Meryl Nass, MD | April 8, 2022
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They keep telling us to “trust the science.” But who paid for it?
By Rebecca Strong – February 16, 2022
After graduating from Columbia University with a chemical engineering degree, my grandfather went on to work for Pfizer for almost two decades, culminating his career as the company’s Global Director of New Products. I was rather proud of this fact growing up — it felt as if this father figure, who raised me for several years during my childhood, had somehow played a role in saving lives. But in recent years, my perspective on Pfizer — and other companies in its class — has shifted. Blame it on the insidious big pharma corruption laid bare by whistleblowers in recent years. Blame it on the endless string of big pharma lawsuits revealing fraud, deception, and cover-ups. Blame it on the fact that I witnessed some of their most profitable drugs ruin the lives of those I love most. All I know is, that pride I once felt has been overshadowed by a sticky skepticism I just can’t seem to shake.
In 1973, my grandpa and his colleagues celebrated as Pfizer crossed a milestone: the one-billion-dollar sales mark. These days, Pfizer rakes in $81 billion a year, making it the 28th most valuable company in the world. Johnson & Johnson ranks 15th, with $93.77 billion. To put things into perspective, that makes said companies wealthier than most countries in the world. And thanks to those astronomical profit margins, the Pharmaceuticals and Health Products industry is able to spend more on lobbying than any other industry in America.
While big pharma lobbying can take several different forms, these companies tend to target their contributions to senior legislators in Congress — you know, the ones they need to keep in their corner, because they have the power to draft healthcare laws. Pfizer has outspent its peers in six of the last eight election cycles, coughing up almost $9.7 million. During the 2016 election, pharmaceutical companies gave more than $7 million to 97 senators at an average of $75,000 per member. They also contributed $6.3 million to president Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. The question is: what did big pharma get in return?
ALEC’s Off-the-Record Sway
To truly grasp big pharma’s power, you need to understand how The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) works. ALEC, which was founded in 1973 by conservative activists working on Ronald Reagan’s campaign, is a super secretive pay-to-play operation where corporate lobbyists — including in the pharma sector — hold confidential meetings about “model” bills. A large portionof these bills is eventually approved and become law.
A rundown of ALEC’s greatest hits will tell you everything you need to know about the council’s motives and priorities. In 1995, ALEC promoted a bill that restricts consumers’ rights to sue for damages resulting from taking a particular medication. They also endorsed the Statute of Limitation Reduction Act, which put a time limit on when someone could sue after a medication-induced injury or death. Over the years, ALEC has promoted many other pharma-friendly bills that would: weaken FDA oversight of new drugs and therapies, limit FDA authority over drug advertising, and oppose regulations on financial incentives for doctors to prescribe specific drugs. But what makes these ALEC collaborations feel particularly problematic is that there’s little transparency — all of this happens behind closed doors. Congressional leaders and other committee members involved in ALEC aren’t required to publish any records of their meetings and other communications with pharma lobbyists, and the roster of ALEC members is completely confidential. All we know is that in 2020, more than two-thirds of Congress — 72 senators and 302 House of Representatives members — cashed a campaign check from a pharma company.
Big Pharma Funding Research
The public typically relies on an endorsement from government agencies to help them decide whether or not a new drug, vaccine, or medical device is safe and effective. And those agencies, like the FDA, count on clinical research. As already established, big pharma is notorious for getting its hooks into influential government officials. Here’s another sobering truth: The majority of scientific research is paid for by — wait for it — the pharmaceutical companies.
When the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published 73 studies of new drugs over the course of a single year, they found that a staggering 82% of them had been funded by the pharmaceutical company selling the product, 68% had authors who were employees of that company, and 50% had lead researchers who accepted money from a drug company. According to 2013 research conducted at the University of Arizona College of Law, even when pharma companies aren’t directly funding the research, company stockholders, consultants, directors, and officers are almost always involved in conducting them. A 2017 report by the peer-reviewed journal The BMJ also showed that about half of medical journal editors receive payments from drug companies, with the average payment per editor hovering around $28,000. But these statistics are only accurate if researchers and editors are transparent about payments from pharma. And a 2022 investigative analysis of two of the most influential medical journals found that 81% of study authors failed to disclose millions in payments from drug companies, as they’re required to do.
Unfortunately, this trend shows no sign of slowing down. The number of clinical trials funded by the pharmaceutical industry has been climbing every year since 2006, according to a John Hopkins University report, while independent studies have been harder to find. And there are some serious consequences to these conflicts of interest. Take Avandia, for instance, a diabetes drug produced by GlaxoSmithCline (GSK). Avandia was eventually linked to a dramatically increased risk of heart attacks and heart failure. And a BMJ report revealed that almost 90% of scientists who initially wrote glowing articles about Avandia had financial ties to GSK.
But here’s the unnerving part: if the pharmaceutical industry is successfully biasing the science, then that means the physicians who rely on the science are biased in their prescribing decisions.
Where the lines get really blurry is with “ghostwriting.” Big pharma execs know citizens are way more likely to trust a report written by a board-certified doctor than one of their representatives. That’s why they pay physicians to list their names as authors — even though the MDs had little to no involvement in the research, and the report was actually written by the drug company. This practice started in the ’50s and ’60s when tobacco execs were clamoring to prove that cigarettes didn’t cause cancer (spoiler alert: they do!), so they commissioned doctors to slap their name on papers undermining the risks of smoking.
It’s still a pretty common tactic today: more than one in 10 articles published in the NEJM was co-written by a ghostwriter. While a very small percentage of medical journals have clear policies against ghostwriting, it’s still technically legal —despite the fact that the consequences can be deadly.
Case in point: in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Merck paid for 73 ghostwritten articles to play up the benefits of its arthritis drug Vioxx. It was later revealed that Merck failed to report all of the heart attacks experienced by trial participants. In fact, a study published in the NEJM revealed that an estimated 160,000 Americans experienced heart attacks or strokes from taking Vioxx. That research was conducted by Dr. David Graham, Associate Director of the FDA’s Office of Drug Safety, who understandably concluded the drug was not safe. But the FDA’s Office of New Drugs, which not only was responsible for initially approving Vioxx but also regulating it, tried to sweep his findings under the rug.
“I was pressured to change my conclusions and recommendations, and basically threatened that if I did not change them, I would not be permitted to present the paper at the conference,” he wrote in his 2004 U.S. Senate testimony on Vioxx. “One Drug Safety manager recommended that I should be barred from presenting the poster at the meeting.”
Eventually, the FDA issued a public health advisory about Vioxx and Merck withdrew this product. But it was a little late for repercussions — 38,000 of those Vioxx-takers who suffered heart attacks had already died. Graham called this a “profound regulatory failure,” adding that scientific standards the FDA apply to drug safety “guarantee that unsafe and deadly drugs will remain on the U.S. market.”
