Directing Scientific Discourse

The trailer for the documentary Plandemic has been going viral the past few days…in addition to getting censored. All across social media you can watch people share this…and others attacking it viciously.

There are two major narratives going on right now. And both are actually quite rationally consistent depending on which set of spin of the facts you believe. So who do you believe?

Is the video being removed because its dangerous misinformation that will hurt people…or is it an example of censorship because it contains truth they don’t want you to know?

This video has been removed from Youtube several times.

But it is still available on BitChute.

And here’s the Plandemic Movie website. (Note that the full documentary is not yet available.)

I’ll get to the specifics of the video soon enough, but first a little history lesson…

Who Would Know if Medical Science is Corrupted or Not?

I would say the editors of journals in which such science is published is the best place to look.

Now if there were just one or two of these saying a problem existed, maybe you could dismiss it. But here I quote four such editors across the biggest journals, BMJ, JAMA, NEJM and the Lancet. I could have dug up more, but I feel this is sufficient.

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor.”
– Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of New England Journal of Medicine, 2009

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness”
– Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet

“We landed in our present mess because of the innumerable mistakes in the past…They include failure of clinical scientists, their institutions and the editors of the journals publishing their science to understand how thoroughly they were being caught up by the marketers who paid them. I believe it will take a revolution to sweep away decades of self-dealing by industry.”
 – Drummond Rennie, Deputy Editor, JAMA

“Critics of the drug industry have been increasing in number, respectability, and vehemence, and Peter [C. Gøtzsche, author of Deadly Medicine and Organised Crime] has surpassed them all in comparing the industry with organised crime. I hope that nobody will be put off reading this book by the boldness of his comparison, and perhaps the bluntness of the message will lead to valuable reform.”
 – Richard Smith, MD and former Editor-in-Chief, BMJ

The only people that don’t agree with these people are those that have such conflicts of interest and want to keep them that way!

If you do not believe that science can be bought…you are lying to yourself! It is abundantly clear this is possible and from what I’ve seen medicine is the place where it is worse.

Some people want to say that there are just a few bad apples in the barrel (despite the fact that every pharmaceutical company of note is guilty of the same kinds of crimes committed over and over again).

The barrel itself is not rotten. In other words the scientific method works.

BUT what if the people that direct where the barrel gets moved to are rotten?

How is Medical Science Corrupted?

Another history lesson here. We only need to cast out minds back to Big Tobacco. Everyone knows about this at least vaguely. Unfortunately, they know too few details which then don’t allow them to draw parallels to these same actions and worse being done ever since up to today.

The following quotes come from the article “Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics.”

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“The tobacco industry’s program to engineer the science relating to the harms caused by cigarettes marked a watershed in the history of the industry. It moved aggressively into a new domain, the production of scientific knowledge, not for purposes of research and development but, rather, to undo what was now known: that cigarette smoking caused lethal disease. If science had historically been dedicated to the making of new facts, the industry campaign now sought to develop specific strategies to “unmake” a scientific fact.”

“If public relations could engineer consent among consumers, so too could it manage the science…Although medicine and science had never been sacrosanct from a range of social and commercial interests, the tobacco industry campaign crossed into new terrain to build a powerful network of interests and influence.”

“[Public relations man] Hill understood that simply denying emerging scientific facts would be a losing game. This would not only smack of self-interest but also ally the companies with ignorance in an age of technological and scientific hegemony. So he proposed seizing and controlling science rather than avoiding it.”

“Hill’s proposal offered the potential of a research program that would be controlled by the industry yet promoted as independent. This was a public relations masterstroke…offering funds directly to university-based scientists would enlist their support and dependence. Moreover, it would have the added benefit of making academic institutions “partners” with the tobacco industry in its moment of crisis.”

“The Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), a group that would be carefully shaped by [PR Firm] Hill & Knowlton to serve the industry’s collective interests, would be central to the explicit goal of controlling the scientific discourse about smoking and health.”

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I first covered this in Medical Monopoly Musings #15 – Tobacco Playbook – Muddying the Scientific Waters and there’s more to that. I also covered it in two of my Health Sovereign podcasts here and here.

