May 14, 2021 – updated September 29, 2021
This is a piece I wrote when I wanted to show my ex why it was important to investigate where the money came from for studies about claims of vaccine safety and efficacy. I found that Big Pharma is funding most research on Covid and contributing money to the US government through many channels.
There is a furor over vaccination in the world currently. Anyone who dares to question a particular vaccine or asks for more information on vaccine reactions or safety is labelled as an “Anti-vaxxer” and derided as a stupid and backward yokel. Only my closest friends and family know a few of my thoughts around the current vaccination craze and it is primarily for them that I decided to do some research to point out a few facts that are not widely publicized. These facts, however, are not intentionally hidden from the general public – anyone can dig these up, if they’re willing to take the time and make the effort. There is no “conspiracy”. I have provided sources at the end of this article so that you can do your own investigation, should you be so inclined.
I am not going to talk about the health effects of vaccines on the immune system here. What I am going to lay out is how people are led to believe that published, scientific articles and sources that are used by governments to convince or convey the safety of vaccines are unbiased when, most of the time, they are funded by large pharmaceutical companies. These articles and websites disseminate information on immunology and vaccines with an air of authority and are cited by journalists and others over and over again, around the world. This includes our Canadian government, at all levels.
So if you are willing to spit out the blue pill, read on.
If you Google “Vaccination Adverse Events”, one of the most cited scholarly articles that comes up is “The science of evaluation of adverse events” by Neal A. Halsey, MD from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. (1) Sounds impressive. Let’s dig a bit.
Halsey states that, “Careful studies have demonstrated that many hypothesized causal associations between vaccines and adverse events were not substantiated. False assumptions regarding causality are likely to occur for illnesses without a carefully defined etiology or pathogenesis. Copyright 2002, Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.”
The emphasis is mine. It sounds to me like a lawyer had a hand in this wording but it doesn’t really matter. It is noted that the research was paid for, in part, by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as part of the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Network (CISA) project. These seem like the most reputable of governmental institutions and any reporter, wanting to cite a study, would be reassured that this was a legitimate, honest look at adverse vaccine events and would go no further.
The CDC is a US federal agency under the Department of Health and the national public health agency of the US. While the CDC gets its budget through the US Congress, they also accept “gifts” through the CDC Foundation that operates “independently” from the CDC itself “…to support the mission of CDC in partnership with the private sector, including organizations, foundations, businesses, educational groups, and individuals.”(2)
The CDC Foundation has given $1.2 billion over the past 20 years directly to the CDC.
Where does the CDC Foundation’s money come from? (3)
In one year, from Oct. 1, 2019 to Sept. 30, 2020, the CDC Foundation received $50,819,128.01 from pharmaceutical or biopharmaceutical companies like Amagen, Merck, Pfizer, Inc. BD, Bayer Pharma, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, Gilead Sciences, Inc., etc.
The CDC Foundation also received $16,576,315 from the Global Vaccine Alliance (GAVI) with the CDC directly accepting a further $3,124,974 from GAVI. (4)
GAVI partners with many governments, organizations, and corporations such as the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) – AstraZeneca, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Viatris, Pfizer & Sanofi. (5)
GAVI not only accepts money from big pharma, a rep from IFPMA and another pharmaceutical rep sit on their board. (4)
It is interesting to see how many companies set up foundations and fundraising organizations to receive funding to distance themselves from the taint of receiving pharmaceutical industry money. It is difficult to tease out how much money a company or organization receive.
GAVI, for example, lists the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) among their benefactors. CEPI, which wins the award for the most annoying website, has $3.5 billion and is made up of 30 vaccine developers and manufacturers, among others. (6) CEPI have set up another website (equally as annoying) under another entity to receive money for a fund they’ve created called the “Covid-19 Response Fund.” Among its supporters are GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, The Pfizer Foundation, etc. (7)
It is convoluted but what IS clear is that vaccine manufacturers – pharmaceutical companies – are heavily invested in the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). It is such a common myth that the CDC is independent that even the World Health Organization, on its Global Vaccine Safety page, states that the CDC is “fully funded by the U.S. government and does not involve any external sponsors.” (8) This is simply not true.
