American Thought Leaders - Sharyl Attkisson: My Investigations of Medical Cover-Ups and Pharma Scandals

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist and the Emmy Award-winning host of “Full Measure.” She is also the author of several books, including, most recently, “Follow The Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails.”“Why am I as a non-medical reporter unearthing stories that this whole industry of medical and science reporters are not unearthing?” she asks.In this episode, we dive into the problem of scientific and medical corruption, and how Attkisson’s eyes were opened to the dangers of blindly believing every establishment narrative about our health.“The federal government/pharmaceutical industry have learned how to take our taxpayer money, legally launder them through universities—public and private, who then say they don’t have to reply to your FOIA requests or turn over any data, who then put out studies that are little more than narratives and propaganda that go unchallenged,” says Attkisson.“The health of the individual and their informed consent is far paramount to what you think you are doing for the good of mankind. You don’t have the right, as a researcher, to say, ‘I can sacrifice this child or I can sacrifice something about informed consent because I think I have a more noble goal.’ That’s not your right.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The federal government slash pharmaceutical industry have learned how to take our taxpayer money, legally launder them through universities, public and private, who then say they don't have to reply to your FOIA requests or turn over any data, who then put out studies that are little more than narratives and propaganda that go unchallenged. Cheryl Atkeson is an Emmy award-winning TV correspondent, investigative journalist, and author of several books, including most recently, Follow the Science, How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails. Why am I, as a non-medical reporter, unearthing stories that this whole industry of medical and science reporters are not unearthing?

The health of the individual and their informed consent is far paramount to what you think you are doing for the good of mankind. You don't have the right as a researcher to say, I can sacrifice this child or I can sacrifice something about informed consent because I think I have a more noble goal. That's not your right. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of this podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse, job numbers are a lot worse than previously forecast,

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Cheryl Atkison, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Good to be here. Thanks. So Cheryl, you've been looking at health in America for decades now. I've seen a lot of data now that shows that health outcomes for Americans, certainly, and actually this extends beyond America to Canada, my home country, have been going down, right, while we spend more and more on health care. And so can you give me a picture of that reality? I think I'm like a lot of people where my starting point 25, 30 years ago was a lot

of faith in the medical establishment, doctors, federal health agencies, studies, you know, not really questioning anything and thinking this stuff was fairly pure and above board, didn't put much thought into it at all. And then I was assigned to cover a couple of controversies, medical scandals for CBS News, not as a medical reporter, as an investigative reporter. So I came sort of as an outsider and began to notice some commonalities with other scandals, like government corruption scandals.

There were whistleblowers. There were financial interests. There were conflicts of interest. And the more I began researching things that I thought I knew about, though maybe I hadn't researched, and realized there was evidence, very strong evidence, often to the contrary, of what we've been told our whole lives about various medical issues, I started to realize there was a lot more than meets the eye and that there could be some really significant information to unearth in the health and medical realm. And you started breaking some pretty significant stories. The smallpox vaccine, I think that's something you covered quite a bit. It was something that turned out wasn't a very good product and got withdrawn. Tell me a little bit about the process of figuring that out. Well, as a journalist, I've worked really hard over the years when I go into a story, as we all do, with preconceived ideas of what we think we know, but to identify experts and open my mind and learn. And sometimes you are just gobsmacked by something that's contrary to what you thought.

So I've spent a lot of time making sure I could get informed and leave my own preconceived notions behind on important issues, whether it's health and medical issues or other. But here I'm speaking of health and medical. With the smallpox vaccine program, I think the first eye opener was they were going to resume the program after 9-11 to vaccinate people for smallpox in case the terrorists would use this as a biological weapon, even though we had no outbreak. But experts at the time were saying things to me like, well, this is a toxic vaccine and we have to be careful. And I'm, I remember thinking toxic vaccine.

I thought the smallpox vaccine saved the world. What are you talking about? Learned a lot about side effects and why that vaccine was considered more problematic, perhaps in other routine vaccines. And that's just an accepted fact. And ultimately they halted the program because as they tried to start this vaccine program with first responders and they were going to expand it, people didn't want the shots.

There were cases of heart inflammation and blood clots and so on. Sounds familiar. My child was fully vaccinated. I had more than my share, especially being able to travel with the military on assignments for CBS News. And I realized I had not put much thought into these products and what was happening behind the scenes in terms of toxicity at times, and then cover-ups on the part of government and certain leaders who were affiliated with the vaccine and pharmaceutical industry.