This should come as no surprise, but research has also repeatedly shown that a paper written by a pharmaceutical company is more likely to emphasize the benefits of a drug, vaccine, or device while downplaying the dangers. (If you want to understand more about this practice, a former ghostwriter outlines all the ethical reasons why she quit this job in a PLOS Medicine report.) While adverse drug effects appear in 95% of clinical research, only 46% of published reports disclose them. Of course, all of this often ends up misleading doctors into thinking a drug is safer than it actually is.
Big Pharma Influence On Doctors
Pharmaceutical companies aren’t just paying medical journal editors and authors to make their products look good, either. There’s a long, sordid history of pharmaceutical companies incentivizing doctors to prescribe their products through financial rewards. For instance, Pfizer and AstraZeneca doled out a combined $100 million to doctors in 2018, with some earning anywhere from $6 million to $29 million in a year. And research has shown this strategy works: when doctors accept these gifts and payments, they’re significantly more likely to prescribe those companies’ drugs. Novartis comes to mind — the company famously spent over $100 million paying for doctors’ extravagant meals, golf outings, and more, all while also providing a generous kickback program that made them richer every time they prescribed certain blood pressure and diabetes meds.
Side note: the Open Payments portal contains a nifty little database where you can find out if any of your own doctors received money from drug companies. Knowing that my mother was put on a laundry list of meds after a near-fatal car accident, I was curious — so I did a quick search for her providers. While her PCP only banked a modest amount from Pfizer and AstraZeneca, her previous psychiatrist — who prescribed a cocktail of contraindicated medications without treating her in person — collected quadruple-digit payments from pharmaceutical companies. And her pain care specialist, who prescribed her jaw-dropping doses of opioid pain medication for more than 20 years (far longer than the 5-day safety guideline), was raking in thousands from Purdue Pharma, AKA the opioid crisis’ kingpin.
Purdue is now infamous for its wildly aggressive OxyContin campaign in the ’90s. At the time, the company billed it as a non-addictive wonder drug for pain sufferers. Internal emails show Pursue sales representatives were instructed to “sell, sell, sell” OxyContin, and the more they were able to push, the more they were rewarded with promotions and bonuses. With the stakes so high, these reps stopped at nothing to get doctors on board — even going so far as to send boxes of doughnuts spelling out “OxyContin” to unconvinced physicians. Purdue had stumbled upon the perfect system for generating tons of profit — off of other people’s pain.
Documentation later proved that not only was Purdue aware it was highly addictive and that many people were abusing it, but that they also encouraged doctors to continue prescribing increasingly higher doses of it (and sent them on lavish luxury vacations for some motivation). In testimony to Congress, Purdue exec Paul Goldenheim played dumb about OxyContin addiction and overdose rates, but emails that were later exposed showed that he requested his colleagues remove all mentions of addiction from their correspondence about the drug. Even after it was proven in court that Purdue fraudulently marketed OxyContin while concealing its addictive nature, no one from the company spent a single day behind bars. Instead, the company got a slap on the wrist and a $600 million fine for a misdemeanor, the equivalent of a speeding ticket compared to the $9 billion they made off OxyContin up until 2006. Meanwhile, thanks to Purdue’s recklessness, more than 247,000 people died from prescription opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2009. And that’s not even factoring in all the people who died of heroin overdoses once OxyContin was no longer attainable to them. The NIH reports that 80% of people who use heroin started by misusing prescription opioids.
Former sales rep Carol Panara told me in an interview that when she looks back on her time at Purdue, it all feels like a “bad dream.” Panara started working for Purdue in 2008, one year after the company pled guilty to “misbranding” charges for OxyContin. At this point, Purdue was “regrouping and expanding,” says Panara, and to that end, had developed a clever new approach for making money off OxyContin: sales reps were now targeting general practitioners and family doctors, rather than just pain management specialists. On top of that, Purdue soon introduced three new strengths for OxyContin: 15, 30, and 60 milligrams, creating smaller increments Panara believes were aimed at making doctors feel more comfortable increasing their patients’ dosages. According to Panara, there were internal company rankings for sales reps based on the number of prescriptions for each OxyContin dosing strength in their territory.
“They were sneaky about it,” she said. “Their plan was to go in and sell these doctors on the idea of starting with 10 milligrams, which is very low, knowing full well that once they get started down that path — that’s all they need. Because eventually, they’re going to build a tolerance and need a higher dose.”
Occasionally, doctors expressed concerns about a patient becoming addicted, but Purdue had already developed a way around that. Sales reps like Panara were taught to reassure those doctors that someone in pain might experience addiction-like symptoms called “pseudoaddiction,” but that didn’t mean they were truly addicted. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever to support that this concept is legit, of course. But the most disturbing part? Reps were trained to tell doctors that “pseudoaddiction” signaled the patient’s pain wasn’t being managed well enough, and the solution was simply to prescribe a higher dose of OxyContin.
Panara finally quit Purdue in 2013. One of the breaking points was when two pharmacies in her territory were robbed at gunpoint specifically for OxyContin. In 2020, Purdue pled guilty to three criminal charges in an $8.3 billion deal, but the company is now under court protection after filing for bankruptcy. Despite all the damage that’s been done, the FDA’s policies for approving opioids remain essentially unchanged.
Purdue probably wouldn’t have been able to pull this off if it weren’t for an FDA examiner named Curtis Wright, and his assistant Douglas Kramer. While Purdue was pursuing Wright’s stamp of approval on OxyContin, Wright took an outright sketchy approach to their application, instructing the company to mail documents to his home office rather than the FDA, and enlisting Purdue employees to help him review trials about the safety of the drug. The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires that the FDA have access to at least two randomized controlled trials before deeming a drug as safe and effective, but in the case of OxyContin, it got approved with data from just one measly two-week study — in osteoarthritis patients, no less.
When both Wright and Kramer left the FDA, they went on to work for none other than (drumroll, please) Purdue, with Wright earning three times his FDA salary. By the way — this is just one example of the FDA’s notoriously incestuous relationship with big pharma, often referred to as “the revolving door”. In fact, a 2018 Science report revealed that 11 out of 16 FDA reviewers ended up at the same companies they had been regulating products for.
While doing an independent investigation, “Empire of Pain” author and New Yorker columnist Patrick Radden Keefe tried to gain access to documentation of Wright’s communications with Purdue during the OxyContin approval process.
