Of all the antiviral drugs for Covid-19, Pfizer’s Paxlovid has been the most successful. Not for its safety and efficacy, but for its ability to earn the company billions in profits despite being largely ineffective for most people.
In my opinion, the healthcare system in this country is currently on life support. The level of trust is lower than it’s been in at least 50 years and deservedly so. While many probably believe that the negative impact on the healthcare system’s reputation is based on the nation’s Covid response, I will endeavor to provide, from the perspective of a retired physician and patient, a roadmap that brings all of the elements of the healthcare system together to explain how the disastrous Covid response merely highlighted the rot, rather than being its cause.
A Retired Physician’s View of American Healthcare Read Journal Article
The unholy alliance between Big Pharma and the FDA and Federal Government is truly breathtaking to behold. Unfortunately, its nature is so arcane and obscure that only a few notice this, other than those who benefit from it and keep their lips shut. To unpack this we must explore a few separate but interrelated issues.
Patents, Pharma, Government: The Unholy Alliance Read Journal Article
This report is not a medical study or conclusive document. It presents various ideas and concerns shared by so-called “Covid dissidents” who, from the beginning, were concerned that our pandemic response was causing more harm than Covid-19 itself. No doubt there are other relevant points, and points of view, that are missing from this collection, but it’s a start. My hope is that this book will lead to thoughtful consideration, fruitful conversations, and the pursuit of additional knowledge.
A perverse incentive is when the rules, structures, or practices of any system reward bad behavior or sociopathic outcomes. I had to come up with my own definition because all of the official definitions claim that perverse incentives are unintended. However, after the events of the last four years many of us have grown skeptical that the harms we experience from bad policy and bad law are unintentional.
This ruling, to be actioned by potentially corrupt scientists, health bureaucrats, and captured health and drug regulators, is another step toward a dystopian future unimaginable just five years ago. No doubt the infrastructure to implement this decree is already being constructed by the same groupthink cultists responsible for the nightmarish pandemic lockdowns, continuing to place the pursuit of profit and the greater good above individual choice, bodily autonomy, and informed consent.
Right now, Pfizer/Bio-n-Tech is running an ongoing clinical trial to test the effectiveness of its shots (the shot is not a vaccine as it does not prevent catching the virus or transmitting the virus as typical vaccines do) on kids. Pfizer has been running radio and other ads looking for test subjects.
The US sold its citizens’ right to jury trials to the country’s largest lobbying force, and Americans now bear the costs after Pharma cashed record profits. The PREP Act, a 2005 statute invoked by HHS Secretary Alex Azar at the onset of the pandemic, guarantees immunity “with respect to all claims caused by, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the administration to or the use by an individual of a covered countermeasure,” including mRNA vaccines.
The PREP Act Swallowed the Bill of Rights Read Journal Article
There is no scientific agency outside the Ministry of Health that has flexibility and the capacity to undertake autonomous, long-term monitoring and research in nutrition, diet and health. There is no independent, autonomous, public health research facility with sufficient long-term funding to translate dietary and nutritional evidence into policy, particularly if it contradicted current policy positions.
The Silent Shame of Health Institutions Read Journal Article
With media shying away from publishing views critical of the WHO and its pharma sponsors, our politicians remain naively blind to the web of ulterior, vested motivations driving the restructuring of global public health. But with one set of actors coming to the table with clean hands — no undisclosed financial incentives nor purse strings pulled by profit-driven corporations — and the other with hands stained by pharmaceutical profits and dancing to the tune of undisclosed funders, who would the public trust were they only to be fed the facts?
Health insurance needs a new pricing structure that is not based on a one-size-fits-all model that it is now. Health and therefore healthcare expense is highly tuned to individual choice. We need more information about the best choices, and that information can only come to us once the specialists who know the data are allowed to impact pricing structures in ways they currently cannot.
Public health has come into its own over the past few years; a once-backwater profession now promoted to be the arbiters of liberty and human relationships. Outbreaks of diseases associated with death at an average age of about 80, or even purely hypothetical, are now sufficient reason to close workplaces, close schools, upend economies and convince people to turn on their noncompliant neighbors. The result, while impoverishing the many, has driven an unprecedented concentration of wealth.
