The Federal Government Doesn’t Represent Us. So Let’s Fix It.
Here's how we can get rid of corporate control and make our government representative of ordinary Americans again.
In the 237 years since our constitution was adopted on June 21, 1788, we overcame slavery, reduced oppression of first nations, and extricated ourselves from wars that the majority didn’t want. Women got the vote, Jim Crow was made illegal, hungry children were fed.
Today we are struggling with corporate capture of regulatory agencies, the revolving door, oligarchs’ foundations, astroturfing, etc. Those problems can also be solved.
For 8 years, John Macgregor immersed himself in the history of democracy, going all the way back to hunter gatherers’ equitable decision-making. The result, his long, detailed book:
“The Mechanics of Changing the World – Political Architecture to Roll Back State and Corporate Power.”
The First Draft of democracy happened 2,400 years ago in Athens, and their Golden Age flourished for 65 years.
Then, (a blink of an eye later, historically speaking) some colonial Americans spent May and June of 1787 behind closed doors in Philadelphia. Their combination of practicality and idealism gave us humanity’s Second Draft of Democracy, this one based on elected representatives.
Isn’t now a good time to begin the Third Draft of Democracy?
If you don’t like the influence of Big Everything (Tech, Pharma, Ag, Processed Food, Armaments, and Oil) on our government, from local to state to federal, then you will appreciate this How To book.
Mike Muntisov wrote an excellent overview that will boost morale in these troubled times. It’s short and shows that there is a path to having the government we really want:
https://courtofthegrandchildren.com/democracy-3-0/
After that intro, Chapter 10 illustrates how far we have strayed from true representative government. John Macgregor gave permission to share it with you.
Chapter 10 is about the Covid pandemic, and anyone who took off their rose-colored spectacles saw the censorship, propaganda, medical malpractice, and profiteering in real time as it rolled out, which is why some call it the “Plandemic.”
BTW, the book has over 1,300 meticulous footnotes for the 76 chapters.
No fussing around the edges can fix Washington DC. We must start over, almost from scratch. The good news is that we can tackle the 4 modern obstacles Macgregor found (listed in Mike Muntisov’s summary) — obstacles that the Founding Parents couldn’t have foreseen.
One of my favorite parts of the book is where Macgregor provides dozens of examples of how people solved problems like we now face. They were ordinary voters in the US and other countries, but all achieved their excellent outcomes within living memory
OK, here’s Chapter 10, if you have the guts for it!
The Mechanics of Changing the World –
Political Architecture to Roll Back State & Corporate Power
John Macgregor (2024)
Chapter 10 - The COVID pandemic
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In 2019, medical historian Frank Snowden wrote, rather presciently:
Epidemic diseases are not random events that affect societies capriciously and without warning... To study them is to understand that society’s structure, its standard of living, and its political priorities.1
For anyone making such an argument, COVID-19 certainly delivered.
By 2024, the year this book went to press, many aspects of the pandemic—viral origins, masks, lockdowns, vaccines—had become subject to fierce dispute, even among experts. Whilst the results of the War on Terror [Chapter 8, the first of Macgregor’s three examples of government run amuck] and the GFC [Chapter 9 is about the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8 that moved trillions from the 99% to the 1%, his second example] can now be clearly judged, there’s still little consensus on how well our governments managed the pandemic.
But third draft democracy is metapolitics—to do with how decisions are made, not what they should be. And we can examine how those pandemic decisions were made: these facts are not that contentious.
Examining the entire pandemic would require a book in itself,
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so I’ll select vaccines—probably the highest-profile of the pandemic issues—as a case study. We’ll look at (i) the incentives within each stage of vaccine development and (ii) how transparent each stage is.
The way society develops, regulates, promotes and prescribes the chemicals that are legally injected into our bloodstreams should tell us much about how governance constellates above us, information around us, and perceptions within us.
1. Incentives for vaccine-makers
The incentive for every player in the vaccine development game is of course money—profits, salaries, fees, kickbacks, gifts, and so on. The further you go down the development pipeline (below), the less visible this incentive is. So with vaccine-makers— at the top of the pipeline—the incentive is in the plainest sight.
For these manufacturers, revenue flows from two sources—or, rather, from one source wearing two hats: the taxpayer and the consumer.
The taxpayer: The US government’s contribution to developing the COVID vaccines was $18-23 billion, $19.3 billion or $39.5 billion—depending on which estimate you read.2 This support goes back to the vaccines’ pre-history—the early 2000s— when the mRNA technology was developed at the University of Pennsylvania with government funding.3
Little of the money had conditions attached. Drug companies held onto the patents, and banked most of the profits.4
The consumer: By the end of 2021, the top three COVID vaccine-makers were between them making profits of $65,000 a minute— totaling $34 billion for the year.