“The FDA came back and said, ‘Oh, it’s the weirdest thing, but we don’t have anything. It’s all either been lost or destroyed,’” Keefe told Fortune in an interview. “But it’s not just the FDA. It’s Congress, it’s the Department of Justice, it’s big parts of the medical establishment … the sheer amount of money involved, I think, has meant that a lot of the checks that should be in place in society to not just achieve justice, but also to protect us as consumers, were not there because they had been co-opted.”
Big pharma may be to blame for creating the opioids that caused this public health catastrophe, but the FDA deserves just as much scrutiny — because its countless failures also played a part in enabling it. And many of those more recent fails happened under the supervision of Dr. Janet Woodcock. Woodcock was named FDA’s acting commissioner mere hours after Joe Biden was inaugurated as president. She would have been a logical choice, being an FDA vet of 35 years, but then again it’s impossible to forget that she played a starring role in the FDA’s perpetuating the opioid epidemic. She’s also known for overruling her own scientific advisors when they vote against approving a drug. Not only did Woodcock approve OxyContin for children as young as 11 years old, but she also gave the green light to several other highly controversial extended-release opioid pain drugs without sufficient evidence of safety or efficacy. One of those was Zohydro: in 2011, the FDA’s advisory committee voted 11:2 against approving it due to safety concerns about inappropriate use, but Woodcock went ahead and pushed it through, anyway. Under Woodcock’s supervision, the FDA also approved Opana, which is twice as powerful as OxyContin — only to then beg the drug maker to take it off the market 10 years later due to “abuse and manipulation.” And then there was Dsuvia, a potent painkiller 1,000 times stronger than morphine and 10 times more powerful than fentanyl. According to a head of one of the FDA’s advisory committees, the U.S. military had helped to develop this particular drug, and Woodcock said there was “pressure from the Pentagon” to push it through approvals. The FBI, members of congress, public health advocates, and patient safety experts alike called this decision into question, pointing out that with hundreds of opioids already on the market there’s no need for another — particularly one that comes with such high risks.
Most recently, Woodcock served as the therapeutics lead for Operation Warp Speed, overseeing COVID-19 vaccine development.
To be continued…
Rebecca Strong is a Boston-based freelance health and wellness writer currently contributing to Insider, Health magazine, Healthline, Eat This Not That, and more.
By Meryl Nass, MD | April 7, 2022
I don’t write enough about the adverse events from COVID vaccines. The reason is that I like to be accurate, but most of the data on vaccine side effects is hidden from us. So while I have pointed out the many databases that FDA and CDC have available and are supposed to be using to assess vaccine safety, only 1 is publicly available: VAERS. Officially, it is the joint FDA-CDC Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Steve Kirsch and Jessica Rose have done the best job analyzing the VAERS data, so I suggest you go to their substacks and read what they have to say.
Both FDA and CDC each have about ten other databases that taxpayers pay for, but most of them we never hear about. Here are the FDA databases:
Below, then-head of Immunizations at CDC, Dr. Nancy Messonier, told the public about the databases that would be used to assess COVID vaccines’ safety just before the rollout, on December 10, 2020.
Both agencies provided the public with promises of what these vaccine safety databases could provide. The databases FDA rents include more than 100 million Americans, for example. But since the rollout, the federal agencies have been almost silent on what they reveal.
However, yesterday I came across 3 very important items about COVID vaccine safety that I had not seen mentioned until now. Each one is an important, though limited, piece of the COVID vaccine safety puzzle–but together, they give you a very good idea of what we are all dealing with as we traverse this data desert, touching small bits of the elephant like the blind men, but never being able to grasp the picture in its entirety.
Item 1 was posted on the FDA website on July 12, 2021 with no fanfare. It revealed that yes, FDA was using its Medicare beneficiary database to look for potential vaccine adverse reactions, and it found four related to Pfizer’s vaccine, which is the most widely used COVID vaccine. FDA writes:
FDA has routinely been using screening methods to monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and to evaluate potential adverse events of interest (AEI) related to these vaccines. One of these methods, called near real-time surveillance, detected four potential AEIs in the Medicare healthcare claims database of persons aged 65 years and older who had received the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. The four potential AEI are pulmonary embolism, acute myocardial infarction, immune thrombocytopenia, and disseminated intravascular coagulation. The screening methods have not identified these AEI after vaccination in persons 65 years and older who received the two other authorized COVID-19 vaccines…
These events have not been identified as safety concerns or signals in the CDC Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) or the Veterans Administration (VA) Healthcare data systems screening methods. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), another government monitoring system, also has not identified any association between any COVID-19 vaccine and these AEI.
FDA continues to closely monitor the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines and will further investigate these findings by conducting more rigorous epidemiological studies. FDA will share further updates and information with the public as they become available.
If the vaccine caused blood clots and bleeding, as is suspected, these are exactly four diagnoses I would expect to see indicating vaccine injuries. The claim that FDA has not seen them in its other databases, including VAERS, is curious, because people who independently study VAERS have in fact reported higher rates of myocardial infarctions and pulmonary emboli.
Six weeks after FDA posted about these very serious warning signs, FDA issued a full, unrestricted license for Pfizer’s vaccine, the very one they were warning about. The FDA website where the above information is posted has never been updated, and FDA has not revealed what the last 8 months of “more rigorous epidemiological studies” show.
Item 2 is an academic paper published by the CDC in its own, non peer reviewed journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. It was written by CDC scientists with researchers at various sites that participate in a CDC-funded data collection on COVID.
The paper concludes that while myocarditis is known to occur after COVID vaccinations, it is more common after getting the disease COVID. This is an unusual claim, since myocarditis rates as high as 1 in 2000 males aged 18-24 have been reported after the second Covid shot, and no one has claimed that such rates apply after getting the disease.
So what did CDC do? It chose to examine this issue using a database that admittedly misattributed most vaccinations! CDC has access to everyone’s vaccination data and could easily have have used an accurate dataset, but chose not to. Instead, CDC admitted in the paper’s fine print that while 82% of Americans over age 5 have reportedly received at least one COVID vaccine, in the 15 million person dataset it used, only 28% were recorded as vaccinated. The only reasonable interpretation is that a large number of vaccinated individuals were incorrectly assigned to the unvaccinated category. It seems a case could be made that this is scientific fraud.
Item 3 came from the Pfizer documents that were released on April 1. Huge thanks to all the volunteers who have been digging through these documents to piece together the truth about the vaccines. Huge thanks also to the scientists and attorneys who had to file suit and win in court to force FDA to release them.
This information, I think, could be a gamechanger. It turns out that Pfizer had to hire 600 new full-time employees simply to process the adverse event reports that were coming in regarding vaccine injuries and deaths: 600 new hires in the first 2 1/2 months of the vaccine rollout. And Pfizer further said it planned to hire another 1800. Eighteen hundred more! Just to manage the paperwork resulting from its vaccine-caused carnage.
