Fascinating and horrifying discussion here. The woman being interviewed by Jan Jekielek is Sharyl Attkisson, author of a brand new book that I have ordered but not yet read: Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails (2024).
If we are not collectively (as a country) able to care about our children becoming sick or dying from preventable causes, we have fallen more deeply into nihilism that I could have ever imagined. We seem to be subject to the whims of medical rent seekers, people and companies who are completely willing to accept short term profits in return for hurting and killing millions of Americans. And they know no bounds. They (especially Big Pharma and the federal agencies it has captured) are willing to propagandize and censor researchers and all of the rest of us to keep the money flowing.
I created a transcript of this interview, but I would urge everyone to watch it (it’s only 9 minutes) and to consider buying her new book. Here is the transcript:
Sharyl Attkisson 0:15
I call him the frog professor in that chapter. And it’s a fascinating story, because over 25 years ago, this man was hired by a chemical company to study a chemical that, sadly is in most of our drinking water. It’s run-off from crops used on a lot of corn. The company was hoping to prove it was safe and not causing problems, because the EPA was going to be analyzing it and taking a look at regulations. And unfortunately for him, he found it was feminizing. In his words, frogs, taking frogs that were male and turning them, in essence, into female, or having frogs not develop testes or develop both testes and ovaries at the same time. And a host of other research has built upon this. It turns out, it impacts all vertebrates, basically, in some form, in negative ways, many different ways, besides this feminization.
But what happened to him when he tried to simply report what he had learned, I think, is a lesson for all of us to how studies and sciences skewed today are skewed today because the company had a button-down contract, he wasn’t allowed to report the negative findings. And people don’t realize, pharmaceutical industry hires academics, but the contracts now will say, in essence, if you find something negative, you can’t publish. It used to be everything got published. So to his credit, he went independent. He quit that job, repeated the research independently so that he could publish it, and again, it’s been built on over the years with a lot of powerful research, but what the company did to try to destroy him. The tactics that they deployed to try to get him fired, to controversialize his research, investigate him, investigate his wife, psychoanalyze him. And this was all confirmed with documents that were released as part of a lawsuit. When the company was sued over allegedly adulterating water in various cities, they paid a huge settlement without admitting fault. But I think it’s an instructive lesson in what happens to you as a researcher, if you unfortunately happen to be off-the-narrative of what powerful interests may want you to find, how you can suffer and pay the price for that.
Jan Jekielek 2:25
I think we have a bit of that sort of idealized view of of or at least have had a overly idealized view of research as being kind of something pure. And of course, one would want to keep it that way at some at some level, but tell me a little bit about the sort of the general picture then,
Sharyl Attkisson 2:46
Sadly, the scientific industry has been so corrupted by money sources that even the people that you’d like to think would defend, for example, the scientific journals, have thrown up their hands and said much, or most of The science printed in the journals that your doctor rely relies on today is not to be believed because it’s been so corrupted. And I was stunned, because I’m one of those people that used to think, “Hey, you read something and it’s in a peer reviewed, published journal.” Everybody always says, that’s the gold standard. That’s it.
Come to find out, Dr Marcia Angel, former head of the New England Journal of Medicine, said that she learned, as editor in chief, she could not stop the bad studies with the bad information in them, that were hopelessly tainted by the pharmaceutical industry. She said she lost that battle. The current editor of the British journal Lancet has said much the same. Dr Richard Horton: he in a stunning editorial some years ago, he said that much of the science is not to be believed, and then many studies have been built upon that sense that give high percentages of information in medical journals that are not to be believed because they’ve been corrupted by the scientific, you know, money interests, basically, let’s say, pharmaceutical and chemical industries.
And there are a lot of tactics that I learned they use that are invisible to us, such as ghost writing. A study that looks like it’s it’s signed by an independent doctor who’s paid for the use of a signature. But the article was actually written by the drug company, or a middleman hired by the drug company, not disclosed in the article in the scientific journal, and it’s being used to pump up the need, or supposed need, for a drug that’s going to be introduced, or a medicine that they currently make, or to make it look like the medicine works very well with no side effects. And people have no idea this material, not only the studies, may be tainted, but they’re literally being written by a drug company when not disclosed necessarily in the final product. Those are just some of the conflicts that happen today.