There is far more to this story too. As I wrote about just recently, the WHO did an internal analysis that looked at how Big Tobacco was able to manipulate them. This resulted in a 260 page document that shows the width and depth of tactics used to influence science, policy making, media and more.

“In one of their most significant strategies for influencing WHO’s tobacco control activities, tobacco companies developed and maintained relationships with current or former WHO staff, consultants and advisors. In some cases, tobacco companies hired or offered future employment to former WHO or UN officials in order to indirectly gain valuable contacts within these organizations that might assist in its goal of influencing WHO activities. Of greatest concern, tobacco companies have, in some cases, had their own consultants in positions at WHO, paying them to serve the goals of tobacco companies while working for WHO. Some of these cases raise serious questions about whether the integrity of WHO decision making has been compromised.” (emphasis added)

Understand that these consultants and advisors would help make policy based on “science,” would direct funds to “science,” and would put other public messaging regarding such “science.”

If it happened in tobacco, it happens elsewhere.

Tobacco Science 2.0

Based on that analysis, the WHO made recommendations for changes so such influence couldn’t be done again. How many of those actually went into place?

And even if many changes were made, do you think sneakier methods wouldn’t be developed by industry to achieve the same aims? After all mega-profits are at stake.

Think Tobacco Science 2.0 and you might begin to see what is possible in today’s modern age. In other words the “Tobacco Playbook” is constantly being updated.

For example, as revealed through court cases, we saw GMO and chemical company Monsanto ran an “intelligence fusion center,” a term used by law enforcement for operations for surveillance and to combat terrorism.

Were they fighting terrorists? Nope. The Guardian reports how Monsanto targeted journalists and non-profits that had messages criticizing Monsanto. They used methods such as SEO (search engine optimization), negative book reviews, pressuring journalists and editors, monitoring and actions on social media, engaging “pro-science” third parties, paying academics for positive reports, etc.

Monsanto got bought by Bayer, a pharmaceutical company. In consolidation they have MORE money and power to do continue such intelligence operations. (Related to today’s discussion, Bayer paid out $600 million in damages to people they infected with HIV from their blood product Factor VIII. While they released a safer version in the US, knowing they had problems with it, they sold the contaminated stuff overseas.)

Do you think they’re the only ones using these methods?

Big Tobacco eventually succumbed to the real science as opposed to their tobacco science. But they were hugely successfully (meaning profitable) in delaying what happened. As other industries saw this occur they surely thought: How could we make sure that doesn’t happen to us?

What if you influenced not just some scientists…but the head scientists? From the top down you exert a tremendous amount of control in the direction of where science goes, what gets published, what does not, or even what gets retracted.

My Wrestling with Varmus the Varmint

I read Marcia Angell’s book, The Truth About the Drug Companies back in December. She’s one of the editors quoted above that went on to write a scathing book about the industry as several of them did.

One thing stood out more than anything there, and that was the activities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) director, Harold Varmus. It was at this point that I decided I’d be naming specific people in my Medical Monopoly Musings, starting in #28 The NIH is Compromised.

I wrestled with this decision because talking about powerful people could paint me as a target. Was I really so sure of their actions to do such a thing? I certainly didn’t want to get wrapped up in a libel suit! Still I decided I would pursue the truth, so I moved forward in naming names, starting with this man. Here’s my investigation:

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the main agency of the United States government responsible for public health and medical research. Our taxpayer dollars make up the majority of funding for research done at NIH.

In addition to its own research, grants from the NIH then go out to medical institutions and schools supposedly based on scientific merit.

As a publicly funded institution the science is supposed to be in the public interest. Sometimes it is. Other times…well, you be the judge. Marcia Angell, introduced in my previous post, wrote this:

“A 2003 piece of investigative reporting by David Willman in the Los Angeles Times called that picture into serious question. Willman found that senior NIH scientists (who are among the highest paid employees in the government) routinely supplement their income by accepting large consulting fees and stock options from drug companies that have dealings with the institutes. At one time, most of these kinds of connections would have been prohibited, but in 1995, the then director of the institutes, Harold Varmus, with a stroke of the pen, lifted the restrictions. After that, the NIH placed no limits on the amount of money its scientists could earn from outside work or the time they could devote to it…Some NIH scientists made hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees. The deputy director of the Laboratory of Immunology, for instance, whose salary was $179,000 in 2003, was reported to have collected more than $1.4 million in consulting fees over eleven years and received stock options valued at $865,000.”

