Bad Pharma

An article that I originally published on my WordPress blog eighteen months ago:

The above photo of is the University of Oxford's Old Road Campus Research Building, part of the Medical Sciences Division in Headington, the Jenner Institute being one of eight such departments located therein.  This campus is a fairly recent development compared to the university's main colleges and related departments in or close to the historic city centre.  The impressive scale and design of this campus is a testament to the 'prestige' which the biotechnology sector, particularly the vaccination industry, has been granted in Britain.  It is the Jenner Institute that has partnered with the pharmaceutical firm Astra Zeneca to develop one of the experimental 'vaccines' for the respiratory illness known as COVID19.  These products have been linked to the fatalities of some people who died shortly after being administered with them, as well as to numerous other adverse reactions, many of them serious.  They are not vegan as they contain genes derived from a chimpanzee.

Although the COVID19 respiratory illness has a very high survival rate, with symptoms for the vast majority of the population no worse than a bad dose of seasonal influenza, it has been hyped up by many in the medical profession, the mainstream media and the vast majority of politicians in all 'developed' countries, to be far worse than it really is.  It is a serious illness only for those who are already in the final months of their natural respective lifespans, hence the average age of COVID19 fatality being similar to the average longevity, those who are clinically obese or otherwise immunocompromised.  However, in spite of this, the hype was for a 'need' to rush a 'vaccine' to cope with the supposed 'pandemic', the illness only being defined as such following the World 'Health' Organisation having redefined the term in 2010 following the outbreak of 'swine flu', which had been declared a 'pandemic' although it failed to meet the criterion of a serious and often fatal disease.  So that criterion was revised to allow for a pathogen following a mild or serious course.

I must admit that one of my reasons for having a wander around this campus six months two years ago was territorial in that during the mid-1980's, when I was in my late teens, I lived on the Wood Farm Estate less than a mile away in the direction away from town.  Cycling to and from town for college or any other reason would take me along Old Road.  This building faces onto what is now called Roosevelt Drive, but back then in the 1980's was simply known as the Hospital Access Road for both the Warneford and Churchill Hospitals nearby.  The University of Oxford's Old Road Campus had yet to exist then.  These hospitals are still there as is the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre on the other side of Old Road.  It is hardly surprising therefore that this particular area was chosen as the location for the Medical Sciences Division, whilst the John Radcliffe Hospital, also in Headington, lies about a mile to the north.

The area also has Oxford Brookes University, the former Polytechnic as well as one state secondary school, Cheney and the independent Headington School.  So the 'feel' of the area is that of a combination of hospitals and academia, the pupils at each school being maybe unconsciously groomed towards an obvious career direction, if not in academia then in the NHS.  It strikes me as being an area where it would be difficult to build opposition to the dominance of 'medical science' funded by the pharmaceutical industry.  Whilst there are residential areas close by, including that council estate where I used to live, the Old Road Campus has a feeling of being socially segregated from them, such that those employed within the Medical Sciences Division may view the less privileged human population the same way that they have always viewed animals, as subjects to be experimented on and nothing more.  From a local perspective, the presence of the Old Road Campus in an area where a few decades ago the University of Oxford had no developments represents a further step in the ‘gown’ pushing out the ‘town’ to the periphery, a process that has stealthily continued for centuries.

Across town on the Woodstock Road is the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science, another department of the University of Oxford, located close to the Radcliffe Observatory, for which photos of the relevant Quarter are shown below.  Dr Ben Goldacre is the Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine as well as being a Director at the Bennett Institute.  In 2021 on his Twitter profile he had adopted the slogan 'Get Vaccinated' between his forename and surname, whilst complaining that someone in his household had COVID19.  I wonder if that household was 'fully vaccinated', however defined.  He is best known outside academia for having authored two books, Bad Science and Bad Pharma, published in 2009 and 2013 respectively and for having written a regular column for the Guardian.