FDA knew. But FDA wanted it buttoned up for 75 years. CDC knew also, since the reports of deaths to VAERS for COVID vaccines exceed all death reports for the past 30 years, for all other vaccines, put together. Both agencies hid what they knew. CDC even played tricks with data to mislead us. Pfizer knew. DHHS must have known.
There is no Public Health without public honesty. Our public health agencies have become public trickery agencies. Why should anyone believe anything they say now? Why would anyone do what they recommend?
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 5, 2022
Pfizer hired about 600 additional full-time employees to process adverse event reports during the three months following the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of its COVID-19 vaccine, newly released documents reveal.
According to the documents, Pfizer said, “More are joining each month with an expected total of more than 1,800 additional resources by the end of June 2021.”
The information was contained in a 10,000-page document cache released April 1 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and made public as part of a court-ordered disclosure schedule stemming from an expedited Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The latest revelations appeared in a document, “Cumulative analysis of post-authorization adverse event reports” of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, highlighting such adverse events identified through Feb. 28, 2021.
The document was previously released in November 2021, but was partially redacted. The redactions included the number of employees Pfizer hired and/or was planning to hire.
According to the unredacted document released April 1:
“Pfizer has also taken a multiple actions [sic] to help alleviate the large increase of adverse event reports. This includes significant technology enhancements, and process and workflow solutions, as well as increasing the number of data entry and case processing colleagues.
“To date, Pfizer has onboarded approximately 600 additional full-time employees (FTEs).
“More are joining each month with an expected total of more than 1,800 additional resources by the end of June 2021.”
The unredacted version also revealed the number of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses shipped worldwide between December 2020 and February 2021:
“It is estimated that approximately 126,212,580 doses of BNT162b2 [the Pfizer EUA vaccine] were shipped worldwide from the receipt of the first temporary authorisation for emergency supply on 01 December 2020 through 28 February 2021.”
The number of shipped doses previously was redacted.
Remarking upon this newly revealed information, Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender :
“The rollout of the Pfizer vaccine has led to an unprecedented number of adverse events reported — 158,000 adverse events in the first two-plus months of the rollout means that the rate of reported AE [adverse events] was approximately 1:1000, with many of the AEs graded as serious. This is based on a denominator of 125,000,000 vaccines distributed.
“It is no wonder that an army of 1,800 individuals was needed to process all of the information.”
Hooker noted the total number (1,205,755) of COVID vaccine adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System between Dec. 14, 2020 and March 25, 2022, now eclipses the total number (930,952) of adverse events reported in the 32-year history of the database.
Dr. Madhava Setty, a board-certified anesthesiologist and senior science editor for The Defender, previously reported on the same Pfizer document, before the unredacted version was released.
“In that piece, I alluded to Pfizer’s admission that they needed more staff to process all of the adverse events being reported to them,” Setty said.
“It seems this document has now been updated. 600 FTEs [full-time employees]! … I wonder how many extra people the CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection] has hired? Given how they are operating, I would say zero.”
Pfizer downplayed adverse reactions in request for full FDA license
The April 1 document release also included “request for priority review” — the documentation Pfizer in May 2021 submitted to the FDA for full licensure of its Comirnaty COVID vaccine.
In this document, Pfizer described its vaccine as fulfilling an “unmet medical need,” claiming:
“Mass immunization with a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19 can dramatically alter the trajectory of the pandemic.
“According to policy briefing by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation published on 31 March 2021, COVID-19 remains a leading cause of death in the US with up to 100,000 additional deaths projected in the US between March and July 2021, many of which can likely be prevented with COVID-19 vaccination.”
Pfizer expressed “concerns” about lifting COVID-related measures, such as lockdowns, on the basis that the lifting of such restrictions would “counteract the impacts of this vaccination effort.”
The document states:
“Vaccination against COVID-19 began with EUA/conditional approvals in December 2020, in a phased rollout defined by national/regional guidance.
- “However, there continue to be concerning trends that may counteract the impacts of this vaccination effort, including:
- “[L]imitations in access to obtaining a vaccine due to infrastructure challenges (ie, clinic and appointment capacity and systems)
- “[I]ncreasing viral transmission fueled by relaxed compliance with mitigations as the pandemic surpasses the 1-year mark (ie, masks, physical distancing, limiting travel)
- “[I]ncreasing circulation of emerging variants of concern (which are currently driving continued spread of viral infection in Europe despite extensive mitigation mandates).”
Pfizer justified its request for full licensure of its COVID vaccine on the following basis:
“A vaccine program must be implemented expediently and rapidly expanded to have a significant impact on the pandemic course.
“Licensure of BNT162b2 is likely to enhance vaccine uptake by facilitating supply of vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech directly to pharmacies and healthcare providers/facilities.
“The greatest impact of BNT162b2 licensure may be direct supply to healthcare providers who serve vulnerable populations such as elderly patients and those who live in rural and underserved communities (ie, individuals who might be unable to navigate the challenges of securing vaccine access using the systems in place for EUA).
“Expansion of vaccine via licensure would ultimately improve the prospect of achieving population herd immunity to bring the pandemic under control.”
The same document glossed over the adverse effects for which the company previously admitted it hired a significant number of new employees to process, claiming:
“Based on Phase 1 data from the FIH Study BNT162-01, BNT162b1 and BNT162b2 [various vaccines tested during the trial period] were safe and well-tolerated in healthy adults 18 to 55 years of age, with no unanticipated safety findings.
“Phase 2/3 safety data were generally concordant with safety data in Phase 1 of the study, both overall and with regard to younger and older participants.”
This is despite hard figures regarding adverse reactions provided later in the document:
“Through 28 February 2021 (data lock point aligned with Pharmacovigilance Plan), there were a total of 42,086 case reports (25,379 medically confirmed and 16,707 non-medically confirmed) containing 158,893 events. Cases were received from 63 countries.
“Consistent with what was seen in Phase 2/3 of Study C4591001, most reported AEs were in System Organ Classes (SOCs) with reactogenicity events: general disorders and administration site conditions (51,335), nervous system disorders (25,957), musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders (17,283), and gastrointestinal disorders (14,096).
“Post-authorization data have also informed the addition of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) related to the experience of reactogenicity to the product labeling.”
Release of Pfizer vaccine documents still in progress
Many of the documents released as part of the April 1 tranche appear to include more mundane information and data related to the Pfizer COVID vaccine trials.
These documents include:
The next set of documents — an expected 80,000 pages — is scheduled to be released on or before May 1.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
By Todd Hayen PhD | OffGuardian | April 6, 2022
Stop the party, folks, it’s not over until the fat lady sings, and she is only taking a break.
