How Corruption Dictates the Practice of Medicine
A Midwestern Doctor
2022-04-16
Steve Kirsch recently wrote an excellent article highlighting three “scientists” whose guideline reccomendations were ultimately responsible for the deaths of nearly a million Americans. To summarize: It shows there are dozens of treatments for COVID-19 that have numerous peer reviewed studies demonstrating their efficacy. Despite those therapeutics existing and countless petitions for their usage, the committee responsible for making the guidelines on what is an appropriate treatment for COVID-19 has only approved Remdesvir for the treatment of COVID-19, a toxic drug that has no therapeutic value for COVID-19. As a result, a dangerous drug is mandated, while many drugs that would save lives are prohibited in most medical systems.
As I expected this to follow the typical pattern, I did some digging and discovered a lovely web of corruption around the committee. The purpose of this article is to explain the typical pattern and illustrate how it was followed in this case. I am doing this because I believe the first step to moving beyond that pattern is to recognize its existence. For those of you who do not need the context, please skip ahead to the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines section.
Introduction
There are two ways you can observe most organizational systems:
• As someone trapped within it observing your surroundings.
• As an outside observer who sees the entire system.
As we typically do not explore or examine systems that fall outside our everyday lives, we typically will have the first observation which occur after life circumstances force us to become stuck within the system; something that has happened to many of us swept into the maelstrom of COVID-19.
Two of my central principles for understanding the architecture of modern society have been the relentless promotion of hierarchal systems and the monopolization of life essential resources.
First, regardless of where you look, a typical pattern is always followed: a hierarchy is established, significant investment is created to establish the importance of the hierarchy, and the top of the hierarchal pyramid is bought out (often through bribes) so that a small investment in the top of the hierarchy can be leveraged to control an entire population.
Secondly, those with obscene fortunes seem to always find ways to monopolize resources essential for life and transform them from something each person can independently produce to one they must continually provide their servitude to obtain. For example, it is extremely common after communist revolutions that the independent farmers in the nation will either be prohibited from farming or executed, allowing agriculture to be transitioned to a state-run enterprise. Once this happens, everyone is forced to work for the state or starve, hence leading them to becoming obedient subjects that can be easily exploited for their labor.
In most cases when the monopolization of a life essential resource occurs, the new approach is hailed as a technological miracle and this is used to encourage people to let go of their traditional and self-sufficient approach. When this occurs, the new “miraculous” approach is initially “superior” but gradually worsens and before long is worse than the now abandoned initial approach.
The Green revolution is an excellent example of this (more and more fertilizers herbicides and pesticides are needed to produce the same agricultural input). Bill Gates for example under the guise of “charity” has frequently made people in Africa abandon their traditional self-sufficient forms of agriculture and switch to modern chemical intensive industrial agriculture. Before long, this spikes their price of food and farming supplies (which must be purchased from a multinational corporation like Monsanto). As we are now hitting an unprecedented global wave of fertilizer and food inflation, it is likely the millions who were coaxed into abandoning their traditional forms of agriculture will starve to death.
I have similar reservations about our current transition to green energy technologies. I know of numerous proven effective technologies exist that could lessen the environmental impact of our energy consumption. However, none of the technologies being evaluated meet this fundamental criteria. Rather, each one being evaluated further centralizes control over this life essential resource, and in the future will likely be used to significantly limit unauthorized consumption of energy or transportation once our existing fossil fuel infrastructure is displaced. For example following recent political developments, concerns have begun to be raised over switches existing in electric cars that can remotely turn them off.
Medical Inflation
Those two principles (rigid hierarchal organization and monopolization of a life essential resource) also happened with the medical industry and really kicked into gear when the John Rockefeller (and to some extent Carnegie) bought the AMA and invested a great deal of money into standard medicine (often called “allopathic” or “biomedical” medicine). A variety of competing schools of medicine were removed from the United States, and the practice of medicine was monopolized (for those curious, it is detailed within this freely available classic).
This was an excellent investment and the effect of this monopolization is striking.
Numerous changes in society emerged to support this medical paradigm. Some of most important were as follows:
• The society was conditioned to believe that they needed a doctor to be healthy rather than health being viewed as something each individuals was empowered to seek for themselves. This effectively created an unlimited demand for medical services, and as the above graphs shows an ever growing need for medical spending. Medical Nemesis by Ivan Illich was the earliest work I was able to locate detailing this change and its consequences.