The CDC gets funding from huge pharmaceutical companies directly, through the CDC foundation, as well as through “projects” like the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) Project. The network, CISA, a project owned by the CDC “…provides a clinical case evaluation service for US healthcare providers who have vaccine safety questions.” (9)
Healthcare providers can ring them up if they have any questions on the safety of a vaccine.
CISA’s partners include two non-governmental “Vaccination Safety Partners”:
The Immunization Action Coalition (IAC) and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP).
On the Immunization Action Coalition’s (IAC) very busy website, they immediately reassure you that they are a non-profit charitable organization – even the suffix to their site is a confidence building “.org”. (10)
The top funders of the Immunization Action Coalition are Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Seqirus.
On their landing page they provide free access to hundreds of handouts and staff materials that can be summed up in one word: propaganda. You will find topics such as “Medical Management of Vaccine Reactions in Adults in a Community Setting” that include, curiously, a box for the medical director to sign what looks like a declaration limiting the length of liability for any noted adverse reaction.
There is a link near the bottom of the landing page called “Unprotected People Stories” where you can read horror stories about people who suffered or died from not getting a vaccine. You will not find a link to stories of “People who Suffered & Died from Vaccination”, however.
If you dig a little deeper on the about pages, you will see that the IAC, with the CDC, runs three different websites, all ending in the .org designation, each geared to a specific subset of people like parents and children, for example.
You will also see that they sell “Corporate Memberships”, with five tiers of financial support.
Any information found on any four of these pharma-sponsored websites is now suspect as it comes from Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Seqirus who all stand to profit from immunization.
What about the other Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Network (CISA) “safety partner”? The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP)?
The ISMP also lists itself as a non-profit and uses the .org suffix but at this point, my confidence in the .org suffix is shaken. It does bill itself as the “gold standard” for medication safety information and is proud to partner with the ECRI. ECRI bills itself as the most “trusted voice in healthcare” and is proud that they do not take any funding from pharmaceutical companies. Reputable, right? Not so much. ECRI acquired ISMP and ISMP does take money from big pharma. (11)
The ISMP makes their money by selling corporate sponsorships for “Fellowships: One-year programs for healthcare professionals seeking career advancement
Symposia: Informative continuing education programs on safe medication practices
Self Assessments: Structured approach for organizations to assess safety risks, create action plans for change, and track progress
Summits: Conferences for developing best practice guidelines
Collaboratives: Industry collaborations addressing innovative strategies for proactive risk reduction
Educational Programs: Webinars, lectures, freestanding events, and guest speakers for custom programs on medication error prevention
Newsletters: Subscription-based publication containing valuable resources and guidance on reduction of medication error risk
And so much more.”
Organizations who have paid for these initiatives include Pfizer, Baxter, Novartis, and the US Food & Drug Administration (USFDA).
That last one is problematic as 45% of the FDA’s budget is from industry – mostly pharmaceutical companies. And that’s just direct funding. (12) Who knows how many “gifts in-kind” pharmaceutical companies provide the FDA? When Pfizer is contributing money towards materials, a newsletter publishing or website cost, a conference event, or “educational program,” how objective could the information presented be? When it is your job to regulate an industry and 45% of your income comes from the companies you are charged with overseeing, whose interests are you representing?
The two “Safety Partners” who are financial supporters of the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Network (CISA), as well as the CDC, who funded Halsey’s “research” article, are funded by the pharmaceutical industry.
The “research” article should be read with a critical eye, knowing where much of the research funding came from. Incidentally, you can’t read the whole article unless you pay for it – an insult when you consider that the research was paid for by pharmaceutical companies. In effect, you are paying them to reassure you that their products are safe.
Incidentally, the Elsevier Science (USA) company, who owns the rights to this article, also partners with big pharma. (13)
The CDC monitors the safety of vaccines in the US via the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. If you go to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System website, you will see the same two “Vaccine Safety Partners” listed above. Sadly, the CDC-run Immunization Safety Office is also under this umbrella. Sanofi Pasteur, the biggest pharmaceutical company in the world devoted solely to vaccines, has even supplied a director to sit on the advisory committee on immunization practices. (14)
Interestingly, both the CDC Foundation and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System also use the suffix “.org” after their names. This implies that they are impartial and “fair” – certainly not being funded by huge for-profit companies. If you were on the site for Nestle, say, and read that drinking two litres of chocolate milk a day is beneficial to you, you would call bullshit! But if you were on a .org site with scientific studies and doctors and research facilities telling you the same thing, why you might just pour yourself another glass of chocolate milk…
Or Kool Aid, as the case may be.
