All science should be viewed skeptically. There’s no such thing as reliable “scientific consensus.” It’s rubbish.

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I don’t often suggest you read something outside Coffee & Covid, but there are exceptions, including this October 21st journal article published in Surgical Neurology International titled, “The Pharmaceutical Industry Is Dangerous to Health. Further Proof With COVID-19.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9610448/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

It’s an important article. The author, Fabien Durelle, describes all the methods the pharmaceutical industry uses to manipulate science to sell its products, especially (but not only) related to the pandemic. The 167 reference footnotes alone make the article worth saving.

Durelle tracked the genesis of scientific manipulation back to the tobacco companies, who were faced with an existential crisis when studies began showing harms from smoking cigarettes, like lung cancer. So Big Tobacco occupied science, flooded the journals with favorable studies written by pay-for-play academics, and bought themselves decades. Here is just one of Durelle’s lists of problems of how various industries are manipulating science.

Big business, pharma, and the government:

* Fund or create journals to influence what is published.

* Suppress publication of unfavorable science.

* Attack individual scientists and whole cohorts of researchers.

* Remove individual scientists from positions of power.

* Silence plaintiffs using secret payments.

* Recruit, fund, and train individuals to be trusted scientific voices for industry.

* Fund, produce, and disseminate textbooks and other educational or academic materials.

* Fund media outlets to influence what is disseminated.

* Co-opt journalists through media training and conference funding.

* Ensure and normalize industry’s presence in academic settings in attempts to gain trust and scientific credibility within academia.

Although Durelle touches on military involvement, I believe that, not only are industries like big tobacco and big pharma occupying science, deep state government agencies have also gotten into the game. I think what we’ve seen with government’s occupation of Twitter and the other social media companies is a reflection of something happening in science for a long time.

I also witnessed it firsthand, while I was battling mask mandates, when I observed the burgeoning literature claiming to support cotton mask filtration of virus particles which, tellingly, didn’t benefit pharma, and defending novel military-endorsed mRNA therapies as though they were the safest treatments since Bayer kids’ aspirin.

Seeing all the problems enumerated in once article is pretty breathtaking. One begins to wonder: how much of “science” remains trustworthy? As far back as 2004, Richard Horton, chief editor of The Lancet, said that medical journals had become “information laundering operations” for the pharmaceutical industry. In 2015, Horton said up to half of the scientific literature might simply be wrong.

All science should be viewed skeptically. There’s no such thing as reliable “scientific consensus.” It’s rubbish.

Consider the significance of this article. While it didn’t publish in a major journal, it did publish in “a” journal, which means it is now on PubMed and the NIH’s study website. This kind of information would have died a horrible editorial death from sudden and unexpected covid censorship just a few short months ago.

The floodgates are open! Let the waters of truth flow.