In Bad Science, Goldacre gives good descriptions of the placebo effect based on the number of sugar pills a patient may take unaware of their content, similarly with saline injections. He also does a take down that I have to say that I agree with on homoepathy, being also based on such a placebo effect. Having done a basic evening class about it thirty years ago, when I realised the the primary content of the pills had been so strongly diluted that there was nothing of it there, then I thought at the time and still do that it is all in the mind.  I tried to rationalise in terms of residual molecular energy levels but the tutor waffled on about 'vital force', which seemed to be a New Age belief.  Goldacre is also sceptical about the vitamin pill industry for making unsubstantiated claims analogous to the those of the pharmaceutical industry, Big Pharma, of which some of those companies in the vitamin pill industry are owned.  Whilst claims made for many ‘complementary’ and ‘alternative’ medicines may be exaggerated or even bogus, those medicines are rarely harmful, as Goldacre should admit.  Their existence is testament to a collapse of confidence in ‘conventional’ or ‘allopathic’ medicine, the claims for which may also be exaggerated or bogus, but which in many cases have been – and continue to be - proven harmful.

He continues on the same subject by dedicating a whole chapter to a take down of Gillian McKeith, someone whose television shows I was unaware of, as I rarely watch television and I have never seen her name on any branded goods.  She has had plenty of time and opportunity to push back should she have chosen to.  The following chapter deals with a ‘fish oil trial’ carried out in a Durham school in which those responsible from the school and local authority subsequently back-pedalled about the ‘trial’ really being a ‘trial’ when it didn’t deliver the anticipated benefits.  As a vegan the lack of benefits don’t surprise me and it is a good way of debunking those anti-vegans who claim that fish oil is 'essential', either in its original form or as a supplement.  A nutritionist whom I had never heard of then comes under similar criticism as McKeith.  Fair enough.  However Goldacre apparently will not, or would not at the time, countenance any criticism of the ‘anti-retroviral’ drug AZT (azidothymadine), the implication that anyone from the ‘developed’ world who criticises it must have a vested business interest in selling an ‘alternative’ therapy of some form.

Chapter 11 of Bad Science (which forms the basis of Bad Pharma) is dedicated to the way that drug trials are run and how sometimes the data are amended to remove results that appear to be ‘erroneously’ unfavourable.  Unsurprisingly this feeds through the results published and as medical journals prefer to publish trials that show positive outcomes, then the bias comes through.  Drug companies have a vested interest in highlighting data that make their latest product look good.  Similarly, they are keen to hide the side-effects.  Notably, as Goldacre points out (and as Professor Carl Heneghan has recently done so as well), information on the dangers of prescribing anti-arrhythmic drugs to those who have suffered a heart attack were withheld from doctors who prescribed them, with in a great many cases fatal results.  The myocarditis risk from the pain killer Vioxx, developed by Merck, was also withheld from doctors and the withholding of that data only later criticised by the New England Journal of Medicine.  As at the time of publication, Goldacre stated that the pharmaceutical industry was the third most profitable activity in the country.  Not stated is that this was a symptom of other industries having been either run-down or off-shored.

To quote Goldacre directly from this chapter:

Doctors need reliable information if they are to make helpful and safe decisions about prescribing drugs to their patients.  Depriving them of this information, and deceiving them, is a major moral crime.  If I wasn’t writing a light and humorous book about science right now, I would descend into gales of rage.

Substitute the word 'drugs' with 'vaccines' and you might think that he would hold a similar view of vaccines.  You might think that, but Chapter 12 entitled How the Media Promote the Public Misunderstanding of Science treats concerns about the MMR (combined measles – mumps – rubella) vaccine as if those concerns were a media fabrication, another ‘scare’.  In this chapter Goldacre deliberately places trashy tabloid stories, sometimes about ‘celebrities’, alongside genuine health concerns as if the latter are no better than the former.  He criticises the mainstream media for being obsessed with ‘new breakthroughs’ when medical journals do precisely the same.  But when Goldacre treats a fellow medical professional Andrew Wakefield as someone of ‘questionable authority’ akin to Gillan McKeith, he gives his own bias away.

The mainstream media have spent since early in 2020 promoting the huge scare story of ‘Coronavirus’ aka ‘COVID19’ and its 'variants', so one would expect Goldacre to have spoken out against this.  But has he?  Worse still, the mainstream media have pushed ‘pro-vaxx’ propaganda, without any degree of responsibility for the huge numbers of adverse reactions to the ‘vaccines’, the University of Oxford / Astra Zeneca one among them.  And the reaction from the medical profession?  Whilst an honorary minority have spoken out, the majority, including the vast majority of GP’s, have not.  It is no surprise that, as pointed out in a footnote, doctors were actively involved in the Nazi project, with 45% being party members, the highest proportion of any profession.

