On Being a Vaccine Heretic Excommunicated From the Church of Big Pharma
By Gary G. Kohls, MD, guest to Natural Blaze
Definitions below have been obtained from a variety of open-source online sites – and then edited to fit
Big Pharma is the pejorative term given to the vast number of multinational (global) pharmaceutical corporations. It takes no Hippocratic Oath, does not insist that its sycophants give fully informed consent when their products are prescribed and it ignores the Precautionary Principle, thus affirming the sense that it has no concern for the health of its users or the health of the planet.
Big Pharma’s corporations make up the most profitable industry on the planet. According to US surveys, its executives are also among the most despised multimillionaires in America – just behind Big Tobacco and Big Oil. It is the industry that has the largest number of salespersons (who try to induce/bribe physicians to prescribe their increasingly unaffordable products that usually have no long-term safety studies performed prior to launch, especially when taken in combination with other of its drugs).
Big Pharma spends the most money of any other industry advertising their products on TV and print media outlets (trying to make prospective patients demand getting the prescribed from their physicians). This industry hires the most highly paid lobbyists in Washington, DC (many of whom actually help write legislation that favors itself at the expense of patients – who are at the mercy of the medical establishment that prescribes its products).
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Critics of Big Pharma often use the Big Pharma nickname when addressing this partial list of its well-documented abuses:
1) Trying to suck every penny out of the pockets of the sick, injured, dying, and hypochondriacal.
2) Inventing new diseases so that frightened people will buy more drugs.
3) Selling new and old drugs, many of which are often falsely and cunningly marketed to be life-long medications that often cause dependency (addiction) so that those now-permanent customers won’t be able to stop taking them without going through serious withdrawal (similar to what happens to those taking addictive, molecularly-similar street drugs like uppers, downers, tranquilizers, hallucinogens, alcohol, nicotine, etc.
4) Demonizing and trying to drive out of business alternative treatments that would be cheaper, safer and possibly even curative.
5) Cleverly “educating” the public about a new disease just before the FDA is about to announce the approval of a new drug for the disorder.
SEE: The Vaccine-Religion-Police State Created By U.S. Bureaucratic Decrees
6) Managing to convince people that their curable, temporary malady is permanent or more serious than it is, making them more willing to see a doctor and pay for high priced drugs.
An organized religion is a belief system that has a large number of followers and a set of rules that must be followed.
A cult is a religious or semi-religious sect whose members are controlled almost entirely by a single individual or by an organization. This kind of cult is usually manipulative and demanding of total commitment, unconditional obedience and loyalty from its followers.
Organized crime is illegal behavior that is planned and carried out by groups of people (sociopaths) in a very systematic fashion.
Faith is the strong or unshakeable belief in something, especially without proof or evidence (or, in the case of sociopathic corporations; believing in provably false, fraudulent corporate pseudoscience).
Heresy is any belief or theory that is at variance with the established beliefs or customs of an organized group, especially a religious organization. A heretic is an ex-believer who has come to doubt or disobey the dogmas and beliefs of the group. The heretic is often punished for his or her disobedience (especially if the heretic refuses to be silent in the hope of reforming or exposing the criminality of the organization – sort of like being “dis-fellowshipped” by the congregation of a Christian church).
A sociopath is an entity (including many inanimate, conscienceless corporations [google “The Corporation – the movie”) whose behavior is antisocial, often criminally greedy, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility, empathy or social conscience. Sociopaths never sincerely apologize nor are they capable of exhibiting remorse for wrongs that they have committed.
Common sociopathic traits include:
No conscience; deceitful; aggressive; often guilty of repeatedly lying
Conning others for profit; aggressively avoiding punishment; lack of remorse for evils done to others; indifference to the suffering of its victims
Rationalizes (makes excuses for) having hurt, mistreated or stolen from others
Willingness to exploit, seduce or manipulate others
Cunning, clever, and always looking for ways to make money or achieve fame or notoriety
Willing to cause or contribute to the financial ruin of others
Untrustworthy; cannot be trusted to adhere to conventional standards of morality
Big Pharma and its assortment of pro-drug/pro-vaccine acolytes in Big Medicine has a view of the world that requires as much of the public as possible to bow down to its fundamentalist, authoritarian “scientific priesthood of believers” whose knowledge, opinions, mercenary scientists, manufactured sets of data and orders from on high are never to be questioned.
Many such corporate powers appear to generously spread some of their wealth around (until it longer makes financial sense to do so), but it only does that to the acolytes and true believers that are loyal to it, particularly to its advertising branch, Big Media, a connected-to-the-Big Pharma-hip set of corporations, which knows its place, particularly because its executives and editors understand where most of its advertising revenues come from.
The executives of Big Pharma’s corporations are in possession of immense wealth and power – mostly undeserved, because the wealth usually comes from cunning or lucky investments – and lots of stock options. And, just like most non-democratic, authoritarian systems, the executives of Big Business insist that those below them in the pecking order pledge unquestioned obedience to the organization’s dogmatic teachings.