I’ve written about this premature euphoria several times, warning that we really haven’t won a thing, not even one battle, until some heads roll. And there are no rolling heads to be seen. Not even a cursory fall guy having his career destroyed due to all the blame thrown his way.
I thought at first Fauci was going to get this honour with his mysterious disappearance as a precursor to his public fall from grace. But I was wrong. He is only off somewhere private to lick his wounds, assuming he even considers himself wounded, which I rather doubt.
No, we have won no battle, not even a skirmish. The enemy just backed off a bit. We woke up one morning and they were gone. The hill we were supposedly fighting for was ours.
Really? It doesn’t seem like both sides were fighting for the same hill.
So what happened? I know I am preaching to the choir here. I think most of us have a pretty good idea what happened. The Ukraine/Russia incident makes clear the conditioning that Covid has accomplished over the population of the world.
Suddenly all of the focus shifted, suddenly a new enemy was in sight, much like enemies of old—at least an enemy we could see. It was actually quite astounding how quickly all the profile photos on Facebook changed from “I Got Vaccinated!” to the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine.
As we stand on our deserted Covid hill, waving our own flag, and wanting the enemy to at least acknowledge how clever we were to see through their lies and subterfuge we wonder where everyone has gone. “Yea!!” we shout, “we’ve won!!”
No, we haven’t, and not only have we not won, we have lost—big time. Sorry to break it to you (and like I said, I think most readers of OG know this, maybe you can share this article with all those who don’t even know we were in a fight).
It is beyond the scope of this article to list all of the things they have won, and all of the things we have lost, but I will take a stab at the ones that stand out to me. First of all I think it is important to point out the things many of us think we have won—like the rescinding of mandated mask wearing as the first example.
Most states, provinces, and even whole countries have removed mask wearing in public as a “rule, law, or regulation” or whatever you want to call it. In Canada this is true as well. However, you still must wear a mask on public transit, in medical facilities, and quite a few other places. Why? That’s a “ha ha” question. There never has been a reason why, and there isn’t now. And even as this restriction has been “removed” many people are still wearing masks—everywhere.
I am not sure how it is in other parts of the world, but here in Canada there is quite a large percentage of people still wearing masks, even those walking outdoors, or riding alone in their cars. This is the first example of “what they got”—blind obedience to the cause, even when the cause has officially been announced as being no cause at all.
The fear was created; the high morality of “following the authority for the good of the people” has been established. A superstitious effect follows the fear—wear a mask the same way one wears a talisman to ward off evil spirits (although that is probably more effective). A blind obedient habit follows the bowing down to authority. Soon people won’t even know why they first started wearing them, it is just a thing you do, like shaking hands when you meet someone (which we no longer do).
Of course the normies will say “why not? Why is wearing a mask so difficult to do?” Need I explain why? When it is used as a form of compliance to authority, when wearing one obliterates one of the prime ways humans communicate and socialize, when it is actually medically dangerous to wear one, and when there is absolutely no reason to—then we should get rid of them as soon as we can and should never have worn them to begin with.
The powers that ought not to be have won a very effective form of blind compliance, ready to implement at full force again with a snap of a finger. Not only are people still wearing them, it will take no effort at all to get the majority of the world’s population to don them en masse again.
They have also won, and we have lost, a sense of unsubstantiated fear of our fellow humans.
Social distancing has forced us into an unconscious avoidance of other people. I have not seen much handshaking going on, or even hugging. People now avoid each other, and I doubt if most of these avoidances are even conscious. This has established a deep sense of fear and loss of trust, which again makes us all easily manipulated. It will only take small insertions in the culture through media to basically push us anywhere they want us pushed.
The breakdown of social psychology is clearly part of the agenda, and I believe they can indeed count that as a “win”—a big one. The implications of this sort of thing are unconscionable, and range from a general disconnect from human interaction to massive unrest, impatience, and lack of tolerance—more violence, road rage, disputes, and tribal dissonances, not to mention higher rates of depression, anxiety, drug use, and suicide.
If we think of Orwell’s 1984 as any sort of playbook for this agenda, we can see the foundations laid for many of the more atrocious aspects of Big Brother’s world. The idea of continuous war raging somewhere in the world is certainly in place along with the confusion of which side to be on at any given moment. The propaganda is relentless and leaves us all in a sticky syrupy mess. Hate is an all-powerful stimulator for extreme nationalism and compliance to a singular narrative.
During Covid we were trained to accept nothing but one clearly defined truth, different perspectives were not allowed, as anything with a different view was immediately labeled as “misinformation,” “fake,” and “dangerous.”
There are no “second opinions” anymore, either a source of information is in line with the mainstream, or it is simply degraded as insanity, moronic, or “anti science.” There is no grey—only black and white.
During Covid we learned, through a very conscious manipulation, that there was only one way to see truth, and that polarized thinking can apply to anything the narrative wishes to apply it to. First, “all about Covid and vaccines” now “all about Ukraine and Russia.” Two very different events in nearly every way, yet each with one mainstream view that we all must be in alignment with.
The ease of applying censorship to nearly any situation is a huge win for them. Any contrary opinion has been all but obliterated—if information is labeled “mis” by the mainstream it is blocked. Contrary ideas and opinions on social media are deleted, those who are brave enough to speak out lose their jobs and their reputations are ruined.
Once we start marching to this drum—that anything that challenges the main stream narrative is false, fake, misinformation, dangerous or “anti science”—we are quite literally walking into a totalitarian state. After Covid this sort of censorship will just be that much easier to implement, and it will be that much easier to just go along with it, or worse, advocate it.
In more subtle areas we see the foundation firmly set for other agenda items such as Central Bank Digital Currency and digital ID’s, obviously the way having been paved by the infamous “vaccine passport.” The ground they have acquired through the Covid manipulation is clear, and substantial.
Anything they wish for in the future has been normalized by the events of the past two years, any radical demand made in the future has had its path greased by these events such as travel restrictions, bank closures (as punishment for supporting any sort of protest against the main stream narrative), forced medical intervention with no substantial medical purpose or reason, restrictions on gathering, redefining words in order to fit the agenda, on and on and on.
Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you are willing to go, the “powers that ought not to be” could possibly have accomplished the initial stages of ridding the world of millions of “useless eaters” through the wholesale injection of god knows what into billions of bodies.
We may be seeing only the tiny tip of the iceberg with the thousands of deaths and injuries undoubtedly caused by the “vaccines”—probably effects the makers of the injections see as a minor annoyance when the major event could very well be the deaths of millions spread out over generations (or much less!)
If true, that’s a BIG win for them!—and an equally big loss for us. There is no turning this one around, no stopping it, as it has already been done and all we can do is sit and await the results.
