The following excerpts are adapted from the author’s latest book, Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails.
We’re deeply mired in a serious crisis that is touching all of us and growing worse. It is virtually ignored by our elected officials and popular media—but for their efforts to bury it.
It’s a health crisis that encompasses an epidemic of chronic and acute diseases, an explosion in disorders related to Covid and Covid vaccines, historic levels of mental illness, and more young people than ever afflicted by brand-new diseases or those previously unheard-of in children.
We could fix these emergencies, but they are nowhere to be found on the national agenda set by our health agencies and major political figures. They’re too busy spending your tax dollars on their own priorities.
Their priorities include deflecting from the crisis by feeding us a steady stream of propaganda and misinformation. Creating a market for, selling, and defending medicine. And smearing anyone who stands in the way. Why they do this, contrary to all of our best interests, is at the heart of this book.
Death by Prescription Drugs
Long before the opioid crisis, prescription drugs were a top cause of death. Today, they are number one, estimates Danish physician Dr. Peter C. Gøtzsche. In 2014, Dr. Gøtzsche helped start an independent collaborative, hoping to cut through the government-medical industry’s hold on our health information. At the time, he wrote:
Our drug agencies . . . rely on fake fixes . . . a long list of warnings, precautions, and contraindications for each drug, although they know that no doctor can possibly master all of these. Major reasons for the many drug deaths are impotent drug regulation, widespread crime that includes corruption of the scientific evidence about drugs and bribery of doctors, and lies in drug marketing, which is as harmful as tobacco marketing and, therefore, should be banned. We should take far fewer drugs, and patients should carefully study the package inserts of the drugs their doctors prescribe for them and independent information sources about drugs such as Cochrane reviews [referring to a scientific collaborative group], which will make it easier for them to say “no thanks.”
Ten years later, drug ads are more ubiquitous than ever, and fatalities from prescription medicine are the top cause of death, Dr. Gøtzsche says, often written off to other factors. For example, thousands die of peptic ulcer complications caused by taking common non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs. Others die after falls prompted by medicine they were prescribed.
But because the solutions don’t rest with consuming more drugs that deposit profits into pharmaceutical industry coffers, death-by-prescription-drug doesn’t draw near the attention that other maladies do—which is par for the course.
It’s not as if we haven’t tried to get a grasp on our own health. But for every safety measure enacted on our behalf, there are well-funded and powerful interests working to undermine it. Warning labels are required for drugs, including vaccines. But doctors who prescribe them usually don’t tell you what’s on the labels, encourage you to read them, or later find out if you suffered any ill effects. And if you end up back in the clinic or in the ER with an adverse event, odds are the doctors won’t recognize or acknowledge it as drug-related. They certainly don’t report it to the federal databases designed to track and unearth new side effects. Why?
Speaking of those federal databases, when they do reveal patterns of injuries pointing to possible drug dangers, we’re left to wonder why the data is collected at all. That’s because government and pharmaceutical interests work in an organized fashion to convince us that the patterns mean nothing. They’re to be dismissed.
Artificial Reality
We exist largely in an artificial reality brought to you by the makers of the latest pill or injection. It’s a reality where invisible forces work daily to hype fears about certain illnesses, and exaggerate the supposed benefits of treatments and cures. On the other hand, these forces have financial reasons to minimize or deny spikes in other types of illnesses that they make money treating, so that we don’t seriously explore root causes. In those cases, they argue the surge is just the result of greater awareness and better diagnosis, or maybe the invention of overactive imaginations.
The hard truth is that every emerging disorder we suffer opens up new opportunities for pharmaceutical companies to earn millions or billions. Drug companies and their government partners fund the majority of scientific studies with the goal of promoting a product. Studies that could stand to truly solve our most consequential health problems aren’t done if they don’t ultimately advance a profitable pill or injection.
The government subsidizes food that’s bad for us; allows known neurotoxins, cancer-causing chemicals, and hormone disruptors to be in the food we feed our children every day and the water we drink; and restricts practices that could make us healthier. It incentivizes the practice of medicine in a way that reduces us to a series of target numbers to be achieved through expensive pharmaceuticals and treatments, and punishes doctors who color outside the lines and practice independent patient care. Why?
Misinformation issued on a grand scale saturates the information landscape and becomes impossible to avoid. The government, federal agencies, doctors, medical associations, and cleverly disguised nonprofits backed by industry push this misinformation on the public with impunity. Medical professionals and scientists who question the dogma and offer independent research or individualized treatment to patients are held up to ridicule, punished, even yanked before medical boards to have their licenses pulled.
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.
Part of the reason your doctors don’t dig deeper lies in the fact that medical school curriculae and professional Continuing Medical Education classes are designed by the pharmaceutical industry too.
The media make an incredible fortune selling drug ads, so their news and information arms look the other way on matters of drug safety, or even aid and abet the misinformation. Politicians gobble up contributions from the pharmaceutical industry and staff their congressional offices with drug industry personnel who make sure pesky oversight hearings on all these topics are never held. It’s a scandal of mega proportions—but who is left to expose it and correct it?
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.
Copyright © Sharyl Attkisson