One of my first stories I thought was also fascinating, I broke the story of Viagra causing blindness. The possibility, a study arose that there could be blindness linked to Viagra, and I did a little bit of investigation, like I would do a normal non-health related story, and I found a clear pattern of adverse event reports that leaned toward not only blindness, but deafness as well. I spoke to some experts, I found a clear pattern of adverse event reports that leaned toward not only blindness but deafness as well.

I spoke to some experts. I found some studies. And as luck would have it, as I was preparing the story for air, shockingly the FDA actually acknowledged to me before my story aired that they were negotiating with the drug maker at the time to put a warning label about the blindness on Viagra. So I didn't even have to fight the FDA as to what the truth was, they were acknowledging it. So, and with that story I realized,

why am I as a non-medical reporter unearthing stories that this whole industry of medical and science reporters are not unearthing? Why are the drug companies and the government not on the front line of alerting us to some of these dangers that you'd think they would be on the cutting edge of alerting us to? And why, as I discovered, is it so often a doctor outside the specialty who's looking at patterns and unearthing side

effects that the specialists who are prescribing the drugs aren't unearthing and exposing themselves? I think you dedicate a chapter, a significant portion, to the findings of Tyrone Hayes, and looking at how certain chemicals in water seem to be affecting the development of frogs or tadpoles. And the astonishing reaction. I call him the frog professor in that chapter. And it's a fascinating story because over 25 years ago, this man was hired by a chemical company to study a chemical that sadly is in most of our drinking water now. It's run off from crops, used on a lot of corn. The company was hoping to prove it was safe and not causing problems because the EPA was going to be analyzing it and taking a look at regulations. And unfortunately for him, he found it was feminizing, in

his words, frogs. Taking frogs that were male and turning them in essence into female or having frogs not develop testes or develop both testes and ovaries at the same time. And a host of other research has built upon this. It turns out it impacts all vertebrates basically in some form in negative ways, many different ways besides this feminization. But what happened to him when he tried to simply report what he had learned, I think is a lesson for all of us to how studies and science is skewed today, are skewed today, because the company had a buttoned down contract. He wasn't allowed to

report the negative findings. And people don't realize pharmaceutical industry hires academics, but the contracts now will say, in essence, if you find something negative, you can't publish it. Used to be everything got published. So to his credit, he went independent. He quit that job, repeated the research independently so that he could publish it. And again, it's been built on over the years with a lot of powerful research. But what the company did to try to destroy him, the tactics that they deployed to try to get him fired, to controversialize his research, investigate him, investigate his wife, psychoanalyze him. And this was all confirmed with documents that were released as part of a lawsuit.

When the company was sued over allegedly adulterating water in various cities, they paid a huge settlement without admitting fault. But I think it's an instructive lesson in what happens. They paid a huge settlement without admitting fault. But I think it's an instructive lesson in what happens to you as a researcher if you unfortunately happen to be off the narrative of what powerful interests may want you to find, how you can suffer and pay the price for that. I think we have a bit of that sort of idealized view of, or at least have had an overly idealized view of research as being kind of something pure. And of course, one would want to keep it that way at some level. But tell me a little bit about the general picture then. Well, sadly, the scientific industry has been so corrupted by money sources that even the people that you'd like to think

would defend, for example, the scientific journals, have thrown up their hands and said much or most of the science printed in the journals that your doctor relies on today is not to be believed because it's been so corrupted. And I was stunned because I'm one of those people that used to think, hey, you read something and it's in a peer-reviewed, published journal. Everybody always says, that's the gold standard, that's it. Come to find out, Dr. Marsha Angel, former head of the New England Journal of Medicine, said that it's problematic, that she said she learned as editor-in-chief she could not

stop the bad studies with the bad information in them that were hopelessly tainted by the pharmaceutical industry. She said she lost that battle the current editor of the British journal Lancet has said much the same dr. Richard Horton he in a stunning editorial some years ago he said that much of the science is not to be believed and then many studies have been built upon that sense that give high percentages of information in medical journals that are not to be believed because they've been corrupted by the scientific money interests, basically

let's say pharmaceutical and chemical industry. And there are a lot of tactics that I learned they use that are invisible to us, such as ghostwriting a study that looks like it's signed by an independent doctor who has been paid for the use of a signature, but the article was actually written by the drug company or a middleman hired by the drug company, not disclosed in the article in the scientific journal and it's being used to pump up the need or supposed need for a drug that's going to be introduced or a medicine that they currently make or to make it look like the medicine works very well with no side effects. And people have no idea this material, not only the studies may be tainted, but they're

literally being written by a drug company when not disclosed necessarily in the final product. Those are just some of the conflicts that happen today. I've learned over recent years to look at things from the perspective of the incentive structures that exist in a system. It doesn't seem like that's, I guess, a typical practice. So how did we get to that?