So we have really won nothing, and we have lost an awful lot. In many regards what they have won is really just the beginnings of the foundation of what is yet to come. No one builds a nice foundation to a house without the intention of building the rest of the house that sits upon it. Even though a concrete slab isn’t usually much to look it, it has all the preparations built into it that allow a very complex structure to sit on it. The detail of that structure is yet to be built.
I am afraid it is going to be a very big and complex house and with its eventual erection the beautiful view we used to enjoy will be blocked—a view of freedom and creativity.
These two ingredients have always been necessary to ensure a future that all humans have the right to pursue—a future of life, liberty and happiness, all things surely worth fighting for. Stay on that hill; the battle has only just begun.
Todd Hayen is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies.
By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | April 4, 2022
Another month has been added to the standstill in global temperature, according to accurate satellite measurements compiled by the University of Alabama and NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer (see above). The pause is now 90 months long. In fact a small downwards movement is now discernible, since the trend measured over the last 90 months is minus-0.01°C, which equates to minus-0.14°C a century. It must be noted, however, that such small movements, although widely used by climate alarmists in the upwards direction, are within the margin of error.
As I have noted in recent articles, the Spencer data has been kicked off Google AdSense for “unreliable and harmful claims”. The move demonetised Dr. Spencer’s monthly satellite update page by removing all Google-supplied advertising. Google says it will ban all sites that are sceptical of “well established scientific consensus”. Agenda-driven commentators almost invariably ignore satellite data, which has consistently shown less warming than surface measurements.
Satellite temperature measurements of the atmosphere are generally considered more accurate, because they avoid the urban heat distortions common to surface measurements. It is suggested that such measurements have been pushed higher over time as stationary measuring stations are enclosed by growing urban development. For instance, temperature measurements are common at busy airports. Before the planes arrived at Chicago O’Hare, one of the world’s busiest airports, it was rural orchard fields (as indicated by its IATA code, ORD).
Interestingly, however, the global temperature standstill is starting to show up in the surface record, as measured (above) by the Met Office HadCrut database. Here we see almost no movement over the last 96 months. The 0.04°C century rise is most definitely within the margin of error! But it would seem that the Met Office is failing to discuss these significant trends. This might be considered surprising, since in the U.K. we know that local temperatures have been plateauing for some time. The average temperature in the 2010s at 9.17°C was colder than the 2000s at 9.31°C.
Writing about the latest standstill in Watts Up With That?, the journalist and former political adviser Christopher Monckton described the pause as “one of the best kept secrets” in journalism. Monckton was a former lead writer on the Evening Standard and these days rarely minces his words. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic dare not lose face over the politics of climate change, he suggested. “They cannot bring themselves to admit that they have been wrong, that they have been fooled, and that they have needlessly and expensively ended the free market in energy supply,” he added.
Two months ago, the seven-year satellite record was still showing a tiny warming trend with the Net Zero 1.5°C target achievable in 400 years’ time. Alas, for Thermogeddonites everywhere, even that small consolation is no longer available.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
Thoughts about the significance and meaning of the Shanghai lockdown
eugyppius | April 5, 2022
Sooner or later, Zero Covid makes you crazy, and right now, it is making the Chinese crazy.
That is my theory about what is going on in Shanghai, which has descended into a mass panic over a relative handful of Omicron infections, imposing a harsh and destructive lockdown to stop a disease that is probably no more dangerous than influenza.
Let us rehearse some recent history:
Lockdowns and mass testing and contact tracing and masking are all Asian (primarily Chinese) policies, adopted en masse and with little forethought by western countries in Spring 2020. Our public health mandarins set aside their own planning and opted for Chinese mass containment instead, because they noticed the virus was not very deadly in Asia, and they assumed this was because whatever it was the Asians were doing was the thing to do. Mass containment is a worldwide delusional rain dance: Everyone hops about trying to coax water out of the heavens, copying whatever dance was current in the first place it started to rain.
Crucially, virology has a very primitive and inadequate understanding of how viruses actually circulate. Virological doctrine is that they ought to behave the same everywhere, but they don’t. Early wild-type SARS-2 strains spread far more slowly and were far less deadly in the Asia Pacific, and this had nothing to do with lockdowns or “SARS experience.” Japan started out by ignoring Corona more or less entirely, while South Korea set up mass testing and contact tracing operations straightaway, and both countries saw minimal mortality.
There are many theories about why SARS-2 hit Asia so softly. Probably, the Asian-Pacific populations enjoyed some kind of prior immune protection, which would explain why the later, immune-resistant variant strains of SARS-2 have coincided with higher mortality in the East.
But the main point is this: Countries which did well early in the pandemic got another kind of virus, the Zero-Covid kind. They adopted an eradicationist orientation; they believed their containment measures had succeeded, and the officials who had championed these measures ascended to new heights of prestige. This is what happened in China and throughout Asia, and it is what happened in Australia and New Zealand. To a lesser extent, it is even what happened in Germany. The next act of this play, is the return of SARS-2, the impending revelation that there was only ever the illusion of control, and a spiral of harsh suppression measures that everyone believes in because they seemed to work last time, even though they’re not working now.
We’ve spent many months speculating about Chinese reasons for locking down Hubei and then promoting lockdowns to the rest of us. While malicious ends shouldn’t be excluded, their behaviour in Shanghai points increasingly to official incompetence and stupidity. The Chinese government has almost surely spent two years sowing horror of Corona among its people, to defend its harsh actions in Wuhan and to collect accolades for its alleged Zero Covid success. Now they are going the route of other Zero Covid regimes. They will double down on worthless policies, until their failure becomes so overwhelmingly evident, that they give up.
Further considerations, developed mostly in the context of a recent conversation with a friend, who is sceptical of my thoughts here:
Is this not better understood as some sort of exercise in new authoritarian methods? I don’t think so, because the Chinese won’t be able to control Omicron, and whatever methods they deploy in their attempts to do so will just be discredited.
Did the Chinese then promote lockdowns to the West, simply out of good will and charity, because they sincerely believe in these policies? No. We may never fully understand their motives, but an important aspect, was probably the fear that the West would ignore Corona, nothing much would happen, and the Hubei lockdown would be discredited. These were policies that had been developed in the belief that China was facing a wider-scale version of the SARS virus from 2003. In early March 2020, it was clear that these fears were exaggerated. Evidently, this does not mean that the institutional (and perhaps also popular) momentum behind Zero-Covid policies vanished. In China, in Australia, everywhere, the lockdowners are empowered, as long as Corona appears to be under control. When Corona endangers this illusion, the lockdowners will fight powerfully to vindicate their policies, but sooner or later they’ll lose.
