The Un-Merry-Go-Round of Media, Pharma, and Government

The Un-Merry-Go-Round of Media, Pharma, and Government
by Lori Weintz at Brownstone Institute

A scientific journal on Tuesday retracted the March 2020 study that introduced the world to hydroxychloroquine early in the COVID-19 pandemic – and confirmed that the attention was undeserved from the start…The International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, which is owned by Elsevier and the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, issued a formal retraction.

USA Today, December 18, 2024

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, most people gave little thought to medical journals, pharmaceutical companies, and government regulatory agencies. Any passing thought was likely to involve the idea that medical journals were credible, helpful drugs were being developed, the taxpayer funded FDA was scrupulously testing for safety and effectiveness before approving products, and the media was doing its best to report both sides of every story.

Now we know better.

A Global Scandal

The above referenced USA Today article states that the study and its retraction are the “cornerstone of a global scandal.” That’s true, but not for the reasons the reporter indicates. In fact, the assault on Raoult is bold evidence that the forces which harmed the world’s population during the Covid-19 pandemic continue to work unabated, at the expense of our health and well-being.

In the past we would have assumed the Journal knew what it was doing, that Raoult’s study was deserving of revocation, and that USA Today was providing balanced reporting on the situation. After all, what do most people know about medical research and studies? Even those in the medical field often rely on what they read in the professional journals to help stay up to date on the latest in medicine. The public expects media to be a check on corporate and government corruption, but we’ve been betrayed.

Punishing Those Who Oppose the Official Narrative

Didier Raoult’s situation is emblematic of the rot that was revealed throughout the medical, media, and regulatory industries during the pandemic. In relation to the retraction four years later of Raoult’s hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) study, consider the following excerpt from my book, Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19, published by Brownstone Institute in April of this year:

In Marseilles, France, Dr. Didier Raoult’s team conducted a study of 1,061 patients treated for Covid with a combination of HCQ and azithromycin from March 3-April 9, 2020. The study reported, “A good clinical outcome and virological cure was obtained in 973 patients within 10 days (91.7%).”*

The study further noted, “The HCQ-AZ combination, when started immediately after diagnosis, is a safe and efficient treatment for COVID-19, with a mortality rate of 0.5%, in elderly patients. It avoids worsening and clears virus persistence and contagiosity in most cases.”

A microbiological and clinical scientist, at the time of this study Raoult was the most highly-published infectious diseases expert in Europe, and was founder and head of the IHN Mediterranee research hospital, the premier infectious disease facility in France. Raoult was familiar with earlier studies of HCQ as an infective inhibitor of coronavirus disease progression. His report was likely influential in the FDA’s initial approval of HCQ for the treatment of Covid.

HCQ was over-the-counter in France for decades before some behind-the-scenes political maneuvering led to its reclassification as a “poisonous substance” in January 2020.

When Raoult released his findings in May 2020, prescriptions for HCQ went from an average of 50 per day to several hundred, and then even thousands. The French government quickly acted to recommend it not be prescribed for Covid except in clinical trials, in part based on the falsified Surgisphere study.

Raoult continued to have success using HCQ, combined with other drugs, as a treatment for Covid-19. From March 2020 through December 2021 Raoult conducted a retrospective cohort study of 30,423 Covid-19 patients. A pre-print version of the study concluded that, “HCQ prescribed early or late protects in part from COVID-19-related death.”

It would appear that Raoult poked a hornet’s nest in conducting a routine study using routine drugs with decades’ long safety profiles. After the pre-print of the study was published in March 2023, a group of French research bodies called for Raoult to be disciplined for the “systematic prescription of medications as varied as hydroxychloroquine, zinc, ivermectin and azithromycin to patients suffering from Covid-19 without a solid pharmacological basis and lacking any proof of their effectiveness.”

Just to review: Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are on the World Health Organization’s list of essential meds and have almost no side effects or interactions with other medications. Zinc is an essential nutrient found in a variety of plant and animal foods and is available in pill form in any drug store. Azithromycin is an antibiotic widely prescribed for decades and is also a WHO essential medicine. Multiple doctors and hundreds of studies have found ample evidence that these and other off-label meds were effective in treating Covid patients. Just what are these French research bodies so worried about?