How can we trust any information related to adverse reporting or vaccine safety when the sites are funded by companies whose interest dictates that they need to downplay any adverse event? It would be in their best interest to quickly deny and discredit any research contrary to their positive message. Perhaps by paying for research on things like: “The science of evaluation of adverse events” and having experts summarize, “Careful studies have demonstrated that many hypothesized causal associations between vaccines and adverse events were not substantiated. False assumptions regarding causality are likely to occur…”
“Big deal,” you might think. The money has to come from somewhere. OK, but what you may not know is that taking any gift – even a small one – influences your decisions and opinions, even when you don’t think it does.
According to Michael Joyce, in his article in HealthNewsReview, Industry gifts to doctors are linked to their prescribing … and you, “Health care professionals who received gifts from the pharmaceutical industry not only wrote more prescriptions, but also more costly ones (including more brand name medications), than colleagues who did not receive such gifts.” (15)
Michael goes on to say, “…it’s unclear how many consumers know they can use the search tool in the Open Payments database to look up how much doctors and teaching hospitals are receiving, as well as how much companies are paying out.”
The Open Payments Search Tool is an eye-opener: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov
You can see payments made by pharmaceutical companies to every teaching hospital or physician in the US. Between 2013 and 2019, they gave over $53 billion dollars in US funds. (16)
I plugged in the name of our venerable Dr. Halsey, author of the now dubious article, “The science of evaluation of adverse events” and saw he has received money since 2013 totaling almost $164,000 in “General Payments,” “Research Payments,” or “Associated Research Funding” from Pfizer, Merck and Novartis Vaccines among others. (16)
A conflict of interest exists when a person is in a position to derive personal benefit from actions or decisions made because they will likely not make a decision or take an action against a company that is paying their bills.
Halsey works for the Institute for Vaccine Safety which is under the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. (17) He “…has authored more than 250 peer reviewed publications, 6 books, and 43 book chapters on the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases through vaccination, and he has participated in the development of more than 100 guidelines for the use of vaccines while serving on advisory groups for the WHO Expanded Programme on Immunization, the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) for CDC…” (18)
According to the World Health Organization site, “The Institute for Vaccine Safety received start up financial support from vaccine manufacturers in 1997 and 1998. In 2001, IVS sponsored a workshop on bifurcated needles for smallpox administration with Becton Dickinson. IVS has not received support from manufacturers or any other corporate sponsor since then.” (19)
However, Halsey DOES take money directly from pharmaceutical companies for research so he is NOT impartial. He also gets money for research from companies that are themselves funded by the pharmaceutical industry. He then links these articles to the IVS site as if they are “clean” and unbiased. Both the site and organization no longer accept money from big pharma but I bet that almost all individuals who work for them do.
Halsey’s research was paid for, ultimately, by the very pharmaceutical industry it was supposed to be objectively reporting on. In no way could he have been an impartial reporter on this crucial topic.
Journalists, physicians, other researchers, etc. all over the world reference these articles, as if they were the unbiased truth. Even the WHO endorses them. Because researching and teasing apart all the funding and where it comes from is difficult and time consuming, most people don’t bother. For researchers it becomes even more difficult. Why would you want to question such a large source of funding? How easy is it to look the other way when a million dollar donor, through an arm’s length foundation – sometimes even registered as charity – gives you some cash?
A preliminary study entitled Accuracy of Conflict-of-Interest Disclosures of Physician-Authors Publishing in High-Impact U.S. Medical Journals: A Comparison of the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine found that 81% of general payments were not reported by the authors which is in direct conflict with Conflict of Interest disclosure protocol. (19a)
By now you might think that you’d like to get your information from someone you trust, like your friendly family physician. Unfortunately, they do not have many unbiased sources of information on the safety of vaccination. A quick search on the AAFP website (Family Physicians) for COVID-19 resources leads to CDC pages with a menu on the left with headings like “Vaccine Recipient Education” and “Vaccinate with Confidence”. I chose “Vaccine Effectiveness Research” and was given a shortcut to a few articles, including this one:
“Effectiveness of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Vaccines Against COVID-19 Among Hospitalized Adults Aged ≥65 Years — United States, January–March 2021” (20)
I skipped the article and went right to an untitled section just after the acknowledgements and above the references. Out of the 17 authors of this research, 15 disclosed that they receive funding from pharmaceutical companies that stand to gain from their work – and I’m being conservative.
