Jabbed

Americans tend to hold their medical professionals and healthcare system in high regard. And with good reason. Skilled practitioners perform life-extending medical interventions on a routine basis. But, as is evident by the information in the preceding chapters, the medical establishment is enmeshed in a rat’s nest of corruption with government and industry, and of the three members of the Unholy Trinity—the pharmaceutical industry, the government, and the medical establishment—industry is the king rat. A brief examination of American history reveals that the original rats gained their wealth not through drugs, but through oil.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and his brother William Rockefeller amassed the largest private fortune in history, primarily through Standard Oil. Their cutthroat business practices included “grand-scale collusion with the railroads, predatory pricing, industrial espionage, and wholesale bribery of political officials.”³

While the Rockefellers were building their dynasty, the drug industry orchestrated the birth of the American Medical Association in 1847 to gain an advantage over nondrug therapies and to solidify the supply chain from manufacturer to consumer.⁴ More than 50 years later, however, the drug-based AMA was still a weak organization compared to the influence held by chiropractic, homeopathic, and herbal-based medical practitioners.⁵ That was due in part to the fact that the drugs of that era were no better and in some cases were worse than the products hawked by traveling snake oil salesmen.6

Since the AMA couldn’t compete with the more effective medical practices of the day, it devised a plan in 1904 to delegitimize non-drug-based therapies through a medical ranking scheme conducted by its Council on Medical Education (CME). By 1910, it was evident that the plan had failed because the AMA was destitute, but the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation stepped in to fund the CME, and over the following decades its tactics succeeded in making drug-based therapies, or allopathy, society’s most accepted form of treatment.

By 1925, over 10,000 herbalists were out of business. By 1940, over 1500 chiropractors would be prosecuted for practicing “quackery.” The 22 homeopathic medical schools that flourished in 1900 dwindled to just 2 in 1923. By 1950, all schools teaching homeopathy were closed. In the end, if a physician did not graduate from [an] approved medical school with an M.D. degree, he couldn’t find a job as a doctor.⁷

The driving impetus behind that shift was that the Rockefellers had expanded their business empire to include the pharmaceutical industry as well as the drug-intensive American medical establishment. Doctors were educated in Rockefeller-founded institutions with Rockefeller-supported curricula emphasizing the use of drugs manufactured by Rockefeller-owned pharmaceutical companies.⁸

E. Richard Brown, author of the 1979 book Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America, described the means by which “philanthropic capitalists” transformed social institutions,

giving corporate philanthropy an historical role beyond the most visionary dreams of early philanthropic capitalists. This union of corporate philanthropy, the managerial-professional stratum, and the universities and science spawned the Rockefeller medicine men and their new system of medicine.⁹

It may have been a new system of medicine, but it was run on the same business principles that had turned the original oil robber barons into some of the most powerful men on Earth. In 1952, the New York Times described the power of the AMA on Capital Hill:

Some rather expert observations of the art of lobbying as practiced in Washington assert that the A. M. A. is the only organization in the country that could marshal 140 votes in Congress between sundown Friday night and noon on Monday. Performances of this sort have led some to describe the A. M. A. lobby as the most powerful in the country.10

As a consequence of its monopoly position, financial resources, and political strength, organized medicine is able to maintain a quasi-legal status in medical societies to appoint or recommend members of regulatory bodies. A.M.A. standards in medical education, training, and practice are usually adopted by law. In addition, A. M. A. inspection to determine whether its own standards have been satisfied is seldom subject to judicial review. Thus the political authority of the state itself has in effect been delegated to organized medicine.¹¹

The medical establishment essentially claimed proprietary ownership of certain words such as “cure,” “health,” and “naturopath,” and according to the naturopathic doctor T. W. Schippell, it used its power to put non-pharmaceutical-based practitioners who used those words out of business.¹² Dr. Richard Shulze, ND, MH, expanded on the establishment’s control over language:

Medicine in our country has been on a crusade over the last 100 years to wipe out every other form of medicine. One of the things they did that was unique was they lobbied to make words legal only for them to use. Today in the US, only a medical doctor can diagnose a disease, prescribe something, and cure you. Nobody else can say “diagnose”, “prescribe” and “cure”. . . .

I can’t as [an] herbalist, say that an herb will cure, even though a lot of prescription drugs are made from herbs.

. . . If I say that I go to jail. It isn’t because the herbs don’t work and the drugs are better, it’s just because they have more money, they lobbied more and got the law passed in their favour.¹³

The assault on medical freedom was evident in the AMA’s organized campaign to expose “mental health quackery”¹⁴ as well as its decades-long battle to destroy the chiropractic profession. In 1987, a US judge ruled that the American College of Surgeons and the American College of Radiology had participated in a conspiracy with the AMA to prevent chiropractors from practicing in the United States. The New York Times reported:

The American Medical Association led an effort to destroy the chiropractic profession by depriving its practitioners of association with medical doctors and by calling them ‘‘unscientific cultists’’ or worse . . .

