How Medicine Became “Too Big to Fail”
Last month, I highlighted the unfortunate state of medical research where “science” that supports corporate interests is held to much lower standards than science which opposes those interests, thereby ensuring “the science” becomes what benefits industry rather than the American people
The central vehicles for this are large randomized controlled trials (RCTs), something which in theory seems like an excellent idea as they can eliminate unwanted bias and lead us to the truth.
Unfortunately, large RCTs suffer from four major issues:
- They cost tens of millions of dollars to conduct.
-
The small benefits they are able to detect are often small enough they offer no meaningful benefit to patients.
-
Much cheaper trials that could independently be conducted (e.g., by doctors in practice) have been shown to effectively detect the clinically meaningful benefits patients care about (typically as well as RCTs), but as regulatory standards do not permit this “low quality” research, drug approval (or becoming part of “the science”) is effectively a pay-to-play situation which can only be achieved by companies that can afford to invest in a profitable pharmaceutical.
-
As I showed previously, there are a lot of ways to rig clinical trials that are routinely used throughout clinical research (to the point it has developed into a standard playbook you can easily spot once you know how to look for it):
All of this hence leads to a few recurring issues:
- Because of how much money is on the line for drug approvals (and how much has been invested in drug development and their studies), there is an inevitable temptation to doctor them so that they arrive at results which benefit their sponsors.
-
Because of how much money is on the line, a large amount is invested to ensure studies are supported by the entire establishment (e.g., regulators, medical journals, guideline committees and the mass media). As such, despite the ways studies are doctored being readily apparent (and routinely complained about), everyone we trust to safeguard us against them instead turns a blind eye to it and allows this to continue.
-
As a result, large numbers of pharmaceuticals enter the market (and standard medical practice) which provide minimal benefit to patients and frequently have significant toxicity. Yet, each time this happens, rather than upholding their responsibility to remove or restrict those drugs, medical authorities fight tooth and nail to defend them and gaslight everyone who is injected by them. I’ve hence tried to show how this continually has happened with key drugs (e.g., the SSRI antidepressants) to provide a way for everyone to come to terms with the fact the COVID vaccines were pushed on the public (and continue to be) despite:
•The trials providing negligible evidence the vaccines had any meaningful value.
•The “95 percent” effective vaccines failing to meet any of their promised benefits (eventually pivoting to the easily doctored outcome of reducing “severe COVID”).
•The vaccines injuring (or killing) more people than any pharmaceutical product in history, countless datasets showing their extreme danger and half the public recognizing this (to the point the impossible happened and got MAHA elected into power).
•Numerous whistleblowers coming forward to testify the COVID vaccine trials were rigged.
Note: a much more technical audit of all the proven issues in the COVID-19 clinical trials (which builds upon the playbook I laid out for how trials are routinely rigged) can be read here.
However, while all of this is extremely unfortunate (to the point Senator Johnson has effectively dedicated his term and unique investigative position within the Senate to exposing how the CDC and FDA again and again willfully covered up their data showing the dangers of the COVID vaccines1,2,3,4,5,6), it only touches upon half of the picture.
Too Big to Fail
The phrase “too big to fail” originally described banks so large and so entangled with the rest of the economy that governments felt they had no choice but to bail them out rather than let them collapse and take everything down with them.
Medicine now sits in a similar position: so much wealth, so many careers, and so large a share of the market are tied to the existing system that almost no one with the power to change it can afford to, and so, rather than fix the corruption, everyone involved has every incentive to keep it running.
For example, because of how much money is on the line with the trials, it is inevitable not only that pharmaceutical companies will pay off everyone they need to ensure investors can be guaranteed a reliable return on their investment, but also that those institutions will reshape themselves around those facilitating those payoffs and that their employees will fight to defend the existing status quo (rather than challenge it) because they too are dependent upon it.
In parallel, the FDA (the agency responsible for catching trial manipulation), is itself financially dependent on the industry it regulates. Industry user fees now account for nearly 51% of the FDA’s total budget (up from roughly 20 percent in 2007), with pharmaceutical user fees specifically funding 77% of the prescription drug review program.
Likewise, its personnel situation is equally compromised: a 2024 BMJ investigation found that nine of the FDA’s last ten commissioners went on to work for or sit on the board of a pharmaceutical company, and a follow-up investigation found every commissioner since 2000 had gone to industry.