I think this has been a slippery slope that has occurred over the course of 20 years or more. You know, I've covered it and noticed it in the last 20, 25 years for sure as I got assignments at CBS News as an investigative reporter. But money interests have figured out how to infiltrate virtually every aspect of the information we may get about our health. And this has happened over time. And unfortunately, the powers that be have allowed it. So pharmaceutical interests have too much influence in medical school, but the medical schools allow it in part because the drug companies give them money for research, money for projects, money for professorships,

bring in lunches for the students. I mean, it's top to bottom, all kinds of influence. They influence the professional educations of doctors once doctors have gotten their licenses to keep them. They take classes that are taught by the pharmaceutical industry, but often not disclosed in overt ways. So the doctors think they're being taught by independent authorities about, you know, steered to look at medicine and the practice of medicine a certain way and maybe not to look for side effects or to believe very much in a medicine

that may have controversies and dual sides to it, but they're taught only one side. They have taken over, as the journal editors have said, the scientific journals in many respects. They have taken over the media in many respects and influenced the media through the advertising money they spend in the media. So the media, now they just self-censor. Really, the outsiders don't even have to tell them what to report and what not to report, which used to happen. Now I think there's so much self-censorship because it's understood where the money is made. And then they've influenced the federal agencies and political figures through donations and influence that make sure policies that happen and laws that are written are favorable to they and their interests rather

than to those of us who are impacted by them. And this is something that I think is a very well-orchestrated, clever campaign by financial interests whose job is to try to maximize their profits and figure out how to make the world work this way. Unfortunately, and I'm not sure it's by design, maybe some people think it is, unfortunately, it's resulted in our poor health.

Overall, I think making us sicker as a population. What I think is alarming is we've noticed over the past couple of decades there is an epidemic of chronic health disorders among our children and also among adults and our elderly but particularly we see what's happened to the younger generation, whether we're talking about mental illness, metabolic problems and obesity, cancers, disorders that didn't used to exist that are related to immune system disorders and so on. And yet you look in the big picture and you say, we've never spent more money on insurance, health care, pills, doctors. And our doctors and our federal agencies, they seem not to notice this. So they're either not noticing what we all see,

or they're looking the other way. I don't know which is worse. But I think that's what's led to people understanding there's a crisis going on. And the medical establishment as it exists today has done a poor job of addressing the root causes or even seeming very alarmed by these epidemics that are impacting in some way almost every American today. Give me an example of some of the changes that you've seen throughout your career covering these sorts of things in terms of the incidents. There are certain diseases, for example, that have become much more prevalent. Well, I'll give you examples and then I'll speak to how interesting it is that instead of addressing the root causes, we are taught to

normalize and accept them. And there's a reason behind that. I think the people steering us to accept these disorders rather than address maybe how to prevent them, are sometimes the same industries implicated in the problems. So let's say a lot of people think, and there's great science that points to metabolic disorders being caused by the adulterated food that we eat today

that has a lot of products and chemicals in it, and the chemical it and the chemical makers and the companies that make so much money with these products and the processed foods that we think are so bad for us now well they want you to accept obesity of course people shouldn't be shamed for their size and so on so that's not an issue but why don't we also address why everybody so many people are obese and there is a metabolic thing happening. But those who want us to accept it are the ones that make the products that could be causing it.

We're also talking about artificial food dyes. We're talking about preservatives that go in food. So there's just a lot of things impacting us. There's pressure to accept the outcome rather than address the root causes. And I think that's big money driven. This issue of informed consent is something we've certainly been talking about. But this is something that's been kind of a problem from some time. You have some significant examples in your book. Informed consent and the tenets of it were really ingrained in our scientific system

after the Tuskegee syphilis experiments where African-American black men were experimented on without being told exactly why and what was happening to them and were not, they had syphilis and were not given treatment for syphilis years after one was discovered was being withheld from them. This was exposed later by an Associated Press story. It resulted in a lot of outrage and these ideas that people should have to give written informed consent if they're going to be in a study. They should be told and all the risks disclosed to them. There should be independent boards overseeing all of this. Well, there's been a tension ever since, as I've learned, with researchers arguing, well,

when we tell people all the risks, they don't want to be in the study. And we can't do really important research for the greater good by telling people all the risks. And there have been many cases where they haven't. And they've gotten caught by the government's own assessment or by their ethics body's assessment not giving proper informed consent in some really horrible ways. But that was always considered, okay, you violated informed consent, but that's still our tenet. Informed consent is still how it should be. But I watched as the past 10 years with a particular case where informed consent was violated according to an ethics

body looking at important studies by prestigious institutions in a study of premature babies. Researchers started to overtly argue that maybe these rules should be changed. Maybe we shouldn't have to tell everybody so much. For the past 10 years, there have been facets of the scientific community working on that problem, trying to not have to tell us if we're in a study what could happen. And most people, I think, don't know that some months ago the FDA passed a rule that said researchers, if they determine on their own that the risks are minimal, they don't have to disclose those to people in a study. Shocking, a shocking lifting of these rules that have really guided us, or were supposed to guide researchers for decades.