• Things which genuinely improve public health (and thereby reduce medical expenses) are typically not allowed to emerge, while pointless initiatives that do not improve public health (water fluoridation or annual flu shots) are continually promoted. Likewise, a basic health education is not taught to most people, and instead corporate sponsored health habits constitute the majority of “health education” (industry funded nutritional textbooks for example are very common in college courses). Succinctly, there are dozens of simple and obvious policy changes that many have independently identified which could rapidly improve public health and save a lot of money, but despite decades of campaigning to enact them, most have never been adopted.
• Hundreds (or possibly thousands) of highly effective medical treatments for common diseases have been kept off the market to preserve the market for ineffective expensive treatments that often require lifelong purchasing. For example, prior to the legislative battle for acupuncture being legalized, I know of cases where Chinese immigrants were raided at gunpoint for practicing acupuncture in their own community without a license. For those interested, I’ve spent decades tracking those “forgotten cures” down, and while I have found many for one reason or another were oversold and didn’t really work, I also found many others that were highly effective.
• Every medical service or product is designed to encouraged the consumption of more medical services or products.
• A rigid hierarchy was created to support this monopoly.
Medical Hierarchies
The first hierarchy relates to the right to practice of medicine. A large debate exists over whether or not a license should be required to practice medicine. The trade off is that if no license is required, unqualified practitioners who can harm the public are allowed to practice, while if a license is required, the practice of medicine is monopolized (making medicine much more expensive) and medical practitioners become unable to provide life saving medicines they believe in.
I will now examine a few levels of this hierarchy:
• Medical boards have the power to pull the licenses (and hence careers) of any physician who does something “bad.” Some of the reasons they exercise this authority are valid, but many others are done to target physicians who step outside the line of what prevailing interests want done. This has happened for a long time. To show a few examples:
1. Following SB 276 being signed in 2019, writing vaccine exemptions was for all practical purposes outlawed in California and I heard of numerous cases of doctors writing a single justified exemption and then having their license terminated. For this reason, doctors in California will not even write exemptions for patients who nearly died from their first COVID-19 vaccine (ie. from anaphylaxis or a heart attack).
2. The federation of state medical boards put out a statement that publicly promoting any type of COVID “misinformation” (ie. mask efficacy, early treatment options, vaccine safety concerns) could be used to take away your license.
3. Physicians have had their license suspended for using early treatment options with FDA approval for other conditions.
The experiences of Robert Malone’s colleague Meryl J. Nass MD is a well known example of the above occurring, but there are many others as well.
• It is very difficult for physicians to work privately in independent practice (a variety of factors have been put in place to promote this over the last 10-20 years). Instead they are required to work at corporate, federal or state jobs. At these jobs, they are largely at the mercy of the institution they work within to follow its policies.
It is for this reason as soon I was able to, I stopped working for an institution that controlled my practice of medicine.
During the pandemic, many physicians who had serious concerns about the existing approach towards COVID-19 attempted to do things differently, and were frequently shut down by their institution. This led to physicians being fired for not telling their patients the vaccine was “safe and effective” and physicians such as Paul Marik MD having to sue their hospital to prescribe a treatment they felt could save lives to their patients (where no effective treatment was currently available and the patients were frequently expected to die otherwise). Trump’s Right to Try Act was meant to address this issue, but corporate management has largely superseded it.
• Everyone in medicine is taught to defer to the judgement of a doctor. Hence if you want to do some type of medical treatment and the doctor does not “approve” it, you can’t. In nursing textbooks, it is repeatedly hammered in to always defer to a doctors judgement. Nurses for context typically spend significantly more time with patients where they can see and in their hearts question the human cost of an enforced medical regimen. In contrast, physicians (the ones with authority over the patient) due to their time constraints, typically spend very little time with their patients and are much more detached and isolated from them. This results in the human connection that should be necessary in medical decision making being bypassed, and that organizational structure has been used by numerous inhumane systems in the past.
Similarly, many individuals who have found their loved ones in the hospital have been told unless the supervising doctor approves it, they cannot have any other type of therapy administered. As the hospitals would not change their policy, numerous lawsuits have been filed to permit patients expected to die to receive ivermectin, and to my knowledge in each case where the lawsuit ordered ivermectin to be administered, ivermectin then saved the patient’s life.
To further illustrate this hierarchy, I know a few physicians with active medical licenses in the state who were hospitalized for COVID-19. Each told me during their hospital stay their care was continually mismanaged, they had to constantly be on the alert for a fatal medical error, and many of their reasonable requests were not approved by the doctor supervising their hospital care.
