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Nov. 7, 2024 - Epoch Times
22:21
The Erosion of Informed Consent: Sharyl Attkisson
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The federal government slash pharmaceutical industry have learned how to take our taxpayer money, legally launder them through universities, public and private, who then say they don't have to reply to your FOIA requests or turn over any data, who then put out studies that are little more than narratives and propaganda that go unchallenged.
Cheryl Atkisson is an Emmy Award-winning TV correspondent, investigative journalist, and author of several books, including most recently, Follow the Science, How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails.
Why am I, as a non-medical reporter, unearthing stories that this whole industry of medical and science reporters are not unearthing?
The health of the individual and their informed consent is far paramount to what you think you are doing for the good of mankind.
You don't have the right as a researcher to say, I can sacrifice this child or I can sacrifice something about informed consent because I think I have a more noble goal.
That's not your right.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek.
Cheryl Atkinson, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Good to be here, thanks.
So Cheryl, you've been looking at health in America for decades now.
I've seen a lot of data now that shows that health outcomes for Americans, certainly, and actually this extends beyond America to Canada, my home country, have been going down, right, while we spend more and more on health care.
And so can you give me a picture of that reality?
I think I'm like a lot of people where my starting point 25, 30 years ago was a lot of faith in the medical establishment, doctors, federal health agencies, studies, you know, not really questioning anything and thinking this stuff was fairly pure and above board, didn't put much thought into it at all.
And then I was assigned to cover a couple of controversies, medical scandals for CBS News, not as a medical reporter, as an investigative reporter.
So I came sort of as an outsider and began to notice some commonalities with other scandals, like government corruption scandals.
There were whistleblowers.
There were financial interests.
There were conflicts of interest.
And the more I began researching things that I thought I knew about, though maybe I hadn't researched, and realized there was evidence, very strong evidence, often to the contrary, of what we've been told our whole lives about various medical issues, I started to realize there was a lot more than meets the eye and that there could be some really significant information to unearth in the health and medical realm.
You started breaking some pretty significant stories.
The smallpox vaccine, I think that's something you covered quite a bit.
It was something that turned out wasn't a very good product and got withdrawn.
Tell me a little bit about the process of figuring that out.
Well, as a journalist, I've worked really hard over the years when I go into a story, as we all do, with preconceived ideas of what we think we know, but to identify experts and open my mind and learn.
And sometimes you are just gobsmacked by something that's contrary to what you thought.
So I've spent a lot of time making sure I could get informed and leave my own preconceived notions behind on important issues, whether it's health and medical issues or other.
But here I'm speaking of health and medical.
With the smallpox vaccine program, I think the first eye-opener was they were going to resume the program after 9-11 to vaccinate people for smallpox in case the terrorists would use this as a biological weapon, even though we had no outbreak.
But experts at the time were saying things to me like, well, this is a toxic vaccine and we have to be careful.
And I remember thinking, toxic vaccine?
I thought the smallpox vaccine saved the world.
What are you talking about?
Learned a lot about side effects and why that vaccine was considered more problematic perhaps than other routine vaccines, and that's just an accepted fact.
And ultimately they halted the program because as they tried to start this vaccine program with first responders and they were going to expand it, People didn't want the shots.
There were cases of heart inflammation and blood clots and so on.
Sounds familiar.
My child was fully vaccinated.
I had more than my share, especially being able to travel with the military on assignments for CBS News.
And I realized I had not put much thought into these products and what was happening behind the scenes in terms of toxicity at times and then cover-ups on the part of government and certain leaders who were affiliated with the vaccine and pharmaceutical industry.
One of my first stories I thought was also fascinating, I broke the story of Viagra causing blindness.
The possibility, a study arose that there could be blindness linked to Viagra, and I did a little bit of investigation, like I would do a normal non-health-related story, and I found a clear pattern of adverse event reports that I leaned toward not only blindness, but deafness as well.
I spoke to some experts.
I found some studies.