The acolytes of Big Pharma’s priests, the sales reps, are very well-paid underlings. But they have been indoctrinated in the faith and know that they will lose their status and incomes if they ever waver from the dogmatic teachings. As Upton Sinclair so wisely proclaimed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Check out this item from a 2008 ABC News expose of the pharmaceutical industry, written by journalist Marcus Baram (http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=4438095&page=1):
Baram wrote: “To sell their drugs, pharmaceutical companies hire former cheerleaders and ex-models to wine and dine doctors, exaggerate the drug’s benefits and underplay their side-effects, a former sales rep told a Congressional committee this morning.
“According to Ahari (ex-drug rep Shahram Ahari, who spent two years selling Prozac and Zyprexa for Eli Lilly), the benefits could be lucrative for sales reps, who tended to earn more than (Lilly’s) researchers. On top of a base salary for starting reps of $50,000, ‘there were four quarterly bonuses, an annual bonus, stock options, a car, 401K, great health benefits, and a $60,000 expense account.’
“Included in his prepared remarks, Ahari cites a quote from a senior marketing executive at Parke-Davis: ‘I want you out there every day selling Neurontin. Neurontin is more profitable than Accupril, so we need to focus on Neurontin. Pain management, now that’s money…. I don’t want to see a single patient coming off Neurontin before they’ve been up to at least 4,800 milligrams a day. I don’t want to hear that safety crap, either.’
Ahari was quoted elsewhere as saying that “his job involved ‘rewarding physicians with gifts and attention for their allegiance to your product and company despite what may be ethically appropriate …and that drug companies like hiring former cheerleaders and ex-models, as well as former athletes and members of the military, many of whom have no background in science.
Ahari was also quoted as saying that ‘On my first day of sales class, among 21 trainees and two instructors, I was the only one with any level of college-level science education…and that instructors teach sales tactics, including how to exceed spending limits for important clients, being generous with free samples to leverage sales, using friendships and personal gifts to foster a ‘quid pro quo’ relationship, and how to exploit sexual tension…The nature of this business is gift-giving…You drink the Kool-Aid. We were taught to minimize the side effects and how to use conversational ploys to minimize it or to change the topic.’”
See: The Vagaries Of Tobacco, Food, And Vaccine Ads And Their Impacts Upon Health?
Ahari was a heretic from the religious cult of Big Pharma when he finally couldn’t endure his two years job as drug rep for Eli Lilly anymore. He should be congratulated for followed his conscience in exposing the dark side of what he saw of the drug industry. He deserves our thanks, although I suspect that he paid dearly for his act of whistle-blowing.
It could be said that the first (now known to be false) article of faith in the Big Vaccine sector of the pharmaceutical cult (contrary to all the documented, unbiased historical evidence) is this one: “Vaccinations are the reason for the decreased deaths and disabilities related to common childhood infectious diseases.” For the evidence establishing that as a falsehood, click HERE.
Another article of faith declares the documented falsehood that “all vaccines are safe and effective”. In order to believe that one, one must ignore the fact that every vaccine has warnings about the dangers and lack of efficacy in the product information handouts. Big Pharma itself acknowledges that their vaccines are neurotoxic and have not been subjected to the gold standard – double blind studies – prior to FDA approval.
Faith in Big Pharma’s high priests (usually not even scientists, but rather masters of business administration) is the key to the belief (preferably blind) in this system. Those high priests are housed in the sacred corporate board rooms at Merck, Glaxo, Pfizer, Sanofi Pasteur, etc, and they forbid any government regulatory inspections of their manufacturing plants (privileged proprietary secrets!) unless there is a court-ordered subpoena related to a vaccine–injury or vaccine-death lawsuit (which, since 1986, is no longer allowed in the US).
The problem is that rich corporations have manipulated the science and thus have been able to distort research. Their vast financial influence gives them political clout and control of many scientific institutions. The result is that these for-profit institutions, research programs and practitioners now willingly serve the interests of powerful corporations rather than their vulnerable patients. Rather than helping mankind corporate greed has usurped what was once an honorable profession.
The reason why so many rational people doubt science is because they can have seen how it has been corrupted and manipulated by the 1%. They have noticed that the 1% has become increasingly unaccountable and that their activities and products are not properly regulated by watchdog governmental agencies. In fact, the regulatory agencies are being shut down or underfunded – as we speak!
Many scientific studies show that prescription drugs (especially psychiatric drugs) are a serious safety issue for both individuals and the environment.
By not being willing to inform patients about what is actually in the cocktail of vaccines or drugs that infants, children, pregnant women and increasingly chronically ill children are being injected with, Big Medicine is failing its ethical responsibility.
Labelling vaccines (and also food!) and fully informing patients about any potentially toxic ingredients would convince some patients to reject the “unavoidably unsafe” vaccines that are being forced into their bodies – and perhaps convince a small number of physicians, physician assistants and nurses to wonder about the over-vaccination agendas that they have blindly supported and had developed so much faith in. By attempting to side-line open discussion about Big Pharma’s potentially toxic products in this way, healthy public debate was stymied.
