"There are four federal studies that have looked at CDC and said the vaccine program at CDC is a cesspool of corruption." -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from the forward to the book, Vaccine Whistleblower: Exposing Autism Research Fraud at the CDC, 2015 (source)
interlocks
'Interlocking directorate' refers to corporate board members who sit on multiple boards, however for our purpose interlocks will also include relationships between pharmaceutical companies and government or other entities where such relationships present an obvious conflict of interest. An example of this is when when a board member of a pharmaceutical company simultaneously holds a position within government which regulates the same drugs the company manufactures, or when a government official leaves their position to work for a pharmaceutical company which benefited from regulations the person introduced while they held a position in government or visa-versa.
One must understand that the U.S. government and the mainstream media have strong political and financial motives for protecting the pharmaceutical industry. Many board members of the larger pharmaceutical companies hold highly influential positions in government, including within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Furthermore, with lobbying expenditures totaling $277,784,999 in 2017 alone, the pharmaceutical industry is the number one lobbyist by far, doling out more than double that of the second biggest spender that year, the insurance industry.
As for the mainstream media, their relationship with the pharmaceutical industry is obvious given simply the number of drug advertisements one is inundated with in virtually all forms of media. Drug advertisers spend roughly $5 billion dollars in ad revenue annually which in turn rake results in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits. The vaccine industry alone was estimated to be worth $24 billion in 2016 and that figure is expected to nearly triple by 2020. Also consider the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is well represented in much of the mainstream media in the form of corporate board members. Let's have a look at some of the interlocks regarding Johnson & Johnson for example, which Wikipedia tells us is the largest manufacturer of pharmaceuticals according to revenue which totaled a record $76.5 billion dollars in 2017. As of February, 2018:
- Mark B McClellan, a board member of J&J, also happens to be the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, the administrator of the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, the Senior Director for Health Care Policy of the White House Office and the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy of the U.S. Department of the Treasury
- Ronald A Williams, a board member of J&J, must have a particularly busy schedule. He has relationships with more than 20 other companies, including Blue Cross/Blue Shield of California where he is the Executive Vice President. He is also a member of the Wall Street Journal CEO Council which is apparently composed of 120 of the world’s most powerful chief executives. In addition, he is a member of the Director of National Intelligence Senior Advisory Group and a board member of both the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and the President's Management Advisory Board.
- Anne M. Mulcahy, a board member of J&J and former CEO of Xerox, is also a board member of The Washington Post and the Graham Holdings Company, a Washington, DC-based newspaper company that owns Harman Newsweek LLC
- Melanie Healey, who holds a position at J&J, also sits on the board of Verizon Communications. Interestingly, she is also a director of Bacardi USA, Bacardi Limited and Hilton Hotels.
- Harry C. Alford, who holds a position at J&J, is also the Cultural Ambassador for the U.S. Department of State
- Charles Prince, the director of J&J, is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is not the only one.
- Sherilyn McCoy, the worldwide chairman of J&J, is also the CEO and chairman of Avon Products
The above list is only a sampling of the many interlocks which exist between pharmaceutical companies, government and the mainstream media. You can research these kinds of interlocks further using resources such as the LittleSis website.
The 2009 Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) study referred to in the video is titled Single-Payer & Interlocking Directorates and in it we find:
The study also found crossover between these media corporations and several large pharmaceutical companies, such as Eli Lilly, Merck and Novartis, whose profits would also likely be negatively impacted by a single-payer system. Out of the nine media corporations studied, six had directors who also represented the interests of at least one pharmaceutical company. In fact, save for CBS, every media corporation had board connections to either an insurance or pharmaceutical company.
revolving doors
Video: The Revolving Door Between The FDA and Big Pharma (2016) by Ben Swann
Another area which is heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry is medical schooling. In the well-referenced 2016 article, The Pharmaceutical Industry’s Role in U.S. Medical Education on the in-Training website, an online magazine for medical students, we read:
Medical students are subjected to a barrage of advertising that inevitably leads to a physician-industry connection that can be harmful to our health care system. Medical students’ exposure to pharmaceutical marketing begins early, growing in frequency throughout their training. Students receive gifts such as free meals, textbooks, pocket texts, small trinkets and even drug samples.
