Corruption in the Medical Establishment

Unpleasant facts.

Photo by Sara Bakhshi via Unsplash

This article is meant as something simple and logical that you can send to friends who still blindly trust in the American medical establishment. It’s a collection of stories and links that are not conspiratorial at all. All logical, all “respectable,” bland almost—yet demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that we need to watch out for ourselves.

Now, are there amazing and brilliant professionals involved in medicine and medical research? You bet, and I tip my hat off to them. But the system is corrupt as hell, and we are all better off dealing with reality vs. fantasy. My heart bleeds when I think of those who trusted the American medical establishment and who were effectively murdered in the hospital last year. What an awful way to go.

I think we owe it to ourselves to seek the truth. And it’s important that when we present our facts-based skepticism to others, we do it in an even-headed way.

My own skepticism started when I was a kid because I grew up around medical research. From conversations, I learned that some research was factual, and some, well… not so much. I also heard heartwrenching stories about medical mismanagement and cruelty. Some made my stomach turn. Growing up, I thought that it had to do with how things were done “in Russia.” Corruption and so on.

I realized that things were not much better in America when I had to look after a relative at a good American hospital (before COVID). The chaos blew my mind! One department didn’t know what the other one was doing, nurses broke basic sanitary rules, etc. etc. I was coming into this with idealistic ideas about American medicine working like a well-tuned machine (maybe mechanical but at least fine-tuned!), and my delusions were crashed. I realized that existentially, it’s the same everywhere.

Then 2020 showed up, and science in the traditional sense of it went out of the window. The official narrative was getting weirder and weirder, the bullying and the censorship were competing with each other in absurdity—and so to save my sanity, I started really looking into the state of medicine and medical research.

“Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness,” wrote Richard Horton, the Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet in 2015. [source]

“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 over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine,” wrote Marcia Angell in 2009. [source]

Below is her presentation at Harvard Medical School from a few years ago (when it was still okay to be critical of the pharma industry).

Here is a must-watch interview with Leemon McHenry, posted just a few days ago.

Here are some facts about the state of hospitals in America (pre-2020):

"Using a weighted average of the 4 studies, a lower limit of 210,000 deaths per year was associated with preventable harm in hospitals. Given limitations in the search capability of the Global Trigger Tool and the incompleteness of medical records on which the Tool depends, the true number of premature deaths associated with preventable harm to patients was estimated at more than 400,000 per year. Serious harm seems to be 10- to 20-fold more common than lethal harm.”

And here is a list of links to articles in “respectable media” about various unseemly practices, including by the very pharma companies whom we are supposed to idolize today. I borrowed much of the list from my earlier article, “Pandemic, Meet Panopticon. Panopticon, Meet Pandemic.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/11/pfizer-nigeria-meningitis-drug-compensation
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/12/did-pfizer-bribe-its-way-out-of-criminal-charges-in-nigeria/68495/
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-largest-health-care-fraud-settlement-its-history
“Lavishly funded Moderna hits safety problems in bold bid to revolutionize medicine”
https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
Drug Companies Continue to Shed Liability for Rushed Coronavirus Treatments
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/28/coronavirus-vaccine-prep-act/
“Research not fit to print: Some biotech companies now eschew traditional publication in peer-reviewed journals.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3488
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9220789/Merck-anti-baldness-drug-Propecia-long-trail-suicide-reports-records-show.html
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/03/719037789/botched-vaccine-launch-has-deadly-repercussions
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-narcolepsy-fiasco-spurs-covid-vaccine.html
“Why was the public not told of early warning signs?”
https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3948
“Revealed: how drug firms 'hoodwink' medical journals” 
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/dec/07/health.businessofresearch
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-astrazeneca-results-vaccine-liability/astrazeneca-to-be-exempt-from-coronavirus-vaccine-liability-claims-in-most-countries-idUSKCN24V2EN
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielcassady/2020/10/05/johnson--johnson-to-pay-100-million-in-baby-powder-settlement/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_settlements
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/10/30/929080692/the-campaign-to-wipe-out-polio-was-going-really-well-until-it-wasnt
https://www.drugwatch.com/manufacturers/pfizer/
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/04/peter-doshi-pfizer-and-modernas-95-effective-vaccines-we-need-more-details-and-the-raw-data/
“UK firm tried HIV drug on orphans”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/apr/04/usa.highereducation
“How Your Hospital Can Make You Sick”
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/health/hospital-acquired-infections/index.htm
“Killer fungus spread rampantly at US hospital Covid ward: study”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/killer-fungus-spread-rampantly-at-us-hospital-covid-ward-study/ar-BB1cAVBI?ocid=msedgntp
https://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/Fulltext/2013/09000/A_New,_Evidence_based_Estimate_of_Patient_Harms.2.aspx
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964337/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext
“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124
https://ethics.harvard.edu/blog/risky-drugs-why-fda-cannot-be-trusted
https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/fdageneral/94596
https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/94733
https://time.com/3714242/candidate-to-lead-fda-has-close-ties-to-big-pharma/
https://www.science.org/content/article/fda-s-revolving-door-companies-often-hire-agency-staffers-who-managed-their-successful

I will end this with a story. When I was a kid, my mom’s hospital was giving out a limited number of condominiums to select employees. There was throat-cutting competition. We didn’t get it. Later on, it turned out that the building had asbestos, and people started getting sick. Many of them were doctors. It wasn’t corruption even, they just didn’t know…