Biased Media Leads to Public Harm

The information and links in the above excerpt from Mechanisms of Harm are all from publicly available sources, which reporters should be accessing when covering these types of news stories. Instead, too often Legacy media has a cozy relationship with Big Pharma advertising dollars, and government regulatory agencies. In the case of this USA Today article, it appears the reporter took quotes and info given to him by those with an interest in discrediting Didier Raoult, without presenting the other side of the story, which means this particular USA Today article is more propaganda than news.

Hydroxychloroquine Is Safe Unless Given in Toxic Doses

The USA Today article quotes the French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics saying that Raoult’s paper “constituted a clear example of scientific misconduct…to falsely present the drug as effective against Covid-19.” The society claims, without citing any evidence, that Raoult’s work led to ‘unwarranted risks to millions of people and potentially thousands of avoidable deaths.’”

Hydroxychloroquine has been used for more than 60 years to treat malaria and other diseases, and has such a good safety profile that it is routinely given to pregnant women and children. It is an over-the-counter medicine in many countries. The alleged “serious side effects” from HCQ only occur if the patient is overdosed, a fact that was established by the World Health Organization’s consultant, H. Weniger, hired in 1979 to look at episodes of adult poisoning by chloroquine drugs.

Dr. Richard Urso, another early proponent of using HCQ to treat Covid-19, stated, “The whole political situation has driven the fear toward this drug.” He explained that the safety profile for HCQ is safer than aspirin, Motrin, and Tylenol, but noted that the large clinical trials testing HCQ against Covid-19 were set up to fail. Dr. Urso said they “used massive toxic doses and guess what they found out? When you use massive toxic doses, you get toxic results.” He explained that HCQ concentrates in the lungs, which is where Covid-19 disease develops. Dr. Urso noted that combined with zinc, HCQ is highly effective as both a prophylaxis and early treatment of Covid-19 disease.

Weintz, Lori. Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19 (p. 69). Brownstone Institute. Kindle Edition.

Dr. Urso, Dr. Raoult, and many others, including Dr. Tony Fauci, knew at the beginning of the pandemic that hydroxychloroquine was a prime candidate for treating Covid-19. A National Institutes of Health (NIH) study found in 2005 that chloroquine, a precursor to HCQ, was a “potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread” in cell culture studies. Chloroquine had also shown promise against MERS in vitro. USA Today failed to mention this relevant history about HCQ.

Elsevier and Compromised Medical Journals

The USA Today article exhibits an odd lack of curiosity about Elsevier, the part owner of the journal that retracted Raoult’s study.

Wikipedia identifies Elsevier as “a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content.” The motto on Elsevier’s webpage is “For the benefit of society,” and states, “We help researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve healthcare outcomes.” 

However, Elsevier is a multi-billion dollar for-profit company that owns many of the medical and scientific journals, and has been accused by multiple sources of having a negative impact on research sharing. Its high subscription prices, and its support of organizations that wish to prohibit open-access to articles and studies, has led to paywalls. 

While abstracts are freely available, access to the full text of articles is often pay-per-view or by subscription, even for studies that were funded by public tax dollars. Elsevier has also created a situation where researchers are sometimes blocked from their own published work due to company policy on research and copyright. Editorial boards of journals (often nonprofit) have resigned due to disputes with Elsevier over pricing, and librarians have boycotted Elsevier in response to pricing schemes.

While ignoring Elsevier’s less than honorable business model, the USA Today article does note just 3 of the 18 authors of the retracted study agreed to withdraw it. Lead author Didier Raoult was not among the three, and apparently neither he, nor anyone who might share a counter perspective for the article, was interviewed.

HCQ Was Approved by the FDA to Treat Covid-19

The USA Today article states, “In 2020, then-President Donald Trump said he had been taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent a COVID-19 infection, despite warnings by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over its effectiveness.” However, in May 2020 when Pres. Trump said he was taking HCQ, it was emergency use authorized by the FDA for treating Covid-19, and was being tested in several clinical trials. It was not until June 15, 2020 that the FDA revoked its EUA approval for HCQ to treat Covid-19, stating “the known and potential benefits of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine no longer outweigh the known and potential risks for the authorized use.”