Obviously I think if you're in a study, you should be told every little thing that could go wrong so that you can make up your mind if you want to be in the study. I think if risks really are minimal, why can't they tell you? Why is that something they would want to be in the study. I think if risks really are minimal, why can't they tell you? Why is that something they would want to withhold? And then I think that the history of some corrupt scientists or scientists who have made bad decisions in the past shows us it shouldn't be left up to them to decide a risk is minimal. It may not be. You know, you're leaving it up to the same people that could be conflicted to decide that their study needs to be disclosed to the subjects who are in the study. So I think this is a huge, important development that hasn't been well reported.

Well, the support baby oxygen study that you reference is kind of a case in point. I think the story of me covering medical issues is sort of a story of me hearing or starting to research something that sounds outrageous and thinking to myself that can't be true. It's just too outlandish. And then meticulously going through the facts and then understanding many times it is true. And the baby oxygen study, as I call it, which was called SUPPORT, which stands for various things, this was a study on premature babies conducted by prestigious research institutions, such as Yale, and funded by the federal government,

that according to the government's own ethics body, and according to watchdogs who later looked at this, resulted in the death of some of these premature babies. The mothers, several of them told me the same story. These moms didn't know each other. These pregnant moms in the hospital having extremely premature infants, many of these women were single, poor African American women, were told, hey, consent to this study or consent to this program, sign this paper, it'll help your baby.

It's just going to measure their height and weight. It's just going to provide you with support with a premature baby. And in reality, the study allowed the doctors who were in the researchers to manipulate the oxygen levels of these extremely premature infants in a way that could result in their blindness or in a way that could result in their death and was not in the best interest of the individual baby. I mean, really shocking findings. When the ethics body for the government weighed in on this after someone flagged it some years later and found that these institutions violated various rules, instead of being held accountable, the institutions and the researchers

argued, we didn't do anything wrong. And they started to argue that maybe the informed consent rules were too tough because who would take part in research if they knew all the risks? I think that was just, it was stunning and it was heartbreaking. One of the women that I interviewed, the baby had died. We don't know if it's because of the participation in the study but certainly the mother wonders. And two of the children were actually three of the moms I interviewed had children who were extremely disabled. Again we can't prove, they can't prove it's because the participation in the study but they'll never know.

And they certainly weren't told they say that they were putting their extremely fragile premature babies in a study that could put them at serious risk. If the ethics body itself found that informed consent was not given, I mean, isn't informed consent kind of a core tenet of medicine? It was. For decades, it's supposed to be. And you see this pressure. So what happens in the research community, I've also learned, when someone does stick their head up and say something about it as this government watchdog, this ethics body that's supposed to look at these things, when he and his office came out with these findings, his name was Jerry

Menikoff, instead of the researchers saying, oh my gosh, we're in trouble, we better fix this, you know, somehow fix our processes, they attacked the ethics watchdog. They went to medical journals and published letters against him. They petitioned his bosses. They told him to withdraw the finding. And the pressure worked. Some months later, although he never withdrew his findings of what had gone wrong, he said we're going to suspend corrective action or punishment

ideas because in essence we don't think the researchers meant any harm and maybe they misunderstood informed consent and some of the rules. Really shocking. With the baby oxygen case, the women claimed they weren't told anything that their babies were going to be hooked up to monitors. Here's another outrage that was discovered during this look back. The oxygen monitors put on these study babies were intentionally altered to give false readings, if you can believe it. And obviously this wasn't disclosed to the mothers either. The reason given for that was the researchers didn't want the medical personnel in the hospital coming in and adjusting the oxygen for the good of the individual baby.

They wanted to keep those babies in their assigned oxygen range, which was assigned basically with the flip of a coin to see what would happen. So, yeah, it's pretty shocking all the way around. As a researcher, their arguments, and I listened to a whole seminar where they debated this, well, how can we improve the health of the world if we can't do these studies? So it's sort of the health of the common good versus the health of the individual. I and most consumer advocates would argue the health of the individual. I and most consumer advocates would argue the health of the individual and their informed consent is far paramount to what you think you are doing for the good of mankind. You don't have the right as a researcher to say, I can sacrifice this child or I can sacrifice

something about informed consent because I think I have a more noble goal. That's not your right, in my view. But their argument is, if we keep having to try to get informed consent, we just can't get enough people to take part in these important studies that will make things better for mankind. Some people might say that this contradicts the Hippocratic Oath. I think it does. Yeah, some people do say that. So you've been covering the pandemic response, COVID pandemic response, quite a bit. You actually look at the Amish as a kind of interesting control group. And I want to get you to tell me a little bit about that.

