In Plain Sight

In Plain Sight
by Julie Ponesse at Brownstone Institute

[The following is an excerpt from Julie Ponesse’s book, Our Last Innocent Moment.]

One of the things we have learned over the last three years is just how much regulatory capture factored into the Covid response, how economics turned vaccine technology into an industrial profit machine. One crucial piece of evidence for this came from the Pfizer report, released last year by the FDA as part of a US court order, containing what Naomi Wolf calls “evidence of the greatest crime against humanity in the history of our species.” 

The report shows massive incongruity between how the vaccines were marketed to the public and what Pfizer knew about them prior to their release to market. It shows:

• Pfizer knew their gene-based injections had negative efficacy as early as November 2020 (with the third most common side effect of the vaccine being Covid, itself)
• shortly after the vaccines came to market, Pfizer hired 2,400 full-time employees to process the adverse event reports (a stunning fact given the culture of silence that prevented so many adverse events even from being reported to, or processed by, physicians)
• that the vaccines cause myocarditis within a week after injection
• the shot’s lipid nanoparticles do not remain at the injection site but are quickly biodistributed throughout the body to the brain, liver, spleen, and ovaries where they may remain permanently
• an asymmetry between the adverse events that were disclosed to the public (chills, fatigue, swelling at injection site) and those contained in the documents (haemorrhages, blood clots, neurological disorders, Bell’s palsy, Guillain-Barré syndrome)
• there were 61 deaths from stroke, half of which took place within 48 hours of injection

These are the things Pfizer knew. These are the things Pfizer did not reveal to the public. These are the things that made us the turkeys and Pfizer, the butcher. 

It has been said that there is no historical parallel to the Covid vaccines: a vigorously marketed experimental product on a global scale, which garnered almost perfect support from policymakers. The scale of money involved is almost beyond comprehension. Pfizer’s 2023 “Annual Review” states: “2022 was a year in which we set all-time highs in several financial categories.” That year, Pfizer’s revenue was a record-setting $100.3 billion, 38% coming from the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

While it’s no secret that pharmaceutical companies spend large portions of their budgets on marketing, it’s hard to think of pharmaceutical products being marketed like cars or lipstick. But they are. Perhaps even more so. In 2022, Pfizer spent $2.8 billion on marketing, a mere 2% of the revenue they earned from the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. But just how pharmaceutical products are marketed is a complex business.

One thing we find in the Pfizer report is a long list of donations to organizations that encouraged vaccine use, and/or directly addressed vaccine hesitancy. Pfizer couldn’t produce ads endorsing mandates — that would have been too obvious — but they could fund various lobbying groups, healthcare colleges, media, and even medical journals that promote vaccine use, address vaccine hesitancy, and support mandates. 

Among Pfizer’s charitable donations, the report lists: $200,000 to the American Academy of Paediatrics, $100,000 to the American College of Emergency Physicians for Vaccine confidence PSAs, and $337,550 to the American Lung Association’s Pneumonia Awareness Campaign. (If you want to promote the uptake of a vaccine for a respiratory virus, it makes strategic sense to advertise pneumonia as a severe side effect of Covid.)

It is also noteworthy that Pfizer is a regular contributor to universities, most of which mandated their product. When the newspapers started to report my story in the fall of 2021, the Toronto Star contacted Arthur Caplan, Director of Medical Ethics at NYU Medical Centre, for a comment. His response was “I’ve been working on vaccines for 9 years and I wouldn’t pass her in my class.” What I have since discovered is that Pfizer donated $20,000 to NYU for a program to counter misinformation about Covid-19 vaccine. Caplan’s salary is, therefore, paid by a university that received money directly from Pfizer to promote the uptake of its Covid vaccine.

We have a similar situation in Canada. In 2020, Pfizer Canada made a $600K donation to the McGill “Interdisciplinary Initiative in Infection and Immunity” (M14). M14 promotes Covid vaccine uptake and Pfizer funds M14. And “19toZero,” an “independent, non-profit organization” aimed at increasing vaccine confidence, states on their website (albeit in very fine print): “…This portal has been funded by a pharmaceutical grant provided by Moderna Canada.”

Back to the issue of perspective. What we knew, and didn’t know, during the Covid crisis about the severity of the virus, and the safety and efficacy of the technology developed to address it, was heavily influenced by the companies that stood to make the greatest financial gains from how we responded. Everything from how many companies enforced vaccine mandates to whether mothers would allow their children to play with unvaccinated friends impacted the bottom lines of companies like Pfizer and Moderna, and they seem to have acted accordingly and strategically.

But the fact that the pharmaceutical industry has been shaping health care policy through outside advocacy organizations is not a new phenomenon. Let me offer two examples of this phenomenon that existed in plain sight prior to 2020. 

Example 1: The Opioid epidemic: Conservatively, opioids caused the deaths of half a million Americans in the last 20 years. Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, aggressively promoted its use for decades despite clear evidence of its potential for addiction and overdose. Court documents revealed that Purdue spent over $200 million on advertising and sponsored 20,000 pain “education programs” in an effort to sway physicians to prescribe more opioids. Five years after its release, OxyContin had generated an annual revenue of more than $1 billion. 

Example 2: Tamiflu: During the 2005 avian flu outbreak, Evan Morris, a former lobbyist for Genentech (the company that sells Tamiflu for Roche), reportedly paid third-party groups to generate fears about the virus and the need for the government to stockpile Tamiflu. Dozens of US Senators wrote to President George W. Bush about their concerns, and the president authorized an emergency stockpile that bought $1 billion of the antiviral medication.

These occurrences of collusion between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry might seem surprising but the information was hardly lurking in the shadows. In 2002, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine Arnold Seymour Relman wrote: 

“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry.”

And four years before that, Dr. Matthias Rath wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

“Throughout the 20th century, the pharmaceutical industry has been constructed by investors, the goal being to replace (and outlaw) effective but non-patentable natural remedies with mostly ineffective but patentable and highly profitable pharmaceutical drugs. The very nature of the pharmaceutical industry is to make money from ongoing diseases.”

In more quantitative terms, the British Medical Journal in 2017 showed that 50% of editors of the world’s most influential medical journals were receiving money from the pharmaceutical industry.

What all of this should have taught us going into 2020 is that, just because something is on the market, doesn’t mean it is safe. Just because a product is vigorously marketed or highly profitable, doesn’t mean it is safe. And just because a product is endorsed by a university or medical college, or even by the Nobel committee, doesn’t mean it is safe. On the contrary, the evidence shows that collusion between drug companies and major institutions was common long before 2020. The fact that both the severity of Covid as a virus, and the safety and effectiveness of the Covid shots were vastly overestimated should never have surprised us. They were the white swans of 21st century medicine. And they shouldn’t have shattered our innocence because it is information we should have had a clear hold on in the first place. 

In Plain Sight
by Julie Ponesse at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society