• Medical school to a large extent selects for individuals who do not challenge the system, and once in medical school, rigidly targets anyone who is not compliant and obedient to the existing hierarchy so that they will not graduate.
The medical education process is extremely difficult (you have to work brutal hours which break a certain number of medical students and resident physicians each year; suicide is quite common) and many aspects of the education could be equated to a hazing process is regular. These two methods are known to produce subservience to a system and have been utilized in many fields besides medicine throughout history.
Finally, there is a massive financial cost to become a doctor (most physicians now graduate with between 200,000 to 400,000 of debt with ~7% interest) which leads many doctors who want to do things differently being completely unable to challenge this system.
The second hierarchy is “medical evidence.” When evidence based medicine was initially introduced, it was a very good and needed paradigm. Many horrific and harmful practices were in wide usage and overtime, medical evidence had them regulated to the dustbin of history. However, medical evidence follows also follows a hierarchy which rejects foreign or competing ideas and the upper levels of this hierarchy is bought out by pharmaceutical interests. Here are some examples:
• In order for a study to “matter” it has to be published in a prestigious journal. The problem is that with the occasional exception of the British Medical Journal, none of the prestigious journals will ever publish studies which go against the existing narrative. “Controversial” studies that merit publication are continually rejected, while bad studies that support mainstream views are regularly published.
One of the better known recent examples involved The Lancet publishing a study showing hydroxychloroquine was unsafe and ineffective, which was used to end trials of HCQ globally. This study used blatantly fake data and was eventually retracted after readers complained.
The Journal of the American Medical Association appears to be the most biased publication in this regard, and in most cases you can predict what an entire article will say on a topic before you even read it (ie. does the COVID vaccine have any possible harm associated with it…no). The one interesting exception I have seen to this was a recently published study debunking the use of ivermectin. Here the conclusion of the article argued against the use of ivermectin, while the actual data argued for it, raising the possibility the authors phrased the conclusion to say the opposite of their results so JAMA would publish it (it is very common for conclusions in journal articles to not be representative of their results).
• In order for a study to be published in most journals, it has to pass “peer review.” In most cases, peer review will hold ideas challenging the existing narrative to either a high standard or an impossible to meet standard. Conversely, if an idea agrees with existing narratives, it is held to a very low standard to be published. This is an extremely common issue and why much of the most useful research I come across is not publishes in peer reviewed journals.
• In order for a study to be conducted, it frequently needs approval from the FDA (or an equivalent) and in most settings needs approval from an Institutional Review Board (IRB). In general, it is very difficult to get approval from the FDA to conduct any type of study unless a lot of money is behind the endeavor (for example I was familiar with multiple teams who had safe and effective treatments for COVID with supporting data that nonetheless could not receive FDA approval to begin their human trials). Similarly, despite the fact extremely unethical human experiments are often conducted under an IRB, IRBs typically will not approve “controversial” research, leading to it not being done.
As a result I frequently hear of fascinating therapeutic discoveries made outside the normal research process through trial and error that greatly benefit those who receive them, but in most cases these approaches can never be publishes because no IRB is willing to evaluate them. An excellent 2016 article written in the AAPS (a group that has also continually advocated for COVID patients) summarizes how many actually useful medical discoveries are made in independent clinical practice, but the recent hierarchal shifts in medicine have made it so this process is becoming continually rarer and rarer.
The accepted practice of medicine is also a hierarchy largely dictated by “medical evidence.” The existing hierarchal structure here makes it so that contrary research that makes it to being published nonetheless is prevented from challenging the status quo. I will review the key examples:
• Medical practice is largely determined by “guidelines” each physician is expected to follow. In most cases if you follow existing guidelines (ie. don’t treat someone with COVID until they have respiratory failure, then put them on a ventilator and give them Remdesivir), you get paid and cannot get in trouble. If you do not follow guidelines, it becomes possible to be sued for medical malpractice, health care systems will fire you, and medical boards may take your license.
To illustrate the physician attachment to guidelines: Throughout the pandemic I have participated in an online forum that approximately 100,000 US healthcare workers use. As you would imagine, the general mentality there was very conventional. One of the more interesting things I noticed in the early days of the pandemic was health care providers desperately asking for and enthusiastically sharing COVID-19 treatment guidelines from various academic institutions, while at the same time aggressively shooting down independent suggestions or ideas raised by individual physicians.
Guidelines are supposed to be made by impartial committees of experts tasked with reviewing the existing evidence in order to determine the most appropriate guidelines. In reality, as pointed out in Steve Kirsch’s article, these committees are extremely biased, and selectively chose evidence supporting the prevailing narrative.