A good portion of these profits flowed from vaccine supply contracts that indemnified the companies against ‘adverse events’ (side effects).5, 6
Pharma had gained such powers over government (according to a study in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice) via ‘state capture’.7
Transparency was scarce:
For example, Moderna in the US was contractually obliged to
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disclose the extent of its taxpayer funding. But it declined to heed the contract—and the government declined to enforce it.8 When the EU’s first COVID vaccine supply contract was made public, nearly every bit of useful information (e.g. the price per dose and the rollout schedule) had been redacted.
Fig. 2.5: A released page from AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine supply contract with the UK Government (2021) [This page couldn’t be copied, but a description makes the point: there are two huge blocks of black ink covering up the still-censored content, with a few meaningless sentences at the top.]
Most vaccine supply contracts didn’t get that far. Transparency International surveyed 182 of them. Only 13 had been made public—most heavily redacted.9
Although very few indemnity clauses made it into public view, in those that did, the vaccine-maker was rendered immune from any liability for causing death, illness, disability or injury—mental or physical. The taxpayer would be paying for vaccine harms, not the vaccine-maker.
In Latin America, Pfizer made governments put up national assets such as central bank reserves, military bases and embassy buildings, to cover it against claims for vaccine side effects. These included any claims against the company for ‘negligence, fraud or malice’. This only came out via leaks.10
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Secrecy likewise surrounded EU President Ursula von der Leyen's negotiation of the world’s largest COVID vaccine deal— for 900 million Pfizer doses.11 Europe’s Parliament,12 its Court of Auditors,13 its Public Prosecutor14 and the European Ombudsman15 all investigated. They had no success: von der Leyen was not talking. Critics were curious to know how it came about that the contracts she negotiated paid Pfizer €31 billion above the vaccines’ production cost.16
In summary: The incentive of revenue proved a rational one, at least for drug companies: by the start of 2022, COVID vaccines were among the most lucrative products in history. Pfizer’s revenues alone were greater than those of most nations.17
2. Incentives for clinical trial researchers
Those running COVID vaccine trials were mostly paid by the vaccine manufacturer. This enabled the company to set the ground rules, interpret the data, and bury the results if they were disappointing.
(It’s probably for that reason that only 45% of COVID vaccine trial results were ever disclosed.18)
By way of example, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) reported that:
Pfizer’s pivotal covid vaccine trial was funded by the company
and designed, run, analysed and authored by Pfizer employees.19
The majority of drug and vaccine trials overall are funded this way: 63%,20 68%21, 75%22 or 87%23—depending on study. Curiously, company-sponsored trials are much more successful than independent ones. Meta-analyses of hundreds of trials find that those sponsored by industry succeed between two and 20 times more often.24
Even more curiously, the opposite seems to be true for side effects. Company-sponsored trials report less of these. For example, company-sponsored trials of the Pfizer vaccine did not report a
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fraction of the side effects that an independent team found in Denmark in 2023.
The latter analysed the records of 10.8 million doses: finding that side effects were batch-dependent—with one batch causing them in 1-in-20 patients.25, 26 Neither Pfizer nor the regulator had noticed this.
Transparency:
The path from corporate check to scientific result is camouflaged by many factors. One of these is trial design. Richard Smith— former editor-in-chief of the BMJ—wrote in 2005:
The companies seem to get the results they want not by fiddling the results, which would be far too crude...but by asking the ‘right’ questions... I must confess that it took me almost a quarter of a century editing for the BMJ to wake up to what was happening.27
Few COVID vaccine-makers made their trial ‘protocols’ (designs) public—and then only late, after public pressure.28 When Transparency International (TI) analyzed 86 COVID vaccine trials, they found that 76 of them kept the protocol secret. This meant there was no way to spot design flaws that could have skewed results.29
As for the ‘clinical study reports’—which describe the trial’s methods and results—only two of the nine jurisdictions that TI studied mandated that these be shared with the public. The US and the UK, for example, did not.30
When it came to the more detailed ‘raw’ or ‘patient-level’ data—which would allow independent researchers to confirm the accuracy of the results—most of this was also suppressed. The BMJ lamented that:
despite the global rollout of covid-19 vaccines and treatments, the anonymised participant level data underlying the trials for these new products remain inaccessible to doctors, researchers, and the public—and are likely to remain that way for years to come.31
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Thereafter, if any avenues of free disclosure remain, they can be chilled by court action. For example, when the European Medicines Agency began releasing even basic trial reports, drug companies launched lawsuits to try to stop it.32 And if a trial scientist voices public concern about a drug, he can be sued by the maker for breach of contract.33
3. Incentives for contract research organizations (CROs)
Trials are often hived off to a ‘contract research organization’. There are thousands of CROs worldwide, with a collective value of $73 billion.34
These entities have a built-in ‘incentive’ problem—as medical investigative journalist Jeanne Lenzer explains:
CROs face a fundamental conflict of interest—if they do not please their commercial clients, they may be less likely to get more work from them.35
The weight of this incentive became clear in September 2021, when it emerged that a part of the US Pfizer vaccine trial was riddled with errors, malpractice and falsification of data. Samples were mislabeled, data retrospectively changed, and ‘adverse events’ not followed up. Staff who flagged these irregularities were ‘targeted’ by management at Ventavia, the CRO responsible.