In the next post I’ll dive deeper into Harold Varmus, the man responsible for this and a prime example of the revolving door in action, specifically within the scientific realm.

To boil it down, a guy with massive conflicts of interests makes it so that conflicts of interest are no longer restricted.

Does anyone else see a problem here?

Willman wrote, “Dual roles — federal research leader and drug company consultant — are increasingly common at the NIH, an agency once known for independent scientific inquiry on behalf of a single client: the public.”

Furthermore, “Increasingly, outside payments to NIH scientists are being hidden from public view. Relying in part on a 1998 legal opinion, NIH officials now allow more than 94% of the agency’s top-paid employees to keep their consulting income confidential. As a result, the NIH is one of the most secretive agencies in the federal government when it comes to financial disclosures…Many of them also routinely sign confidentiality agreements with their corporate employers, putting their outside work under tight wraps.”

Not only do they have conflicts of interest, but they keep them hidden. Nothing to see here folks! Keep on believing that science is objective.

You know what? Yes, I am anti-science…when that science is conducted in this way.

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And then in the following post, #29 Varmus the Varmint (Scientific Revolving Door!)…

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Last post shared how the NIH, our biggest scientific body, was effectively bought by Big Pharma. This was exposed by investigative report David Willman of the LA Times in 2003.

Willman wrote, “In November 1995, then-NIH Director Harold E. Varmus wrote to all institute and center directors, rescinding “immediately” a policy that had barred them from accepting consulting fees and payments of stock from companies….Varmus’ memo — which until now has not been made public — scuttled other restraints affecting all employees, including a $25,000 annual limit on outside income, a prohibition on accepting company stock as payment and a limit of 500 hours a year on outside activities.”

Eight years between the memo and the exposure of it. The industry made some significant strides during that time according to these rules.

As you might imagine, Willman’s exposé caused a stir. A follow-up piece came out March 13th, 2004. “Appearing before the NIH’s blue-ribbon panel on conflict of interest, Varmus also said the agency should discourage its scientists from accepting large amounts of money from companies or spending too much time on nongovernment work.” Yet the panel didn’t press Varmus very hard on why he changed the rules.

Did he really change his mind, or was he simply covering up his mis-deeds? Let’s dig a bit deeper into Varmus to get a better picture…

• 1989 – Varmus shared a Nobel Prize for genetic cancer research.
• 1993 to 1999 – Director of the National Institutes of Health
• 2000 to 2010 – President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
• 2008 to 2010 – Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
• 2010 to 2015 – Director of the National Cancer Institute
• 2015 to Current – Professor of Medicine at Lewis Thomas University and Senior Associate at New York Genome Center
• Current – Member of the Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board, Global Health Advisory Board at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and several other boards.

Just looking at that the average person may see a distinguished and successful scientist…but if you understand that game, instead you might be worried.

Of course, in addition, Varmus has been an advisor to pharmaceutical companies Merck, Chiron Corporation, Gilead, and Onyx Pharmaceuticals.

The Cancer Prevention Coalition (CPC) had a big problem with Varmus being appointed to director of the National Cancer Institute. This was because of his clear conflicts of interest, as well as his statement “You can’t do experiments to see what causes cancer – it’s not an accessible problem, and not the sort of thing scientists can afford to do.”

You can’t do experiments to see what causes cancer? Is this a statement that our top scientist in charge of cancer should be making?

Here’s his opinion on what cancer is all about. “Tobacco, UV rays, viruses, heredity, and age are the main causes of cancer.”

That’s a great opinion…if you want to keep the status quo of many, many people getting cancer! Notice how environmental pollutants have nothing to do with it.

Samuel Epstein, Chairman of CPC, wrote, “The ignorance of Varmus to cancer prevention is reinforced by his unrecognized personal conflicts of interest…Varmus also gave senior NCI staff free license to consult with the cancer drug industry, a flagrant institutional conflict of interest. In this connection, the 2008 edition of Charity Rating Guide & Watchdog Report listed Varmus with a compensation package of about $2.7 million. According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, this is the highest compensation of directors in over 500 major non-profit organizations ever monitored.”