And as luck would have it, as I was preparing the story for AIR, shockingly, the FDA actually acknowledged to me before my story AIR that they were negotiating with the drug maker at the time to put a warning label about the blindness on Viagra.
So I didn't even have to fight the FDA as to what the truth was.
They were acknowledging it.
And with that story, I realized, why am I as a non-medical reporter unearthing stories that this whole industry of medical and science reporters are not unearthing?
Why are the drug companies and the government not on the front line of alerting us to some of these dangers that you'd think they would be on the cutting edge of alerting us to?
And why, as I discovered, is it so often a doctor outside the specialty who's looking at patterns and unearthing side effects that the specialists who are prescribing the drugs aren't unearthing and exposing themselves?
I think you dedicate a chapter, a significant portion, to the findings of Tyrone Hayes, and looking at how certain chemicals and water seem to be affecting the development of frogs or tadpoles, and the astonishing reaction.
I call him the frog professor in that chapter.
And it's a fascinating story because over 25 years ago, this man was hired by a chemical company to study a chemical that sadly is in most of our drinking water now.
It's run off from crops, used on a lot of corn.
The company was hoping to prove it was safe and not causing problems because the EPA was going to be analyzing it and taking a look at regulations.
And unfortunately for him, he found it was feminizing, in his words, frogs.
Taking frogs that were male and turning them, in essence, into female, or having frogs not develop testes or develop both testes and ovaries at the same time.
And a host of other research has built upon this.
It turns out it impacts all vertebrates basically in some form in negative ways, many different ways besides this feminization.
But what happened to him when he tried to simply report what he had learned, I think is a lesson for all of us to how studies and science is skewed today, are skewed today, because The company had a button-down contract.
He wasn't allowed to report the negative findings.
And people don't realize the pharmaceutical industry hires academics, but the contracts now will say, in essence, if you find something negative, you can't publish it.
It used to be everything got published.
So to his credit, he went independent.
He quit that job, repeated the research independently so that he could publish it.
And again, it's been built on over the years with a lot of powerful research.
But what the company did to try to destroy him, the tactics that they deployed to try to get him fired, to controversialize his research, investigate him, investigate his wife, psychoanalyze him.
And this was all confirmed with documents that were released as part of a lawsuit.
When the company was sued over allegedly adulterating water in various cities, they paid a huge settlement without admitting fault.
But I think it's an instructive lesson in what happens to you as a researcher if you unfortunately happen to be off the narrative of what powerful interests may want you to find, how you can suffer and pay the price for that.
I think we have a bit of that sort of idealized view of, or at least have had an overly idealized view of research as being kind of something pure.
And of course, one would want to keep it that way at some level, but tell me a little bit about the general picture then.
Well, sadly, the scientific industry has been so corrupted by money sources that even the people that you'd like to think would defend, for example, the scientific journals, have thrown up their hands and said much or most of the science printed in the journals that your doctor relies on today is not to be believed because it's been so corrupted.
And I was stunned because I'm one of those people that used to think, hey, you read something and it's in a peer-reviewed published journal, everybody always says that's the gold standard, that's it.
Come to find out, Dr.
Marcia Angel, former head of the New England Journal of Medicine, said that it's problematic, that she said she learned as editor-in-chief she could not stop the bad studies with the bad information in them that were hopelessly tainted by the pharmaceutical industry.
She said she lost that battle.
The current editor of the British journal Lancet has said much the same, Dr.
Richard Horton.
In a stunning editorial some years ago, he said that much of the science is not to be believed.
And then many studies have been built upon that sense that give high percentages of information in medical journals that are not to be believed because they've been corrupted by the scientific, you know, money interests.
Basically, let's say pharmaceutical and chemical industry.
And there are a lot of tactics that I learned they use that are invisible to us, such as ghostwriting a study that looks like it's signed by an independent doctor who has been paid for the use of a signature, but the article was actually written by The drug company,
or a middleman hired by the drug company, not disclosed in the article in the scientific journal, and it's being used to pump up the need or supposed need for a drug that's going to be introduced, or a medicine that they currently make, or to make it look like the medicine works very well with no side effects, and people have no idea that this material, not only the studies may be tainted, but they're literally being written by a drug company when not disclosed, necessarily, in the final product.
