Your health is not in safe hands, claims a new book Follow the Science by Sharyl Attkisson, an American investigative journalist. A sticky corrupt nexus of doctors, pharma companies, and drug regulators has been normalised in society to such an extent that patients’ health is suffering.
This is the sum and substance of not an imagined dystopian science fiction, but a bare-all non-fiction that exposes the corruption that has infected the world of medical science today—from medical research, to the way it is conducted; the way clinical data is analysed; the way the drugs and vaccines are approved by regulators; the way their side-effects are dismissed for as long as possible; the way narratives are spawned to suit those in power. In brief, powerful medical authorities serve a perverse incentive of keeping us on more and more pills and vaccines forever rather than nursing us back to health.
That’s because pharma companies, which call the shots behind the scenes, are more answerable to their shareholders than their patients. Attkisson navigates through a range of case studies across therapies to show how compromised the checks and balances have become in the healthcare space, with the emergence of a medical-industrial complex over the last few decades.
For 200 years, vaccines were defined as ‘agents that prevent a disease’. The definition in US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was no different, till September 2021. Amid the raging Covid-19, the definition was changed overnight to ‘stimulate the body’s immune response’ without any public consultation. This definition fitted the vaccines that came during Covid as they didn’t prevent the disease.
“Why admit the product is a failure, when you can unilaterally change the meaning of a word (vaccine) and claim it’s a success?” the author jibes. Using secret phone recordings of a Congress member, she claims that experts at CDC knew all along those vaccines offered no additional protection to people who had already had a bout of Covid-19, but the agency maintained publicly that those with prior infection should get the shots. Without these measures, the vaccine market would have shrunk vastly. When authorities lie, people suffer.
The US federal agency and many government agencies across the world pretended as if the question of natural immunity was not important, while it was probably one of the most important questions. Why expose people to risks of vaccines’ side effects if they have acquired natural immunity through infection? There were others such as—are some elderlies at higher risk of health complications or even death from the vaccines; does the risk of acquiring infection go up significantly immediately after vaccination; what have been the real side effects of the largest vaccination drive globally; and did benefits of mass vaccination in children really outweigh the risks?
Attkisson cites the example of how right-leaning journalists favoured Hydroxychloroquine (HCL) and left-leaning media rallied behind Remdesivir to show how science has been politicised. She also narrates how doctors finding Ivermectin and HCL effective were marginalised, as no money was to be made there.
She uses the case of a ‘baby-oxygen’ study to depict how unsuspecting parents of prematurely born infants were misled to enroll for a clinical trial that put the newborns at the risk of serious vision disorder, brain damage or even death. The study, instead of adjusting infants’ oxygen requirement as per their need put them on a constant high oxygen level (too much can damage vision) or low oxygen level (too little can damage brain) to arrive at the lowest oxygen level needed to prevent health issues. Parents who participated uninformed, live with the lifelong regret that they may have been responsible for the serious health issues of their children.
Meanwhile, the official who acted against the deficient informed consent faced stiff opposition from their peers to not take action. And one of those responsible for this trial bagged the top job at USFDA years later and diluted the informed consent further for ‘greater good of science’.In her pursuit to expose the corporate pressure scientists come under, she follows Dr Hayes, who, while working on a project of Syngenta, found that their top-selling agri-chemical Atrazine feminised frogs, as male frogs developed ovaries and sometimes both testes and ovaries.
Not only did the company stop him from publishing the research, it also harassed and discredited him after he left to publish the research independently. The chapter ends on a chilling note—indicating that Atrazine and other hormone disrupting chemicals in our water and food could be behind a rise in shifting sex identities, more boys feeling like girls, and vice versa.
Another chapter probes deeply whether vaccines could be responsible for rising autism in children, and reports on instances where vaccine lobbies have colluded with the state and academia to sweep the evidence linking the two under the carpet.
Across many chapters, the author exposes the disturbing level of conflict of interest that plagues the healthcare space today. Medical scientists who are paid consultants of pharma companies sit on government advisory expert boards of drug approval and set standards favouring companies, which turn out dangerous for patients long after, shows the author.
The author is at her most convincing when connecting the dots, showing how a handful of powerful scientists from the US and China (including Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance) who were involved in the ‘gain of function’ research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the lab in China suspected to be the source of Covid virus leak) and hence should have been in the dock answering questions, were instead steering World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of Covid, and leading prestigious journal Lancet’s special committee on virus origins working overtime to deflect the mainstream discourse from lab-origin theory of Covid-19.
In short, those who might be responsible for the lab leak of the virus were telling us that Covid-19 didn’t leak from the lab. The dizzying level of collusion revealed in the book calls for serious introspection on whether ‘unearthing conflict of interests’ should be a separate discipline today. You may or may not agree with Attkisson’s answers, but you can’t question her questions. They are so fundamental, that it needs an outsider with ‘nothing to lose’ to ask these questions to the ‘fraternity’. Her field of research may be the US, but the impact of her investigation affects your body and those of your loved ones.
The collusion may be more sophisticated in the US, but the tendencies are no different in India. A recent publication on Covid-19 vaccine side effects by Banaras Hindu University researchers was forced to be retracted after the vaccine-maker sued them for defamation. A public interest litigation on vaccine side effects was junked by the Supreme Court, calling it ‘sensational’ late last year. The book is a compelling eye-opener that poses vital questions and answers a deeper one— why we are losing trust in experts and establishment when it comes to matters of our health.
Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails
Sharyl Attkisson
HarperCollins
Pp 288, Rs 1,399
Soma Das is the author of The Reluctant Billionaire and an adviser to agencies in the development space