Ventavia kept the findings to itself: management was concerned the company would be exposed by a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspection. They needn’t have worried. Because of the FDA’s own incentive structure (section 7., below), physical inspections of trials are now rare.
The Ventavia malpractice was only revealed when a regional director reported it to the FDA, then leaked it to the press. (She was fired within hours.)
Even then the FDA did not investigate. Three months later the agency approved the vaccine for emergency use—the irregularities were nowhere to be found in its report—and Pfizer went on to rehire Ventavia to run four new COVID trials.36
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4. Incentives for the trial committees
A drug or vaccine trial generally has an independent data monitoring committee (IDMC) to analyze data as it comes in—and to keep an eye on patient safety, and a trial’s evolving endpoints. Notwithstanding the word ‘independent’, the IDMC is usually appointed by the vaccine-maker—which drafts the committee’s mission statement, and pays its members, and can replace the latter at will.37
A trial also has an ethics committee—to ensure the ‘rights, safety and wellbeing of human subjects’. And it will, at times, need an endpoint adjudication committee and/or a steering committee—to ensure scientific integrity.
All of these are typically bankrolled by the vaccine-maker.38
5. Incentives for medical journals
Five large corporations own most medical journals—ownership concentration akin to that of mainstream media.39 Shareholders of the five are mostly international investment houses and fund managers of the BlackRock and Vanguard variety—not companies or people whose principal interest is science or medicine.40, 41, 42
Medical journals are one of the most lucrative sectors of the publishing industry. The Lancet, for example, has an estimated annual revenue of $71 million.43
The journals make much of their income—sometimes all of it— from drug company advertising.44 This gives pharma a lot of say over content: submissions that pass the editorial test can sometimes be vetoed by a journal’s marketing department.45 In narrow commercial terms, this can be prudent. When the Annals of Internal Medicine published a study showing that ads in journals were often inaccurate, drug companies withdrew their advertising. The journal lost between $1 and $1.5 million, and its two co-editors resigned.46
Journals are not only hit with sticks but fed with carrots. A journal that runs an article favorable to a vaccine may be rewarded with an order for glossy reprints, to be distributed to
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doctors as advertising. Such deals can yield a million dollars apiece.
Some journals need none of these incentives, as they are secretly owned by a drug company for the purpose of spruiking its drugs.47, 48
Transparency of authorship:
Many articles in medical journals are penned by ghostwriters. Studies with differing definitions and methods have put the incidence at 1%, 8%, 11%, 50%, 70%, 75% and 91%.49
Commonly, a ghostwriter is paid by the drug company to write a paper favorable to its drug or vaccine.50 As he lacks scientific credentials, his paper will be credited to the scientists named as the ‘principal authors’. The arrangement is kept from the public, even as far back as the paper’s original Word document, all data that identifies the true author is stripped from the file properties.51
The ‘medical communications’ company DesignWrite starts with a first draft, sends it to the drug- or vaccine-maker for comment, then writes the second. Only thereafter is the paper’s academic ‘author’ brought in. As the academic may not know anything about what he has ‘authored’, he’ll get crib notes from DesignWrite so he can respond to peer reviewers’ questions.52
Peer review itself—which might have shone light on such malfeasance—has not done so, according to former BMJ editor Richard Smith:
Research into peer review has mostly failed to show benefit but has shown a substantial downside (slow, expensive, largely a lottery, wasteful of scientific time, fails to detect most errors, rejects the truly original, and doesn’t guard against fraud).53, 54, 55
6. Incentives for the editors of medical journals
As with clinical trials, medical journals have a double layer of incentives. Not only are the journals themselves paid by drug- and vaccine-makers, but so are many of their editors.
A study of 52 influential American journals found that more than 50% of editors (senior, managing, associate, deputy and exec‐
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utive, as well as editors-in-chief) were being paid directly by the drug industry. The average annual payment was $27,500. The monies were for items like ‘enrolling patients in a study’, and ‘food and beverage, royalties, honorariums, consulting fees, travel and entertainment’.56
Specialist journals are notably favored. Citing a study in the BMJ, Nephrologist Jason Fung wrote that in 2014:
Each editor of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology received, on average $475,072 personally and another $119,407 for ‘research’. With 35 editors, that’s about $15 million in bribes to doctors. No wonder the JACC loves drugs and devices.57
7. Incentives for regulatory bodies
With trial scientists and medical journals compromised, one might hope that accountability—and objective judgement— would kick in when the vaccine reaches a regulator.
