Five years later: Recalling my own reporting on the triumphantly dishonest pharmaceutical industry (part 1)
If you're suddenly doubting someone whose judgments you've long respected, you may be misidentifying the person whose mind has drifted
First, a factoid for those who have been semi-sentient news consumers since at least 2003, especially Democrats: Robert Reich, a Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton and a nonstop pounder of the “income equality sucks” drum ever since, now thinks warmonger (and thus inflation-supporter) Liz Cheney is a fantastic choice for POTUS.
That might not seem germane to what appears below, but this clip should. It’s from April 9 of last year, when Rachel Maddow spent eleven minutes browbeating, shaming, and lying to the American public about the coronavirus vaccines, thereby serving as a babbling but highly effective advertisement for various drug-makers as well as a guided rhetorical weapon for the U.S. regime.
Maddow gets paid around $100,000 per episode to smirk and lie like the foul human being she is, all while portraying herself as an especially good person: She got vaccinated despite her own fear of needles and general reluctance! Be a hero like Rachel!
I’m assuming that even the most partisan meatheads can now admit to themselves that Maddow was lying her ass off in that soliloquy (as she does nightly), even if they won’t admit it out loud. If you can’t agree with this much, there’s something wrong with you that isn’t your fault—if Maddow can say that, so can I—and you might as well stop reading, not just this post but every word I type about anything. Even if you despise what I believe to be eminently defensible characterizations of people who actively damage the morale of millions of viewers at a pop using pure misinformation as a hammer, Maddow was lying.
And that makes Rachel Maddow as much as a public menace as superbuffoon Alex Jones—whose worst lies, however vicious, are at least obviously untrue—or any other high-visibility liar-for-gain. Anyone who does this is either a sociopath or behaving like one thanks to its effect on their bank account, and I no longer agonize over possible moral distinctions between these dark inner states.
Almost five years ago, I wrote an article for the Boulder Weekly about a drug called Vivitrol (generic name naltrexone; also a shot) made by Alkermes Pharmaceuticals. I was coming up on one year alcohol-free and reflecting on my experiences at the local detox, which at last notice was an administrative, personnel, and clinical shambles and surely still is.
I’m asking you to read this piece for two related reasons: One, the experience of writing it and the events of the intervening years, especially the last two, are major contributors to my fury at both the shameless deviance of the pharmaceutical industry and the inability of the public to accept how bad it is despite constantly yelling “Big Pharma Bad!” along with every other superficially engaged yutz. And two, you won’t understand my next post on this topic without having done so unless you want to flit back and forth between tabs or wind up trash-canning the post mostly unread.
In those same five years, as the media’s lies and exhortations to despise the opposition have ramped up and worked beautifully to divide Americans, I’ve noticed a stark disconnect between people’s stated trust of institutions, per polling, and what they actually believe, per social media and angry e-mails.
As much as even Democrats agree that the media and the Democratic-“controlled” government are both wrecks, they double down on claims from both sources no matter how laughably perilous those claims are. Shows like talking potato Brian Steltzer’s just-cancelled and hilariously named CNN drumbeat-for-neocons Reliable Sources have clearly done their job of convincing rapt viewers that it’s other media that are spreading the misinformation. And instead of the sudden presence of a growing army of former CIA and FBI officials now populating liberal-media broadcasts, which should alarm truth-tropic viewers, this development has worked to reassure the same rapt audience that the government is doing just fine.
Not only are people willing to trust these sources despite a part of their beleaguered brains often grasping as much, they’re willing to trust them over people they know whose supposed smarts they have long admired and boasted about to their friends.
I consider myself to be fairly adept at math. I scored an 800 on the math portion of the SAT back when that was impressive. I got a degree in physics (with one of my minors in mathematics). And I absolutely aced—and loved—the biostats and epidemiology course I took in medical school. I know how to parse more than what the abstract of a study says. I worked as a research assistant on a clinical study centering on glucose metabolism at the University of California-San Francisco in 2004. I know how researchers game numbers in their favor (not at UCSF, at least not in my experience). For decades, I’ve relied on maintaining proficiency in basic statistics in my writing and tutoring.
Of course, you can use the fact that I didn’t finish medical school as prima facie evidence that anything Anthony Fauci, M.D. (who’s resigning! What superb comic timing!) says is to be trusted over anything I say, no matter how many other people point out that Fauci is lying and describe how the historical record makes this fact undeniable. I think that’s trending toward intellectual dishonesty. (Also, isn’t my education closer to his than yours?) You can use the fact—one apparently unbeknownst to you all those years you were referring people to my written opinions—that I am not an expert on everything (true!) as an excuse to rebel against my ideas when they conflict with those of your preferred cable-television yapperheads, who make millions of dollars from lying to you.