In most cases, the decision of these unelected guideline committees goes unchallenged and even though they should not be, are in effect, law.
The only to this exception I know of occurred when the Lyme community sued the Infectious Disease Society of America (which has also published widely cited COVID treatment guidelines I and others strongly disagree with). The lawsuit challenged IDSA’s guidelines that argued against the use of antibiotics for chronic lyme disease, which was frequently being used by insurers to deny payment for those treatments and as a basis for authorities to crack down on those treatments being administered in private practice.
• Many people can only afford medical care covered by their insurance. In most cases, insurance will only pay for treatments supported by guideline committees and forces providers to spend most of their time fulfilling requirements of the insurance companies rather than treating patients. As you would imagine, significant conflicts of interest exist between hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies (for example they often share board members), which further incentivizes specific therapeutic approaches.
The insurance dynamic creates the unfortunate situation where many people can only help for a condition must depend on word of mouth to identify a physician outside the insurance system who they have to pay for out of pocket. Provided they find the right physician and can afford their care (each of which is often not the case) these individuals unlike many others often get well.
• Reciprocally, insurance companies will often pressure health care providers to perform certain services for each patient that “improve quality of care.” If you follow those suggestions (which frequently results in most of the visit being taken up by doing so), you are paid more by the insurance companies. Since everyone in health care is tight on money, those incentives result in significant pressure to physicians from their administrators to follow those suggestions.
The problem is that many of these suggestions encourage doing things I do not believe help patients and often harm them. For example, one of the reasons doctors aggressively push vaccines to their patients is because insurance companies pay them significantly more for all visits if most of their patients (especially children) are vaccinated. Similarly, one of the reasons why hospitals have been so aggressive in forcing ventilation and Remdesivir (to the point they will fight expensive lawsuits to continue doing so), is because Medicare, in accordance with COVID treatment guidelines, pays them a lot more to manage (and then kill) their patients in this way.
• Federal, state and municipal law enforcement authorities will frequently target those who promote treatments that violate guidelines. In my own experience (and for many others) IV vitamin C has been extremely helpful in certain (but not all) COVID-19 cases. There is also research showing a benefit from the therapy Nonetheless, the guidelines recommend against it and individuals who publicly promoted IV vitamin C (at a time when no treatment for COVID-19 was available) had their clinics raided and were criminally charged.
• The media will attack any controversial treatment by claiming there is no evidence for it, and simultaneously refuse to report any evidence that emerges in favor of it. Likewise, Big Tech aggressively censors anything that goes against the existing medical narrative. For example, early in the pandemic, a video was posted of a leading IV vitamin C researcher who had conducted clinical trials on using it for COVID-19 presenting his data to the National Institute of Health. This video shortly afterwards was removed by Youtube for violating their COVID misinformation policy.
How the Hierarchy is Bought Out
As you might imagine, the hierarchy outlined before is immensely susceptible to bribery. As so much money is in health care, this is what always happens.
• When the Affordable Healthcare Act was passed in 2010, its goal was to make health care more affordable. In 2009 total USA healthcare costs were 2.6 trillion dollars. In 2020 it was 4.3 trillion dollars (compared to wages going from 40,711.61 to 55,628.60 per the SSA). As the above data shows, Obamacare failed its stated objective. The central problem with Obamacare was that the medical industry are the largest lobby in congress. Because of this, they were able to craft Obamacare to benefit their industry and thereby remove each provision that would have achieved the stated goal of the Affordable Health Care Act and instead left us with a variety of highly problematic federal regulations.
• The pharmaceutical industry is the largest sponsor of the mainstream media. For this reason, they prevent stories critical of pharmaceutical products from being aired and regularly have stories promoting pharmaceuticals to be aired. Likewise, they will relentlessly attack anything that opposes mainstream pharmaceutical positions (frequently “cancelling” it by labelling it unscientific and without evidence). During COVID-19 this trend has accelerated following the Biden administration dispensing 1 billion dollars to news outlets across the political spectrum in return for positive coverage of the vaccine. I do not know of any past precedent for that occurring.
Many journalists have complained about their inability to criticize dangerous pharmaceutical products, and to my knowledge, Tucker Carlson is the only individual with a mainstream platform who has (occasionally) spoken out against the industry. In recent times Big Tech and Big Pharma (who during Obama’s presidency became the core sponsors of the Democrat Party) have financially merged with each other, and like the media Big Tech now has a similar commercial interest in protecting Big Pharma’s monopoly.