The interesting thing I began with, I saw an Associated Press story that said or suggested they were the first to get herd immunity because they just ignored all of CDC's recommendations. They let COVID fire through quickly. So-called let it rip. Right, let it rip. So I went there and I found that there is no hard data, as I said in my story, because they don't test for COVID. They don't go to the hospital for it. They don't do autopsies that are designed to see, did they die of COVID? But if you just look at the overall sickness and death figures, they clearly either fared much better than the rest of the society or they fared no worse and probably fared better in terms of the toll and didn't spend any money on vaccines and medicine and experiment, didn't shut down the schools, didn't shut down their businesses, made more money in their society than they ever had.

So fascinating story. That was so popular when we did that story in full measure. Then I think maybe the more interesting part that makes this part of the book is what the scientific community slash government did, I think, to try to disparage the Amish approach when they saw people reporting on it. The government hates the Amish because the Amish don't follow the normal practices. And arguably in some areas may be sicker. They have more because there's a closed population. They have told me themselves they have more genetic disorders and issues, but far fewer of these ADD and autoimmune and brain disorders that are so associated with American society today.

Government hates that. I've learned over the past decades they don't want the Amish to be able to prove that our practices are not good. So next thing I know, a study comes out funded by the government that's clearly by the headline intended to imply the Amish approach made them sicker and that more of them died, which is not true. And I knew it wasn't true, so I start looking at the study to see where they got their data. I start noticing strange things. Number one, they excluded the biggest Amish population in the country, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where I had done my story. Why would you exclude from

your data the biggest Amish population in the country when you're trying to draw a conclusion about the Amish approach to COVID? A lot of anomalies like that. So it started to look to me like propaganda. Additionally, the conclusions that they drew, even though they tried to make it sound like a lot of people died because of their religion and not following CDC recommendations, as hard as they tried to slant the picture, still showed that the Amish fared no worse for not having followed any of the CDC practices. Why wasn't that the takeaway? So I wrote the journal. I wrote the authors of the study, I challenged all of this and it took a year but I recently got word that they've had to

issue numerous corrections to the article. Maybe a hollow victory because the people, most people only remember the study that came out, they don't go back and look for corrections and the corrections don't really change the title and make it clear the things that I just told you in my view. But at least the scientists had to make some embarrassing corrections to acknowledge that there were issues with this study. I have a second one under challenge right now.

I've had another study changed and corrected in addition to that. My point is, how are peer reviewers, how are the journals themselves not catching stuff that ordinary people like me can look and read and flag? I'm not a scientist. And I think that gives you just a little hint of how problematic some studies are. And then try to find out, because I'm like, okay, I want to follow the money and follow the communication trail. Who assigned this study?

It's our taxpayer money paid for it. Government won't tell you. They won't turn up the communications. They won't hand over the data, even though that makes the study, that renders the study invalid according to scientific method if you can't look at the data and replicate it. There's two studies I've been trying to get communications for and more data from. Even though we funded the studies, government slash academic institutions won't turn over the material. So the caution here is I believe the federal government slash

pharmaceutical industry have learned how to take our taxpayer money, legally launder them through universities, public and private, who then say they don't have to reply to your FOIA requests or turn over any data, who then put out studies that are little more than narratives and propaganda, that go unchallenged. It seems to me from what you're saying that there's a fear of having deviations from the orthodoxy reported on meaningfully? I think that's because the orthodoxy has been designed by people who profit from and make money off of the dogma that we accept. So when you challenge it, it's not just that you're going

against the grain and they don't like it. There may be a little bit of that. But it's because the whole system has been set up to treat us a certain way when we enter the medical system, to practice medicine in a way that drives profits to industries and companies. And suddenly when you start questioning that in a way that changes the balance and may take profits out of the hands of the people that are making them, then they're going to find a lot of ways to try to controversialize those researchers or journalists or you know anybody that's kind of going against the orthodoxy. So there's gonna be a lot of people that are skeptical of what you just said. How would you explain to them how this really kind of came about? Or I think for

