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April 23, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:25
How Big Pharma Corrupted Medical Research and the Peer Review Process: Dr. Joseph Varon
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When you have, let's say, a paper that has 20 authors, and out of those 20 authors, more than 90% of them are in the payroll of a specific pharmaceutical company that makes the product that you are studying, that's a conflict.
Dr. Joseph Varen is a critical care physician, medical professor, and president of the Independent Medical Alliance, formerly the FLCCC.
Their mission is to provide and advocate for patient rights, informed consent, And medical transparency, and they've played a major role in supporting Secretary Kennedy.
Hopefully, with the new NIH director, we'll be able to fund some of these studies for these repurposed drugs that are really going to cut on cost of health care expenses.
Varen has contributed to more than 950 peer-reviewed journal articles and is the editor-in-chief of multiple medical journals.
Including the newly launched Journal of Independent Medicine.
If we don't do something about the current state of medicine in our country, we are really doomed.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janje Kellek.
Dr. Joe Varan, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you for having me again.
Well, there is a crisis in research and reproducibility of research.
As we speak, and some people would even say corruption of research.
And you're trying to tackle this head-on.
What is it that's happening?
Well, there is no question that, you know, unfortunately, most of the research is being taken hostage by a variety of interests: pharmaceutical industry, political interest.
There are so many things.
And what we're trying to do is just to get true science out there without any Outside influence.
That's very difficult, because if you think about it, conflicts of interest are present everywhere.
When you look, for example, on the number of peer reviewers that have some kind of conflict of interest as it pertains to pharmaceutical industry, more than 80% of people that review papers for a journal have some kind of conflict of interest.
So it's very difficult to have a clean...
Clean board.
And what's an example of a conflict of interest that's common?
Let's say that you speak for a pharmaceutical company and you promote one of their products.
And then you get a paper that has to do with that product.
So more likely than not, you will accept that paper just because you work for the other guys.
You get money that's being paid to you as a result of your interactions with that.
But conflicts can also be sort of unconscious as well.
Like you might not be thinking to yourself at that moment,"Aha!
Because I work for them, I'm going to accept it." Right?
Correct. I mean, there's going to be a timeframe where you will not realize that you have a conflict.
I mean, you don't realize it because you've been doing it.
It's part of your normal way of doing things.
But if you think about it, in reality, you have An important problem.
And you have to recognize them.
Trying to get people to recognize that they have a conflict of interest is even more difficult.
Because many journals, what they do is they say, just disclose your conflict of interest.
That's just not good enough.
I'm sorry.
That's not good enough.
If you get a stipend from a pharmaceutical company or stuff like that, just putting it as an addendum to the article, that's not good enough.
Where does this...
Years of manipulation of data, years of manipulation of studies by big pharma.
You just say that so blanket, but explain that to me.
I mean, it's not as easy as it means, but when you have, let's say, a paper that has 20 authors, and out of those 20 authors, More than 90% of them are in the payroll of a specific pharmaceutical company that makes the product that you are studying,
that's a conflict.
And the fact that you disclose it, just you say, you know, we are members of this company, that's not good enough.
Well, there's this famous saying that I always forget who it's attributed to.
Maybe it's Mark Twain, that if you're financially motivated to...
See a particular outcome or to not see a particular outcome, then you will tend to go in that direction.
There is no question about it.
You know, throughout the years we have seen all these kind of randomized controlled clinical trials that are funded by particular entities.
That when they start seeing that things are not going their way, they change the outcomes in the middle of the study.
They change the outcomes.
And just explain what that means, they change the outcomes.
So what they look is, you know, you're looking for specific points to show, let's say that a drug works or doesn't work.
And they say, okay, we're going to look at A. But then in the middle of the study they say, you know what, it looks like we're not getting A. So let's change A and make it B. That's not right.
That's not right.
Okay, well, there's still a whole...
A whole lot of papers that are being published across, you know, thousands of scientific journals, some of greater impact, some of less impact.
How do we even know what is good?
Because presumably some of it's still good.
Well, you know, in the past we used to look at the impact factor.
And the impact factor is the number of times that a paper gets referenced in that particular journal.