• Most medical journals are primarily funded by pharmaceutical companies. Because of this, there is a strong bias to publish questionable industry sponsored trials. Conversely is also a strong bias to not publish data supporting alternative therapies that challenge their sponsors (the earliest example of this being explicitly detailed can be found within the 2001 book Heart Frauds but I am sure many earlier ones exist). As many of you have noticed, this publication bias has gone into overdrive throughout COVID-19.
• ”Large randomized double blind studies” are typically considered to be the best form of evidence, and many individuals will reflexively dismiss a study unless it fulfills that criteria. The problem is that these types of studies are immensely expensive to do, and in most cases can only be done if a pharmaceutical company sponsors them.
As you might expect, numerous studies have shown that when pharmaceutical studies are compared to noncommercial studies, industry studies tend to greatly overestimate the benefits of a drug and understate its harms. This is due to them having a large number of (fraudulent) tricks to create the “scientific” outcome they want. One of the best known recent examples concerned an article in the BMJ discussing a whistleblower who provided proof widespread fraud occurred during Pfizer’s vaccine trials.
While a small benefit can be attributed to the placebo effect (hence suggesting the need for a “placebo controlled trial), in most cases, the bias that emerges from the inherent conflict of interest in a pharmaceutically sponsored trial greatly exceeds the placebo effect. This is extremely important to understand, but rarely understood.
Even in non-blinded studies where a large magnitude of benefit is found (which greatly exceeds any possible placebo effect) those results are typically ignored or dismissed in favor of corporate sponsored research. A sad reality with many scientific publications is that if you read the author conflict of interest disclosures (which intentionally omit key details) and see who sponsored the study of the study, you can typically predict most of what will be written within the publication.
• Most researchers and academic institutions are extremely short on money. Because of this, they are forced to accept pharmaceutical money for any type of research they want to do, and in most cases not ask questions that will upset their sponsors (and even when honest researchers exist, administrators directly concerned with institutional finances will keep them in line). To a lesser extent, they can also function through grants, but as detailed in “The Real Anthony Faucci” the grant system has been compromised so only researchers who support the mainstream narratives (and have not opposed Anthony Fauci) can get grants. Many respected scientists I have learned a great deal from, believe the corruption of the grant system, which Fauci is largely responsible for, has prevented American science for developing innovative scientific discoveries that were frequently developed in the past.
• In many cases, guideline committees are composed of individuals who have a direct financial conflict of interest over the guidelines they are promoting. The Lyme disease lawsuit for instance was filed on this basis. Malcom Kendrick an English physician who has done an excellent job illustrating many of the scams conducted by the pharmaceutical industry provided one of the best examples for this concept in his book Doctoring Data.
Many physicians are of the opinion statins (which lower cholesterol) have minimal benefit in preventing heart disease, but expose patients to frequent and significant adverse effects. Since statins were put on the market, guideline committees have continually lowered the acceptable blood levels of cholesterol, thereby significantly increasing the pool of people who could take statins (leading to the situation that on almost any medical board examination, the correct answer is almost always “give the patient a statin”).
Kendrick’s specific example was that on the guideline committee responsible for determining who needed to receive statins in the United States, every single person who was on the committee (except the chair who was legally barred from it) had a financial conflicts of interest with statin manufacturers. As you might guess, one of the quality metrics administrators have held meetings I was forced to attend regarded insufficient numbers of eligible patients receiving statin therapy.
• One of Fauci’s major achievements was turning the NIH and NIAID into pharmaceutical production pipelines. This was largely accomplished by making federal officials who were involved with the discovery or development of a pharmaceutical that went to market receive royalties for the drug once it was approved that often vastly exceed their salary.
As a result, there is an inherent conflict of interest to push unsafe or ineffective pharmaceuticals through the regulatory process. This frequently happens, whereas non-commercial enterprises focused on public good can almost never receive approval for a medication.
One of the most interesting aspects of this scheme (detailed in the Real Anthony Fauci) was that Fauci developed a large network of principle investigators (PI’s are needed to run clinical trials) who hold significant sway in getting IRBs around the country to approve ethically questionable trials needed to get unsafe drugs to market. The Real Anthony Fauci also discusses the retaliation faced by honest regulators who raise objections to problems with those trials.
In short, pharmaceutical companies have always bribed regulators, but Fauci had the unique accomplishment of transforming this being an integral part of the HSS where the regulators would often take it upon themselves to solicit those bribes.