Many scientists are actually employed by pharmaceutical companies such as AMGEN and many “scientific” articles are directly funded by pharmaceutical companies, their subsidiaries or “foundations”. (21) Authors of scientific papers try to maintain a distance from their pharma money, declaring that the pharmaceutical industry money they receive is “outside the submitted work.”
Remember the study linking pharmaceutical industry gifts to physicians and their subsequent over prescribing? It is not possible for an individual to remain uninfluenced by the pharmaceutical industry if they are receiving money from them – this is why we have conflict of interest laws.
It can be very discouraging to see how much the pharmaceutical industry has infiltrated the “healthcare” industry but there are a few organizations pushing back. One excellent resource is “PharmedOut” which is a Georgetown University project encouraging physicians to take pharmacy-free continuing education and to recognize misleading pharmaceutical advertising and marketing practices. (It appears that much of the Continuing Medical Education that physicians must take every year is paid for by the pharmaceutical industry.) (22)
Keep in mind that this deep-dive was on the very first article I googled. My point is that unless you are willing to do your own research when the public health authorities are telling you something, you will not learn the truth.
While I don’t believe the pharmaceutical industry is evil, I know that they are for profit companies with the goal of making money for their shareholders. They fund much of the research being done on the safety and efficacy of their own vaccines. (Read this study on biomedical integrity to see how insane it is to believe any of this research: https://edintegrity.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s40979-021-00072-y)
They donate millions of dollars to the U.S. government and spend many more lobbying, on “educating” physicians and the public, on getting their own people sitting on influential Boards and even flood the market with their own studies to cast doubt on outcomes that weren’t favourable to one of their products (22a).
Pfizer has made a killing on selling vaccines during the pandemic. It expects its revenue to be $26 billion in 2021 – on the Covid vaccine alone (this is in American dollars). (23) Your health is not their concern. They intend to increase the price of their vaccine as soon as the pandemic is over to be able to make more profit from the booster shots. (23a)
Vaccine manufacturers have been granted immunity and you cannot sue if you are harmed by one of their vaccines. (23b) Our government implores us to “trust science” when even the vaccine manufacturers are hedging their bets!
This cursory search of one author on one paper has yielded me much more information than I ever imagined. I had a feeling something wasn’t “right” because the information we are provided by our Public Health Authority is so one-sided, so fluffy, and so dumbed-down that I knew they were not telling the full truth. That the media jumped on board and now dares not step out of line is worth a whole other investigation.
But already, I grow weary of a world where no one can be trusted to be honest and true. Yes, I spat out the blue pill but I’m no hero. I just wanted to be left alone by my government. Little did I realize they would cast me as the worst kind of villain and turn all of society against me!
All because I needed time to decide what was best for myself – because I dared to do a little research and ask a few questions rather than accept their propaganda at face value.
Yeah, I took the red pill. (24)
Sources
Note: In the article I have bolded all companies and organizations that were receiving money from pharmaceutical companies.
(1) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1045187002500273
(2) https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/ensuringsafety/monitoring/cisa/index.html
The CDC Foundation operates independently from CDC as a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization incorporated in the State of Georgia. The creation of the Foundation was authorized by section 399F of the Public Health Service Act to support the mission of CDC in partnership with the private sector, including organizations, foundations, businesses, educational groups, and individuals.
Where did the CDC Foundation’s money come from? It looks like a lot of it comes from companies like Leidos. Leidos is the biggest company you’ve never heard of – they used to be Locheed Martin. They made $11 billion in 2019 and have revised their 2020 forecast upward to $12.5 billion. They sell handy pandemic things like contact tracing tools (paid for by the CDC of course), remote patient monitoring tools, and the Leidos Rapid Screening Tool to check temperatures quickly.
Leidos, that makes a profit selling things to the Center for Disease Control, donates a huge amount to the CDC Foundation, which turns around and gives it back to the CDC.