You can ignore everything you’ve seen with your own eyes over the past couple of years, and you can even ignore that The New York Times is signaling that it’s okay for people to start saying things that—along with other kinds of “misinformation”—got the accounts of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter users demonetized or banned by faceless bitch-ass censors until quite recently. (Those platforms are still banning other narratives that will become mainstream in their own time, after even the intentionally misled and confused American public eventually wises up to the point at which citizen enlightenment reaches a critical mass and disallows broad continuation of the same dishonest narratives.)
After you read the Vivitrol article, you’ll better understand just how openly deceitful drugmakers are in touting the nonexistent efficacy of their products even when they have to admit they don’t work on the extended, for-providers package insert. You will perhaps have a better idea of why you shouldn’t respond to points I make with “but the statistics” when you don’t understand what those numbers refer to or how they are derived.
Concerning the coronavirus vaccines, I’ll remind you I got the Maddowian “one-and-done” (See? I’m the consistent one) shot last June and have not complained of ill effects. I don’t have to believe that the vaccines are especially dangerous—although they could be, as they invoke new nucleic-acid technology that was curiously under-emphasized during the first and subsequent jab-rollouts—to believe that they are, considering what everyone pushing them promised, a categorical failure. Or to be as generous as I can be, forced (in some cases literally) on enormous numbers of people who didn’t need whatever brief protection they may have conferred.
Every single person reading this knows that drug companies both market flatly ineffective products and push even effective drugs on people who don’t need them. Instead of not eating a huge Mexican meal at 10:00 p.m., take a Zantac so you don’t get heartburn thanks to your failed esophagus. If your life is a wreck thanks to a dead-end banal job and a marriage to match, maybe with a drinking problem tacked on to complete the American picture, you first need to fix your serotonin levels. If you’re 75 and your wife doesn’t want to have sex anymore because it hurts, grab some Viagra and insist on plowing away into sandpaper anyway while your partner whimpers and waits three to seven minutes for it to be over, wondering how or even if she had ever in her life enjoyed this type of game.
Why is it so hard to believe that these vaccines have been vastly oversold?
I left out a bunch of stuff, like the CDC admitting many moons ago that it wasn’t publishing all its data, the whistleblowers from the various vaccine trials who described the suppression of inconvenient data and other high-scale shenanigans, and Walensky’s comments from over a year ago about the vaccines not helping to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
Also, hey, I’m willing to concede any “the stats show” rebuttals anyone wants to make as long as you can explain how those numbers were obtained. If terms like “effect size” are foreign to you, then you might not have a clue. If you can’t see how researchers simply create patient categories to suit whatever conclusions pro-drug the data seems to best support—as the Alkermes deviants blatantly did with Vivitrol—then you might be out of your depth. As an innumerate, you may turn out to be right when arguing with someone who understands statistics, but it won’t be because of any reasoning process you’ve undertaken.
Why do Reich and The Washington Post support Lize (ouch!) Liz Cheney? Two (big) reasons. One, they require the continuation of the current neoliberal regime, which is perfectly okay with either a Democrat or a Republican as POTUS long as the script doesn’t change—and Cheney is the perfect heir apparent. And two, these representatives of the political establishment know that all it takes for most Democrats to support someone is for that person to vocally oppose Donald Trump “from within.” That’s literally all it takes. It worked with obvious scumbag Michael Avenatti for longer than it should have, and it will continue working for as long as well-intentioned Democrats remain glued to their propaganda outlets of choice.
I really think this explains why so many people are unwilling to accept the obvious: Somehow, Donald Trump even in exile represents a bigger threat to American life than the people in authority now energetically and conspicuously dismantling it. The President of the United States is practically dead and demonstrates the thinking powers of a squirrel in most public appearances. (I don’t feel bad for him—he was an illiberal prick for decades before his brain went to porridge.) But because Donald Trump is associated with millions or at least dozens of active white supremacists, and because textbooks from decades ago treated the experience of human enslavement as a lark, and because people who tend to die of otherwise mild respiratory ailments are dying from this new one too, standing behind everything any Democratic politician, operative, or pundit says is a requirement for establishing being on the right side of everything.
It’s not only easier to mistrust the entire machine, it also leads to being more informed. I’m slowly getting around to a post about some great alternative news sources; most are hard to find by mere Googling (did I mention what company owns YouTube?).
Americans are fond of waxing aghast about how citizens of China, Russia, and Muslim-dominant countries have no access to legitimate information. If you think things are materially different here, you’re blind. I don’t hate you for it, because I am just as organically susceptible to most of this nonsense as anyone else if I stand in the path of the cannon of dishonesties; I just have less need to belong to a tribe, I guess.
But it feels like hatred a lot of the time, because the number of people with whom I can have honest conversations that don’t end in strife and turmoil is shrinking. I don’t hate people; I hate how easy it is to load their neural machinery with cognition-programs rich in bugs and viruses. And I hate my own inability to deal gracefully with any of it and retreat into some niche where I can pretend none of it is happening. Even if I choose to survive for as long as I can, it won’t be that long.