some people, it might even seem fantastical. Well, it does. If you had laid all of this on me 25 years ago, I'd have been like, whoa, whoa, whoa. In fact, even as I learned and investigated little pieces of this puzzle, a little bit at a time, pretty much with each one, I started out thinking, you know, this can't be true. There must be more to it, and sometimes there was. But as I've said, so often when I found out the things that we've been taught aren't true or that there are hidden financial interests behind such innocent-sounding and independent-sounding things, you start to develop a pattern of understanding. For example, the first time I asked whether a doctor who was being overtly supportive of a controversial drug rather than acknowledging this is somebody for a story who was going to speak on camera,

was talking almost like the drug maker, not like a concerned doctor who would be weighing scientifically evidence that was coming out. And I remember thinking, he sounds like he's being paid by the drug company. And he was. So from that moment on, every doctor I was referred to that was passed off to me as sort of an independent expert that seemed too high on a medicine or drug that was controversial, that didn't seem to want to weigh both sides, every time, 100%, when I looked them up or asked them, they were connected financially to the drug company. You go from disbelieving to understanding the system, but it takes time. What I tried to do

and follow the science is make people understand that I started where a lot of people are today. I didn't know anything about this stuff, never questioned it. Full faith went into the medical system and my doctors and medicine and scientific studies. It was a process of many years to get to where I am today, as I would say, an informed skeptic. And I take selected anecdotes with data, hard data and examples that I think will bring people along on the journey in a way

that they don't have to do 20 years of research, but they can see really key, salient, provable examples that will help them understand how the system got where it is today. There's a ton of, you know, reasonable, ethical people that work in this industry. I mean, how many millions of Americans, right Americans work in the health industry? Surely they're not all, I guess, compromised in this way you're describing. How do you explain that? Well, there are stories in the book, and I've learned many stories, of those who do.

Certainly ethical people try to stick their head up and speak truths, or they're not even considering themselves activists. They happen to just be a researcher who uncovered something about a medicine. And unfortunately for them, it was the wrong thing in terms of the profit motive or the special interests, and they get destroyed. And trust me, they all see what happens. I use the anecdote of a researcher who was hired, was studying a potential candidate for an AIDS vaccine years ago, worked at a California university. The study had to be stopped, a futility study, meaning you can tell, if you can tell early on, it's not going to work.

You don't waste the money. You don't keep testing patients when you know there's not going to be a good outcome. The study stops. The scientists back then, you publish good or bad, but they're suddenly told, we don't want you to publish this study. And they went up against the company they had contracted with. They said, we've got to publish either way. This is a body of knowledge issue. Well, they published, and back then the journals supported that, the medical journals, and published a joint editorial saying this is not fair for the drug companies to be controlling important information like this. Drug company vaccine makers sued this researcher for seven million dollars. Now other researchers see that and even though ultimately

the drug company dropped the lawsuit under pressure from at the time the medical community saying wait a minute you can't corrupt the system like this. Everybody saw he had to pay money for legal fees. It made him unpopular with his university. That's like, hey, the sponsor's not happy. This is where we get our money from. This is seen by honest researchers who are telling their stories as best they can in many cases, but they end up having to work within a system. As researchers told me, the studies that could solve some of our most consequential health problems today, like the chronic diseases, are simply not being conducted because the funding mechanisms for these studies are government-slash-pharma. And the researchers will tell you, I can't get a grant for my study if I don't frame the question of what I want to study in a way that would benefit a pharmaceutical interest or what the government wants you to find

because they won't give the grant. So some studies, in fact, I argue, again, the most consequential ones, are not being done because nobody will pay for them. The money system is controlled. This is from the researchers themselves who are well-meaning and honest in many cases but simply working within the system they have to survive and be able to do research so they just try to find research that they can get funding for and get published. I think most doctors are not corrupt or fraudulent in any way but most of them have agreed to work within the system

that I would say a lot of them don't like and don't think is very honest in some respects. We hear them complain about it all the time. But this is the system that's been designed by money interests, and they operate within it, and they've just been from med school all the way up funneled to operate in this paradigm. There are independent doctors who color outside the lines, but a lot of

them just stay, you know, stay put and do what they're supposed to do. Is it possible because of the, you know, maybe the very specific nature of the piece of the puzzle that you're involved in that you might be unaware or maybe millions of people might be unaware of the overall picture being not as on the up and up as one would want. Is it possible? Yeah, sure. And let's talk about the study situation. It used to be the researchers for a study, if it didn't go well for the drug and they were going to still publish anyway because that's what science does, they had full access to the data so they knew, the researcher knew, this drug could be harmful or it's not working.