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Some resident physicians report an average of six pharmaceutical gifts annually, up to 70 industry sponsored lunches, and nearly 75 promotional items in one year, and a survey showed that 41 percent of emergency medicine departments allowed their residents to be taught by drug company representatives.
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As medical students are increasingly subjected to pharmaceutical marketing throughout their education, their skepticism towards the practices of the pharmaceutical industry gradually diminishes.
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In order to prevent our future physicians from becoming puppets of the pharmaceutical industry, the current medical education system must undergo key reform.
corruption
Corruption exists in every major institution. It is an inherent component of greed; greed for money, power, control. And the more money at stake, the greater the risk of corruption. We are taught to blindly trust our healthcare professionals with our lives and with our children's lives, yet the healthcare industry is no less susceptible to corruption than any other. Case in point:
For approximately two decades, into the 1950s, the public was repeatedly told that cigarettes were safe while, at the same time, information was available that linked smoking to lung cancer. From a 2005 article titled When was the link between smoking and cancer established? by The Guardian, we read:
Evidence had been gathering for more than a decade beforehand. In 1949, Richard Doll, a researcher working for the Medical Research Council, and Bradford Hill, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene, began looking at lung cancer patients in London hospitals. The patients were asked about family history, diet and previous diseases. In 649 cases of lung cancer, two were non-smokers. Doll immediately gave up his own five cigarettes a day habit.
Doll and Hill extended their research to Cambridge, Bristol and Leeds and, after speaking to some 5,000 people, found the same results.
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Doll and Hill followed up their work and, by 1956, the link was incontrovertible: more than 200 heavy smokers had died in a four-year period while the incidence among non-smokers was negligible.
Though the smoking-cancer link was well established in 1956, the majority of doctors apparently continued to ignore the science. From a 2012 paper titled The history of the discovery of the cigarette–lung cancer link: evidentiary traditions, corporate denial, global toll we read:
Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics. Cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales. Propagandising the public proved successful, judging from secret tobacco industry measurements of the impact of denialist propaganda. As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established.
Possible connections between tobacco and cancer were made approximately 62 years prior to 1960. From the same paper we read:
In 1898, a medical student by the name of Hermann Rottmann in Würzburg proposed that tobacco dust—not smoke—might be causing the elevated incidence of lung tumours among German tobacco workers. Rottmann's mistake was not corrected until 1912, when Adler proposed that smoking might be to blame for the growing incidence of pulmonary tumours.
Historical evidence of a tobacco-cancer link aside, one simply might wonder what it was that the tobacco companies might have known that caused them to target the healthcare industry as a marketing vehicle.
The tobacco issue is just one glaring example as to why it can be a bad idea to blindly trust healthcare professionals who are often incentivized to promote products which are known to have wide-spread adverse and sometimes deadly consequences to our health.
Science itself is no stranger to corruption and fraud either. From the 2017 article, Most editors of top medical journals receive industry payments, by Retraction Watch:
When examining the roles of conflicts of interest in academic publishing, most research focuses on transparency around the payments authors receive. But what about journal editors? According to a new Peer J preprint, two-thirds of editors at prominent journals received some type of industry payment over the last few years – which, at many journals, editors are never required to disclose. (The findings echo those reported by another recent paper in The BMJ, published six days later.)