Cancer drugs are a big industry…an industry that wants to keep it that way. God forbid we help people without lining the pockets of Big Pharma even more. Varmus the Varmint has done very well for himself and those he works for…which is not the public.

THIS is how the scientific research game is played in the real world.

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Look, until I came across this story in Angell’s book I had never heard of this man. I’m willing to bet, unless you read my posts earlier, you haven’t until now either.

But based on that I started really digging into him, finding that almost no one had really covered him. This is really where I started to put pieces together in the bigger picture of how science can be rigged.

I bring him up because the ONLY other person I’ve seen talk about him is…Dr. Judy Mikovits, the woman featured in the Plandemic video.

Plague of Corruption

Dr. Judy Mikovits only came on my radar a few months back. I ordered and read her new book, Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science.

I’ll tell you what. This current pandemic has led to my getting educated around HIV and AIDS a lot! (For example, similar controversies regarding testing.) But I’m no virologist. I do not have the expertise to judge the truth of Mikovits claims, nor her detractors, on retroviruses.

The main message is contained within this simplified cartoon. Using mouse cells to produce vaccines (or human cells) can cause the introduction of retroviruses into us.

Again, that is beyond my pay grade. But plenty of other stuff she talks about does fit into what I have researched.

She asks a really good, yet simple question about vaccines. “If vaccines are as safe as sugar water, why do the pharmaceutical companies need to have complete financial immunity and be protected by a battalion of lawyers from the US Department of Justice?”

(By the way all SARS-CoV2 vaccines and drugs are already exempt from liability in the US.)

With my recent focus on the WHO I want to include this quote, mentioned in her book, from the Simpsonwood conference, Scientific Review of Vaccine Safety Datalink Information, June 7-8, 2000 which looked at the scientific data for a study showing possible causal link of thimerosal (mercury) in vaccines and autism.

John Clements, worked for the WHO in the Expanded Program on Immunization. Near the conclusion of the meeting he states:

”I am really concerned that we have taken off like a boat going down one arm of the mangrove swamp at high speed, when in fact there was no enough discussion really early on about which way the boat  should go at all. And I really want to risk offending everyone in the room by saying that perhaps this study should not have been done at all, because the outcome of it could have, to some extent, been predicted and we have all reached this point now where we are leg hanging, even though I hear the majority of the consultants say to the Board that they are not convinced there is a causality direct link between Thimerosal and various neurological outcomes. I know how we handle it from here is extremely problematic…And what we have here is people who have, for every best reason in the world, pursued a direction of research. But there is now the point at which the research results have to be handled, and even if this committee decides that there is no association and that information gets out, the work has been done and through freedom of information that will be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the control of this group. And I am very concerned about that as I suspect it is already too late to do anything regardless of any professional body and what they say. My mandate as I sit here in this group is to make sure at the end of the day that 100,000,000 are immunized with DTP, Hepatitis B and if possible Hib, this year, next year and for many years to come, and that will have to be with Thimerosal containing vaccines unless a miracle occurs and an alternative is found quickly and is tried and found to be safe. So I leave you with the challenge that I am very concerned that this has gotten this far, and that having got this far, how you present in a concerted voice the information to the ACIP in a way they will be able to handle it and not get exposed to the traps which are out there in public relations. My message would be that any other study, and I like the study that has just been described here very much. I think it makes a lot of sense, but it has to be thought through. What are the potential outcomes and how will you handle it? How will it be presented to a public and a media that is hungry for selecting the information they want to use for whatever means they have in store for them?” (emphasis added)

Mikovits replies to this with, “Are you reading this summation the same way I am? That maybe this is a study that shouldn’t have been done? In my entire life I’ve never known a scientist to argue against obtaining knowledge. And it isn’t the harm to children he’s worried about, but how this information can be managed. Honestly, it seems they’ve done a pretty good job of managing information in the nearly two decades since that meeting was held.”

By the way, she states she is not against vaccines…just bad science or lack of it around vaccines.

The best of tobacco science 2.0 is to only conduct science where the outcome is already known. And if science comes out contrary to what industry wants it has to be handled appropriately. That is what Mikovits is saying happened to her.

