How Big Pharma Bought the Federal Government

For a society to function, it requires a collective trust in the society’s institutions. One of the most challenging things for many to come to terms with throughout COVID-19 has been how each institution we trusted to protect us instead pushed a variety of unjustifiable policies and then refused to stop pushing them even as public protest broke out against the harm those policies were creating. I would argue what we saw throughout the pandemic was ultimately a consequence of two things:

• Medicine is one of the United State’s most lucrative industries (the amount we spend on it has steadily increased each year).
• The practice of medicine is controlled by regulatory bodies who grant monopolies to any party which can complete the arduous tasks needed to earn their seal of approval.

Because of this, an immense incentive exists to buy out the regulators, so unscrupulously spending large amounts of money to earn a coveted spot in the medical marketplace has become a routine business practice for the pharmaceutical industry.

In turn, as time has moved forward, and the medical industry has continued to grow (e.g., in 2021, 4.3 trillion dollars went to healthcare, amounting to 18.3% of all spending in the USA), the corruption that sustains it has proliferated throughout our institutions.

Because of the wanton disregard for the science we saw throughout COVID-19, much of the public now believes our institutions are throughly corrupt. However, what is much less understood is the anatomy of that corruption and how deeply it has entwined itself within the Federal government.

Tightening the Thumbscrews

A common pattern I repeatedly witness is a new institution being created by strongly investing in creating the idealized version of it, then once that ideal version has earned the public’s trust and everyone becomes invested in its new way of doing things (to the point they can’t return to how things were before), the screws are gradually tightened on the institution. Once this happens, those who work within the institution often become willing to compromise on their values and ethics.

For example, a college education was originally considered a specialized path for those genuinely interested in scholarly pursuits. However, after it became a way for individuals to dodge being drafted into the Vietnam War, many more began pursuing it, which made the Federal Government’s willingness to provide unconditional loans to anyone wishing to pursue a college education give birth to an enormous industry which rapidly inflated the costs of a college tuition.

This, in turn, increasingly incentivized colleges to prioritize growth and to retain their failing students so those students would continue paying tuition.

In parallel to this, the job of a college professor radically changed; previously they were in short supply now a glut of them exists in the marketplace, especially since the growth-focused mentality of higher education has eliminated the previous stipulation that professors needed to be selected on the basis of their academic merit.

Because of this, there are many professors (often with PhD’s) who have a low enough salary they need food stamps to make their ends meet and hence cannot do anything which challenges their employers.

For example, I’ve talked to numerous professors who have stated that they have been forced by their administration to disregard cheating from their students (so they would continue to pay tuition) and a cottage industry now exists for professors to make money on the side by writing papers (e.g., a thesis) for students seeking a degree.

Note: One of the best compilations I saw of the increasing corruption within the educational sector came from a blog by an anonymous college professor. A few years ago he passed away from a grossly mismanaged testicular cancer, so the final posts on it focus on medicine rather than education.

As you might imagine, this issue has also seeped into the medical field as medical schools make a lot of money. In turn, as the years have gone by, colleagues have shared increasingly concerning instances of cheating being swept under the rug or them being pressured by the administration to find ways to pass students who should have otherwise failed.

Likewise, since the position of a professor (and often a graduate student) is so dependent on the papers they publish, they are incentivized to fabricate data so their paper can be published and many studies have shown this fraud has become a widespread issue within the scientific literature.

One of the most overt examples we saw of this came from the recent discovery that immediately after the leak occurred at the Wuhan lab (which Fauci had funded), he panicked and then contacted a group of respected virologists to request they produce a paper to prove COVID-19 could not have come from a lab. The virologists, in turn, did just that, and Fauci repeatedly used their paper to debunk the lab leak hypothesis.

Shortly after, the lead author had a 9.8 million dollar research grant from the NIH approved (which Fauci held the final say on) — which that author lied to Congress about, and later leaked chat messages emerged showing the paper’s authors also lied to the world as they themselves believed the virus had come from a lab.