• Lastly, physicians in everyday practice are remarkably susceptible to being bribed, and a cornerstone of the pharmaceutical industry is sending sales reps to convince physicians to prescribe their medications. A small number of physicians refuse to see reps under any circumstances as they feel it is immoral for their own financial self interest to influence their treatment of patients. Typically however, pharmaceutical reps are remarkably effective at accomplishing their goal of selling their chosen medication and many academic physicians who widely promote pharmaceutical products receive immense payouts for doing so.
Revisiting HIV
In my initial post on this substack, I stated I was able to predict much of what has happened with COVID three months before the pandemic started. This was because I have found whenever a formula is discovered which “works” it is typically reused over and over.
The story of HIV, for those interested was originally detailed in Peter Duesberg’s book Inventing the AIDS Virus, and then subsequently further discussed in The Real Anthony Fauci. Fauci’s conduct during this period appeared to have laid the blueprint for what was done with COVID.
At the start of the HIV, there was no cure and many members of the gay community suffered severe disease or died. As time moved forward, independent physicians working in the community discovered a variety of effective treatments for the AIDS patients, some of which were alternative therapies, but most of which utilized repurposed FDA approved drugs. Like the stories shared in those books, a few of my own friends worked in HIV hot spots during this time, and each found they were able to save the lives of their patients if they abandoned government recommendations and tried their own protocols.
Despite endless requests to study these approaches, Anthony Fauci blocked every single one from being studied or adopted into standard of care. In parallel, he pushed along research on a highly toxic drug, AZT. AZT had originally been intended to be used for chemotherapy, but was abandoned as it proved to be too toxic.
While AZT should have never been approved, Fauci was eventually able to manipulate one terrible study enough and that with sufficient pressure being applied to the FDA on the basis of that study to earn AZT FDA approval. Once AZT entered the market, as was obvious from the existing clinical data, it significantly worsened the prognosis for AIDS patients, something both reported in each of those books and also reported to me by a few colleagues who observed it enter the market. Despite being responsible for killing many members of the gay community (who at the time protested against Fauci for being a mass murder), Fauci was hailed a hero, became one of the most influential members of the US government, and made a lot of money in the process.
COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines
At the start of COVID-19, the WHO made the curious announcement that Remdesivir would be the standard of care for COVID-19, despite almost no evidence existing to support this decision. After finding out the drug was a nonspecific viral RNA polymerase inhibitor, I became worried it would likely be somewhat toxic to cells, as broad spectrum antivirals tend to overlap with chemotherapy drugs (AZT being one example).
My initial suspicion was that Remdesivir would also affect cellular RNA polymerases (the classic example you learn in medical school are poisonous wild mushrooms triggering organ failure through this mechanism). As I began hearing of reports of organ failure near the start of the pandemic from physicians in China, I prayed we would not see a repeat of AZT. Since that time, significant evidence against Remdesivir has been uncovered suggesting it should have never been brought to market and to some extent, it like AZT, it appears Remdesivir has killed a lot of Americans.
As I observed the trajectory COVID-19 was headed in, I formed the hypothesis that a new lucrative drug needed to be put onto the market which could be theoretically argued to treat COVID-19 (“remdesvir most work since it is a non-specific viral RNA polymerase inhibitor”) but in reality would not be effective and instead would worsen and prolong the pandemic. I suspected this strategy would be adopted since the profit from selling the drug could be channeled into keeping effective therapies off the market long enough for vaccines to enter the market. This sadly appears to be what exactly happened once the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel of the NIH made Remdesvir the standard of care for COVID-19.
After Steve Kirsch published this (accurately titled) post:
It then occurred to me to work backwards and look up each member’s financial conflicts of interest. First I checked Open Payments (which typically indexes most physicians), and oddly could only find partial information for one of the three chairs. Payment data from 2014-2016 was available for Henry Masur, who in 2015, had received $581,445.00 in “research funding” from Gilead, the maker of Remdesivir.
I then compared this to the declared financial conflicts of interest and the NIH reported that 7 of the members reported financial conflicts of interest with Gilead. However, despite it even being easily viewed for Henry Masur on Open Payments, all three co-chairs lied and reported no financial conflicts of interest in their decisions (keep in mind that the chairs of these panels are not allowed to have financial conflicts of interest).
After a bit more digging I found this article which noted that all 3 co-chairs had undisclosed financial conflicts of interest with Gilead, and as did 4 other members of the panel, along with 2 former members. The composition of the panel has changed a quite a bit in the last 6 months, but at the time the article was written, the majority of the panel had financial conflicts of interest with Gilead. I also strongly suspect additional conflicts of interest with Gilead were present neither I nor the author were able to identify.