But the contracts today, according to the researchers, I don't think anyone disputes this, the drug companies have written the contracts in ways where they can't publish negative results many times, where the company controls the data. So an individual researcher may not have the whole picture. Maybe a drug study ends but the drug company divided up the study through different sites in a way that no single researcher has the whole picture and may even know the full picture of the drug they just know that maybe the study was halted or they don't know how the study came out because they don't have all the results. That information is being stove piped and controlled by pharmaceutical industry. So that's a way in which maybe not everybody has full

information on that. Just very briefly, what does stovepiped mean? Keeping, in my mind, this means the drug company makes sure the research centers and the drug company itself are keeping information from being shared. Like I consider it sort of in a silo where it's not being shared and exchanged so that you at one research site might know you're a little piece of the puzzle, but you don't know how it fits together or necessarily what the drug company is finding in the big picture. So you don't know about a bad adverse event or that maybe they were allegedly twisting the data to make it look better than it really did. You don't have the evidence of that, so you don't have full

information. I think there's a lot of recognition in important quarters of medicine that something is seriously broken and that their ethic collapses all the way around. I first started learning this from FDA scientists themselves who were working on approvals and who were trying to uncover what was being covered up in the drug applications by the drug companies that were not being forthcoming with information. I learned from the FDA scientists that at some point in time

when they would speak at the advisory meetings to decide whether drugs should be approved, and they would have cautions that they found in the data that they were supposed to present and have discussed, and at some point in time they weren't allowed to present at the meetings anymore. They know something's wrong, and it's not the whole FDA that's corrupt by any stretch of the imagination. Certainly there are awesome researchers who work there and scientists. I know some of them.

I knew some of them. But there are certain elements of conflicts of interest and alleged corruption that the rest are aware of and I think find it very difficult to do much about or risk losing their entire careers and livelihood. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has recently sort of suspended his campaign with a message of Maha, I think, right? Make America healthy again.

I can't help but think about that, given everything we've just discussed. My first interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was decades ago when I was again assigned to cover a medical controversy for CBS News. And I would just say he is the single most important political figure right now who has his finger on the pulse of what's happening with the things we've discussed, the food and health crisis, the crisis in medicine and treatment, and the corruption that exists inside our institutions. He said to me in one of our interviews, which makes him uniquely dangerous to this establishment we've discussed, that if he were elected president when he was running, he said, I will go to CDC headquarters in Atlanta, and I know the names of the people to fire.

And he does. I don't know if people know he's an attorney who has litigated against the government in medical scandals, in vaccine and vaccine autism cases. And he has won cases against the government. He intricately understands how this system works and where the corruption lies. So again, I think that makes him uniquely dangerous, but very well informed because he has decades of looking at environmental factors and health factors, particularly in children, of what's causing chronic diseases and disorders.

And I think he's really an important voice right now in all of these things. You know, one of the things he advocates for, and you advocate for too, is basically people taking a more serious role in their own health. I suppose at some level in our societies we've been taught to expect the doctors or the healthcare professionals to take care of everything, or at least a good part of it. How do you view that? Well, that's certainly what I always wanted. I'm not an expert. I wanted to be able to go to my doctor and listen to public health guidance and just feel like I was getting good, pure,

sound advice in my best interest. And I think particularly after COVID, it made people think differently about the system. And I don't know about you, but there are not many days that go by where I don't talk to somebody who's been sick, who's consulted a different kind of doctor. They're looking for root cause medicine doctors, functional medicine doctors. They're looking for people that aren't even doctors, but are practicing certain specialties, for example, in metabolic disorders, they're looking because they're not finding answers from what we might call establishment medicine. And I think this shows you what a demand there is and how much skepticism has grown among the public, particularly

in the post-COVID environment. You know, it could be bad for people to be funneled into the unknown and maybe they could be sold a bill of goods or they could do something that's unhealthy. But I argue that it's good if people are getting more informed on health matters and not just believing the narratives that are spat at us by the usual sources. Everybody's saying kind of the same thing in the medical journals and the media. There's good reason history tells us to question these things. And there are places to find either other opinions on matters that we couldn't possibly know the ultimate truth to yet, or science that's contrary to what we've been told. I was told a lot of science didn't exist that I was steered to then by sources, for example, inside the government or esteemed researchers.

They're like, yeah, that research does exist. There are ways for people to get this information. And unfortunately, it takes a little more work than you'd like to have to do, because I think we all would love to be able to go to the doctor and just have them cure us or treat us in a way that's best for us.

