Regulatory Capture in the Age of COVID

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Our healthcare system is broken, a fact nobody would have disputed in pre-COVID times. Regulatory capture is a reality, and the pharmaceutical industry is fraught with examples. Yet we trusted private-public partnerships to find an optimal solution to a global pandemic, assuming a crisis would bring out the best in historically corrupt institutions.

Here is a brief list of less-than-savory behavior demonstrated by our titans of healthcare:

• Pfizer and J&J plead guilty to “misbranding with the intent to defraud or mislead” and paying “kickbacks to health care providers to induce them to prescribe [their] drugs”, resulting in fines of $2.3 billion in 2009 and $2.2 billionin 2013, respectively.
• Pfizer settled another lawsuit for “manipulating studies” and “suppressing negative findings” just a few years later.
• Moderna has never developed an approved drug yet one of their board members was placed in charge of Operation Warp Speed. This certainly is unrelated to the fact that they received the most federal vaccine R&D funding and have received over $6 billion from our government since the start of the pandemic.
• Gilead Sciences paid $97 million in fines because it “illegally used a non-profit foundation as a conduit to pay the Medicare co-pays for its own drug”.
• In 2005, AstraZeneca’s drug Crestor was shown to be linked to a life-threatening muscle disease while the company withheld evidence of this and two dozen other effects from the public.
• In 2012, GlaxoSmithKline paid $3 billion in fines as it “failed to include certain safety data” relating to their drug, since labeled to be connected to heart failure and attacks.

Thankfully our public health guardians are in place to protect us from the greed and deceit of the private sector, right? Wrong. Another brief list:

• FDA worked behind the scenes with company Biogen to alter previously conducted trials of their $56,000 per year Alzheimer’s treatment, and “by removing the subset of people for whom the drug didn’t work, they found a slight statistical effect in favor of the drug.” Even after doing this, an advisory committee voted 10-0 against approving the drug. The FDA approved the drug anyways, causing three committee members to resign.
• In that case, the third-party advisors did the right thing. This is not always the case… A study by Science Magazine tracking 107 FDA advisors for four years, found that 62% received money from related drug makers with 25% receiving over $100k and 6% receiving over $1 million. It only takes a few corrupt advisors to fix a panel and feign medical consensus.
• The WHO has come to be dominated by China over the last 17 years by bribing poor nations and altering the organization’s voting structure to ensure their candidates obtain high positions (most notably director-general).
• WHO parroted false claims made by the CCP in Jan 2020 that COVID-19 had “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” (still on Twitter!), despite receiving contrary evidence from Taiwanese health monitors in December 2019 and during which time Chinese hospitals were overrun, requiring mass disinfections across villages (see this interesting thread on why the following photo may be CCP propaganda):

A worker in a protective suit uses a large fogger to disinfect outdoor areas in a village in Qingdao, Shandong province, as the deadly new coronavirus continues to spread in China. Reuters

• If you need more proof that the WHO is in China’s pocket, just watch this clip.
• In 2017, it was revealed that the CDC Director for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention had been secretly communicating with Coca-Cola, providing guidance on how “to influence world health authorities on sugar and beverage policy matters”.
• As for Fauci and the NIH, I can’t do any better than Dr. Chris Martenson in his video analyzing Fauci’s declassified emails. One thing is clear, the Wuhan research was gain-of-function.

Why does this matter?