The FDA cited concerns over “cardiac adverse events and other potential serious side effects,” and “recent results from a large randomized clinical trial in hospitalized patients.” As stated earlier serious side effects from HCQ would only result from overdose. The details behind the sabotage of clinical trials testing HCQ as a treatment for Covid-19 can be found here, but the short version behind the motive is this: By the FDA’s own rules, under section 564 of the FD&C Act, the FDA can only give Emergency Use Authorization to an experimental vaccine if there is no other effective treatment.

If Covid-19 could be treated effectively with already FDA-approved meds, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, there would be no legal justification to give Emergency Use Authorization to the Covid vaccines in development.

Weintz, Lori. Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19 (p. 74). Brownstone Institute. Kindle Edition.

An article like the USA Today column referred to in this post is problematic not only because of what it says, but because of what it doesn’t say. The real story is how already FDA approved drugs, which multiple doctors were finding effective at treating Covid-19, were sabotaged and suppressed to make way for highly profitable, poorly tested, ineffective, and harmful Emergency Use Authorized medications and vaccines.

Conflicts of Interest at the FDA and NIH

There is a need to separate Big Pharma and other third party dollars from being paid to regulatory agencies. Almost half of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) budget comes from the pharmaceutical companies whose products the FDA approves and regulates.

In another conflict of interest, National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists receive royalties on product discoveries. NIH is described on its website as “the nation’s medical research agency,” with billions of taxpayer dollars going toward research each year. A May 2022 report from government watchdog group Open the Books notes that, “Essentially, taxpayer money funding NIH research benefits researchers employed by NIH because they are listed as patent inventors and therefore receive royalty payments from licensees.” Open the Books estimates “up to $350 million in royalties from third parties were paid to NIH scientists during the fiscal years between 2010 and 2020.”

Open the Books, notes, “When an NIH employee makes a discovery in their official capacity, the NIH owns the rights to any resulting patent. These patents are then licensed for commercial use to companies that could use them to bring products to market.” Open the Books states, “[N]one of these payments are receiving any scrutiny whatsoever and to the extent that a company [is] making payments to either leadership or scientists, while also receiving grants…then that just on its face is a conflict of interest.”

Although separate agencies, both are under the umbrella of Health and Human Services, in 2010 the NIH and FDA entered into a Joint Leadership Council Charter to facilitate “collaboration between NIH and FDA” noting, “The NIH and FDA “share a common goal of advancing public health by promoting the translation of basic and clinical research findings into medical products and therapies. The agencies are complementary in their roles and functions—NIH supports and conducts biomedical and behavioral research and FDA ensures the safety and effectiveness of medical and other products.” That sounds good on paper, but as we’ve experienced in the past five years, these agencies are not protecting the public health.

There is also the problem of the so-called revolving door between the FDA and pharmaceutical companies. For example, nine out of the last 10 FDA commissionerswent on to work for the pharmaceutical industry or to serve on a prescription drug company’s board of directors after leaving the FDA. Then there is the reality of Big Pharma campaign contributions and lobbying to Congress. Fully two thirds of Congress cashed a check from the pharmaceutical industry ahead of the 2020 election according to STAT news.

There aren’t many articles on these topics in the mainstream media, because the system is largely corrupted. Big money and powerful forces are behind the drive to keep the current system in place. Take note of how often your program or news is “brought to you by Pfizer,” or another drug company. Consider the fact that only two countries in the world allow direct marketing of pharmaceuticals to the public – the United States and New Zealand. Big Pharma and pharma-related corporations have outsized influence over our media, the scientific and medical journals, and our government regulatory agencies. 

Time to Shake up the Status Quo

We need accountability, and a separation of Big Pharma money from the agencies that regulate medical research and pharmaceutical products. Also, it’s time to put a stop to the myriad commercials that end with “ask your doctor about (fill in the blank).” If the Legacy media can’t survive without Big Pharma advertising dollars, then it’s time for a new media model.

With the incoming Trump Administration, and the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as director of the Department of Health and Human Services, we have the chance for a desperately needed course correction. 

Republished from the author’s Substack

The Un-Merry-Go-Round of Media, Pharma, and Government
by Lori Weintz at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society