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Science Not to be Trusted

8 Top Leaders in Field of Medicine Say Don't Trust Science

Throughout the pandemic, we were told by the powers that be to trust the science. But science is a process, not a person in whom we can place our faith. This process always produces meaningful data about how the world works, yet correctly interpreting that data isn't always easy or possible. And for a variety of reasons, official interpretations of scientific data appear broadly untrustworthy. When science is used by powerful interests to support questionable policies, it ceases to be a tool for the betterment of all mankind. ~~ WantToKnow.info team member Mark Bailey

Dear WantToKnow.info subscribers,

A democratic culture can be defined as one that invites open dialogue of different views, and promotes transparency. Most importantly, a democratic culture builds trust. Yet we live in a time where trust in American media and public institutions are at an all-time low. Making sense of this collective distrust requires that we understand the political agendas and government corruption that covertly shape our lives.

A growing number of leaders in the fields of medicine and science are speaking up about the corruption they've witnessed within these systems. Did you know that the FDA has shifted from being an entirely taxpayer-funded entity to being primarily funded by the very pharmaceutical corporations they are supposed to regulate? An in-depth investigation by Project on Government Oversight shows how special interests drive the approval of prescription drugs for industry profit rather than public health safety. How do we begin to "trust the science" if there is minimal public awareness and dialogue about these issues?

Why do these eight top leaders in medicine say that science is not to be trusted?

  1. Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) - “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.”
      ~~  Taken from this webpage on a U.S. National Institute of Health website
  2. Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet (considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world) - “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
      ~~  Taken from this webpage on a U.S. National Institute of Health website
  3. Dr. Fiona Godlee, 16 years as editor-in-chief of The BMJ - "It's estimated that 70 per cent of the retractions are based on some form of scientific misconduct. I think we have to call it what it is. It is the corruption of the scientific process.”
      ~~  Taken from this webpage on the website of the CBC (Canadian Broadcast System)
  4. Kamran Abbasi, current executive editor of The BMJ - “Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. COVID-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health."
      ~~  Taken from this webpage on the website of The BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal)
  5. Dr. Raeford Brown, chair of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Committee on Analgesics and Anesthetics - “Congress is owned by pharma. The pharmaceutical industry pours millions of dollars into the legislative branch every single year. In 2016, they put $100 million into the elections. That’s a ton of money.”
      ~~  Taken from this webpage on The Yahoo! News website
  6. Assistant Professor Ray Moynihan, one of the leaders of a campaign sponsored by The BMJ to separate medicine from big Pharma - “When we want to decide on a medicine or a surgery, a lot of the evidence we used to inform that decision is biased. It cannot be trusted ... because so much of that has been produced and funded by the manufacturers of those healthcare products.”
      ~~  Taken from this webpage on the website of the Sydney Morning Herald
  7. A group calling itself CDC Scientists Preserving Integrity, Diligence and Ethics in Research, or (CDC SPIDER), put a list of complaints in writing in a letter to CDC Chief of Staff. The members of the group have elected to file the complaint anonymously for fear of retribution - “It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests … and Congressional intent for our agency is being circumvented by some of our leaders. What concerns us most is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception. These questionable and unethical practices threaten to undermine our credibility and reputation as a trusted leader in public health.”
      ~~  Taken from this webpage on the website of The Hill
  8. Dr. Herbert L. Ley Jr, head of the FDA in the late 1960s - “What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it is doing are as different as night and day.” He complained further that during his 18‐month tenure he had been under “constant, tremendous, sometimes unmerciful pressure” from drug industry officials.
      ~~  Taken from this webpage on the New York Times website

Recent Articles We've Summarized on Corruption in Science

Internal Pharma Documents Reveal Strategies Used to Corrupt the Medical Field
May 9, 2023, Mad in America
read on madinamerica.com