The problem is that you can even manipulate that.
I can go ahead and write a paper and cite that same journal multiple times.
So that at the end of the year, the impact factor for the journal goes up.
So those are things that are easily manipulated.
And they're not right.
I mean, these are the things that, as a scientist, make me very uncomfortable.
So what's your solution?
I know that this is part of what you're actually trying to do with the Independent Medical...
So what the Independent Medical Alliance has done, as you well know...
We're all about science and advocacy.
That has been our two major things.
What I have been pushing for from the very beginning was the creation of a journal, of an independent journal, a journal that is unbiased.
And you're going to say, well, it's very difficult to get rid of all the biases and conflicts and stuff like that.
But I try to do it as best as I can, trying to keep as transparent as we can.
The things that are particular about the...
Journal of Independent Medicine, which is a journal of the IMA, is that it's a journal that is not sponsored by pharmaceutical industry or any other kind of industry.
It's basically self-funded.
We fund our journal.
It's a journal that accepts all sorts of scientific papers, but we accept them in a way that...
Nobody knows who is the person writing the paper until the very end because I don't want to have any bias.
So we have what I call a double-blinded method.
What that entails is if you send me a paper, and let's say I know Jan is such a nice guy that I know that everything he writes is good, so therefore I'm just going to accept whatever comes with his name.
Well, what I do is I take away your name from the paper.
We actually have a whole system where we remove your name from the...
The papers will remove what institution you are affiliated with.
There is no way to identify you.
No way to identify you whatsoever.
I send that to reviewers, the external peer reviewers, and we have a board of more than 50 people from pretty much all over the world that will look at your paper in a constructive way.
I mean, we're not trying to reject things.
Now, the reviewer doesn't know who you are, and then they give me feedback.
And the feedback is either accept, Except with some changes, requires a lot of changes, I need to see a revision, or definitely reject.
We try to make sure that we include all sorts of topics, even though at the beginning, as you remember, we were mostly COVID.
Now we do pretty much everything.
I am very interested in the use of repurposed drugs, so we encourage the submissions of papers that have to do with repurposed drugs and some of the other things.
You know, we have editorials.
We have original investigations.
We have reviews, systematic and narrative reviews.
Some people want to learn more about a particular medication.
Well, we have those things done.
We also have an area of legal aspects.
I mean, some people have manifested interest in knowing more about the legality of A, B, or C. Well, we have that.
And we have, like, a forum where you can have...
Even people who are not healthcare professionals can submit to you a good paper that may be their own personal experience with the healthcare system.
My goal is to be able to have this journal as an avenue for those scientists that have been censored, have been neglected because they don't follow the narrative, but that have good science to be able to get their papers published.
Dr. Varan, just one quick sec.
We're going to take a break, and we'll be right back, folks.
And we're back with the president of the Independent Medical Alliance, Dr. Joe Varan.
We've interviewed before about this, but for the benefit of our new viewers, I'd love them to understand how it is that you came to be in this role.
Well, I mean, first, as you remember, My background is in six different specialties.
I'm an intensive care doctor, internal medicine, pulmonary emergency medicine.
I have been in administration for quite some period of time of hospital intensive care units and stuff like that.
When the pandemic first hit us, I mean, we have people dying.
We don't know what to do.
So that's when we created the FLCC where Paul Baric, Pierre Corey, myself, you know, they're...
We're talking at 3 o'clock in the morning, coming up with all sorts of ways in which we can fix people.
As the time progresses, I mean, we're using everything that we learned in our patients.
And at some point in time, I don't know if you remember, I worked 715 continuous days taking care of patients.
I mean, every time we heard that something was safe and effective, initially we tried it because we believed the establishment.
We believed that they were telling us the truth.
And then we found the hard way that, you know, some of these things were not safe, were not effective.
I remember the first time that Dr. Fauci says, we have a cure for COVID.
And he had said that, use remdesivir.
Oh, my gosh.
You know, I ran to the first patient we could.
We tried the remdesivir, and the patient didn't do well.
And then the next patient didn't do well.
And we recognized that that was not working.
