Loading ...TRUST THE SCIENCE !!!
JEFF CHIDERS EXPOSE OF THE MEDICAL SCIENCE COMPLEX DESERVES A SEPERATE POST !
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It’s hard to pick the most depressing part of Jan Jekielek’s most recent interview with independent investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi discussing the Paxil scandal— the forged numbers, the missing suicides, or the fact that the fake study was bought so brazenly you half expect it to show up listed on Zillow as “Two-Bedroom Bungalow, Recently Renovated, Includes Complimentary Journal Editors.”
SEE THE INTERVIEW HERE
From Statins to Paxil, Here’s What’s Wrong With a Lot of Medical Research | Maryanne Demasi
https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/from-statins-to-paxil-heres-whats-wrong-with-a-lot-of-medical-research-maryanne-demasi-5952555?
The story, which originally broke in 2015, is as old as “peer review” itself: a drug company (GlaxoSmithKline) wanted glowing results, so a helpful army of ghostwriters tweaked their study’s original results, massaged the incriminating data, and buried the bodies. Literally. The study’s authors either downplayed or outright concealed suicide attempts among teens taking Paxil.
The resulting paper —if you can call it that— created an entire generation of “unexpected adverse events,” otherwise known as dead kids.
And yet it had passed peer review. It was published in the BMJ. It had 21 co-authors— none of whom reviewed the raw data. It influenced medical guidelines. It made enormous sums of money. Then it exploded, leaving behind a familiar chalk outline: the corpse of scientific credibility.
“Prescriptions of antidepressants to young people surged in the wake of the study,” one New York Times article said, blandly.
In 2012, the DOJ got GSK to pay a $3 billion dollar fine —the biggest in medical history at the time— for falsely marketing Paxil to kids. Get this: to this day, in spite of the criminal fine and all the poor press, the BMJ has refused to retract the paper. (Just this year, a ‘notice of concern’ box was added to the top of the online version of the study.)
But this depressing anti-depressant story wasn’t any rogue case. It was the system working exactly how it has been designed.
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? Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the people who actually ran the journals. In 2015 —the same year the Paxil story broke— former Lancet Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton finally snapped, and blurted out the truth like he was confessing to siphoning gas from his neighbor’s lawn mower:
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”
Perhaps half. Half! That’s not a statistical signal or a confidence interval. It’s a crime scene report.
Even the BMJ’s own former head editor, Fiona Godlee, admitted the field is “corrupted.” And not in the cute, old-fashioned way where the guy at the lab sneaks home a spare beaker. She meant intellectually corrupted— results engineered, journals captive, entire fields shaped by whoever has the fattest budget for “research support.”
Third: former New England Journal of Medicine Editor Marcia Angell (who spent twenty years guarding the temple) finally conceded the high priests were selling edible miracles in bulk:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published… I take no pleasure in this conclusion.”
It’s not possible to believe the research! That’s from the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, not some random TikTok alien theorist.
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Finally, there’s controversial mathematician John Ioannidis, who coldly and logically ran the numbers. His famous 2005 paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” now has an eye-watering 3.3 million views and 9,000 citations. Ioannidis calmly proved, with data and statistics, and without sarcasm (showing heroic self-restraint), that modern research is structured so that false results are the expected output.
You don’t even need a conspiracy theory, when the trashy incentives mathematically guarantee “garbage out.”
Which brings us back to Paxil. New York Times headline, 2015:
Antidepressant Paxil Is Unsafe for Teenagers, New Analysis Says
Now they tell us. “Retractions,” the Times reported, as though this kind of about-face were a regular occurrence, “are at an all-time high; recent cases of fraud have shaken fields as diverse as anesthesia and political science; and earlier this month, researchers reported that less than half of a sample of psychology papers held up.”
Richard Horton’s estimate might have been overly optimistic.
The Paxil story isn’t any aberration. It’s a smoking crater, along a winding road of smoking craters; a road lined with credible warning signs that the bowtied establishment types shrieked at us to ignore. Follow the science and shut up, morons!
The top journal editors tried to warn us. The statisticians tried to warn us. The whistleblowers tried to warn us. Even the retraction counts tried to warn us.
But the system kept on selling the provably false narrative that “science is self-correcting.” The fines do their job. Sure. The Titanic was self-correcting, too— right after it finished correcting itself at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Now, years later, we look back at the Paxil disaster like it was ancient history or something, the way astronomers study a distant supernova. But this is what happens when you mix industrial-strength money with scientific credentialism and silence skeptics by removing all the oxygen.
? Critically, the children harmed by that scandal never got the benefit of the “self-correction.” The correction always comes later, in a politely worded retraction, in six-point type, long after the damage is irreversible and the bodies are cold in the ground. The market moved on. The bonuses were paid. The prescriptions were written. The parents found some way to keep going.
And yet— medical authorities still lecture the public about “trusting the science” like a drunk uncle insisting he can drive. Paxil isn’t a ghost of scandals past. It’s a preview of the operating system we all lived under during the pandemic.
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Bought studies. Captured journals. Silenced critics. Manufactured consensus. Same structure, bigger budget.
? But the Paxil scandal may serve as more than a gruesome relic of the past. It could be a sign, an ignition point for a full-blown reckoning with what many now openly call “junk science.” More optimistically, just this year, Secretary Kennedy, FDA Commissioner Dr. Makary, and NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya all began pushing a radical overhaul of how medical science gets published. Inside Higher Ed, October:
At the heart of their plan: dismantle the luxury-journal cartel that has long protected industry-funded papers, restricted publication to a tiny oligopoly of gatekeepers, and rewarded pro-pharma results over truth. Under the terrific Make America Healthy Again Commission (MAHA) report —chaired by RFK— the administration pledged to “realign incentives,” restore transparency, and prioritize “gold-standard science, not special interests.”
As part of that effort, the newly confirmed NIH director (Bhattacharya) and FDA chief (Makary) aren’t just going through the motions. One of the very first things they did, racing right out of the starting gate, was to launch a competing journal explicitly meant to challenge the gatekeepers. Politico Pro, February:
It would be a massive understatement to say the big federal health agencies and their billions in annual grants direct the conversation. If nothing else, the impending shift in NIH standards at least threatens to end the corrupt old system, wherein pharmaceutical companies laundered regulatory influence using taxpayer-funded grant money, and top-tier journals translated that into prestige, citations, and sales pitches disguised as “clinical guidance.”
If anything, the pandemic proved how much worse things can get when you combine corrupted research with political power and real-time censorship. You might consider Paxil as the prototype.* Covid was the industrial release version. (* the catastrophe of Alzheimer’s research —scientific corruption’s Mount Everest— might be an even better example, but that’s for another day when I don’t have a plane to catch.)
Maybe the saddest part of all is how numb and unselfaware the establishment has become. Horton, Angell, Godlee, Ioannidis— they didn’t whisper. They shouted. And nobody with power wanted to hear it, because the money was good and the machine was running smoothly.
Until it wasn’t. Far below the news surface, Tectonic forces are shifting the scientific landscape in ways that are devilishly difficult to detect on the ground. They still cling to their old, failed system. But they aren’t getting away with it anymore.
Welcome to the Reckoning,™ and to the new age of reason.
JEFF CHILDERS