Those are just some of the conflicts that happened today.
You know, Cheryl, we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with investigative journalist and author of Follow the Science, Cheryl Atkinson.
I've learned over recent years to look at things from the perspective of the incentive structures that exist in a system.
It doesn't seem like that's a typical practice.
So how did we get to that?
I think this has been a slippery slope that has occurred over the course of 20 years or more.
You know, I've covered it and noticed it in the last 20, 25 years for sure as I got assignments at CBS News as an investigative reporter.
But money interests have figured out how to infiltrate virtually every aspect of the information we may get about our health.
And this has happened over time, and unfortunately, the powers that be have allowed it.
So, pharmaceutical interests have too much influence in medical school, but the medical schools allow it in part because the drug companies give them money for research, money for projects, money for professorships, bring in lunches for the students.
I mean, it's top to bottom all kinds of influence.
They influence the professional educations of doctors once doctors have gotten their licenses to keep them.
They take classes that are taught by the pharmaceutical industry but often not disclosed in an overt way.
So the doctors think they're being taught by independent authorities about, you know, steered to look at medicine and the practice of medicine a certain way and maybe not to look for side effects or to believe.
Very much in a medicine that may have controversies and dual sides to it, but they're taught only one side.
They have taken over, as the journal editors have said, the scientific journals in many respects.
They have taken over the media in many respects and influenced the media through the advertising money they spend in the media.
So the media now, they just self-censor.
Really, the outsiders don't even have to tell them what to report and what not to report.
Which used to happen.
Now I think there's so much self-censorship because it's understood where the money is made.
And then they've influenced the federal agencies and political figures through donations and influence that makes sure policies that happen and laws that are written are favorable to they and their interests rather than to those of us who are impacted by them.
And this is something that I think is a very well-orchestrated, clever campaign by financial interests Whose job is to try to maximize their profits and figure out how to make the world work this way.
Unfortunately, and I'm not sure it's by design, maybe some people think it is, unfortunately it's resulted in our poor health.
Overall, I think making us sicker as a population.
What I think is alarming is we've noticed over the past couple of decades there is an epidemic of chronic health disorders among our children and also among adults and our elderly, but particularly we see what's happened to the younger generation, whether we're talking about mental illness, metabolic problems and obesity, cancers, disorders that didn't used to exist that are related to immune system disorders and so on.
And yet, you look in the big picture and you say, we've never spent more money on insurance, healthcare, pills, doctors, and our doctors and our federal agencies, they seem not to notice this.
So they're either not noticing what we all see, or they're looking the other way.
I don't know which is worse, but I think that's what's led to people understanding there's a crisis going on, and the medical establishment as it exists today has done a poor job Give me an example of some of the changes that you've seen throughout your career covering these sorts of things in terms of the incidents.
There's certain diseases, for example, that have become much more prevalent.
Well, I'll give you examples and then I'll speak to how interesting it is that instead of addressing the root causes, we are taught to normalize and accept them.
And there's a reason behind that.
I think the people steering us to accept these disorders Rather than address maybe how to prevent them, are sometimes the same industries implicated in the problems.
So let's say a lot of people think, and there's great science that points to metabolic disorders being caused by the adulterated food that we eat today that has a lot of products and chemicals in it, And the chemical makers and the companies that make so much money with these products and the processed foods that we think are so bad for us now, well, they want you to accept obesity.
Of course, people shouldn't be shamed for their size and so on, so that's not an issue.
But why don't we also address why everybody, so many people, are obese?
And there is a metabolic thing happening.
But those who want us to accept it are the ones that make the products that could be causing it.
We're also talking about artificial food dyes.
We're talking about preservatives that go in food.
So there's just a lot of things impacting us.
There's pressure to accept the outcome rather than address the root causes, and I think that's big money driven.
This issue of informed consent is something we've certainly been talking about, but this is something that's been kind of a problem from some time.