But the pharmaceutical industry has left little to chance. If even one player gives the wrong message, public skepticism might stir. A ‘chorus’ is required.
As regulators are such a critical part of the ‘chorus’, here there is a triple layer of incentives:
Firstly, national medicine regulators are mostly financed by the pharmaceutical industry in the form of fees.58
The regulator in the United States (the FDA) receives 65% of its funding from the industry. In Japan, the figure is 85%, in the UK 86%, and in Europe 89%. Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration gets 96% of its funding from the drug and vaccine industry.59
Generally, a regulator doesn’t have to work too hard for its fees. When the Australian regulator approved the Pfizer vaccine, for instance, standard practice applied: the TGA didn’t read the patient data from the relevant study, and relied on a summary supplied by Pfizer.
The BMJ wonders whether this arrangement might have something to do with the rash of drug and device scandals of recent
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years: opioids, joint prostheses, breast and contraceptive implants, cardiac stents, pacemakers, et al.60 Under our present form of democracy, and the ‘non-disclosure’ that cloaks its workings, we will probably never know.
Secondly, a regulator will typically be advised by arm’s length bodies which supposedly critique its decisions objectively. For advice on COVID vaccine approvals, for example, Britain’s regulator has the Commission on Human Medicine (CHM)—which it describes as an ‘independent body’. It’s not clear why, as the CHM is wholly funded by ‘medicines licensing fees’ from the drug industry.
A CHM subcommittee, the Paediatric Medicines Expert Advisory Group, is ‘an independent advisory committee’ that provides ‘impartial advice’ on child vaccines and medicines. Its impartial advice is funded by the drug industry.61
Thirdly, there are incentives for the individuals working in these agencies. In four separate studies of departing FDA employees, for instance, half to two-thirds went to work for a company whose drug they had approved.62
Transparency:
Regulatory assessments tend to be kept secret till they’re of little use. The Australian Government published its January 2021 assessment of the Pfizer vaccine more than two years later, in March 2023—and then only because of a Freedom of Information request, which it fought for months. The eventual release was heavily redacted.
In response to a lawsuit seeking the data from its own Pfizer vaccine assessment, the FDA offered a staged release—one small section per month— till the year 2097. The plaintiffs declined the offer, on the ground that those involved in the case will by then ‘have died of old age’.63
8. Incentives for those working in the biomedical research agencies
The US Government’s biomedical research system disburses $30 billion from taxpayers to scientific grantees each year.
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Hundreds of millions of these dollars flow back from corporations to government: and to individual government scientists and bureaucrats, for work they’ve done on a drug’s development. Between 2009 and late 2023, Pfizer made 265 such grants to National Institutes of Health scientists, and Moderna 207.64
Transparency:
This definitive conflict-of-interest scenario unfolds amid sepulchral secrecy.65
In 2022, the watchdog group OpenTheBooks won a court order to get details of the 1,700 government employees who’d received such payments. The National Institutes of Health responded by supplying data to 2014 only—with corporation names and dollar amounts redacted. This included 23 payments to senior bureaucrat Anthony Fauci.66
9. Incentives for politicians
I do, yes—it's ten thousand sterling.67
— Matt Hancock, the British health secretary (2018-21) who oversaw the COVID response— on being asked in 2023 if he had a daily rate for serving on a corporate advisory board.
The interview was by fake ‘recruiters’. Ex-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng likewise agreed to a £10,000 daily payment. Both men were serving MPs.
The politicians who make decisions on vaccine development and rollout—and how much the public should know about each —appoint the health regulators, and also the bureaucrats who decide on government vaccine subsidies. They sign off on public health rules and messaging. They also sign off on large grants to drug companies for vaccine R&D.
And they influence whether a law is enforced. For instance, the FDA does not dispute that it’s legally obliged to make its COVID
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vaccine assessments public. But, knowing that the political class has its back, it declines to do so.68
Members of this political class often go to a job at the vaccine-maker on retirement, or have come to government from such a company—and often enough both. (The latter are known as ‘serial revolvers’.)
Australia’s politicians and regulators, and the drug companies they shuttle to and from, work ‘collaboratively’, and resemble a well-established, sprawling family.69 Some of Britain’s top government health and science positions—including Chief Scientific Advisor—are occupied by former drug company executives.70
Under the Trump administration, the Health and Human Services secretary was the former president of Lilly USA, and the chief of the FDA resigned to take up a position at Pfizer. At the former’s confirmation hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren opined that his résumé ‘reads like a how-to manual for profiting from government service’.71
The Biden administration, too, is replete with drug industry lobbyists, executives, lawyers and stock-holders.72 Flowing the other way, nearly 340 former congressional staffers work for drug companies and their lobbyists. Many once staffed key pharma-related committees.73
This is plutocracy’s cardio-vascular system: a continuous flow of personnel from corporation to government and back again.