So on that sense, we started working so much on this alliance.
That we start recognizing that not only the issues that we have are just in COVID, they're everywhere.
And many of us start opening our eyes.
And last year I was asked to take over the presidency and chief medical office of the FLCCC then.
And I said, I'll be happy to do this because it's a passion for me.
I really think that...
If we don't do something about the current state of medicine in our country, we're doomed.
We're really doomed.
And what do you make of the new appointments at HHS and in the sub-agencies and the current approach, which is frankly quite controversial?
Well, to be honest with you, I think that we know what doesn't work because that is what we had before.
So I think that we...
At the minimum, the current administration deserves the benefit of the doubt.
I mean, what do I believe?
I mean, I try to always stay in the middle.
I don't go one side or the other side or one party or the other party.
But there are some things that at least call my attention.
Do I believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism?
The answer is, I don't know.
My kids were vaccinated against that.
But when you start hearing that there are populations out there that don't get vaccinated against things like the Amish population, that they don't have autism, you wonder.
And as a scientist, what I do in science is when I have a question, I study it.
So recently, as you know, RFK instructed the CDC.
To do a study looking at whether or not vaccines cause autism.
Well, what impressed me the most is that immediately following that, the American Academy of Pediatrics said, absolutely not.
We don't need to do a study because we know that they are safe.
I don't know if they are or they're not.
And I know that there are a lot of parents out there that don't know if they are or they're not.
If I was the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, I would say, yes, go ahead, do the study.
Because if indeed we are correct and there is nothing here, At least you're going to put a stop to all of this stuff.
So that's an example of what the current administration is doing, which I think is...
I would applaud that.
I mean, they are now trying to get an area that's going to deal specifically with vaccine-related injury, which, again, it's an area that a lot of my colleagues do not believe that even exists.
And I'm telling you about people that are board certified and, you know, have a bunch of diplomas in their walls.
Yet what I see in my office today, I see more than 50% of patients that come to my office have vaccine-related injuries.
So the efforts of the current administration, I think that they are going the right way.
I want to see the signs so that I can then make an informed opinion as to whether or not, I mean, is there a relationship between A, Because that's what a real doctor should do, not just take things for granted.
And for many years, I took things for granted.
And again, the classic example is when we were told that COVID vaccines were safe and effective.
You know, I was out there advocating the use of vaccines.
I'm sorry, but that's the truth.
And, you know, within a couple of months, I said, hey.
They're not effective because I'm seeing a lot of vaccinated people that are coming to my unit and they are sick, if not sicker than the usual.
And then I started to realize that a lot of people were having side effects, so I said, they're not safe.
And as a thinking human, I changed my mind.
I changed my mind.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
I mean, actually, what annoys me is that a lot of people within the system, they are refusing to change their mind.
It's their way or no way.
They're not willing to even have a discourse or talk with each other to see what's going on.
I mean, I have many conversations with some of my colleagues which were very uncomfortable, as they don't believe in 90% of the things that we do.
How do you explain that 50% of the people in your practice have some form of, I think it's COVID vaccine injury, right?
Is it because they know that you are one of the doctors who can help them?
Is that why?
Well, there are several reasons.
One is that you are correct.
But as you know, I've been featured in more than 4,000 television interviews for the last five years, so I'm very visible and a lot of people have seen that.
I have particularly looked at populations of race, people that will do whatever they're told to.
Those are mostly minorities.
So I have a lot of minorities that come to my office after we have discussed some of the issues that are going on.
And the other thing that you should also remember is that we're truly now going through what I call the real pandemic.
The pandemic that we had before was just COVID.
Now we have a pandemic of people that got vaccinated and are having the side effects related to COVID.
And it's unreal.
I mean, you spend a day with me in my office and you will see.
And the problem is if you come out and say these things, like when I've tried to talk about some of these things in some of the national TV stations, they will ask you...
These questions, and then at the time that the interview comes out, obviously anything that has to do with vaccine-related injury has been deleted from the interview.
Because it's not convenient.
And I'm just telling them what I'm seeing.
I'm not making a point they are good, they're bad.
It's like, look, this is what I'm seeing.