Note: This paper also formed the basis for Big Tech aggressively censoring anyone who suggested a lab leak had occurred. Had the lab leak hypothesis have been allowed to enter the public discourse, Fauci likely would not have been allowed to direct the response to the pandemic he himself was responsible for creating (especially given that in response to public outcry over previous leaks of dangerous pathogens, Obama had effectively banned Fauci’s research).

Most recently, it was revealed Fauci also covertly met with the CIA when they were deliberating if SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab. The CIA in turn publicly announced the lab leak could not be proven, (which amongst other things required bribing the team responsible for the CIA’s assessment).

Another noteworthy example occurred after the vaccines had hit the market and many recipients began developing complex neurological illnesses from them. Some of those individuals (e.g., the clinical trial participants) contacted the NIH for help and were enrolled in a study to evaluate and treat their concerning disorders.

According to one participant (Brianne Dressen), the NIH was initially very interested in helping them (and learned from the FDA that it was aware of other clinical trial participants who had been injured), but once it became clear neurological injuries were a frequent complication of the vaccine, the NIH appears to have decided its best move was to try and bury everything and hence ghost the people it was evaluating for the neurological illnesses.

Thus the NIH publicly denied there was any evidence neurological vaccine injuries were occurring and repeatedly pushed back the date they’d promised Dressen and others to publish the study evaluating them. Had that study been published on time, it would have greatly helped many of the patients suffering neurological injuries that “couldn’t exist” because there was no peer-reviewed literature substantiating those injuries or more importantly guidelines on how to treat them.

In short, I’d argue that the debasement of our educational system has rippled out into the entire society as we depend on its graduates to turn the gears of everything (e.g., by appropriately conducting scientific research), and if we have incompetent or dishonest personnel occupy these positions, the institutions they staff decay as well.

Note: This issue was significantly worsened by Obama’s decision to prioritize academic qualifications rather than real world experience in the federal hiring process. Similarly, most of his senior officials had a degree from an Ivy League college.

Revenue Shortfalls

One of the primary ways the thumbscrews have been tightened throughout the society has been by gradually impoverishing everyone except the working class (most recently, from 2020 to 2021, billionaires went from owning slightly over 2% of the global household wealth to 3.5% of it.). Because of this, almost every institution we depend upon is underfunded and thus willing to consider unethical sources of funding.

For instance, industry often “donates” large amounts of money to schools in return for favorable research being pursued there, and then may threaten to withhold those donations unless an unrelated professor within the college stops performing research that is critical of the industry.

Within the federal government, this impoverishment comes through budgets being slashed and agencies inevitably looking to the private sector for funding. In turn, something similar to what is observed in the educational sector happens, although the scale of it is often far worse.

For example, in 1983, Congress authorized the CDC to accept gifts “made unconditionally…for the benefit of the [Public Health] Service or for the carrying out of any of its functions.” Then in 1992, Congress established The National Foundation for the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention so that CDC could obtain additional funding for its work, or put differently, created a third party for passing tainted money to the CDC.

The CDC Foundation has been accused of egregious conduct since its inception and has received nearly 1 billion dollars from corporate “donors.” The potential for the foundation enabling corruption in turn has been criticized by many, including by a scathing editorial in one of the world’s top medical journals. Many examples of its corruption are documented within this 2019 letter to the CDC. They include:

Note: As of 2019, the CDC also owned 57 vaccine patents and recently spent $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget buying and distributing vaccines. This may help to explain why the CDC always recommends every vaccine regardless of the evidence arguing against of doing so or how much opposition they receive from the public (and sometimes even their advisors).

Members of Congress have even formally complained about the payments to the CDC foundation (as have anonymous whistleblowers within the CDC). In short, the conflicts of interest with the CDC foundation are immense and help to explain why the CDC always pushes corrupt and harmful policies (e.g., many of the profiteers who benefitted immensely from the COVID-19 vaccination campaign had previously given the CDC millions).