10. Incentives in the vaccine injury reporting process
In 2021, Britain’s regulator, the MHRA, moved to improve its vaccine ‘adverse event’ reporting by appointing Commonwealth Informatics—a ‘pharmacovigilance’ company. In the US, Commonwealth was already performing this task for the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System.74
Commonwealth serves large pharmaceutical companies worldwide, including four of the top ten. Its owner, Qinesca Solutions, is a corporate giant with a slew of pharma clients of its own, including Pfizer.75 A British MP gave a crisp summation of the incentive structure in this arrangement:
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The contract has been given by the MHRA—who are 86% funded themselves by Big Pharma—to a company which is funded by Big Pharma, to investigate complaints against Big Pharma.76
11. Incentives for media
I’ve written a lot of things over the last few years— The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Express, and lots of other publications. For the first year or two [of the pandemic] we could write nothing about the origin of the virus... [And] the minute I questioned the efficacy of the vaccine—even though it had been edited in the usual Daily Mail style, it would get crushed at the last minute. I was expecting it to come out— and I was told by the editor, ‘Something more important came up.’ This was the trend that happened all over the place...
I was invited onto the BBC to do a program about the origin of the virus... They edited my contribution so it looked like I agreed that it came from an animal. Russian and Chinese radio and TV stations would have been proud of it.77
— Professor Angus Dalgleish, British physician, oncologist and pathologist
With trial scientists, trial committees, contract research organizations and medical journals (and their individual editors) largely on the drug company payroll: along with regulatory bodies (and those working in them), biomedical research agencies, politicians, and the vaccine injury reporting agencies: a late check on a COVID vaccine’s safety and efficacy might have been media reportage.
But media, too, is part of the drug industry ‘chorus’. Pharmaceutical ad spending in the US was one billion dollars per month in 2022.78 It made up 75% of the total ad spend on television.79 During the pandemic, the US Government added to this sum by paying millions to The Washington
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Post, The LA Times, NBC, CNN and Fox News to advertise COVID vaccines. Notably, potential critics such as BuzzFeed and Newsmax were also paid, along with hundreds of local newspapers and TV stations. Blaze media, which broke this story in 2022, reported that, collectively, these outlets went on to produce:
countless articles and video segments that were nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety.80
As usual, the expenditure was kept secret from those who paid for it, and had to be unearthed via freedom of information requests.81
In December 2023, Tucker Carlson was asked if financial pressure from advertisers ‘shaped things’ on the news—or if this idea was just ‘a boogie man that doesn’t exist?’:
Oh, it not only exists but it defines news coverage. Especially on pharma. Because pharma is the biggest advertiser on television. If Pfizer is sponsoring your show, you’re not going to question the facts. It’s that simple. And, of course, that’s why they’re the biggest advertiser—so they can shape news coverage. That’s the point.82
12. Incentives for social media companies
Hey folks— Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP.83
— Email to Twitter from the White House COVID-19 team, on a tweet from Robert F Kennedy Jr questioning COVID vaccine safety (2021)
Not to sound like a broken record, but how much content is
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being demoted, and how effective are you at mitigating reach, and how quickly? 84
— Email from the White House director of digital strategy, asking Facebook about alleged COVID misinformation (2021)
Take some of the stuff around COVID... Unfortunately I think a lot of the stablishment...asked for a bunch of things to be censored that in retrospect ended being more debatable—or true.85
— Mark Zuckerberg (2023)
For a social media company, an elementary goal is survival: so there is a strong incentive to stay on the right side of the government—which has the power to apply laws, including anti-monopoly law.
The central incentive, of course, is revenue—which rests almost solely on happy advertisers.
Global pharma and healthcare advertising on social media is worth $15.3 billion annually. For example, four of the top ten spenders on the Facebook app are drug advertisers. (The less effectual a drug is the more is spent to promote it.) 86, 87, 88
These advertisers are also campaign contributors. Pharma contributed $4.7 billion to US federal politics between 1999 and 2018.89 It gives to more than two-thirds of the members of the US Congress,90, 91 and 2,400 state lawmakers.92 The revolving door is also involved: many legislators, civil servants and ex-law enforcement officials have moved to drug companies and their ‘anti-misinformation’ arms since the pandemic began. For instance, Moderna’s ‘global intelligence’ division is headed by Nikki Rutman, who spent nearly 20 years as an FBI analyst. in May 2023, Jonathan Van-Tam, Britain’s former deputy chief medical officer—who oversaw supply contracts for COVID shots, and the investments in manufacturing—took a senior advisory role with Moderna.93
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All this may shed light on why government officials were so quick to ask social media to censor posts that went against drug sector interests, and why the social media companies so readily obliged.