The concept of “sound science” is being manipulated by for-profit corporations and it increasingly obvious that there is a lot of deception going on, and it has become far too easy for America’s vaccine industry to promote vaccines since it coerced the US Congress and Ronald Reagan to grant legal immunity from prosecution for the deaths and disabilities of vaccine victims.
Big Pharma carries out inadequate and only short-term safety and efficacy studies and then conceals the data produced by the research done by its mercenary scientists under the rubric of “commercial confidentiality”, and this cover-up if facilitated by its partners in Big Media. Malcolm X was right when he famously proclaimed: “The real power of the media is the power to ignore.” Big Media censors out or distorts scientific facts – especially the inconvenient kind – and then helps its partners in crime to smear and intimidate anybody who challenges its interests. Heretics are not welcome. Ask Andy Wakefield, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and the hundreds of other American whistle-blowers for justice that have been made radioactive.
The reason why informed consent is not practiced in the US and no vaccine labelling or testing has taken place is not due to “sound science” but rather due to the undeserved political power and influence of Big Pharma – and because sound scientific principles have not been applied.
The pharmaceutical sector knows that it cannot win a fair scientific debate on these issues, so it resorts to co-opting “key opinion leaders” that are willing to propagate various falsehoods and deceptions.
Co-opting Scientific Research
People’s faith in science (especially corporate science) is being destroyed at many levels. Big corporations have achieved intimate access to policy makers, legislators, bureaucrats and governments and are increasingly funding research and setting research agendas that only have profits as their motivation. Money talks.
It is not science itself that people have doubts about but the kind of science that is owned by powerful profit-making corporations who have infiltrated governmental regulatory bodies that have adopted a ‘don’t ask, don’t look, don’t find, don’t tell” approach – or are simply being pressured by Big Pharma to fast-track drugs and vaccines onto the market before proper research is done. Time is money, and there is so much more money to be made if short-cuts are taken doing the research.
Science is up for sale to the highest bidder, but one of the unwritten contract terms assumes the suppressing of adverse scientific findings and the intent to harm the careers of scientists who discover and then altruistically publish adverse findings about a drug or vaccine. The best recent example was the smearing of the reputation of Andrew Wakefield, MD and his team of researchers (who should have, by the way, gotten the Nobel Prize for making the connection between GlaxoSmithKline’s flawed live virus MMR vaccine and a cluster of severe infectious regional enteritis cases in severely regressed autistic children – and then publishing the study for in a 1998 Lancet article). Big Pharma has the financial clout to control the funding that shapes what research is conducted at Merck, Glaxo, Pfizer, Sanofi-Pasteur, AstraZeneca, the NIH, NIMH, CDC, and the many others who have massive financial and professional conflicts of interest.
Are Synthetic Brain-altering Drugs and Vaccines Actually Good for You?
Marcia Angell, author of The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. Wrote this after she was fired for complaining in an editorial about Big Pharma’s increasing control over medical research: “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 of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
And the retired editor-in-chief of the Lancet, Richard Horton, echoed what Dr Angell said:
“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.”
Big Pharma funds many for-profit research programs and greatly influences the careers of normally altruistic scientists. Through their funding activities, Big Pharma shapes the research agenda. Those agendas decide which issues are to be examined and which are not, and they even determine how research is to be carried out. By diverting funds to more malleable scientists they can suppress certain findings and even decide what gets published. Corporations may also fund or hold sway over journals and peer reviewers who commonly have their own careers to consider.
Big Pharma: Masquerading as Trustworthy Truth-tellers
Big Pharma’s thought-leaders routinely attack basic unbiased research scientists and scholars who have witnessed the immense dangers of America’s current corporate-induced, over-diagnosis, over-treatment, over-vaccination agendas because it is so very good for business.
The rhetoric makes the actual unbiased truth about the dangers of America’s over-vaccination schedules into taboo subjects. It also shuts down useful discussions about the root causes of our increasingly sick, over-treated and over-vaccinated society which, despite the trillions of dollars that the American health system has wasted on costly and usually unproductive screening tests, costly drugs, costly vaccines, and costly surgeries. Despite the trillions spent nobody can claim that they have increased either the quality or the quantity of American life.
Perhaps the well-financed thought-leaders from Merck, Glaxo, Pfizer et al (and the highly-paid mercenary scientist acolytes that are diligently working deep in the bowels of every Big Pharma corporate plant that you can name) should try to convince us why we should not doubt the perverted science that bombards us consumers multiple time per day – perhaps most cunningly in the incessant prime-time drug commercials and in the ubiquitous canned medical infomercials that pass as news items on the nightly news.
And while they are at it, given the reality of Big Pharma’s generations-long history of deceptions, cover-ups and criminality, they might want to contemplate why we should believe anything they say.
It is well past time for the hidden heretics and whistle-blowers to courageously stand up and address the congregation.
Read more from Dr. Gary Kohls
Dr. Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty year family practice career. Prior to his retirement, he was a member of Mind Freedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It was titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.
Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.
Many of Dr Kohls’ columns are archived HERE and HERE.
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