You have some significant examples in your book.
Informed consent and the tenets of it were really ingrained in our scientific system after the Tuskegee syphilis experiments where African American black men were experimented on without being told exactly why and what was happening to them and were not, they had syphilis, and were not given treatment for syphilis.
Years after one was discovered was being withheld from them.
This was exposed later by an Associated Press story.
It resulted in a lot of outrage and these ideas that people should have to give written informed consent if they're going to be in a study.
They should be told and all the risks disclosed to them.
There should be independent boards overseeing all of this.
Well, there's been a tension ever since, as I've learned.
With researchers arguing, well, when we tell people all the risks, they don't want to be in the study.
And we can't do really important research for the greater good by telling people all the risks.
And there have been many cases where they haven't.
And they've gotten caught by the government's own assessment or by their ethics body's assessment not giving proper informed consent in some really horrible ways.
But that was always considered, okay, you violated informed consent, but that's still our tenet.
Informed consent is still how it should be.
But I watched as the past 10 years with a particular case where informed consent was violated according to an ethics body looking at important studies by prestigious institutions in a study of premature babies, and researchers started to overtly argue that maybe these rules should be changed.
You know, maybe we shouldn't have to tell everybody so much.
So for the past 10 years, there have been facets of the scientific community working on that problem, trying to not have to tell us, if we're in a study, what could happen.
And most people, I think, don't know that some months ago, the FDA passed a rule that said, Researchers, if they determine on their own that the risks are minimal, they don't have to disclose those to people in a study.
Shocking.
A shocking lifting of these rules that have really guided us or were supposed to guide researchers for decades.
Obviously, I think, if you're in a study, you should be told every little thing that could go wrong so that you can make up your mind if you want to be in the study.
I think if risks really are minimal, why can't they tell you?
Why is that something they would want to withhold?
And then I think that the history of some corrupt scientists or scientists who have made bad decisions in the past shows us it shouldn't be left up to them to decide a risk is minimal.
It may not be.
You know, you're leaving it up to the same people that could be conflicted to decide that their study needs to be disclosed to the subjects who are in the study.
So I think this is a huge, important development that hasn't been well reported.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
has recently sort of suspended his campaign with a message of Maha, I think, right?
Make America healthy again.
I can't help but think about that, given everything we've just discussed.
My first interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
was decades ago when I was again assigned to cover a medical controversy for CBS News.
And I would just say he is the single most important political figure right now who has his finger on the pulse of what's happening with the things we've discussed.
The food and health crisis, the crisis in medicine and treatment, and the corruption that exists inside our institutions.
He said to me in one of our interviews, which makes him uniquely dangerous to this establishment we've discussed, that if he were elected president when he was running, he said, I will go to CDC headquarters in Atlanta and I know the names of the people to fire.
And he does.
I don't know if people know he's an attorney who has litigated against the government in medical scandals, in vaccine and vaccine autism cases.
And he has won cases against the government.
He intricately understands how this system works and where the corruption lies.
So, again, I think that makes him uniquely dangerous.
Very well informed because he has decades of looking at environmental factors and health factors, particularly in children, of what's causing chronic diseases and disorders.
And I think he's really an important voice right now in all of these things.
Cheryl, this has been a fascinating conversation.
Final thought as we finish up?
I think on a positive note, the COVID experience, during which some of the forces trying to control our narratives in a way that I think was not healthy, it became so audacious that it made people pay attention who weren't paying attention before.
It turned some people and some Mainstream doctors, even, into activists who'd never seen themselves that way.
And out of that has been born this new sort of subculture that is not small, where they are working now to figure out how to solve our most vexing health problems that the main establishment has ignored, like the chronic health disorders.
They are trying to mount independent studies that the establishment won't pay for.
They're developing protocols, and people are starting to look for these resources and take back more control of their own health.
I think that's the silver lining in all of this.
Well, Cheryl Atkison, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again.
Thanks.
Thank you all for joining Cheryl Atkison and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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