(4) https://www.gavi.org/our-alliance/about
GAVI BOARD GAVI has a 28 member board with vaccine manufacturers sitting in two spots, including “Representatives of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) have one seat on the Gavi Board. The IFPMA represents more than 55 members of national industry associations, including Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Novartis, Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of Sanofi-Aventis and Pfizer. They further support our immunisation strategy both by contributing to the education of public health officials and by working to engage other private sector organisations in our mission.” https://www.gavi.org/operating-model/gavis-partnership-model/industralised-country-pharmaceutical-industry
(5) https://www.ifpw.com/manufacturers.htm
(6) https://endpandemics.cepi.net/#group-section-Why-CEPI-TDji57TEI7
(7) UNDER CEPI https://covid19responsefund.org/en/supporters
(8) WHO https://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/initiative/communication/network/nip/en/
(9) CISA “Safety Partners” https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/ensuringsafety/partners/index.html
(10) Immunization Action Coalition IAC’s Corporate Membership Circle (immunize.org) https://www.immunize.org/aboutus/corporate-members.asp
(11) Institute for Safe Medical Practices (ISMP) has big pharma funding https://www.ismp.org/about
(12) FDA Source of funding https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-basics/fact-sheet-fda-glance#:~:text=Program%20Funding,%249.95%20per%20American%20per%20year.
(13) Elsevier Science (USA) company also partners with big Pharma: https://www.elsevier.com/about/partnerships/research-in-healthcare-collaborations
(14) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/ensuringsafety/monitoring/vaers/index.html
CDC – ACIP Site showing Committee Board Members, past and present, including Sanofi:
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/members/index.html
(15) HealthNewsReview – Michael Joyce, “Industry Gifts to Doctors are Linked to Their Prescribing…and You” https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/10/158166/
This is the study he sites: Influence of pharmaceutical marketing on Medicare prescriptions
This is the founder of HealthNewsReview:
Gary Switzer, founder and publisher of HealthNewsReview. He has covered health care news almost exclusively since 1973. Here is his online bio. He tweets as @garyschwitzer or as @HealthNewsRevu.
“The years 2020 and 2021 so far have sucked the wind from my sails. The pandemic, vaccine/treatment hype, confusing and contradictory statements from federal health agency leaders (Azar and Atlas lead the list), the ugliest politics, unequal justice, violence, the attack on the U.S. Capitol and the refusal by many elected officials to do anything about it – it all adds up to the worst year of misinformation of the American public that this journalist has seen in a 48-year career.”
(16) The Open Payments Homepage has a total of all payments made. Type any name in the top right search tool. Halsey’s take (2020 data will be released in June for the Open Payments Tool)
https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/physician/146375
(17) Institute for Vaccine Safety here https://www.vaccinesafety.edu/
(18) Halsey biography https://www.vaccinesafety.edu/bios.htm#NAH,
(19) WHO https://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/initiative/communication/network/ivs/en/
(19a)
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.12.21263468v1
Results Thirty-one articles from NEJM and 31 articles from JAMA met inclusion criteria. The physician-authors (n = 118) received a combined total of $7.48 million. Of the 106 authors (89.8%) who received payments, 86 (81.1%) received undisclosed payments. The top 23 most highly compensated received $6.32 million, of which $3.00 million (47.6%) was undisclosed. Disclosure rates were the equivalent between the top 23 and the entire sample.
Conclusions High payment amounts, as well as high proportions of undisclosed financial compensation, regardless of amount received, comprised potential COIs for two influential US medical journals. Further research is needed to explain why such high proportions of general payments were undisclosed and whether journals that rely on self-reported COI disclosure need to reconsider their policies.