Doesn’t this destroy your prior hypothesis, that the Chinese escaped the mass containment dilemma entirely, by changing test criteria and perhaps taking other actions behind the scenes to ‘construct’ Corona out of existence? Maybe, but perhaps these aren’t mutually exclusive possibilities. As long as a given virus isn’t having any population-wide impact, it is possible to ignore it. Omicron spreads too fast to be ignored.
Do Chinese officials, with unique knowledge of SARS-2 origins, know something we don’t about the virus? Most of the SARS-2 genome has natural analogues, with a couple of odd tweaks, like the furin cleavage site. There’s not a lot of room for hidden functions in there, and mainland Chinese policies and science have never demonstrated special foreknowledge or awareness of SARS-2 features. If anything, the opposite is true: They overestimated the risk at first, and they seem to persist in this error now.
So you believe the West is stupid, and China is stupid, you just believe everyone is stupid but you I guess? I think institutions in mass society develop behaviours and even ideologies that are beyond the understanding of the individuals who participate in them. Our critical views of containment and mass vaccination are surely shared by many people throughout these institutions, who however find it in their best interests to promote quite different ideas, not reluctantly but even with enthusiasm.
Why is it always boring banal explanations from you? The extent to which Corona resists elaborate conspiratorial theories is a good sign that it is either an emergent phenomenon or epiphenomenal. The most compelling theories are those which cast Corona and containment as the unintended consequences of something else.
Swiss Policy Research | April 3, 2022
A Brazilian investigator may have identified the mechanism driving mRNA vaccine myocarditis. And the US CDC finally acknowledges the strongly increased risk in young males.
What is causing vaccine myocarditis?
What is causing post-vaccination myocarditis, and why does it affect primarily young adults, especially young males and athletes? It has been speculated that in young males, muscle blood flow may be higher, which may cause higher biodistribution of vaccine mRNA or spike protein. The mRNA or spike protein may then be absorbed by the heart muscle and cause inflammation.
But Brazilian investigator Flavio Cadegiani, who previously looked into the role of androgens (male sexual hormones) in covid, recently proposed a new and highly intriguing theory: Based on autopsy findings, Cadegiani noted that post-vaccination myocarditis appears to be very similar not to typical myocarditis (e.g. viral myocarditis), but rather to adrenergic myocarditis or catecholamine-mediated stress cardiomyopathy (i.e. heart muscle injury caused by catecholamines).
Catecholamines are a group of hormones that include, most notably, dopamine, adrenaline and noradrenaline. These hormones drive the “fight-or-flight response”, and their concentration is highest in young adults, especially in young males and athletes. Cadegiani notes that the adrenal glands (located on top of the kidneys) are amongst the tissues with highest production of spike protein from mRNA covid vaccines, which can cause local inflammation and may lead to a “catecholamine storm”, which is known to have a toxic stress effect on heart muscle cells.
Prior to covid mRNA vaccinations, this type of heart injury was seen almost exclusively in patients with a rare tumor of the adrenal gland (called pheo-chromo-cytoma). Cadegiani suspects that mRNA vaccination is more likely to affect adrenal glands than a mild coronavirus infection, especially in young and healthy adults.
Cadegiani (February 2022): Catecholamines are the key trigger of mRNA SARS-CoV-2 and mRNA COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis and sudden deaths. (ResearchGate)
New CDC study on myocarditis
In a newly published study covering data from 40 US health care systems and about 15 million people, the US CDC purports to show that “the risk for cardiac complications was significantly higher after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination for both males and females in all age groups”, which “supports the continued use of recommended mRNA COVID-19 vaccines among all eligible persons aged ≥5 years.”
But the actual data provided by the CDC tells a very different story.
First, the US CDC confirms that among males aged 12 to 17, the rate of diagnosed myocarditis or pericarditis after the second vaccine dose is 1 in 4,500 to 1 in 2,700, and in males aged 18 to 29, the rate is 1 in 15,000 to 1 in 6,600.
These values are significantly higher than anything previously acknowledged by the CDC, but they still only include cases diagnosed by a doctor or in a hospital. If undiagnosed and unrecognized (subclinical) cases of myocarditis and pericarditis are taken into acccount, the rate will likely reach about 1 in 1,000 in young males. Even an undiagnosed case of myocarditis can turn out to be fatal, as the many recent cases of athletes with sudden cardiac arrest have shown.
However, the CDC argues that the risk of diagnosed myocarditis and pericarditis is still higher after SARS-CoV-2 infection, viz. 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 1,500 in males aged 12 to 17, and 1 in 1,800 to 1 in 1,000 in males aged 18 to 29. But previous studies, both in the US and in Europe, have already shown that the incidence of myocarditis remained normal or even below average during major covid waves in 2020 and early 2021 and only increased during vaccination campaigns in 2021 (see chart below).
So what did the CDC get wrong? It’s a classic mistake (or trick): while the CDC speaks of “SARS-CoV-2 infections”, they in fact only captured positive tests and only within the health care system (i.e. at a doctor’s office or in a hospital). SARS-CoV-2 infections were not captured “if testing occurred in homes, schools, community sites, or pharmacies”, or, one may add, if no testing at all occurred. Thus, the CDC captured only a fraction of actual infections (perhaps 10% or even less), and they likely captured only the most severe infections (i.e. young adults who visited a doctor or a hospital).
(In a somewhat related development, the CDC recently reduced US child covid deaths by 25%, as these deaths, while testing positive, had nothing at all to do with covid.)
But the CDC made another basic mistake: not only is the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis after vaccination in young males higher than after infection (as already shown by several other studies), but vaccination doesn’t prevent infection, either, and there is still no evidence that vaccination reduces the risk of post-infection myocarditis in young adults. In other words, the risk after vaccination simply increases the already existing risk after infection.
To make matters even worse, the CDC study considered only the first two doses of covid vaccination, whereas some US colleges and universities have already mandated a third dose for their students, adding even more risk. In fact, a booster dose may well increase the total risk of myocarditis and pericarditis to more than 1 in 1,000 in otherwise perfectly healthy young males. And as a recently published cardiac MRI study has shown, heart abnormalities in adolescents with mRNA vaccine myopericarditis may persist for at least several months.
In conclusion, the forced covid vaccination of young and healthy adults and children may constitute the largest medical scandal, or medical crime, in modern history. Based on the currently available evidence, covid vaccination is only appropriate in people at significant risk of severe acute covid.