As you would imagine, other pertinent conflicts of interests were also present for the co-chairs (for example Gulick had ties to J&J). Given the national importance of these conflicts and my own limited time (I admit did a very superficial evaluation of their ties), I would strongly encourage a fellow journalist to produce a full picture of the panel’s conflicts of interest. If that is done, I will do everything I can to make sure it is promoted.
To conclude this section, what this means in plain English is that the people directly responsible for much of the COVID disaster (hopefully this article has laid out the effects of their “guidelines”) did so because they were bribed. Additionally, whoever should have flagged them for having significant financial conflicts of interests before assuming the chair position did not.
The final question then becomes how on earth did they get to that position?
It turns out at least two of them had a close relationship with Anthony Fauci who as best as I can tell arbitrarily appointed them to chair (his) panel. Henry Masur, pictured above and his appointment is discussed here.
H. Clifford Lane (the NIAID Deputy Director for Clinical Research and Special Projects), had previously been exposed in a now deleted Associated Press (AP) article. That 2005 article discussed the AP’s Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) that revealed 51 NIH scientists were “currently involved in testing products for which they secretly receive royalties.”
Fauci and Lane had received “tens of thousands of dollars” in royalties for an experimental AIDS treatment they invented [interleukin-2] as they directed the NIH to spend millions in tax dollars to test the treatment on patients across the globe. For example, 36 million dollars of tax payer money was spent testing IL-2 at more than 200 sites in 18 countries. Once again to illustrate the relationship between chemotherapeutics and antiviral drugs, IL-2 is now primarily used in treating cancer and has a significant toxicity similar to other chemotherapies.
Prior to this FIOA, in 2000, the Secretary of the Health and Human Services had issued a federal requirement for NIH scientists to reveal their conflicts of interests to subjects they enrolled in their trials. This is fundamental to medical ethics and most potential research subjects will choose to not participate in questionable research if they know the clinical investigators have a financial conflict of interest to pursue that research.
Many of the studies Fauci and his principle investigators pushed through were questionable, dangerous and likely motivated by greed. For example, in the early days of HIV, black and hispanic orphans in New York were forcefully administered highly toxic and unnecessary HIV drugs. The children could not leave the study, even when adults involved in the study attempted to adopt them so they could be withdrawn, and over 200 children died.
However, until the 2005 FOIA from the AP, members of NIH had not, as required disclosed their financial conflicts of interest. In fact, according to the AP, the NIH did not even consider doing so until the FOIA was filed. While in recent times the AP has jumped on the Fauci bandwagon, in 2005 they still had integrity and were appropriately outraged at the clear ethical issues with this conduct, demanding basic reforms such as HSS whistleblower protections and justice department oversight to be put in place.
Not surprisingly, none of the AP’s suggestions ever happened, but it is always helpful to look back on what had been said in the not to recent past to see how quickly things have changed. While the media has always been corrupt, it is incredible how much worse it has has become in the last twenty years.
As one of the top officials within the NIAID, since 2005 H. Clifford Lane has continued to work hand in hand with Fauci. This included being an author on the African Ebola study (published in the prestigious Lancet) which showed remdesivir had the highest rate of death from any treatment they attempted, and the more recent (and questionable) NEJM study used to justify remdesivir being a treatment for COVID-19.
I was unable to find any connection between the final co-chair Roy M. Gulick and Fauci. However, as they worked in nearly identical fields (Gulick is chief of Cornell’s division of infectious disease, and frequently conducts research particularly relating to AIDS medications), I it is quite likely they frequently crossed paths.
On a broader level, the entire NIH (which often functions as an extension of Fauci’s dictates) had a conflict of interest with remdesivir. While Gilead claims to have invested 1 billion dollars developing remdesivir, research from the Center for Integration of Science and Industry determined that between gathering knowledge behind remdesivir’s chemical structure and molecular target, the NIH invested as much as $6.5 billion between 2000 and 2019 in remdesivir.
Early in the pandemic, despite highly questionable evidence the HHS signed a deal to buy the entire supply of remdesivir for approximately 3200.00 per treatment course. It was estimated the fair price for each course was 310.00 (while the production cost was approximately 10.00). An estimated 500,000 doses were purchased, and this resulted in well over a billion dollars going to Gilead. Typically, when the government makes an investment of this scale (both in the development and acquisition of remdesivir), it will always do everything it can to utilize the investment (this is one reason there has been such a push to “use” all the vaccines the government pre-paid for).
