It's all turning to crap — including medicine and public health

10 July 2021

COVID illuminated the (literally murderous) corruption . . .

. . . at the heart of US plutocracy. Corporatism and Government malefeasance drove the lack of preparation for a pandemic that national security certainly foresaw, but did absolutely nothing about.

And once people began dying in noticeable numbers, Big Pharma twisted America's public health apparatus into putting its confidence in the production of expensive, novel vaccines and completely useless drugs like Remdesivir.

All this, while simultaneously ignoring the possibilities for low-cost, early infection treatment (of SARS-CoV-2) that a handful (of already proven safe generic drugs) look to have offered. Supposedly 'advanced' nations left it to the impoverished third world to give those generics arguably successful tries.

The entirety of American culture was turned on its head, so as to profit Corporate America and Big Government at everyone else's expense.

I have made these points repeatedly, during the last year

So has Peak Prosperity's Dr. Chris Martenson. Most recently here:

Fauci has destroyed faith in science.

The FDA and NIH have diminished people’s faith in medicines and treatments, respectively.

This is a terrible direction in which to head –– once a society loses its ability to trust its main institutions and authorities, bad things follow.

We cannot consider this to be accidental any longer.

Most of the public is unaware of these medical and public health shortcomings . . .

. . . being, for the most part, scientifically illiterate.

And the US press actively supports America's hoodwinking. Our lamestream combines corporate-sponsored malevolence with astonishing reportorial ignorance.

Falsified medical research has gotten so bad . . .

. . . that a recent editorial in BMJ (a prominent medical journal) warned against perennial falsity in 'studies':

Research fraud is often viewed as a problem of “bad apples,” but Barbara K Redman, who spoke at the webinar insists that it is not a problem of bad apples but bad barrels if not, she said, of rotten forests or orchards.

In her book Research Misconduct Policy in Biomedicine: Beyond the Bad-Apple Approach she argues that research misconduct is a systems problem—the system provides incentives to publish fraudulent research and does not have adequate regulatory processes.

Researchers progress by publishing research, and because the publication system is built on trust and peer review is not designed to detect fraud it is easy to publish fraudulent research.

The business model of journals and publishers depends on publishing, preferably lots of studies as cheaply as possible. They have little incentive to check for fraud and a positive disincentive to experience reputational damage—and possibly legal risk—from retracting studies.

Funders, universities, and other research institutions similarly have incentives to fund and publish studies and disincentives to make a fuss about fraudulent research they may have funded or had undertaken in their institution—perhaps by one of their star researchers.

Regulators often lack the legal standing and the resources to respond to what is clearly extensive fraud, recognising that proving a study to be fraudulent (as opposed to suspecting it of being fraudulent) is a skilled, complex, and time-consuming process.

Everybody gains from the publication game, concluded Roberts, apart from the patients who suffer from being given treatments based on fraudulent data.

[W]e are realising that the problem is huge, the system encourages fraud, and we have no adequate way to respond.

It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary.

Reason magazine provided a lay overview . . .

. . . of the fraud problem:

Fraud may be rampant in biomedical research.

In his famous 2005 article, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," Stanford University biostatistician John Ioannidis cited conflicts of interest as one factor driving the generation of false positives but also did not suggest that actual research fraud was a big problem.

How bad is the false-positive problem in scientific research?

As I earlier reported, a 2015 editorial in The Lancet observed that "much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue."

A 2015 British Academy of Medical Sciences report suggested that the false discovery rate in some areas of biomedicine could be as high as 69 percent.

In an email exchange with me, Ioannidis estimated that the nonreplication rates in biomedical observational and preclinical studies could be as high as 90 percent.

The moral? — Corporate-sponsored corruption is picking up gargantuan steam

'Developed' world culture tends more and more toward morality-denying greed and profit-seeking deviousness.

The fabric of civilization now seems to almost entirely be founded upon lies, baseless propaganda and the interminable distortion of facts.

We, my friends, exist only to serve Corporatism's maws. Educate yourselves, to the degree that you can.

In a world in which Truth has been banned as matter of political policy, it would nevertheless benefit us (as individuals) to continue seeking it out.

PeteFree.com

It's all turning to crap — including medicine and public health