A recent Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods article examines internal pharma industry documents, primarily obtained through litigation. The study finds that the pharmaceutical industry employs numerous ghost management strategies to corrupt research, circumvent and undermine regulations, manipulate consumers, and protect its interests. The authors write: “The scientific literature using internal documents confirmed widespread corporate influence in the pharmaceutical sector. While the academic literature used internal documents related to only a handful of products, our research results, based on ghost‐management categories, demonstrate the extent of corporate influence in every interstice of pharmaceutical markets, particularly in clinical research and clinical practice.” Analysis of the articles revealed several common ghost management strategies the pharmaceutical industry utilizes. Ghost management is a system of behind-the-scenes processes by which the industry corrupts researchers, clinicians, and regulatory agencies with gifts and bribes and determines what research will be funded, what scientific journals can publish, and how physicians, etc., will present their product. The present research reveals eight broad categories of ghost management: scientific capture, professional capture, regulatory capture, media capture, market capture, technological capture, civil society capture, and others. Scientific capture was the most commonly analyzed ghost management strategy.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.


There’s far more scientific fraud than anyone wants to admit
August 9, 2023, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
read on theguardian.com

Scientific misconduct does not happen only at Stanford and Harvard. Of the nearly 5,500 retractions we catalogue in 2022, and the thousands of cases we have reported on since launching our watchdog website Retraction Watch in 2010, the vast majority involve researchers at institutions without anywhere near Stanford and Harvard’s pedigrees. The number of retractions each year reflects about a tenth of a percent of the papers published in a given year – in other words, one in 1,000. Yet the figure has grown significantly from about 40 retractions in 2000, far outpacing growth in the annual volume of papers published. Retractions have risen sharply in recent years for two main reasons: first, sleuthing, largely by volunteers who comb academic literature for anomalies, and, second, major publishers’ (belated) recognition that their business models have made them susceptible to paper mills – scientific chop shops that sell everything from authorships to entire manuscripts to researchers who need to publish lest they perish. These are not merely academic matters. Particularly when it comes to medical research, faker hurts real people. The truth, however, is that the number of retractions in 2022 – 5,500 – is almost definitely a vast undercount of how much misconduct and fraud exists. We estimate that at least 100,000 retractions should occur every year. Journals and publishers ... fail to do their part, finding ways to ignore criticism of what they have published, leaving fatally flawed work flagged.

Note: Back in 2015, the editor-in-chef of The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, wrote that much of scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. According to a revealing article by Nature, a leading science journal, medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials. Who can we trust? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on science corruption from reliable major media sources.


From fatal eyedrops to mislabeled melatonin, why the FDA is failing the public
August 21, 2023, Salon
read on salon.com

A 2022 investigation by the journal The BMJ declared that FDA oversight of clinical trials, including those for Pfizer and Moderna's mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, was "grossly inadequate," from not conducting enough inspections to failing to alert scientific journals or the public when violations were flagged. But the issues here are not confined to behind the pharmacy counter. Dr. John Abramson, author of the recent book "Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It," traces the roots of issue back decades. "In 1992, when what turned out to be effective HIV drugs were stuck in the bottleneck of the FDA, they didn't have enough staff to get them through quickly enough. Many people were dying, and it was a real crisis," he explains. "The solution was that the Prescription Drug User Fee Agreement was passed. The drug companies started to pay a user fee with that was due upon application for new drug approval. And now roughly 65% of the FDA budget for overseeing human products comes from the drug and device companies. This comes with rigid timelines, and as I see from the outside, some degree of influence and obligation to the drug companies that derives from this agreement." The numbers here vary — Forbes puts that budget figure as high as 75%. Another similar conflict of interest that concerns Abramson is what he calls "the revolving door that goes between FDA and the drug industry."

Note: Read about Brook Jackson, a researcher for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trials, who discovered patient safety concerns, data integrity issues, and other significant issues at her site. When she reported it to the FDA, she was fired the same day. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and health from reliable major media sources.


Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials. How many studies are faked or flawed?
July 18, 2023, Nature
read on nature.com

How many clinical-trial studies in medical journals are fake or fatally flawed? In October 2020, John Carlisle reported a startling estimate. Carlisle, an anaesthetist who works for England’s National Health Service, is renowned for his ability to spot dodgy data in medical trials. He is also an editor at the journal Anaesthesia, and in 2017, he decided to scour all the manuscripts he handled that reported a randomized controlled trial (RCT) — the gold standard of medical research. Over three years, he scrutinized more than 500 studies. For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data. Carlisle called these ‘zombie’ trials. Even he was surprised by their prevalence. “I anticipated maybe one in ten,” he says. The issue is, in part, a subset of the notorious paper-mill problem: over the past decade, journals in many fields have published tens of thousands of suspected fake papers, some of which are thought to have been produced by third-party firms, termed paper mills. “It ... has the potential to amplify a wrong result, suggesting that treatments work when they don’t,” he says.


Monsanto and the Merchants of Poison
December 23, 2022, CounterPunch
read on counterpunch.org

Last week, the report Merchants of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide was published by authors Stacy Malkan, Kendra Klein and Anna Lappé. [In 2012], pesticide and processed food companies spent $45 million to defeat a ballot initiative to label GMOs (genetically modified foods) in California. This campaign was led by Monsanto, one of the planet’s largest producers of GMOs. Monsanto created a PR storm through the mouths of so-called third-party “experts” from across the fields of academia and science. It was later revealed that these allegedly neutral voices were closely tied to Monsanto. The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2015 concluded that glyphosate—the chemical contained within herbicides that most GMO crops have been engineered to resist—is likely a human carcinogen. Thousands sued Monsanto claiming that their exposure of Monsanto’s glyphosate-based product, Roundup, caused their cancers. Monsanto employees ghostwrote scientific papers on the safety of glyphosate and strategized how to discredit journalists and scientists raising concerns about the pesticide. Major universities, including University of California Davis and University of Florida, played a significant role in legitimizing and amplifying pesticide industry product-defense efforts. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Cornell University, and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) ... also provided essential aid and cover for pesticide industry propaganda.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on GMOs and science corruption from reliable major media sources.


The pharmaceutical industry finances about 75 percent of the [FDA]’s drug division
September 15, 2022, New York Times
read on nytimes.com

Every five years, top officials of the Food and Drug Administration go behind closed doors to negotiate the terms of its core budget — about $3 billion this year. But the F.D.A. is not at the table with members of Congress or with White House officials. Instead, it’s in dozens of meetings with representatives of the giant pharmaceutical companies whose products the agency regulates. The negotiations are a piece of the “user fee” program in which drug, device and biotech companies make payments to the agency partly to seek product approvals. The fees ... make up nearly half of the F.D.A.’s budget, financing 6,500 jobs at the agency. The pharmaceutical industry funding alone has become so dominant that last year it accounted for three-quarters — or $1.1 billion — of the agency’s drug division budget. Advocates for patients and doctors say the agreements have enabled the industry to weaken the approval process meant to ensure that drugs are safe and effective. “It’s kind of like a devil’s bargain,” said Dr. Joseph Ross, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine who has studied F.D.A. policies, “that I think is not in the best interest of the agency, because it turns this every-five-year cycle into the F.D.A. essentially asking industry, ‘What can we do to secure this money?’” Senator Bernie Sanders ... suggested that the pharmaceutical companies’ tendency to charge “outrageous” prices was related to their significant role in funding and advancing policy goals of the F.D.A.’s drug division.

Note: This profoundly eye-opening interview of a top cardiologist reveals without doubt how big Pharma has corrupted science and greatly damaged public health. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.



For more specific details on how science has been corrupted, explore a 10-page summary of former NEMJ editor-in- chief Marcia Angell on this webpage. See also the Great Barrington Declaration on better ways of dealing with COVID-19 signed by over 50,000 scientists and medical professionals. By spreading the word on this message from top leaders in the health field, we can make a difference. Thanks for caring.

With best wishes for a transformed world,
Amber Yang and Fred Burks for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
Former White House interpreter and whistleblower

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