CDC (April 2022): Cardiac Complications After SARS-CoV-2 Infection and mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination (CDC/MMWR)
Figure: Myocarditis and Covid Vaccination in the Western US
eugyppius | April 4, 2022
On Tuesday, 29 March, virologist and foremost German Corona astrolger Christian Drosten went on indefinite hiatus from Coronavirus Update, his noxious state media podcast. The show was introduced on 26 February 2020, with Drosten as its centre. He starred in about 80 of its 113 episodes; from September 2020, he began alternating appearances with virologist Sandra Ciesek. Lest the oracular pronouncements of these luminaries be lost to history, Norddeutsche Rundfunk lovingly transcribed their utterances into a downloadable 1446-page document. There is every reason to fear that, one day, this monstrosity will be issued in print for the Scientific Faithful as a boxed set.
I confess that I’ve only listened to about 20 episodes of this bizarre exercise in propaganda. I can’t imagine how anybody could handle more than that. Probably never before in history, has there been a radio show so heavily promoted by the national media, that is simultaneously so devoid of content, and also so destructive to the cult of expertise, as something that can ever exist outside of politics or culture. For in all the ponderous hours that I listened, I never heard Drosten say anything that fashion-forward Twitter accounts, media pundits´and Tomas Pueyo hadn’t already said a little bit earlier.
Drosten was initially agnostic about the wisdom of closures, but after Merkel bought into containment, he preached the necessity of non-pharmaceutical interventions at every opportunity. In the earliest days, he didn’t think children and schools were all that important to infection dynamics; when school closures became policy, he developed a deep obsession with the virus spreading of children. No sooner had Germans elected a new, more containment-hesitant government in September 2021, than Drosten discovered a fresh interest in naturally acquired immunity, and suggested that infections in the vaccinated would be essential to building more robust immune protection.
Plainly, Drosten’s celebrity has been little more than a publicity exercise, arranged to provide scientific endorsement of whatever pandemic policies the German government alights upon. This what, in the end, all that following the science amounts to: Governments get to do whatever they want, so long as they first find some well-credentialed scientists to say that whatever they’re doing is what the science demands. This turns out to be a lot easier than securing popular or parliamentary support for policies.
Now, for follow-the-science government, not just any scientist will do. You need an especially authoritative Media Scientist, who meets public and journalistic preconceptions of how scientific authority is enacted and embodied. Thus, the German press has spared no effort in establishing Drosten in the minds of the regime faithful as one of the world’s most eminent scientists. A deceptively worded paragraph in Zeit, for example, gave rise to the pervasive myth that Drosten discovered the SARS virus in 2003:
Drosten completed his training at the Hamburg Tropical Institute, where he managed a scoop in spring 2003: In Frankfurt, a virologist friend gave him cell material from a doctor in Singapore who had contracted SARS. Drosten raced back to Hamburg in his old Opel Omega with the cell culture in a salt block and worked for 14 days, on hardly more than three hours of sleep per night, to identify the previously unknown coronavirus – thus making it possible to fight the deadly lung disease.
Drosten did not discover SARS. He thought the pathogen was a metapneumovirus; by the time he worked out he was wrong, American scientists at the CDC had published an electron micrograph of the coronavirus responsible. He was left to create primers for PCR tests to identify the new virus. Drosten mysteriously reprised his role as test developer in January 2020, when he developed the first PCR test for the novel Coronavirus responsible for viral pneumonia cases in Wuhan – precisely as China needed infection statistics that Westerners would find credible. This shady work laid the foundations for mass testing in the West, and remains his most significant contribution to science around the pandemic. He has also loudly resisted suggestions of a lab leak, going so far as to co-author an openly misleading paper about the likelihood that the furin cleavage site in SARS-2 originated naturally.
Like many people granted an artificial renown, Drosten has proved unworthy of it, and over the past two years he has given us many odd moments.
Very early, for example, he confessed to a strange fear of draft beer; to avoid viruses, he said, you should stick to bottles. More recently, he revealed a bizarre lack of metaphorical aptitude, claiming that anyone who believes he can train his immune system with infection, must necessarily also believe that he can train his digestive tract by eating steak.
In May 2020, he threw together a sloppy study arguing that children are just as infectious as adults. The purpose was to provide Merkel’s government with some “research” that would speak against reopening schools, but the paper was so bad, it drew critique from other virologists as well journalists at BILD, and couldn’t be formally published for a full year. As the controversy unfolded, Drosten avoided any open exchange with his critics and defended himself dishonestly on sympathetic media platforms.
Some months later, Drosten was invited to give the Schillerrede, a speech on the occasion of Friedrich Schiller’s birthday, where he embarrassed himself anew, claiming that Schiller would’ve been an avid mask wearer; and proposing, in an awkward allusion to Kant’s Categorical Imperative, a Pandemic Imperative, according to which everyone should live his life as if he had just tested positive for Corona and all his contacts are old and vulnerable.
While Drosten is a state media scientist who will say almost anything, on a few points he has been constant. Nothing has angered this small man more, than the Great Barrington Declaration, drafted by Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya. In the year and a half since its publication, he has resorted to various slurs, not always veiled, on the qualifications and abilities of its authors. His last tweet, posted on the day he recorded his final podcast episode, equates its publication with sabotage. Given the relative unimportance of the GBD, and its failure to end the catastrophic policies that Drosten and the other Corona astrologers have supported, his animus seems strange. I can only imagine that when you have been paid to lie, it is a humiliating experience, to find yourself confronted by more honourable colleagues, who can afford to speak the truth.
Now, Drosten will not podcast anymore. He says it is because he needs time for his research. I incline to the optimistic interpretation, that he is being deliberately retired from public view, lest he persist any longer as an eternal advocate of lockdowns and vaccination mania whenever the Corona news takes a turn for the worse. Whatever the case, it can be no accident that this happens precisely as most of the other restrictions Germans have endured for the past two years have come to an end. Masking, green passes, closures, and Drosten too – all of them were part of the same political program, the same system of social, cultural and intellectual strangulation, from which we have now been released.
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RT | September 23, 2026
The US Democratic Party has embraced a transgender agenda that amounts to “the normalization of sadism,” author A.J. Rice has said, warning that radical trans policies would return if the party is allowed to regain power.
Speaking to RT’s America First host Scotty Nell Hughes about his new book, ‘The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity’, Rice argued that activists have gained significant influence in schools, medicine, and corporate America while people who questioned the agenda have faced pressure to stay silent.
The author described the “trans mafia” as the sprawling network of people and institutions that have helped the movement gain influence. He singled out parts of academia, wealthy backers, and corporations, and stated that providers of transition-related treatment also have a financial incentive to keep young people in their care indefinitely.
Rice argued that the consequences of these policies ultimately fall on children who are being drawn toward gender-affirming medical treatments and on girls who are expected to share locker rooms or compete in sports with biological males.
He noted that while voters rejected the Democrats’ approach to gender in 2024, the party, which has been “captured by madness,” has since only doubled down and is seeking what is effectively “the normalization of sadism.” … Full report
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