With all of the above information, I believe it is very likely multiple members of the guideline panel, particularly Lane, have received royalties for the sale of remdesivir. At this time there is no way for me to assess who is receiving royalties, and I am doubtful in this present era groups like the AP will again investigate if that is the case. This once again demonstrates how independent journalists, such as those enabled by substack’s model are so crucial in this current era.
Conclusion
The Real Anthony Fauci makes an excellent case Anthony Fauci was the party ultimately responsible for the remdesivir fiasco and to an eery degree did the exact same thing he did decades before with AZT. Fauci secured funding from numerous branches of the government to study and develop remdesivir, pushed it through to a drug approval despite it being both dangerous and ineffective, and he kept competing generic drugs such as hydroxychloroquine from being permitted for patient care and disrupting his monopoly.
Given all of this, it is not surprising Fauci gave himself the authority to appoint the panel to evaluate COVID-19 therapeutics, and selected individuals with massive conflicts of interest in favor of remdesivir to chair this panel. A common PR tactic reviewed discussed in an article exposing that PR industry was how corporations will sponsor third party groups that “appear” to be independent and on the public’s side to promote industry interests. For some reason people always trust these “independent” groups and it appears this is what was done by Fauci in the creation of an “impartial” committee to determine the appropriate treatment guidelines for COVID-19.
When I was young, my uncle told me that for many people, if they are given the choice between getting money (or prestige or protecting their ego) and doing the right thing, they will chose to not do the right thing. He had witnessed hundreds of pretty horrendous examples of this happening and related many of them to me.
In reviewing the saga of the COVID-19 treatment guidelines, it is very clear many of the responsible parties also chose their own self interest over doing the right thing. As a result many died, and the pandemic was extended for a period of time sufficient to put millions into poverty and erased generations of wealth (depending on the estimate 30-40% of small businesses have closed). Beyond the absurdity of the lockdowns, a good case can be made that the decision to purchase and mandate remdesivir was the action most directly responsible for the high death rate within the United States from COVID-19.
A common complaint from many conservatives pertains to “unelected government bureaucrats taking away our freedoms.” Despite their decades in government where they have shaped the health care policy that controls our lives, no one ever elected Fauci or those three co-chairs to their position. Someone just appointed each of them to serve their own agenda.
It is important to note no law existed that give either Fauci or his COVID-19 treatment committee the authority to mandate remdesivir. Nonetheless, it has been aggressively mandated by nearly every party that could mandate remdesivir. Simple standard legal remedies that could have prevented some of this from happening, such as provisions against clear financial conflicts of interest in the guideline committee were non-existent.
While the lawsuit against the IDSA’s lyme disease treatment guidelines was ultimately dismissed, the judge’s basis for doing so relied upon two premises. The first was his agreement with the evidence that supported IDSA’s guidelines. The second was “IDSA’s guidelines…make clear that adherence to the guidelines is voluntary, with the ultimate determination regarding their application to be made by the physician in light of each patient’s individual circumstances. “ Hence even though guidelines are treated as law, it appears that the only federal ruling assessing them clearly states they are not.
It’s a fact of life there will always be bad people in the government. Democracy and laws restricting the actions of the government historically are the best remedies we have come across. Because the NIH has been allowed to operate outside of this, bad things always happen, and the corruption within the organization has grown by leaps and bounds since Fauci transformed it into a pharmaceutical pipeline.
If there is a sincere public interest in preventing another similar to the COVID-19 treatment fiasco, I believe this is where the focus must be directed. In studying the history of American politics and political activism, I’ve found most permanent changes only result through protest movements spending years of blood sweat and tears to forcing the passage of laws that address the existing issue.
While there are likely better options, three laws immediately come to mind.
1. Short term limits must be in place for bureaucrats in positions of significant power (which could say be quantified by the amount of federal dollars they are responsible for). Fauci has been able to do much of his damage because he has been in his position for decades.
2. There must be a state level mechanism to prosecute the HHS officials for conflicts of interest because the federal government will not prosecute itself.
3. Although this is likely a much harder law to put into law, physicians must be given protections to practice medicine that falls outside industry sponsored treatment guidelines. Many of the people who survived COVID-19 survived because doctors at great personal risk elected to do so, and had laws protecting physicians been put in place, many more would have done so.
I sincerely appreciate each of you who takes the time to read these pieces, share their content and subscribe. I had hoped to write more but was unable to this week due to a few deadlines that recently emerged at work.