The Public Good Projects [PGP], an NGO funded by Pfizer and Moderna, co-ordinates many of these efforts. With the help of artificial intelligence, Moderna and PGP monitor 150 million websites, including MSM, independent media, social media and gaming sites. The focus is on dissident voices such as Michael Shellenberger, Russell Brand and Alex Berenson.
On Substack, Lee Fang reported that PGP helped with the deletion of posts from numerous social media platforms through 2021 and 2022—including accurate content that had ‘the potential to fuel vaccine hesitancy’:
Emails from that period show that PGP routinely sent Excel lists of accounts to amplify on Twitter and others to de-platform.94, 95
PGP also ‘helped Twitter to formulate its pandemic-related speech policies’, Fang reported.
Thus, when Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, published a study showing that the World Health Organization had originally overstated the COVID fatality rate by a factor of 17 times, he was put on a Twitter ‘trends blacklist’— a tweak to the algorithm that ensured his posts would not trend.96, 97 (His paper became the 55th most-read scientific paper in history.)
Transparency:
None of this information was released voluntarily— it all arrived in the public space via leaks. Indeed, Twitter in this period claimed, ‘We do not shadow ban’—when in fact it had run a ‘search blacklist’, engaged in ‘visibility filtering’, and issued ‘recent abuse strikes’ and ‘do not amplify’ edicts.98
The existence of co-ordinated corporate-government COVID censorship of those from the left and right reached the ears of the public only after Elon Musk bought Twitter in late 2022, and released the relevant files. This is only the tip of what is now
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emerging as a large iceberg: a corporate and ‘all-of-government’ censorship partnership whose targets extend well beyond COVID critics (Part Five).
13. Incentives for doctors
Unsurprisingly, drug company monetary incentives percolate through the process we’ve been looking at right down to the level of prescribing doctors.
‘Opinion leader’ doctors do the best: receiving large consulting and speaking fees to promote specific drugs. In the five years to 2019, 700 US doctors received more than one million dollars each for such services.99
Regular MDs do not miss out. A company will often pay for a doctor’s continuing professional education (which typically features the sponsor’s drugs), or underwrite expensive holidays thinly disguised as conferences. Then there are more prosaic items like ‘gifting branded as office supplies’.100
Such largesse, when it flowed from Purdue Pharma to encourage doctors to prescribe OxyContin, helped to kick-start the American opioid epidemic.101
In Britain, doctors on average receive £10,000 in ‘education’ from drug companies annually.102 In 2016, 631,000 doctors— covering 65% of American patients—were given gifts such as travel, speaking fees and drug company stock. The total value was $8.2 billion.103
‘Industry-physician interactions’—lunches, trips, gifts, speaking engagements, and so on—lead doctors worldwide not only to over-prescribe,104 but to prescribe the donor’s drug over cheaper, generic alternatives.105
The indoctrination of doctors by drug companies begins in medical school.106 In 2004 Purdue Pharma funded a Canadian medical school course on pain management, wrote the textbook, and supplied the lecturer. The text described Purdue’s drug OxyContin as a ‘weak opioid’. As a result of this kind of marketing, Canada has its own opioid epidemic, which causes thousands of deaths per year.107
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14. Incentives for patient advocacy groups, non-profits, professional associations, government health services [comment from Lauren: like county public health departments] A modern plutocracy lives or dies by the chorus effect. Its messages, whether about a war, a financial system or a vaccine, flow to the public ear from an array of sources—expected and unexpected, central and marginal, official and unofficial—to create the impression of broad, diverse support. All this is achieved by a financial inducement for every player in the system, and even at its edges.
Those at its edges, indeed, are among the most useful—as entities such as patient groups, NGOs, professional associations and public health agencies are presumed to be giving their opinions freely, for no reward. This adds a vital layer of credibility.
So, how freely given are these opinions?
Patient groups: Various studies have found between 20% and 83% of these to be funded by pharma.108 For instance, the American Heart Association receives tens of millions of dollars annually from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, and other drug- and vaccine-makers.109 In the US there’s no requirement to report these payments—so they’re seldom disclosed.110
[Comment from Lauren: I saw this as a teacher attending ADD parent organization meetings – they were well funded by the manufacturer of Ritalin.]
To flesh out the chorus effect, pharma funds not only large patient groups such as the American Diabetes Association, but small, obscure ones like the Caring Ambassadors Program.
Drug companies are overt in pressuring patient group boards and staff to act in the company’s interests.111 This seems to have stopped many groups from complaining about high drug prices.112 Indeed, industry-funded patient groups have lobbied the US Congress to not allow the import of cheaper drugs from Canada— in the interests of ‘safety’.113
A patient group will also be paid to lobby a regulator to approve a drug or vaccine. Or it might assemble an ‘expert panel’ to pass judgement on it on the public’s behalf. (The panel will be a group of doctors who are likewise on the industry payroll.)114
If a drug or vaccine is not government-subsidized, patient groups will be paid to complain about this—on ‘affordability’ grounds—via social media posts, press releases and submissions to
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government. A PR firm is then hired to generate media stories about the ‘complaints’.115
Investing in patient groups is a significant part of drug company business. Studies reveal €6.4 million paid out in Sweden (2014-2018), €8.8 million in Denmark (2014–2019), $AU34 million in Australia (2013-2016), £57 million in Britain (2012-2016), and $680 million in the US in 2018 alone.116
The biggest contributors included companies that went on to make COVID vaccines, such as Merck, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca.