It sounds unbelievable at first, but that’s only if you do not understand the game being played and the stakes involved.

“Science” is directed to predetermined outcomes by those that have the power to direct it. You could think of it as one of the ultimate forms of marketing, to achieve scientific consensus.

What Mikovits has to say about Varmus

“There are three people I place in what Frank Ruscetti [her research partner] calls the “Unholy Trinity of Science,” and they are Harold Varmus, Francis Collins, and Tony Fauci. Whenever you ask yourself why the truth hasn’t been told in a critical area of public health, you’ll probably find the fingerprints of these men at the crime scene.”

Everyone knows who Fauci is now.

Francis Collins is someone else who has been director of NIH, well known for his involvement in the Human Genome Project. I do not know much about him beyond this so that’s a topic for another time.

As mentioned, after all my research into Varmus, this was the only other person I’d heard talking about him. It’s a brief mention midway through the book. But then bigger details come later which line up with my own research into this man.

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“Let’s talk about downward mobility and see if this makes any sense.

Depending on experience (and probably your political backing), the director of the National Institutes of Health will make somewhere up to $230,000 a year.

“In 2016, it was reported that the president and CEO of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Dr. Craig Thompson, made $2,944,000, or about ten times what one would make as director of the National Institutes of Health. [We saw above Varmus actually made about $2.7 million]

“Now, the latest information on a salary for the director of the National Cancer Institute (a division of the National Institutes of Health) is up to a little more than a $151,000.

“Okay, so let’s get this chain of events straight.

“You’re Harold Varmus and you’ve got both a Nobel Prize and a Lasker Award.

“You serve as director of the National Institutes of Health for eight years.

“After serving as director of the National Institutes of Health, you pick up a sweet gig at a New York Cancer clinic where you make a couple million dollars per year.

“Then suddenly you decided you want to head up a division of the National Institutes of Health (National Cancer Institute), where at most you’ll make a little over a hundred and fifty thousand a year, about five percent of what you’d made the previous year.

“I just don’t buy it.

“Harold Varmus was brought in to get Frank Ruscetti under control.

“When Harold Varmus took over at the National Cancer Institute, he directed a team led by John Coffin to discredit Frank Ruscetti.”

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I had looked at the timeline of where Varmus worked before, seeing the scientific revolving door in action. But here one of those moves specifically was addressed in why.

Why did Varmus rotate from a top private industry position back into a lower government position then he’d previously had?

A director of scientists can work to control the scientific narrative. Tobacco science 2.0 at its best.

Motive and Follow the Money

If you’re looking into crimes, there are two things you want to look at. Motive is why a person or group of people would engage in such things. In many cases this happens to be money, in which case you want to see where the money comes from and goes.

The narrative against Mikovits is that she did flawed science but wanted to win awards for it.

Lots of science is wrong. Plenty of papers get retracted. But do those scientists tends to get fired and arrested for it?

Something that lends credence to her story is how she was arrested but never charged for anything. If they had all the proof, why not? “And in the years since my false arrest and imprisonment, why have I been unable to have a single day in court for a judge and jury to hear my claims, even though I have never given up the effort to receive process?”

They claim she’s trying to make money from her book (personally, as a seller of books I know that unless you’re at the very top, like Stephen King, this is NOT a good way to make lots of money).

Meanwhile the money involved in the medical complex is VAST. Financial conflicts of interest are rampant, so wouldn’t we expect at least some top scientists to be included in that, especially when, like we see with Varmus, he wrote the rules to make it so at the NIH?!?

Ultimately, it is up to you to make your own decision. But I figured it was worth writing this article to give my view.

(Just because I believe Mikovits’ main story doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with her on every point and opinion.)

Varmus’ Connection to…who else…the Gates Foundation

In case you missed it, where is Varmus today? He’s on the Global Health Advisory Board at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

As far back as 2003 we see a $200 million grant on “Grand Challenges” in global health from the Gates Foundation. Varmus chaired the scientific board. Also on that board were Anthony Fauci and Julie Gerberding.

But of course all roads leads back to Gates. He’s self-appointed world director of health. And on that note, a funny look at this…