Judge Susan Getzendanner described the conspiracy as ‘‘systematic, long-term wrongdoing and the long-term intent to destroy a licensed profession’’ in a ruling late Thursday in an antitrust lawsuit filed in 1976.

The decision said the nation’s largest physicians’ group led a boycott by doctors intended ‘‘to contain and eliminate the chiropractic profession.’’15

The medical establishment was clearly out of control, in part because it derived its ethics from the out-of-control pharmaceutical industry, which derived its ethics from the out-of-control oil barons of the 1800s.

In 2015, Oprah Winfrey interviewed former US president Jimmy Carter, who essentially echoed the claim of Princeton University professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern University professor Benjamin I. Page that “. . . policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans . . .”¹⁶ when he said, “We’ve become now an oligarchy instead of a democracy. And I think that’s been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards of the American political system that I’ve ever seen in my life.”¹⁷

One need look no further than the lucrative pharmaceutical market to see the bitter fruit of amoral and unethical business practices in the American oligarchy. Following are a few of many examples published by the New York Times:

2007: “ . . . Bristol-Myers Squibb and a subsidiary paid $515 million to settle federal and state investigations into marketing of its antipsychotic drug Abilify.” (Bristol-Myers Squibb also manufactures vaccines.)

2009: “Pfizer paid $2.3 billion . . . , including $1.3 billion in the biggest criminal fine of any type in Unites States history, for off-label marketing of the painkiller Bextra and other drugs. Bextra was withdrawn from the market in 2005. The Pfizer fine included $301 million for off-label marketing of its antipsychotic drug Geodon.” (Pfizer also manufactures vaccines.)

2009: “Eli Lilly paid $1.4 billion in January 2009 to settle investigations into illegal marketing of its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. Lilly’s settlement included a $515 million criminal fine, which, until the Pfizer case, was the largest such fine ever imposed on a corporation.” (Eli Lilly manufactured thimerosal for vaccine use.)

In 2015, the New York Times published a scathing report on Johnson & Johnson’s marketing of its blockbuster antipsychotic, Risperdal. Although not approved for use by children, J&J distributed “lollipops and small toys” in sample packages as part of its “back to school” marketing campaign. If truth in advertising were part of J&J’s business ethics, it would have included bras for boys because insiders knew and hid the fact that Risperdal led 5.5 percent of boys to develop large breasts, 46DD in one case. The price of the bras could have come out of Alex Gorsky’s $25 million salary. He was the crook in charge of marketing the drug to children and seniors. J&J paid out more than $2 billion in penalties and settlements. J&J punished Gorsky by promoting him to CEO.¹⁹

A sampling from US Department of Justice news releases reveals additional Big Pharma shenanigans:

2004: “Warner-Lambert to Pay $430 Million to Resolve Criminal & Civil Health Care Liability Relating to Off-label Promotion.”²⁰

2008: “Merck to Pay More than $650 Million to Resolve Claims of Fraudulent Price Reporting and Kickbacks.”²¹

2010: “GlaxoSmithKline to Plead Guilty & Pay $750 Million to Resolve Criminal and Civil Liability Regarding Manufacturing Deficiencies at Puerto Rico Plant.”²²

2010: “Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. to Pay More Than $420 Million to Resolve Off-label Promotion and Kickback Allegations.”²³

2011: “U.S. Pharmaceutical Company Merck Sharp & Dohme to Pay Nearly One Billion Dollars Over Promotion of Vioxx^®.”²⁴

2012: “Sanofi US Agrees to Pay $109 Million to Resolve False Claims Act Allegations of Free Product Kickbacks to Physicians.”²⁵

2012: “GlaxoSmithKline to Plead Guilty and Pay $3 Billion to Resolve Fraud Allegations and Failure to Report Safety Data.”²⁶

2013: “United States Sues Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. For Allegedly Paying Multi-Million Dollar Kickbacks To Doctors In Exchange For Prescribing Its Drugs.”²⁷

As if apologies from criminals engaged in elaborate, organized criminal activities mean anything, the Daily Mail reported that “the firm said it ‘fully accepts’ the facts of the investigation and the verdict and ‘sincerely apologises’ to patients and doctors.”²⁹ Industry apologies might mean a bit more if the industry also stopped injuring and killing people for profit.

The consumer group Public Citizen reported in 2010 the unlikelihood of such an outcome since the pharmaceutical industry had overtaken the defense industry as “the biggest defrauder of the federal government.” The Public Citizen report reads:

Of the 165 settlements comprising $19.8 billion in penalties . . . , 73 percent of the settlements (121) and 75 percent of the penalties ($14.8 billion) have occurred in just the past five years (2006-2010).