Non-profits (NGOs) are another beneficiary of drug company generosity. For example, the US National Consumers League and the Immunization Partnership were given hundreds of thousands of dollars by Pfizer to lobby for mandatory COVID vaccinations (and were instructed to keep the donations quiet). Other beneficiaries are ‘dark money’ non-profits, or ‘action networks’, that lobby politicians on drug prices, alert the public to the ‘dangers’ of importing cheaper drugs, and get pro-pharma politicians elected. Pharma’s US trade association gave more than half a billion dollars to these non-profits in 2020.117
Journalist Lee Fang writes that the professional associations for pharmacists and practitioners of preventive medicine, managed care, clinical pathology and emergency medicine:
signed a letter in support of the Biden administration mandate to require employers with 100 or more employees to require their employees to be fully vaccinated or tested at least weekly. The organizations all received individual grants from Pfizer.118
In Britain, the royal colleges—of general practitioners, physicians, surgeons, et al—received more than £9 million in donations from drug and device companies between 2015 and 2022. Pfizer was the largest donor.119
Finally, drug companies contribute millions of pounds to parts of Britain’s National Health Service, and to individual NHS doctors. The money is to fund the ‘redesign of patient services’— usually to maximize the purchase of the companies’ drugs.120
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End-to-end containment
This is an impressive state of anarchy.
How might one ‘follow the science’ in a regime like this?
And how many of these scenarios—perverse incentives, no transparency—apply to the other elements of the COVID response?
By mid-2024, official accounts of that response were being undermined by independent studies, a series of exposés, an unexplained global rise in ‘excess deaths’, and some humbling concessions by the WHO. Narratives on viral origins, school closures, the effectiveness of masks and prolonged intubation, the wisdom of vaccine mandates, and the reliability of government data, were shown to have been often dubious, sometimes wrong, and occasionally fraudulent. 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132
No consensus has yet emerged on the safety and efficacy of the vaccines themselves. But by looking upstream, as we’ve done, it’s clear they were evaluated in compromised circumstances. From lab to jab, every stage was sponsored by the one party with an overwhelming financial interest in the outcome.
You might call this end-to-end containment.
A plutocracy develops end-to-end containment in each major economic sector. The ‘just war’ narrative, for example, is built through investment in politicians, media, think tanks, schools, universities, astroturfing and lobbying (Part Three). As with vaccines, even the peripheral players are catered for: intelligence agencies put journalists on the payroll;133 the military works with studios to make it look good in movies; the funds of independent media critics are frozen so they lose their platforms...134
A similar ‘chorus’ was assembled post-2008, to fumigate the reputation of the financial sector.
In each case, the goal is an ensemble of voices that support a certain viewpoint. Any critic who then arises seems ‘uninformed’.
End-to-end containment is imposed on any narrative that significantly affects the disposition of wealth. (There are few attempts to condition the populace about nutrition or personal
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morals.) This is less a centralized conspiracy than money spontaneously filling the holes in a dated constitutional order.
The lure of this money—high profits, generous salaries, large campaign donations—draws all players in the same direction: as a cold snap causes fuel companies to raise production, road repair teams to work overtime, and householders to shut their curtains— without anyone coordinating them.
Upstream of this approach to power and information is the political capture we’ll encounter shortly, in Part Three.
Downstream of it, we have spin in place of news, war in place of peace, bubble economies in place of stability, and favors in place of governance.
Leaving the real world: the replication crisis
The story of the COVID vaccines is not unique in the field of biomedicine. The development of nearly every device, drug or vaccine is shaped by a similar list of incentives, and is likewise shielded from view by a meticulous regime of secrecy.
This lays the ground for the hundred tricks—woven through the process—by which something can be ‘made true’. For example, in a trial report, an inconvenient dataset can be left out;135 or a new ‘expected outcome’ can be inserted retrospectively, if the first one didn’t deliver. (This ‘outcome switching’ is rife.)