Note: Many other agencies within the federal government, including the CIA and the NIH, have their own foundations that were also created by Congress to allow them to access corporate bribes donations that are not subject to legal oversight such as freedom of information act requests).

Not surprisingly, many of the directors of these foundations, like their peers in government, often follow the revolving door and end up in high-paying executive roles at major pharmaceutical companies after leaving the foundations.

The pernicious influence of industry cash can also be seen at the FDA. On October 29, 1992, in response to public concerns that no AIDS treatments were getting to market (which was a result of Fauci deliberately blocking all of them to clear the way for the deadly and ineffective AZT), Congress and then George Bush Sr. signed into law the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which authorized the FDA to take money from the drug makers it approved drugs for.

As a result of this act, drug approval times were shortened (going from 29 months in 1987 to 10 months in 2018), and the percentage of drugs that were approved the first time an approval was requested dramatically increased. Conversely, prior to the act, 21% of medications were removed from the market or had new black box warnings added to them.

After the act, this figure increased to 27% as a result of factors such as senior FDA officials overturning its scientists’ recommendations, and the evidence required for a medication approval being lowered.

As a result of these changes, user fees now comprise a significant portion of the FDA’s budget (e.g., 46% in 2022, and approximately of the 65% of that allotted for regulating drugs used in humans) — which not surprisingly has had an increasingly corrupting influence on the FDA’s drug approval process.

One of the best illustrations of this can be seen with the current FDA commissioner Robert Califf, who in 2009, was considered to be too close to the industry to nominate to the position, yet in 2021 was appointed to it, and ever since gaining control of the FDA has advanced the interests of his industry.

For example shortly after the backdoor approval of a controversial Alzheimer’s drug, Califf was a keynote speaker at the annual pharmaceutical industry conference which emphasized the incredible investment opportunities offered by the new Alzheimer’s and obesity drugs (which the agency was also pushing through).

Furthermore in addition to being overtly compensated by the industry for supporting its interests (e.g., Califf had taken a lot of money from Big Pharma), a revolving door also exists to pay them off after the fact. Consider for instance that the second official appointed by Trump to head the FDA, Scott Gottleib is now on Pfizer’s board.

Likewise, Stephan Hahn the commissioner who was in charge of the FDA for the entirety of Operation Warp Speed (and as Peter Navarro showed, against the president’s orders, actively sabotaged affordable and effective treatments for COVID-19) Hahn is now an executive for the venture capital firm that launched Moderna (and thus owns a significant portion of it).

Note: This issue exists beyond the healthcare sector — for instance Lloyd Austin was first a four-star general under Obama, then left to become a board member for Raytheon, and then left that position to become Biden’s Secretary of Defense. Since becoming in charge of our military, one of the worst wars in modern history has broken out, which coincidently required a massive amount of weaponry to be purchased from defense contractors like Raytheon.

All of this has effectively created a “pay-to-play” situation, where it’s almost impossible to get a drug approved unless you have a lot of money and as a result, therapies that put people before profits have a very difficult time getting through.

This was best shown throughout COVID-19 where numerous teams were unable to receive an EUA (or sometimes even permission to conduct American trials) for safe therapies that had strong evidence they were effective in treating COVID-19, while awful but highly lucrative therapies (e.g., Remdesivir, Paxlovid and Molnupiravir) sailed through the approval process.

Given that the Prescription Drug User Fee Act was originally created during the AIDS crisis to help expedite emergency therapies being approved to treat novel diseases, its noteworthy the exact opposite ultimately happened.

Note: I was heavily involved with one team which attempted to secure an EUA, and it was depressing how high a standard we were held to compared to Pfizer.

Likewise, a big part of why Steve Kirsch originally got involved with the vaccine issue was because he provided a wealth of evidence and funded the original clinical trial that demonstrated an already FDA approved drug was a highly effective treatment for COVID-19 but was stonewalled in receiving an EUA from the FDA (which Kirsch was told from an insider also sabotaged Fluvoxamine making it into the NIH’s COVID treatment guidelines).