According to Dr. Aseem Malhotra, most people — including doctors — don’t realize that researchers who do peer review of drug company-sponsored trials don’t get access to the raw data. All they get is the drug company’s analysis of that data, which leaves the door wide open for manipulation and obfuscation.
Story at a glance:
- Drug companies have a legal responsibility to provide profits for their shareholders. They do not have a legal responsibility to give patients the best and safest treatment. But the biggest scandal is that those with the responsibility to uphold scientific integrity — academic institutions, doctors, and medical journals — also collude with industry for financial gain.
- Five hundred Australians have joined a class action lawsuit against the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), arguing the agency did not fulfill its duty to properly regulate the vaccines, which resulted in considerable harm to Australians.
- Australians who have experienced a serious adverse event following COVID-19 vaccination are invited to register for this class action.
- A similar class action is taking place in the U.K., where attorneys representing approximately 75 people injured by AstraZeneca’s shot, and family members of those killed by it, are suing the drug company.
- There’s now overwhelming evidence showing that the COVID-19 shots were a disaster from the start and that regulatory agencies knew it but went ahead anyway. Now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is trying to rewrite history by giving provably false testimony before Congress.
In the video below, Joe Rogan interviews cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra about Big Pharma’s control over research.
What many don’t realize is that researchers who do peer review of drug company-sponsored trials do not get access to the raw data. All they get is the drug company’s analysis of that data, which leaves the door wide open for manipulation and obfuscation.
As noted by Malhotra, “It’s not scientific, it’s not ethical … and it’s not democratic.”
Most doctors, unless they’re involved in the peer review process, are not even aware of this which is why they rarely ever question published science.
Yet data analyses by Stanford professor Dr. John Ioannidis show that “the greater the financial interest in a given field, the less likely the research findings are to be true,” Malhotra says.
No one protects patients anymore
So, is the drug industry all about satisfying shareholders and increasing profits by any means, with no real regard for public health? Rogan wonders. Basically yes.
As noted by Malhotra, drug companies have a legal responsibility to provide profits for their shareholders. They do not have a legal responsibility to give patients the best and safest treatment.
But the biggest scandal here, Malhotra says, is that “those with the responsibility to uphold scientific integrity — academic institutions, doctors, medical journals — collude with industry for financial gain.”
I would add that our regulatory agencies are also “on the take.” They’ve all been captured by industry, which leaves patients with no one to protect them from Big Pharma’s malfeasance.
Malhotra goes on to discuss Dr. Robert Hare, a forensic psychologist who developed the original DSM criteria for psychopathy, and how Hare noted that the way drug companies conduct business, as legal entities, fulfill the definition of psychopath: “callous unconcern for the feelings of others, incapacity to experience guilt, deceitfulness and conning others for profit.”
Between 2003 and 2016, drug companies paid fines totaling $33 billion. Many of these cases involved the illegal marketing of drugs, scientific fraud, hiding data on harms and the suppression of negative results.
These fines never curtailed the behavior, however, because the fines were a drop in the bucket compared to the profits they made on these drugs. The fines were just considered the cost of doing business.
What is the net effect of pharmaceutical drugs?
While the drug industry has created crucial life-saving drugs, the big question we need to ask is “What is the net effect of them?” Malhotra says. He points out that, in the U.S., of the 667 drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) between 2000 and 2008…