Jan Jekielek 4:49
I’ve learned over recent years to look at things from the perspective of the incentive structures that exist in the system. But. Doesn’t seem like that’s a, I guess, a typical practice. So how did we get to that?
Sharyl Attkisson 2:46 5:08
I think this has been a slippery slope that has occurred over the course of 20 years or more. You know, I’ve covered it and noticed it in the last 20-25 years, for sure, as I got assignments at CBS News as an investigative reporter. But money interests have figured out how to infiltrate virtually every aspect of the information we may get about our health. And this has happened over time, and unfortunately, the powers that be have allowed it. So pharmaceutical interests have too much influence in medical school, but the medical schools allow it in part because the drug companies give them money for research, money for projects, money for professorships, bring in lunches for the students. I mean, it’s top to bottom, all kinds of influence. They influence the professional educations of doctors once doctors have gotten their licensee. To keep them, they take classes that are taught by the pharmaceutical industry, but often not disclosed in overt way, so the doctors think they’re being taught by independent authorities about, you know, steered to look at medicine and the practice of medicine a certain way, and maybe not to look for side effects or to believe very much in a medicine that may have controversies and dual sides to it, but they’re taught only one side.
They have taken over, as the journal editors have said, the scientific journals in many respects. They have taken over the media in many respects and influenced the media through the advertising money they spend in the media. So the media now they just self censor that really the outsiders don’t even have to tell them what to report and what not to report. What which used to happen now I think there’s so much self censorship because it’s understood where the money is made.
And then they’ve influenced the federal agencies and political figures through donations and influence that make sure policies that happen and laws that are written are favorable to they and their interests, rather than to those of us who are impacted by them. And if this is something that I think it’s a very well-orchestrated clever campaign by financial interests whose job is to try to maximize their profits and figure out how to make the world work this way.
Jan Jekielek 7:25
Unfortunately, and I’m not sure it’s by design–maybe some people think it is–unfortunately, it’s resulted in our poor health overall, I think making us sicker as a population.
Sharyl Attkisson 2:46 7:37
What I think is alarming is we’ve noticed over the past couple of decades, there is an epidemic of chronic health disorders among our children and also among adults and our elderly, but particularly we see what’s happened to the younger generation, whether we’re talking about mental illness, metabolic problems and obesity, cancers, disorders that didn’t used to exist, that are related to immune system disorders and so on. And yet, you look in the big picture, and you say, We’ve never spent more money on insurance, health care, pills, doctors. And our doctors and our federal agencies, they seem not to notice this. So they’re either not noticing what we all see or they’re looking the other way. I don’t know which is worse, but I think that’s what’s led to people understanding there’s a crisis going on, and the medical establishment as it exists today has done a poor job of addressing the root causes or even seeming very alarmed by these epidemics that are impacting in some way almost every American today.
Jan Jekielek 8:43
Give me an example of some, some of the changes that you’ve seen through your career covering these sorts of things, in terms of the incidents, there’s certain diseases, for example, that have you know, become much more prevalent well.
Sharyl Attkisson 8:57
I’ll give you examples and then I’ll speak to how interesting it is that instead of addressing the root causes, we are taught to normalize and accept them. And there’s a reason behind that. I think the people steering us to accept these disorders rather than address how to prevent them are sometimes the same industries implicated in the problems. So let’s say a lot of people think, and there’s great science that points to metabolic disorders being caused by the adulterated food that we eat today that has a lot of products and chemicals in it, and the chemical makers and the companies that make so much money with these products and the processed foods that we think are so bad For us now.
Well, they want you to accept obesity. Of course, people shouldn’t be shamed for their size and so on. So that’s not an issue. But why don’t we also address why so many people, are obese, and there is a metabolic thing happening, but those who want us to accept it are the ones that make the products that could be causing it. Or we’re talking about artificial food dyes. We’re talking about preservatives that go in food. So there’s just a lot of things impacting us.
Sharyl Attkisson’s bio:
Sharyl Attkisson has been a working journalist for more than forty years and is host and managing editor of the nonpartisan Sunday morning TV program Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson. She has covered controversies under the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, emerging with a reputation, as the Washington Post put it, as a “persistent voice of news-media skepticism about the government’s story.” She is the recipient of five Emmy Awards and an Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting. She has worked at CBS News, PBS, and CNN, and is a fifth degree blackbelt master in Taekwondo.
