The Epistemic Corruption of Biomedical Science

Note: this article is a highly condensed version of a chapter written for Fear and Loathing in the Pandemic: Propaganda and Misinformation during Covid-19, edited by Colin Alexander.

Health sciences today all too often function as a sophisticated propaganda system for pharmaceutical products, as the Covid‑19 vaccine rollout showed on an unprecedented scale. Since at least the 1980s, scientific institutions, journals, regulators, and mainstream news media have been gradually restructured to align knowledge production, communication, and censorship with corporate interests. This is an argument not against biomedical science but for a science of integrity, honesty, and humanity.

The Blind Spot of Science Studies

Science was once idealized as a norm-governed route to truth, corrected by peer review and open debate – though those norms were always aspirational.^, The “critical turn” in science studies, from Thomas Kuhn’s account of how proponents of dominant paradigms decide what counts as legitimate evidence and dismiss anomalies to Thomas Gieryn’s examination of how scientists marginalize unwelcome challengers, recast science as a social practice shaped by institutions, interests, and power.^,

Yet the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that emerged from this turn has largely ignored the most consequential force on science today: commercial interests. The field has said remarkably little about how actors with concentrated material stakes gain leverage over chokepoints in the research pipeline – funding, design, data, publication, dissemination, retraction – and steer what gets studied, which “knowledge” reaches the public, and what becomes scientific fact and consensus. The field has preferred deconstructing scientific truth to studying its hijacking and destruction by corporate and financial interests.

Epistemic Corruption, Propaganda and Institutional Capture

One prominent exception is STS scholar Sergio Sismondo, who has written widely about how pharmaceutical companies built a vast, industry-controlled pipeline of knowledge production that underpins medical practice. He calls the result “epistemic corruption:” a knowledge system that “loses integrity, ceasing to provide the kinds of trusted knowledge expected of it,” because it has been co‑opted by interests at odds with its central goals.

Unlike bribery or vote-rigging, epistemic corruption arises from dense financial, organizational, and reputational dependencies linking universities, journals, regulators, clinicians, and industry – all of it legal. Science thus becomes less an impartial arbiter of truth than part of a propaganda apparatus through which dominant actors frame problems, filter evidence, and orchestrate consent.

One lynchpin is “ghost management,” in which companies shape every step of the research-to-publication pipeline, with nominally independent academics serving as front‑stage “authors.” This misrepresentation of source is a tacit admission by the real source of its own limited credibility.

Epistemic corruption also shapes which scientific “advances” the news media publicize and which they ignore. Most remarkable is not the corporate influence itself but how thoroughly generations of highly intelligent scientists and physicians have accepted and normalized it. The rare scientists who protest risk career suicide, are branded heretics, and publicly character-assassinated, so the problem seldom penetrates mainstream news coverage.

Regulators have come to serve industry rather than the public, bound to manufacturers through user fees, public–private partnerships, and revolving‑door employment.^, The same revolving door spins between journalism, public relations, media regulators, politics, and lobbying, helping explain how a hegemonic coalition forms and holds power. When industry fees fund most of a regulator’s budget, fast approvals please paying customers while rigorous scrutiny invites backlash. Regulators let companies test drugs against subtherapeutic comparators, switch primary outcomes after the fact, and report results selectively – practices that would be flagged as manipulative in non-commercial research.

Peer-reviewers, the supposed guardians of scientific quality, are themselves deeply entangled with industry. A recent JAMA study found almost sixty percent of peer-reviewers for leading medical journals received payments from drug and device manufacturers, totaling US$1.06 billion between 2020 and 2022. Journals scrutinize authors’ conflicts of interest but rarely reviewers’, opening an opaque channel for industry influence over what gets published and how rigorously it is vetted. 

Industry ties shape findings too: in research on mercury and autism, 86 percent of industry-affiliated studies found no association, compared with 21 percent of unaffiliated studies. Medical journals depend on advertising revenue and the prestige of industry-sponsored research; the Lancet’s editor Richard Horton conceded they had “devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” When conflicts of interest pervade gatekeeping institutions, the appearance of neutral science becomes the very medium through which propaganda operates.

The results are well documented: routinely concealed harms; repeated convictions meeting official definitions of organized crime; and whole narratives – from the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression to the benefits of Tamiflu – that proved false or radically overstated.^,,, Selective publication does much of the work: of 36 antidepressant trials the FDA judged negative, only 8 percent were published as negative and 31 percent were spun as positive, so 94 percent of published trials appeared positive, against 51 percent in the FDA’s full data. More broadly, diseases are redefined to expand markets, mild symptoms pathologized, and drugs of minimal efficacy marketed as breakthroughs.