Four companies (GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Schering-Plough) accounted for more than half (53 percent or $10.5 billion) of all financial penalties imposed over the past two decades. These leading violators were among the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.³⁰

It’s important to remember that the US government is not only a victim of pharmaceutical organized crime, but it also profits from such crimes due to its much-heralded public-private partnership. One would think that it would be illegal for the government to do business with criminals, but, despite some past fines and settlements, the government rarely adequately prosecutes those corporations.

. . . [T]hese settlements are for rather minor infractions—not for deliberately concealing the danger of a killing drug from patients, the medical community, and their investors. Despite the serious consequences of Merck’s actions, the government won’t prosecute them for any serious charges—because, if they did and won, it would mean they would have to stop doing business with Merck in the future! Federal law makes it illegal for Medicare and Medicaid to do business with “an excluded or debarred entity resulting from serious criminal charges.”31

Several books currently on the market describe the corrupting influence the pharmaceutical industry continues to hold over the medical establishment. One such book, On the Take: How Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health by Jerome P. Kassirer MD, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, details the perks—bribes—medical professionals receive from industry in the form of anything-but-free “free” gifts, “free” meals, and “free” education.³² Publishers Weekly’s review of Kassirer’s book summarizes the extent of these problems:

“Some physicians become known as whores.” This is strong language in Kassirer’s mostly temperate but tough look at how big business is corrupting medicine—but according to Kassirer, one doctor’s wife used the word “whore” to describe her husband’s accepting high fees to promote medical products.³³

In 2014, Amy Goodman, the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, narrated a documentary titled Big Bucks, Big Pharma that:

pulls back the curtain on the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry to expose the insidious ways that illness is used, manipulated, and in some instances created, for capital gain. Focusing on the industry’s marketing practices, media scholars and health professionals help viewers understand the ways in which direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical advertising glamorizes and normalizes the use of prescription medication, and works in tandem with promotion to doctors. . . . Ultimately, Big Bucks, Big Pharma challenges us to ask important questions about the consequences of relying on a for-profit industry for our health and well-being.³⁴

Every company mentioned above also manufactures vaccines or vaccine ingredients that are less the fruit of science and more the products of a vaccine paradigm fostered by the industrial-medical-government complex. Its key players were trained to dole out drugs and vaccines to patients just as illicit drug pushers distribute pills and needles on street corners. And at least pushers aren’t under the illusion that their products come to market through a science-based system of checks and balances.

Numerous sources report that Big Pharma and Big Medicine collude in creating and maintaining the illusion—from medical schools, to medical journals, and to medical conferences. Most, but not all, aspiring doctors bow their heads and submit to the indoctrination. In 2009, the New York Times ran a story about the influence of drug companies in Harvard’s educational curriculum. Harvard medical students were not impressed when they learned that they are being trained to pimp for Big Pharma. One student said, “We are really being indoctrinated into a field of medicine that is becoming more and more commercialized.” Another said, “Before coming here, I had no idea how much influence companies had on medical education. And it’s something that’s purposely meant to be under the table, providing information under the guise of education when that information is also presented for marketing purposes.” According to Duff Wilson, the author of the article,

The students say they worry that pharmaceutical industry scandals in recent years—including some criminal convictions, billions of dollars in fines, proof of bias in research and publishing and false marketing claims—have cast a bad light on the medical profession. And they criticize Harvard as being less vigilant than other leading medical schools in monitoring potential financial conflicts by faculty members.³⁶

Marcia Angell is an outspoken critic of Pharma’s influence over medical education and medical journals. As the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine for over two decades, she witnessed the shenanigans first hand. Shortly before Angell stepped down from her position in 2000, she wrote an editorial titled “Is Academic Medicine for Sale?” The question was rhetorical. Angell’s experience proved conclusively that such was the case.³⁷

No one should rely on a business for impartial evaluation of a product it sells. Yet the pharmaceutical industry contends it educates the medical profession and the public about its drugs and the conditions they treat, and many doctors and medical institutions—all recipients of the industry’s largesse—pretend to believe it. So does the government. But “education” comes out of the drug companies’ marketing budgets. That should tell you what is really going on. As in all other businesses, there is an inherent conflict of interest between selling products and assessing them.39

Angell also provided the mind-boggling figure “that the industry hosted over 300,000 pseudo-educational events in 2000, about a quarter of which offered continuing medical education credits.”⁴⁰ The former editor asserts, “We need to end the fiction that big Pharma provides medical education. Drug companies are in business to sell drugs. Period. They are exactly the wrong people to evaluate the products they sell.”⁴¹

Drug companies are also exactly the wrong people to control medical journals, but that doesn’t stop them from doing so. Richard Smith was an editor for the British Medical Journal (BMJ) for 25 years. For the last 13 of those years, he was the editor and CEO of the BMJ Publishing Group. In 2005, the year after Smith stepped down from his position, he published a paper titled “Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies.”⁴²