(20) Article linked from the Family Physicians Website (AAFP)
Weekly / May 7, 2021 / 70(18);674–679 (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7018e1.htm?s_cid=mm7018e1_w)
(20) This is from the article above and as listed on the bottom of the article. I have highlighted the pharmaceutical companies or those that make an ingredient or have something to do with profiting from vaccination, including the biotech companies:
: “All authors have completed and submitted the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. Christopher J. Lindsell reports grants from National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Defense, Marcus Foundation, Endpoint Health, Entegrion, bioMerieux, and Bioscape Digital, outside the submitted work. Jay S. Steingrub reports grants from National Institutes of Health, outside the submitted work. Akram Khan reports grants from United Therapeutics, Actelion Pharmaceuticals, Regeneron, and Reata Pharmaceuticals, outside the submitted work. Samuel M. Brown reports grants from National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Defense, Intermountain Research and Medical Foundation, and Janssen, and consulting fees paid to his employer from Faron and Sedana, all outside the submitted work. Ithan D. Peltan reports grants from National Institutes of Health and, outside the submitted work, grants from Asahi Kasei Pharma, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Regeneron. Adit A. Ginde reports grants from National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Defense and AbbVie, outside the submitted work. Carlos G. Grijalva reports consulting fees from Pfizer, Merck, and Sanofi-Pasteur, grants from Campbell Alliance/Syneos Health, National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, and Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, outside the submitted work. Michelle N. Gong reports grants from National Institutes of Health, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and consulting fees from Regeneron, Philips Healthcare, all outside the submitted work. Steven Y. Chang reports consulting fees from PureTech Health and speaker fees from La Jolla Pharmaceuticals, both outside the submitted work. Jonathan D. Casey reports grants from National Institutes of Health, outside the submitted work. Todd W. Rice reports grants from National Institutes of Health and Endpoint Health, consulting work for Cumberland Pharmaceuticals, Inc, and Sanofi, Inc., outside the submitted work. Manjusha Gaglani reports grants from CDC-Abt Associates, outside the submitted work. Emily T. Martin reports personal fees from Pfizer and grants from Merck, outside the submitted work. Anurag Malani reports shareholder of Pfizer pharmaceuticals. Arnold S. Monto reports personal fees from Sanofi Pasteur and Seqirus, outside the submitted work. Fernanda P. Silveira reports grants from Shire, Qiagen, Ansun, and Novartis, outside the submitted work. Richard K. Zimmerman reports grants from Sanofi Pasteur, outside the submitted work. Donald B. Middleton reports grants and personal fees from Pfizer and personal fees from Seqirus, Sanofi Pasteur, and GlaxoSmithKline, outside the submitted work. No other potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.” No other? Isn’t 39 instances of money coming from a company that stood to gain from the research enough?
(21) Amgen article https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/110514/how-amgen-makes-billions-just-few-drugs.asp
(22) PharmedOut (PhO) is a Georgetown University Medical Center project founded in 2006. It is directed by Adriane Fugh-Berman.[1] The stated mission of the organization is to advance evidence-based prescribing and educate healthcare professionals about pharmaceutical marketing practices. Stated goals are to: 1. Document and disseminate information about how pharmaceutical companies influence prescribing 2. Foster access to unbiased information about drugs and 3. Encourage physicians to choose pharma-free CME (continuing medical education).
(22a) In reviewing Goldacre’s Bad Pharma: how drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients
The second main theme is criticism of the marketing culture of the pharmaceutical companies, its intrusion into medical education, its powerful influence on prescribing patterns, and the complicity of scientists, doctors and even regulators, in supporting it. It is a well-known, but still startling, fact that companies spend about twice as much on marketing as they do on research and development of new drugs. And much of what is done in the name of research is in fact undertaken for marketing purposes, though disguised as science.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3635613/
(23) You need a subscription to read the whole article, but here is an excerpt:
(23a) Pfizer eyes higher Covid vaccine prices after pandemic: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/pfizer-eyes-higher-covid-19-vaccine-prices-after-pandemic-exec-analyst
(23b) You can’t sue Pfizer or Moderna if you have severe Covid vaccine side effects. The government likely won’t compensate you for damages either
PUBLISHED THU, DEC 17 2020
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-compensation-lawsuit.html
(24) https://web.nmsu.edu/~gchavez7/page1.html
| The Blue Pill | The Red Pill |
| The blue pill describes a continuity of the current state of life i.e. living life without knowing its meaning or running away from the truth in order to stay as is. In the movie, Morpheus, a major character, describes it as waking up in bed without caring for your “destiny” or such profound ideas. | The Red Pill is described as the solution for knowing the real truth in life. Morpheus explains it as continuing into the “rabbit hole” or in other words, continuing to learn about the lies that were set in the world in order to break them and obtain freedom.. |
