautifully and tragically articulated by Viktor E. Frankl in his work ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. Participation in the theatre of COVID-19 provided an opportunity for the masses to experience collective action and meaning, even with the extreme costs that this was associated with, and partly explains why only the independent media is demanding an investigation into excess deaths.
Instead, what we are seeing in the legacy media is ‘limited hangout’ a media relations technique for damage limitation where a small lie or failure is acknowledged to divert from the main issue. So, we have the news stories and television presenters acknowledging excess deaths, scratching their heads, and coming out with various possible causes that either blame the public or the health service, without mentioning the COVID-19 vaccines despite their own data showing these deaths rates are not from COVID infections and coincided with the roll out of the vaccines. From my perspective, the authorities are still hoping that they can squash and discredit independent media, intimidate whistle blowers (see the case of Barry Young in New Zealand), and introduce statutory instruments for shutting down any further debate. It remains to be seen whether the authorities will be successful but expect dripping acknowledgement of some of the ‘minor’ vaccine harms in older people, and continued emphasis on how many people were ‘saved’.
In the meantime, I would encourage everyone whenever they see an article in the legacy media telling people to get another booster or jab, to take nothing at face value and investigate the conflicts of interest behind the authorship that are usually blatant. I bring you the following example to illustrate the point which was distributed by MicroSoft News (MSN) feed.
‘Major COVID warning from Scots professor after ‘horrid’ battle with the virus’ by Brock, A., Gourlay, K. and Love, L. published in the Daily Record, 18 December 2023
This article reports on the ‘huge’ increase in COVID cases, and warns that immunity against COVID-19 is as low as when the first vaccines were introduced, and symptoms could be ‘worse than ever’. Experts from Imperial College London and Edinburgh University remind readers about the huge difference made by the vaccines and the need to get another booster to restore their immunity. There are warnings about how ‘devious’ the virus is, how ill people might get, and the dangers of long COVID. After stoking all this fear, the reader is directed to get yet another booster to be saved from the horrors thus described.
This article however is nothing but big pharma propaganda. It turns out that the Professor Eleanor Riley who experienced the ‘horrid’ battle, is a specialist in veterinary pathology and was previously employed by the Welcome Trust pharmaceutical company (remember the revolving door between regulators, industry and academia). She has recently co-authored an article entitled ‘Long-term vaccination strategies to mitigate the impact of SARS-CoV-2 transmission: A modelling study’. This study used a modelling exercise to show that further boosters ‘would avert a further 30% of hospitalisations and deaths’ and recommended that vaccines should continue to be promoted across the world and would result in cost benefits for countries that implemented them. It is not difficult to unpick the methodological limitations of the made up ‘model’ nor assumptions made around the impact on ‘transmission’, which Pfizer conceded it had not actually tested for, or the dubious non-pharmacological interventions deployed during lockdowns.
However, all is revealed in the sections on ‘funding information’ and ‘declaration of competing interest’; all the usual suspects are there including large pharmaceutical companies such as the Welcome Trust, and of course, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Thanks Bill!
Merry Christmas everyone! (Or Happy Winter Festival for the Woke)
References
Eleanor Riley — University of Edinburgh Research Explorer. Available at: ttps://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/eleanor-riley (Accessed: 22 December 2023).
Engel GL. The need for a new medical model: a challenge for biomedicine. Science. 1977 Apr 8;196(4286):129-36. doi: 10.1126/science.847460. PMID: 847460.
Hogan AB, Wu SL, Toor J, Olivera Mesa D, Doohan P, Watson OJ, Winskill P, Charles G, Barnsley G, Riley EM, Khoury DS, Ferguson NM, Ghani AC. Long-term vaccination strategies to mitigate the impact of SARS-CoV-2 transmission: A modelling study. PLoS Med. 2023 Nov 28;20(11):e1004195. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1004195. PMID: 38016000; PMCID: PMC10715640.
Kings College London (2022) Belief, Faith and Religion: Shifting Attitudes in the UK. Available at: kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/lost-faith-the-uk%27s-changing-attitudes-to-religion.pdf (Accessed: 22 December 2023).
Mattias Desmet & Tucker Carlson Discuss Mass Formation (Complete Interview) (rumble.com) (2022). Available at: https://rumble.com/v1ja623-mattias-desmet-and-tucker-carlson-discuss-mass-formation-complete-interview.html (Accessed: 22 December 2023).
‘Major COVID warning from Scots professor after ‘horrid’ battle with the virus’ by Brock, A., Gourlay, K. and Love, L. published in the Daily Record, 18 December 2023. Available at: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/major-covid-warning-scots-professor-31695943 (Accessed: 22 December 2023)
Substacks Mentioned:
Thank you for you insight, frankness and bravery. Keep fighting it is much appreciated by innumerable anonymous people out here. Merry Christmas.