In addition to quoting Marcia Angell and Jerry Kassirer, he also quoted Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet. They all came to the same conclusion: medical journals can’t be trusted or believed. Smith confessed that it took him “almost a quarter of a century editing for the BMJ to wake up to what was happening.” Smith pointed out that journals could go under financially if they were to adhere to journalistic and scientific integrity:

Many owners—including academic societies—depend on profits from their journals. An editor may thus face a frighteningly stark conflict of interest: publish a trial that will bring US$100,000 of profit or meet the end-of-year budget by firing an editor.⁴³

There is rich irony in the fact that Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet in 2004, made the statement that “[j]ournals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”⁴⁶ Horton would know because he’s the editor who announced in a 2010 press conference that the Andrew Wakefield et al. paper was “fatally flawed,” not because the information presented in the case series was incorrect, but because “the claims in the original paper that children were ‘consecutively referred’ and that investigations were ‘approved’ by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false.”⁴⁷ Wakefield described in his book Callous Disregard the role Horton played in the retraction of the paper and Wakefield’s eventual delicensure.⁴⁸

The Wakefield et al. paper was retracted for the same reason that the CDC’s fraudulent 2004 DeStefano et al. paper was not retracted: industry profit. In addition, Dr. Brian Hooker’s 2014 paper, a paper that criticized the CDC’s 2004 paper, was retracted for the same reason.⁴⁹

Last, if scientific integrity really were more than just a slogan, any and all papers concocted to hide the thimerosal-autism link and connected in any way to felon and wanted fugitive Poul Thorsen would have long since been retracted. Sadly, all of these cases are proof that the bond between medicine and Rockefeller money is good for business and bad for medicine, consumer health, and freedom. American citizens now have a medical system that is ranked as the USA’s third leading cause of death due in large part to the number of people who die taking medications even as prescribed.⁵⁰

Inasmuch as healthy diets and lifestyles don’t fit into the drug-based American healthcare system, the medical establishment can also take partial credit for the part it plays in the two leading causes of American death—heart disease and cancer. In their defense, many doctors fail to provide sound nutritional advice because they haven’t been trained to recognize any remedy unless it comes in a pill or a syringe. The curriculum in most medical schools includes little more about nutrition than it includes about the substantiated risks of vaccines.⁵¹

Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at Cornell T. Colin Campbell, coauthor of the best-selling book The China Study, expounds upon this appalling situation:

You should not assume that your doctor has any more knowledge about food and its relation to health than your neighbors and coworkers. It’s a situation in which nutritionally untrained doctors prescribe milk and sugar-based meal-replacement shakes for overweight diabetics, high-meat, high-fat diets for patients who ask how to lose weight and extra milk for patients who have osteoporosis. The health damage that results from doctors’ ignorance of nutrition is astounding [emphasis in original].52

David Ayoub, MD, discussed in a 2010 presentation how hard it was for him when he realized that

. . . everything that you may have learned in medical school about health care potentially now is inaccurate and it was a lie to promote nothing more than the drug companies that really control healthcare education, and much of the healthcare system here in the United States.⁵³

The disillusioned physician learned that institutional ignorance was “more the rule than the exception in healthcare.” Said Ayoub,

Where there’s a profit to be made by the drug industry you can bet that the research on causation has been suppressed, has been converted to mostly genetic research which there is no therapy for, and it maintains enormous profit for the industry that is selling drugs to treat these conditions.⁵⁴

It comes as no surprise, then, that many of the same people who believe that health comes in pills and potions also believe that a healthy immune system comes through a needle . . . with or without patient consent. In 2015, The AMA updated its policy on vaccination proclaiming that the people it purports to serve have no right to vaccine-related religious, philosophical, or medical self-determination: “Under new policy, the AMA will seek more stringent state immunization requirements to allow exemptions only for medical reasons.”⁵⁵ Is it really a good idea to have the AMA—a key player in America’s third leading cause of death—advocating for vaccine policy that strips Americans of their right to decline AMA-mandated vaccines?

Not all medical trade groups share the AMA’s fascist relationship with the government-pharmaceutical complex, but the power of the AMA cannot be overstated. More than 150 years of history demonstrate that AMA policies and practices are designed to control government, contain and eliminate non-drug-related therapies while expanding the market for the pharmaceutical industry, and training medical professionals to hawk its patented products.

As a result, Americans now bear the burden of having the world’s most expensive healthcare system coupled with some of the worst health outcomes among developed and developing nations. Under such circumstances it’s growing ever more difficult to function as a vaccine-informed medical provider. That dilemma will be explored in greater detail in the following chapter.

Chapter Twenty-One

INDOCTRINATING DOCTORS