The above is an excellent example of where the bulk of corruption lies in many areas -- healthcare, government or otherwise -- and that is with the gatekeepers. Those who implement policy, in this case doctors, are basically well-meaning people i think, however the decisions they make are often based upon policy makers whose interests may be wildly different than their own, such as when editors of medical journals refuse to publish data that is critical of a company which is paying them. I found the above article linked to from another titled, Dissolving Illusions - "Authoritative" Medical Information Sources Are Corrupted, which was published in 2017 by the AHRP. In it they write:
Among the numerous examples of corrupted science that can be attributed to the illegitimate intervention by journal editors who are financially tied to pharmaceutical companies, is the case of an Israeli study headed by Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld, an internationally acknowledged, foremost expert on autoimmune disorders.
(2) The Shoenfeld study, Behavioral Abnormalities In Young Female Mice Following Administration Of Aluminum Adjuvants And The Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccine Gardasil, was first submitted to the Journal of Human Immunology where it languished for 8 months and was then rejected by the editor-in-chief, Dr. Racke. According to the American Academy of Neurology, Dr. Racke received personal compensation from EMD Serono, a subsidiary of Merck, the manufacturer of one of the HPV vaccine.
The article was then published in the journal Vaccine (January 2016), until it was summarily withdrawn by that journal’s editor-in-chief, Dr. Gregory Poland, who is chairman of Merck’s safety evaluation committee for vaccine trials.
More recently, former CDC director, Brenda Fitzgerald, was forced to resign her position because she was trading tobacco stocks. From a 2018 article by Politico:
After assuming the CDC leadership on July 7, Fitzgerald bought tens of thousands of dollars in new stock holdings in at least a dozen companies later that month as well as in August and September, according to records obtained under the Stock Act, which requires disclosures of transactions over $1,000. Purchases included between $1,001 and $15,000 of Japan Tobacco, one of the largest such companies in the world, which sells four tobacco brands in the U.S. through a subsidiary.
The purchases also include between $1,001 and $15,000 each in Merck & Co., Bayer and health insurance company Humana, as well as between $15,001 and $50,000 in US Food Holding Co., according to financial disclosure documents.
These are not isolated cases and until one acknowledges the level of corruption and criminality that exists throughout our society, one cannot fully appreciate how broken the system is as a whole. When a study is published in a highly respected, peer-reviewed medical journal that indicates there is no link between a vaccine and neurological damage, complete with high confidence levels and low 'p' values, what is that study worth when it was funded and conducted by the same company that manufacturers the vaccine and reviewed by those with a vested interest? What validity do such studies hold in the minds of thousands of parents who literally watched their child regress shortly after receiving a vaccine? From a 2016 Truth in Media segment by Ben Swann, Understanding Big Pharma's Propaganda Machine, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Marcia Angell, stated:
This is corrupting research and making the public--and doctors--think that prescription drugs are much better and safer than they actually are. I saw an enormous change in the relationship of academic medicine and clinical research to the drug companies. And i saw more and more bias introduced into the research. And one of worst forms of bias is that the drug companies will not permit researchers to publish negative results. If the drug doesn't look good, it's not published. It's buried.
The article, "Peer Reviewed:" Science Losing Credibility As Large Amounts Of Research Shown To Be False, by Arjun Walia of Collective Evolution, provides several sourced examples of how science has been corrupted.
Science today, in all fields, is plagued by corruption. Yet, more often than not, attempts to create awareness about scientific fraud — an issue that few journalists have been willing to address — are met with the response, "Well, is it peer-reviewed?"
Although good science should always be reviewed, using this label as a form of credibility can be dangerous, causing people to dismiss new information and research instantaneously if it doesn’t have it, particularly when that information counters long-held beliefs ingrained into human consciousness via mass marketing, education, and more.
Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that we are being lied to about the products and medicines we use on a daily basis.
If you’re one who commonly points to the "peer-reviewed" label, then you should know that there are many researchers and insiders who have been creating awareness about the problem with this label for years.
Video: Big Pharma Manipulates Physicians and Corrupts "Best Practices" (2016) by Ben Swann
Video: How Big Pharma is Buying Influence Through Lap Dances, Media Collusion & Paying Off Professors (2017) | RT