In December 2002, Sharyl Attkisson, an Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter for CBS News, had a disturbing interview with smallpox expert Jonathan Tucker.
In a post-9/11 world, with fears of terrorists using a long-extinct disease like smallpox as a biological weapon, the US was preparing to reinstate the smallpox vaccination program.
But for Tucker, the idea itself was “striking,” Attkisson writes in her new book, “Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Cheats, Obfuscates and Dominates” (Harper, published Tuesday).
Why? Because it involved “weighing the risk of a possible terrorist use of smallpox. . . against known vaccine risks,” Tucker told the author.
That was news to Attkisson, who was looking forward to her daughter qualifying for the smallpox vaccine. “A ‘toxic’ vaccine?” She writes. “Didn’t the smallpox vaccine save the world once and for all? But, as he soon discovered, it had serious side effects, including a surprisingly high chance of death.
Attkisson witnessed firsthand how deadly the vaccine could be in April 2003, when a colleague at NBC, reporter David Bloom, died of deep vein thrombosis while on duty in Iraq.
He had also recently been vaccinated for smallpox, and as Attkisson learned, thrombosis was a possible side effect of the vaccination.
Medical authorities declined to investigate, and according to Attkisson, even Bloom’s own family seemed uninterested in a vaccine explanation.
Ten years later, Bloom’s widow appeared on the “Today” show to discuss deep vein thrombosis, accompanied by a doctor who, Attkisson notes, was also a paid consultant to a smallpox vaccine manufacturer.
It started Attkisson down a rabbit hole, and she began to investigate the hidden agendas that push many drug companies, not just smallpox vaccines, but medications for every possible disease. “We mostly exist in an artificial reality brought to you by the makers of the latest pill or injection,” she writes. “It is a reality where unseen forces work every day to fuel fear around certain diseases and exaggerate the supposed benefits of treatments and cures.”
The public is aware that mega-corporations like Enron can and have been motivated by profit over ethics and are not above committing crimes to protect their financial gains.
But “they seem unable to understand that pharmaceutical companies may be capable of the same,” Attkisson writes.
But as Dr. Marcia Angell, a former editor-in-chief for the New England Journal of Medicine, told the author, as well as the public AND doctors are repeatedly tricked “into believing that drugs are much better and much safer than they really are.”
Yes, even doctors have been kept in the dark, and according to Attikisson, many are unaware that the medical journals they rely on “are filled with unreliable studies hopelessly tainted by drug industry interests,” she writes.
Most scientific studies are funded and even dictated by drug companies. “Studies that can truly solve our most pressing health problems don’t get done unless they ultimately lead to a profitable pill or injection,” Attkisson writes.
Success is not measured by healthy patients, but “by how many people are taking expensive drugs or getting vaccinated,” Attkisson writes. Global demand for prescription drugs is projected to reach $1.9 trillion by 2027. “These are not necessarily drugs designed to make us well, but we will need them for life,” Attikisson writes.
How do drug companies fare, especially in reputable medical journals?
Some hire “ghost writers” to author studies promoting a new drug, exaggerating the benefits and downplaying the risks, and then paying a doctor or medical expert to sign their name.
A clear example of this practice occurred in the late 1990s, when the pharmaceutical manufacturer Wyeth-Ayerst tried to create demand for its diet drug Redux by hiring an intermediary company, Excerpta Medica, to write favorable articles about Redux for several magazines. medical.
“Excerpta wrote the articles, hired doctors to review and sign off on them, and then submitted them for publication—without mentioning that Wyeth was funding the whole thing,” Attkisson writes. “Basically, the articles were paid advertisements for Redux disguised as scholarly work.”
Redux was eventually pulled from the market due to reported heart and lung problems caused by the drug.
If the medication is effective at all, it is often useless. In 2021, the FDA approved a new Alzheimer’s treatment called Aduhelm, despite several large clinical studies that found it would be “futile” to continue testing it.
Why did Biogen, the drug maker, continue to push it despite Aduhelm’s disappointing results?
Because they can charge about $56,000 a year per patient. “Calculating ten million hypothetical Alzheimer’s patients, it adds up to a mind-boggling half a trillion dollars each year, with a large portion of the cost assumed to be borne by taxpayers through Medicare,” Attkisson writes.
Aside from the costs, it would also lead to “a lot of false hope for millions of patients and their families,” says Dr. Michael Carome, who heads the Health Research Group at Public Citizen Oversight.
Biogen eventually discontinued the drug in 2024, not because of ethical concerns, but because of objections from Medicare over the exorbitant price.
When drug companies can’t get their approvals in medical journals, they take their message to the consumer.
By 2020, about 75% of all US television advertising spending, $4.58 billion, came from the pharmaceutical industry.
And many of those ads were less than honest. In 2007, an ad for the birth control pill Yaz, featuring Twisted Sister’s song “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” featured balloons labeled with words associated with PMS such as “moodiness” and “irritability.”
“They were figuratively beating PMS with Yaz,” writes Attkisson. “The problem is that Yaz was not approved to treat PMS and should not have been promoted for that.” After multiple FDA fines for downplaying the risks and overstating the benefits, the ads were pulled. . . but the damage was done. Patients “were already fooled by him,” says Carome.
Lawsuits and fines do little to stop fraud.
Novartis paid more than $591 million in 2020 over allegations of kickbacks to doctors.
Teva Pharmaceuticals paid $200 million in 2023 in price-fixing fees.
Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Takeda Pharmaceutical have paid several billion each over allegations of deceptive marketing.
But that hasn’t stopped drug companies from continuing to prioritize profits over science.
Our best hope, writes Attkisson, is to question the dominant narrative. “When highly publicized ‘fact checks’ and public health officials seem to all be saying the same thing, it’s often a sign that the invisible hand of powerful interests is at work,” she writes.
And remember that just questioning the science of new vaccines and drugs is not necessarily anti-science. “When I made international news about the deadly rollovers of Ford Explorers equipped with Firestone tires, no one suggested that I was ‘anti-car’ or ‘anti-tire,'” writes Attkisson. “That would be absurd.”
Despite resistance to corporations pushing drugs as COVID vaccines, bigger concerns may be on the horizon.
Attkisson points to Ozempic, the latest medical fad, a diabetes drug that is sold and marketed as a weight loss drug.
“Ignore the side effects, including thyroid tumors, pancreatitis, vision changes, low blood sugar, gallbladder problems, kidney failure, and cancer,” she writes. “Perhaps she will also withdraw from the market one day.
“But in the meantime, there’s money to be made.”
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