But I think a lot of us realize that's just not happening, too often not happening now, at least with a lot of doctors. So, you know, we're looking for different information sources and ways to be critical thinkers so that we can have more information and hopefully take better charge of our own fate. You and I have both interviewed doctors and medical professionals that are treating COVID vaccine injury in a variety of forms. And one of the things that's come up in some of these interviews is that a lot of doctors, through some of the processes you've just described, just simply don't even know what to look for because they haven't realized that this is something that's possible. It doesn't

happen at high frequency, but it happens at enough of a frequency that a doctor might see someone and not realize they're seeing something. I think that's part of the system I've discussed that has been set up that steers doctors away from asking those questions. It's not something new. It's not that they just thought of it like I shouldn't ask about it. The whole system rewards them for not monitoring adverse events with medicine and vaccines. They're supposed to report this stuff to federal databases, not when they think there's a relationship between the vaccine, for example, and an illness.

They're not supposed to decide that. All the data is supposed to be reported to a database. They're supposed to ask you after vaccination, did you have any, did you feel bad? Is anything wrong? If you come in sick to the doctor's office, they should be asking you, did you get the vaccine recently? Which one did you have? When did you have it? When did you notice this problem? And all that's supposed to go into a database so that experts can ultimately have so much data that emerging patterns that we didn't realize were impacted and didn't weren't unearthed in small studies before the drug or vaccine were approved was approved this stuff will be unearthed

that's the whole point of the adverse event databases doctors are not encouraged to report even though in some cases it's mandated certain types they're just not doing it they They're not asking. And the medical associations, the state boards, the federal government could encourage them to or mandate that they do this or punish them for not, but they don't. So the message to the doctors is not to do it and they don't bother. And it's time consuming and they were taught in medical school anyway that vaccines can't do this. So why should I ask questions about it now? Now, there are many exceptions because certainly a lot of doctors are and independent researchers

we've talked to are looking into all this. But I would say the general doctors that we're talking about, I talk to patients injured by both long COVID or long vaccine. They're not being asked these questions by their ordinary doctors. Their doctors don't know what tests to give them. They're just giving them normal tests and saying nothing's wrong with you or we can't figure it out. They're not doing their reading, these doctors, on the post-COVID world and what can be done about these injuries and the spike protein that could be causing them. So, yeah, I think there's a lot of flaws in the traditional system. I guess the other side of that is that these things are treatable,

right? I think that's hugely important. So I have personally, because I've done these stories on full measure and then people have come to me and said their lives have been changed because they understood after being told by their doctors either nothing was wrong with them or it's all in their head or they don't know what's wrong with them. Yes, thank goodness there are independent researchers who are looking into this because they have inquiring minds and they're trying to figure out how to help their patients. And they have unlocked some secrets and are still continuing to do so that can make people better. So I've interviewed people who were told, one was told by Mayo Clinic.

She was in bed, she has five kids, couldn't do anything, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick. And Mayo Clinic's like, we don't know what's wrong with you. She got help from a doctor that's treating these cases and was out of bed in a matter of a couple of weeks after being sick for a really long time. And then after a second process, and some of this stuff is almost natural remedies, I don't mean homeopathic, but it's things that don't necessarily require prescriptions and a lot of dramatic stuff. After a second session and treatment, she was hiking.

I mean, this is someone who had barely been out of bed and had lost her voice and couldn't take care of her kids. So many stories like that. There are ways and protocols being developed to help people who are suffering from long COVID or long vax. And I would like to say, you probably know the same, the researchers say and the doctors say, even if you didn't get sick with COVID or even if you didn't get sick when you got the vaccine initially, you may still suffer later, even years later, adverse events from the spike protein that's involved in both. So when something weird happens to you, you shouldn't assume it's just, I'm just getting older or I can't think, I've got brain fog and maybe I'm just getting older. Like this stuff has been proven in some cases to be related to the COVID infection or COVID vaccine, even if at the time you didn't get sick with these things,

because that spike protein apparently persists in your body and can wreak all kinds of havoc. So it's important for people to know, like you say, treatments and protocols are being developed. Unfortunately, not so much by the government, which doesn't want to talk about the stuff when I've tried, the studies they have going, but by these independent researchers who are getting quite a bit of traction. Cheryl, this has been a fascinating conversation. Final thought as we finish up? I think on a positive note, the COVID experience, during which some of the forces trying to control our narratives in a way that I think was not healthy, it became so audacious that it made people pay attention who weren't paying attention before.

It turned some people and some mainstream doctors even into activists who had never seen themselves that way. And out of that has been born this new sort of subculture that is not small, where they are working now to figure out how to solve our most vexing health problems that the main establishment has ignored, like the chronic health disorders. They are trying to mount independent studies that the establishment won't pay for. They're developing protocols, and people are starting to look for these resources and take back more control of their own health. I think that's the silver lining in all of this. Well, Cheryl Atkeson, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Thanks. Thank you all for joining Cheryl Atkeson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.