Sharyl Attkisson Discusses the Widespread Corruption of American “Science”

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.

[More . . . ]

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No Coverage on Arguably the Biggest Crisis Faced by the United States

Imagine a highly regarded and credentialed doctor like Casey Mean giving an impassioned talk before Congress last week warning that we are being systematically poisoned by Big Pharma and Big Ag. And see my post on her talk.

Then imagine that there has been absolutely no coverage of this important talk by NYT, MSNBC, CNN, NPR or WaPo.  How could that possibly be?

Continue ReadingNo Coverage on Arguably the Biggest Crisis Faced by the United States

The Health State of the Nation

I'm currently reading Good Energy, a new excellent and horrifying book by Dr. Casey Means. Dr. Casey Means:

"I learned virtually nothing at Stanford Medical School about the tens of thousands of scientific papers that elucidate the root causes of why American health is plummeting.”

“I did not learn that for each additional serving of ultra-processed food we eat, early mortality increases by 18%.

This now makes up 67% of the foods our kids are eating. I took zero nutrition courses in medical school.

I didn’t learn that 82% of independently-funded studies show harm from processed food, while 93% of industry-sponsored studies reflect no harm.

I didn’t learn that 95% of the people who created the recent USDA food guidelines for America had significant conflicts of interest with the food industry.

I did not learn that one billion pounds of synthetic pesticides are being sprayed on our foods every single year. 99% of the farmland in the United States is sprayed with synthetic pesticides, many from China and Germany, and these invisible, tasteless chemicals are strongly linked to autism, ADHD, sex hormone disruption, thyroid disease, sperm dysfunction, Alzheimer’s, dementia, birth defects, cancer, obesity, liver dysfunction, female infertility and more.

I did not learn that the eight billion tons of plastic that have been produced just in the last 100 years … are being broken down into microplastics that are now filling our food, our water, and we are now even inhaling them in our air, and that very recent research … tells us that now about 0.5% of our brains by weight are plastic.

I didn’t learn that there are more than 80,000 toxins that have entered our food, water, air, and homes by industry, many of which are banned in Europe, and they are known to alter our gene expression, alter our microbiome composition and the lining of our gut, and disrupt our hormones.

I didn’t learn that heavy metals like aluminum and lead are present in our food, our baby formula, personal care products, our soil, and many of the mandated medications like vaccines, and that these metals are neurotoxic and inflammatory.

I didn’t learn that the average American walks a paltry 3,500 steps per day even though we know, based on science and top journals, that simply walking 7,000 steps a day slashes by 40-60% our risk of Alzheimer’s, dementia, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and obesity.

I certainly did not learn that medical error and medications are the third-leading cause of death in the US.

I didn’t learn that just five nights of sleep deprivation can induce full-blown pre-diabetes. I learned nothing about sleep, and we’re getting about 20% less sleep on average than we were 100 years ago.

I didn’t learn that American children are getting less time outdoors now than a maximum security prisoner, and on average, adults spend 93% of their time indoors, even though we know from the science that separation from sunlight destroys our circadian biology, and circadian biology dictated our cellular biology.

I didn’t learn that professional organizations that we get out practice guidelines from, like the American Diabetes Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have taken tens of millions of dollars from Coke, Cadbury, processed food companies and vaccine manufacturers like Moderna.

I didn’t learn that if you address these root causes that all lead to metabolic dysfunction and help patients change their food and lifestyle patterns … we could reverse the chronic disease crisis in America, save millions of lives and trillions of dollars in healthcare costs per year.

This is a spiritual crisis. We are choosing death over life, we are choosing darkness over light.

We need a return to courage. We need a return to common sense and intuition. We need a return to awe for the sheer miraculousness of our lives.

We need all hands on deck."

Source: Sen. Ron Johnson’s Roundtable on “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion”

Continue ReadingThe Health State of the Nation

Japanese Obesity

It's almost an oxymoron to say "Japanese obesity."  Johann Hari, who has written a new book, "Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs," discussed purported miracle drug Ozempic with Bari Weiss.  His bottom line is that there are straightforward solutions to the out-of-control obesity of Americans. But there is so much more to this interview than Ozempic. Here is Hari's discussion of how obesity is seen in Japan:

Johann Hari: So Japan has 4 percent obesity. Americans have 42.5 percent obesity. But Japan shows us that is not inevitable, right?

I went to a Japanese school, a normal middle-class school, with a thousand kids. It was bizarre walking around this school. There were no overweight children in this school. Every school in Japan has to employ a professional nutritionist. Her job is to design the meals. All processed food is banned.

So I go to the school and I’m watching these kids eating these unbelievably healthy meals. And I said to them, “So what’s your favorite food?” And one of them goes, “My favorite food is broccoli.” Another one goes, “My favorite food is white fish.” And another one goes, “I like boiled white rice.”

And I turned to my translator and I said, “Are these kids fucking trolling me? Their favorite food is broccoli?” She said, “We teach our children to love healthy food, don’t you?” No Japanese person understood why I was shocked.  One of the funniest experiences I ever had was trying to explain the concept of “fat pride” to Japanese people. They were just completely baffled.

They have a law; it was so bizarre witnessing. . . in 2008, in Japan, obesity went up by 0.4 percent, and there was a massive national freakout.

Continue ReadingJapanese Obesity