Chapter 13 entitled Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things which contains a sub-heading of Social Influences, would be an appropriate description of the mass formation psychosis that has gripped the otherwise rational and intelligent professional middle-class over the COVID19 scare.  Most of those people are in good health, because their socio-economic circumstances are conducive to it and their competitive spirit commonly extends to physical fitness.  From my working class council estate background, my own experience of having been an ‘outsider’ member of that professional middle class is that the vast majority are reluctant to criticise their peers in other professions.  They will always conform to the establishment view, hence their belief that COVID19 is far, far worse than it really is or ever has been since the mainstream media started hyping it up early in 2020.

The subject of MMR takes up all of Chapter 15 entitled The Media’s MMR Hoax, implying that it is all a media fabrication.  His pro-vaccine messaging is reinforced by some ‘sciency’, to use his term, graphs, though better statistical information which rebukes such claims can be found elsewhere (see Further Reading below).  In this chapter, he gives a brief mention to concerns in the US about thimerosal, which contains mercury, being used as a preservative for vaccines, but claims that such fears have not caught on in the UK.  Such dismissal of the possibility of mercury poisoning is irresponsible.  He also gives a brief, disparaging, mention to the campaign in Leicester against vaccination for smallpox.  The Media’s COVID19 Hoax would be an appropriate chapter title for a more recent book.  Perhaps Goldacre would like to write one about all the fearmongering that we have been subjected to for what was and still is nothing more than a seasonal respiratory illness affecting the same demographic groups affected by all such illnesses, notably ordinary seasonal influenza.  In the Introduction to Bad Pharma, Goldacre states:

Drug companies are not withholding the secret to curing cancer, nor are they killing us all with vaccines.

The secret to curing cancer is unlikely to be with any drug or vaccine; and whilst the drug companies are not killing us all with vaccines, there have been a high number of fatalities as a consequence of the Pfizer, Astra Zeneca and Moderna products.  As Dr Ben Goldacre is a Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, based within the University of Oxford, then he has a moral obligation to look into this.   As this is a vegan blog, then I must point out that Goldacre supports laboratory tests on animals, as he has written in Chapter 2 of Bad Pharma, so his morality is questionable there and in his own words you can’t even be sure you’ve got a safe, effective drug once you’ve gone this far, because you haven’t given it to a single human yet.  On my old blog, based on information from Bad Pharma, I wrote a brief summary of drug trial information on this blog post from July 2021.

Main References

Bad Science - Ben Goldacre, Fourth Estate / Harper Collins, London, April 2009.

Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken and How We Can Fix It - Ben Goldacre, Fourth Estate / Harper Collins, London, August 2013.

Additional Reference

Corona, False Alarm?  Facts and Figures – Karina Reiss and Sucharit Bhakdi, Chelsea Green Publishing, London, September 2020.  The WHO’s change to the definition of a ‘pandemic’ can be found on pp 112-113.  This is a good book, written by two German doctors, on how the COVID19 ‘pandemic’ has been grossly exaggerated.

Further Reading

Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines and the Forgotten History – Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk, Create Space Independent Publishing, July 2013.  This book contains better quality data on vaccine efficacy - and the lack of it - than that featured in Goldacre’s Bad Science.  Chapters 6 & 7 cover the Leicester Method, which showed that sanitation and the quarantining of the sick and their families (not a city-wide lockdown, let alone vaccination) led to the local eradication of smallpox.

Jabbed: How the Vaccine Industry, Medical Establishment, and Government Stick It to You and Your Family - Brett Wilcox, Skyhorse Publishing, New York, paperback edition, February 2020.  Hardback edition published September 2018.  Amongst other issues Andrew Wakefield's views are at least treated with more respect than afforded by Goldacre.  The Leicester Anti-Vaccination Movement also features in this book.  This book also has an extensive list of references and due to its fairly recent publication most of those that are web-based are still accessible.