Covid‑19 Vaccines: Manufacturing Consensus under Emergency Conditions

Vaccination is framed simultaneously as a medical intervention, a moral duty, and a pillar of national security, making vaccine science especially susceptible to epistemic corruption and propagandistic deployment. Its history includes ethically questionable experimentation on vulnerable populations, retracted vaccine-safety papers, and harmful products such as Dengvaxia in the Philippines. Yet mainstream narratives present vaccination as an unquestionable success story, with adverse events deemed vanishingly rare and methodological critiques dismissed as fringe or conspiratorial. 

Doctors and scientists who question vaccine safety or policy face defamatory labeling, deplatforming, grant denials, and strategic retractions, so the apparent consensus may be, in significant part, an artifact of censorship and self‑censorship. During the Covid‑19 vaccine rollout, corrupted epistemic structures and manipulative communication reinforced one another in an integrated propaganda system.

Regulatory capture at warp speed. Development timelines of ten or more years were compressed to about ten months under the sci-fi inspired slogan “Operation Warp Speed,” led in the US by a military general and a retired pharma executive. Although mRNA vaccines fit the definition of gene therapy medicinal products, a loophole exempted them from the additional testing such products require. Regulators, governments, and most journalists ignored whistleblowers with serious concerns. Regulators approved major production changes without rechecking safety or efficacy, and relaxed purity standards to allow approval.

The upscaled process has since been shown to introduce DNA contamination far above regulatory limits – in tests the regulators neglected to perform themselves. And while the vaccines were still labeled “investigational” when most people received them, emergency authorization was represented as settled science.

Trials built to impress. Pfizer trial data show an average follow-up of just 97 days before placebo recipients were unblinded and offered the vaccine – effectively ending the trial after about three months. There were too few hospitalizations or deaths to show efficacy against severe outcomes, and the absolute risk reduction for PCR-confirmed illness was under 1.5 percentage points, while headlines painted a distorted picture by trumpeting a relative risk reduction of 95 percent. Later analyses highlighted protocol deviations and opaque handling of suspected adverse events – unsurprising when trials are funded, analyzed, and written up by the sponsors themselves.

Harms hidden in plain sight. There is evidence of cover-ups of debilitating adverse events among trial participants. Pfizer participants Augusto Roux and 12‑year‑old Maddie de Garay suffered severe reactions; Pfizer effectively denied causality, dismissed their symptoms as psychological and downplayed their reactions in trial reports. AstraZeneca participant Brianne Dressen’s injuries were omitted from the published trial report.

A re-analysis of the original trial data found an excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest of 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated. The CDC waited 16 months – long after most people had received multiple doses – to first analyze its adverse event reports, which revealed hundreds of alarming signals that remain publicly unacknowledged. With over 4,500 published papers now documenting adverse events following vaccination, the continued refrain of “safe and effective” is best understood as propaganda.

Folk devils and fear. Public messaging descended into moral panic, with the unvaccinated cast as a “folk devil.” German officials spoke of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and portrayed them as conspiracy-minded, dirty, or lacking competence. Across 21 countries, antipathy towards the unvaccinated was more than double that towards the next most vilified group, migrants from the Middle East. UK campaigns branded legitimate uncertainty as “myth or misinformation,” and some rhetoric equated anti-mandate groups with “domestic terrorists.”^, Fear appeals, a classic propaganda tactic, dominated. Meanwhile, social media groups of people with severe adverse events were deleted or censored, and doctors raising legitimate concerns were silenced.

Silencing the experts. When my colleagues and I interviewed prominent scientists and doctors who disagreed with the establishment position on Covid‑19, they reported not only social media censorship but dismissals, loss of honors and positions, coordinated attacks on their credibility, and unprecedented publication barriers and retractions. Later revelations of a massive government-led effort to censor online information about vaccine safety – even correct information – validated their experiences. These experts, along with people reporting vaccine injuries, were universally vilified in the mainstream media.

Conclusion

In large sectors of contemporary biomedicine, science functions less as open, critical inquiry than as a hybrid of research and marketing serving profit-making interests. Normative pressure keeps most scientists from breaking ranks, and a culture that offers little preparation for illness and death leaves frightened patients all the more willing to defer. If one needs to be able to identify propaganda before analyzing it, the Covid‑19 vaccination campaign showed how blind people are to the propaganda permeating biomedical science – even people who are normally suspicious of monied interests. 

Recovering trust requires separating commercial and regulatory functions, enforceable trial transparency, strict conflict-of-interest rules, and real protection for dissent. Without such changes, calls to “trust the science” risk becoming little more than invitations to submit to one of the most elaborate and powerful propaganda systems yet devised.