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.

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