Simpler again, inadequate endpoints can be set in the first place. In 2020, a BMJ analysis of four major COVID vaccine trial protocols found that none of them were designed to detect important outcomes—such as hospital admission or death. Instead, these mega-trials all set a primary endpoint of symptomatic covid-19 of essentially any severity... These studies seem designed to answer the easiest question in the least amount of time, not the most clinically relevant questions.136
Any study showing a drug or vaccine to have no efficacy, or dangerous side effects, is likely to be ‘bottom-drawered’. It never sees light of day.137 The resulting ‘publication bias’ has had lethal
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results. New companies can trial the drug, tweak the methodology to show it to ‘work’, and get it approved for market. Heart antiarrhythmic drugs killed 100,000 Americans this way.138
Ninety-four percent of published antidepressant trials are successful. But when—in a rare feat of scholarship— researchers dug out all the unpublished trials, the overall success rate dropped to 51%.139 In the published literature, the benefits of antidepressants are large; in reality, they’re of ‘small magnitude’.140, 141
You might guess that science arrived at in these ways would be fragile and inconsistent—would be wrong much of the time.
Over the last decade or two, a few curious researchers tried to replicate the findings of a range of existing studies, using improved and unbiased methodologies. The results were dismal. In two of the best-known analyses, the ‘replication rates’ of preclinical studies were 25% and 11%.142 The first, in the journal Nature, was titled ‘Believe it or not’. The second attempted to confirm 53 ‘landmark’ studies in oncology—on which much modern cancer therapy is built. It succeeded in replicating only six.
In a survey by Nature, 67% of medical researchers, 77% of biologists and 87% of chemists had at one time or another tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's results. For all that, studies that can’t be replicated are cited more often than those that have been.143
To find evidence of medical misrepresentation at scale, you don’t need to look to the Old West or the New Age.144 The authority of the august medical journals, the well-credentialed researchers, the ‘gold standard’ science, the ‘stringent’ government regulation, the media ‘watchdogs’, crumbles to the touch.
This radically pessimistic view is shared by many with the deepest knowledge and longest experience:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly.“145
— Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine (2009)
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“Sadly I followed the same path and spelt out my disillusionment in my book. I wrote it in 2004, and since then my pessimism has deepened.“146
— Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group— commenting in 2010 on the above quote from Marcia Angell.“Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry. The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.“147
— Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet (2015)“Our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. Our drugs kill around 200,000 people in America every year...
“Much of what the drug industry does fulfils the criteria for organized crime in US law. They behave in many ways like the Mafia does. They corrupt everyone they can corrupt. They have bought every type of person—even including ministers of health in some countries... The drug industry buys the professors first. Then chiefs of department, then chief physicians, and so on.“ 148
— Professor Peter Gøtzsche, co-founder of The Cochrane Collaboration“We like to imagine that medicine is based on evidence, and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature, when in reality much of it is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are well-educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by industry. We like to imagine that regulators only let effective
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drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve hopeless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients.“149
— Dr Ben Goldacre, in his best-seller Bad Pharma (2012)“There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.150
“National and federal research funds are funneled almost exclusively to research with little relevance to health outcomes.“151
— John Ioannidis, holder of four professorships at Stanford University, including Statistics and Medicine
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Citations for Chapter 10 – The COVID Pandemic
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John Macgregor gave me a link to see the book online at no cost, which I assume he's willing for others to use: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_Q_nr0y9P1X0XZ8rb8td05DTDc-oT6zr/view
We are in such dire need of a big course correction in our country! This book could have a similar impact that Tom Paine's "Common Sense" had back around the time of the Boston Tea Party.
In the next few years, we face an equally crucial change. The percentage of the population who read Common Sense, or heard it read aloud, was greater for that book than for any book since. It was pivotal in nudging people from complacency into action at a time when the British Empire was already fighting on other fronts, so we actually had a chance to gain independence.
In that time and place, an armed revolution had to be the path for independence, but this book is about negotiating and arriving at a common cause. People's ideas of what Preppers have guns for don't fit this approach, sympathetic tho' some of us may be. It's about discussions in every neighborhood, and about trying out methods that have worked in troubled areas around the world.
It won't be easy, but the reward of being alive during— and participating in— a second, peaceful Revolution would be worth it if we reach a tipping point and get government at every level to truly serve the 99%, not the 1%.
"Third Draft" is about building on the first draft in Athens, and extending the second draft that happened in the late 1700s for 13 former colonies working together.
It seems to me that anyone with some time (retired people, for instance) could form Third Draft Chapters that meet on a regular basis. I'll bet the Athenians (property-owning males, specifically) had discussion groups way back then. Ours would be better-- poor and rich, blue collar workers, secretaries, farmers, and nurses and (eye-roll) lawyers, various religions and ethnicities, there might even be a toddler or two in the room!
Each person could take a certain chapter to summarize for the group, as a way to get familiar with these new-to-us methods for real change. (Surely you don't think the Republicans and Democrats will do that for us!)
As a concerned voter, as a person who has been part of large demonstrations (that made no difference), and as a grandmother, I felt the situation was hopeless, until I read about citizen-led groups that solved complex problems in many countries. If they can do it, so can we.
The federal government doesn’t represent us. So let’s stop submitting to it.