Early during the crisis that some call a pandemic The Lancet published an article claiming to evaluate data regarding the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) in treating Covid. The conclusion was that HCQ was not effective. Shortly after publication The Lancet retracted the article, explaining that the paper’s author declined to share the data with independent researchers. How did an article like that get published?
“The main problem is that many of these journals have become terribly conflicted, in the sense that they’ve become dependent on pharmaceutical industry money in terms of the enormous revenue they receive in the way of pharmaceutical advertising, which appear side-by-side to these ghost-written articles … it turns out it’s all marketing … marketing disguised to look like science.” – Leemon McHenry, PhD, co-author of The Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine and professor of Philosophy and Bio-ethics at Cal State University Norhtridge.
It was to the advantage of pharmaceutical companies for HCQ to be found ineffective in treating Covid. Instead of HCQ, they could use expensive drugs such as Remdesivir, expensive treatments such as ventilators, and by demoting HCQ (and other treatments, supplements, etc.) a path was cleared for development and deployment of vaccines, a huge money-maker for the pharmaceutical companies. Vaccines are also the “safest” path to profits for pharma companies because the PREP Act protects companies like Pfizer and Moderna if something goes wrong with their vaccines.
Medical journals do publish genuine science, but, McHenry points out, the problem, “is that the fraudulent articles are so professionally done that it is extremely difficult to distinguish them from the genuine.”
Here are a few more poignant quotes from an interview of Leemon McHenry:
“The pharmaceutical industry is manufacturing all of these medical journal articles behind the scenes for basically marketing purposes. I was astounded because I had this enormous trust in medical journals.” (timestamp: 0:02)
“Disease mongering is a marketing scheme of pharmaceutical companies to persuade us, to use fear, and to use our trust in science, in an extremely deceptive way, in order to persuade us to go on different kinds of drugs.” (timestamp: 1:10)
“The oligarchy of corporations has basically usurped cherished institutions of democracy which involve checks and balances in the system.” (timestamp: 1:30)
McHenry discusses medical ghost-writing in great detail. Freelance medical writers are hired to produce “scientific papers” based upon a template. Then the companies look for a trusted scientist who would be happy to put his name on the article. In other words, “key opinion leaders” often lend their names to articles they didn’t write. (They may have read and made some suggestions, according to McHenry.)
This is not a new phenomenon either. Several editors of medical journals have warned of this, such as Dr. Marcia Angell:
“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.”
Unfortunately, the problem is not confined to medical journals. Dr. Ulfakatte admits, “I’ve been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public.”
Caitlin Johnstone would not be surprised by such an admission:
“Telling the mainstream media to do their job and report the news truthfully is like walking into a shoe factory and telling them to do their job and make dentures. It isn’t the mass media’s job to tell the truth, it’s their job to administer propaganda. And they do a great job.”
Mark Twain understood the way this works a hundred years ago:
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.”
But, Twain might not have imagined the lengths to which those who would like to misinform us now go. Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explains in a Ted Talk about “astroturfing,” which she describes as “fake grassroots:”
“Astroturfing is when political, corporate or other special interests disguise themselves and publish blogs, start Facebook and Twitter accounts, publish ads, letters to the editor, or simply post comments online, to try to fool you into thinking an independent or grassroots movement is speaking. The whole point of astroturfing is to try to give the impression that there is widespread support for or against an agenda when there is not. Astroturfing seeks to make you change your opinion by making you think that you are an outlier when you are not.”
She gives the example of astroturfing being used to “drown out a link between a medicine and a harmful side-effect, such as vaccines and autism, by throwing a bunch of conflicting studies, surveys and experts into the mix, confusing the truth beyond recognition.”
So, how do you spot astroturfing? Attkisson says the hallmarks of astroturfing include use of inflammatory language and words such as: crank, quack, nutty, lies, paranoid, pseudo, conspiracy and myth. It was easy to find such inflammatory language in recent headlines, such as:
YouTube, Facebook and Twitter align to fight Covid vaccine conspiracies
Beto O’Rourke Lambasts GOP As ‘Cult Of Death’ For Withdrawing Mask Mandates In Texas
Republican Governors Celebrate COVID Anniversary With Bold Plan to Kill Another 500,000 Americans
In the case of Covid the use of the term “astroturfing” seems almost quaint. What we are seeing is more akin to an entire fake forest and, in that forest, we are told is … Bigfoot. See that blurry picture … that’s proof of Bigfoot. See that blurry photo of “the virus” … well, that’s proof of the thing that has changed the world … even though the test for it doesn’t look for the thing in the blurry photo … it just finds indirect evidence via a chemistry test (PCR, aka Covid test) … even though the count of people who die from “the virus” includes people who, according to the CDC, have an average of four co-morbidities when they die (and the flu has magically disappeared and, there were fewer suicides in 2020 than there were in 2019, but you should follow the science!).
That’s the thing to notice … when you get up close to those astro-trees and tap on the trunks, don’t be surprised to find that the they sound hollow.
Sources:
RETRACTED: Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis
(The Lancet article retraction)
“The Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine”
(Leemon McHenry video interview)
World Class Journalist Spills the Beans & Admits Mainstream Media is Completely Fake
(Dr. Ulfakatte quote)
Medical Journals Corrupt to the Core!
Astroturf and manipulation of media messages | Sharyl Attkisson | TEDx University of Nevada