Just to be clear, what makes you so sure that these are COVID vaccine-related injuries?
The first thing that makes me think that this is a vaccine-related injury is the temporal relation to the vaccine.
So most of these patients never have any issues whatsoever.
Nothing. They get the vaccine and within a period of time they start having symptoms.
I mean, that's the first.
Then we look at surrogates of spike protein, so the spike protein antibodies.
And when you start seeing somebody that has symptoms and spike protein antibodies more than 25,000 or so, it should be less than 0.8, the normal one.
More than 25,000, you say, hmm, this is probably right.
But what actually confirms it is when we use some of the therapeutic modalities that we have developed at the IMA, and patients start getting better, so then you have confirmed the diagnosis and you have confirmed the effectiveness of what you're doing.
And it's very rewarding.
As a healthcare provider, sometimes I tell my patients, this is what I went to medical school for.
The average patient that I see in my office has been seen by anywhere between 15 and 20 doctors before they come to me, of which two of them are probably psychiatrists or psychologists because people think that they're crazy and they're making things up.
So when you have the opportunity to work with these people and make them better, that's the best kind of pavement that I can have.
You know, I want to touch a little bit on conflicts or related things.
I mean, FLCCC and now IMA is known for being very pro-ivermectin.
I mean, that's, of course, part of how it's been portrayed, even negatively, right?
Would it be possible for your journal to say anything bad about ivermectin?
It could be if we find it, but so far we have not found it.
I mean, we stumbled upon ivermectin, and we found that it's good.
Not just for COVID, but some other things.
I had a patient that drove from Nebraska to Texas to see me recently, that she had an unusual illness, had been treated by many, many doctors.
Nobody could figure out anything.
And she came to see me just because she wanted to have some ivermectin prophylactically.
So we put her on prophylactic ivermectin so that whenever she traveled and stuff like that, it was quote-unquote protective.
Within two weeks she calls me and says,"I've never felt this good in my life." I said,"What do you mean?""Yeah, I mean, you know, I've tried all these other medications for her primary illness.
No improvement." She's using the ivermectin for other reasons and she feels better.
So I put her on ivermectin and this is a woman that was almost bed bound.
Now she's doing a perfectly normal life.
What I'm saying is there's enough power here that...
We have seen some cases of people that are doing well with ivermectin for cancer that either you use it as a secondary agent, like a complementary agent, or let's do a study.
I mean, let's see if this really makes a difference.
Well, and as I understand it, there are studies that actually do show positive action of ivermectin for cancer, which nobody knew about.
I mean, I knew about it as a river...
Blindness drug, of course, you know, won a Nobel Prize for that, right?
But, you know, it's a drug that, as you know, is one of the top ten drugs in the World Health Organization's emergency list of drugs.
When there are catastrophes, one of those drugs is ivermectin.
Ivermectin has been safely given to four billion people around the world.
I mean, it's safer than an aspirin.
I actually am encouraged to see that some of the states are now thinking about Giving it over-the-counter if you need to.
And there is nothing wrong.
You know, I come from Mexico.
In Mexico, kids get deparasited.
I mean, they take antiparasitic medications once a month or so, stuff like that.
And they sell these medications without prescription, without anything.
And nobody gets into major trouble.
But, again, as a scientist, I would like to see some good scientific data that shows it.
But just like it was mentioned this morning, there is no money on that.
See, there is no big pharmaceutical company that's going to come and make a lot of money out of doing a study, so there is no funding for these kinds of studies.
Hopefully now, with the new NIH director, we'll be able to fund some of these studies for these repurposed drugs that are really going to cut on cost of healthcare expenses.
Well, Dr. Verón, this has been a fascinating interview.
Any final thoughts as we finish up?
I mean, again, the goal of the Independent Medical Alliance is to get to the root of this and see if we can modify these variables so that we can have a healthier America.
I know it's difficult.
I'm actually feeling good about it.
Time in history where we can make a change.
And that's the goal.
Well, Dr. Joe Varan, it's such a pleasure having you on again.
It's a pleasure, yeah.
Thank you all for joining Dr. Joe Varan and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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