More broadly, a 2023 study of 766 HHS political appointees found that 38 percent of FDA appointees exited to private industry (with the CDC and CMS being even higher, at 53-54 percent).
Among the rank and file, a 2016 BMJ study found that 57 percent of FDA hematology-oncology drug reviewers who left the agency went to work for or consult with the pharmaceutical industry, and a 2018 Science investigation found that 11 of 16 FDA medical examiners who left after working on drug approvals took jobs with the very companies they had recently regulated.
Likewise, in addition to the FDA commissioners who oversaw the COVID vaccine’s development joining Pfizer1 or Moderna,1 two recent noticeable examples were Peter Marks (who was directly responsible for stonewalling all the evidence of COVID vaccine injuries) leaving the FDA to become a high-paid pharmaceutical executive and the 2021-2024 director of CDER (oversees the review and approval of most new drugs in the U.S) leaving the FDA to become Pfizer’s chief medical officer.
In contrast, anyone who challenges the status quo is normally targeted either by their superiors, or the White House (e.g., over a century ago, the very first FDA commissioner, despite immensely popular with the public, Congress and the courts was successively neutralized and pushed out by industry lobbyists who got to the Secretary of Agriculture).
As such, honest scientists who have tried to push back from within have been marginalized, surveilled and driven out:
•A FDA safety researcher was ostracized by management after his 2004 Senate testimony exposing the Vioxx catastrophe.
•FDA device reviewer was fired and covertly surveilled (the agency planted spyware capturing his emails, including messages to Congress, lawyers and the White House) after he warned that certain breast cancer screening devices exposed patients to needless radiation.
•A group of nine FDA scientists wrote to President Obama that the agency had “ordered, intimidated, and coerced” them to alter their scientific conclusions
•FDA drug reviewer Ronald Kavanagh reported a systematic culture of intimidation and suppression of safety findings.
•A 2022 GAO investigation found employees across the CDC, FDA and NIH had observed political interference alter or suppress their scientific conclusions, yet never reported it (fearing retaliation, unsure how to, or assuming leadership already knew).
In short, everyone in the FDA has two relatively simple options in front of them:
•Go along with the corrupt system (and lie to themselves enough about what is happening to think they are doing the right thing) and in many cases then eventually move to a higher paying job in the private sector.
•Do their jobs and not only face immediate retaliation, but also a loss of future career prospects both in the public and private sectors.
Likewise, if we look at the NIH (which controls most of the public research money in the country), two of the key lines of pressure which have been established to ensure perpetual employee compliance are as follows:
•All “public” scientists (and the institutions that hire them) are dependent upon research grants. As such, there is a strong incentive to only study easily fundable subjects which conform to existing dogmas and avoid controversial ones which can permanently blacklist a scientist (and hence eliminate their economic livelihood).
Note: Fauci was notorious for weaponizing this system, both by permanently cutting off scientists who challenged him from the grant system (thereby making no one else want to step out of line) and by using the approval of grants as leverage for studies he wanted (e.g., Fauci pressured scientists who thought it was a lab leak to publish a paper stating the opposite, after which a key grant they needed was approved1,2).
•After a 1980 law and 1986 law permitted government employees and agencies to patent and profit off discoveries they made that were brought to market, Fauci transformed the NIH into a drug development pipeline.
FOIA litigation, in turn revealed that over $2.685 billion in royalty payments flowed from pharmaceutical companies to NIH institutes and scientists between 2010 and 2023 (with over $1 billion of that marked for individual inventors), data Fauci and the NIH had fought to keep hidden for decades until a federal court compelled its release (discussed further here).
As this money goes to both employees and the NIH, it strongly incentivizes approval (and protection) of technology NIH grants developed (e.g., Remdesivir and Moderna’s vaccine—with Moderna paying the NIH hundreds of millions in royalties).
In in short we effectively have a “too big to fail” scenario where no one can afford to rock the boat by challenging the premises it rests upon (but can get rich through insider trading). As such, while small attempts are made to reform things, as the years go by, things become more and more corrupt and the American people ultimately pay the price by becoming sicker and sicker from what the “health” agencies give to us.
Note: I often ask people directly connected to the government who is actually making the decisions that affect all of us, and one of the most informed people I know simply shared: “You can always point a finger at a specific agency or person, but the reality is that as the government gets bigger and bigger, more and more fiefdoms will emerge within it, and those groups will fight for their own interests at the expense of everyone else.”
See more here midwesterndoctor.com