The Highwire with Del Bigtree - BILLIONS IN DOCTOR PAYOUTS RAISE CONFLICT QUESTIONS

Episode Date: June 2, 2024

Conflicts of interest within the medical community have reached record highs as concerns for patient safety and independent scrutiny of Big Pharma products are driven by newly released information showing serious conflicts of interest.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Last week we reported on UK doctor, one of the darlings of the media over there, Dr. Range, and we reported that he received 22,500 pounds from Astrosenica. And that was still an unfolding story at that time. Now the headlines are looking like this regarding him exclusive. This is the mirror. TV doctor, Dr. Ranch failed to tell BBC bosses about 22,500 pound Astrozenica advert before jabbed feature. And then we have Dr. Carl Hennigan and Dr. Tom Jefferson in The Daily Skeptic. And they're pushing on that nerve a little harder.

I love to see articles like this. Celebrity doctors being paid to promote vaccines is against the law. And it is there in the UK. So they lay out the evidence for that, really, really damning evidence. And why does this all matter? Well, because doctors that, when you have doctors being paid conflicts of interest in the medical community at scale, you have scandals. You have, the pump is primed to have major scandals. One of those we've been covering is the opioid epidemic.

And that was started by Purdue Pharma. And famously, they've had to pay billions of dollars. But now a new organization is caught up in this and is paying criminal case of fines. This is endo health solutions. And they will pay over $1.5 billion in an opioid criminal case. And if we go into this article here, it says this. officials said the case marked the second largest criminal penalties ever levied against a pharmaceutical company. Imagine that. The largest penalties came in the case of Purdue Pharma, which agreed to pay more than $5 billion in a criminal case connected to the opioid crisis.

The Justice Department said the opioid manufacturer, Endo, had pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count on selling misbranded drugs. The company admitted that certain sales representatives touted supposed safety characteristics of its opioid Opana, which weren't supported by clinical data. And you know, we've done so much work on this. We could do flashbacks. We could talk about this. But it's actually written up in a medical journal here. And it just, it's a very concise description. This is the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry.

And it says lessons from corporate influence in the opioid epidemic. And if you go in here, this really just kind of tells the whole story. It says there is overwhelming evidence that the opioid crisis, which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars and counting has been created or exacerbated by webs of influence woven by several pharmaceutical companies. Opioid companies built these webs as part of corporate strategies of influence that were designed to expand the opioid market from cancer patients to larger groups of patients with acute or chronic pain, to increase dosage as well as opioid use, to downplay the risk of addictions and abuse, and to characterize

physicians' concerns about the addiction and abuse risks as opiofobia. So this is where you see the words anti-vaxers, even anti-fluiders, opiophobic, physician. These are marketing terms targeting doctors trying to neutralize concerns. And so we're bringing all this up. We just lived through this opioid crisis. These payments are still being paid. People are still harmed by this. And this has been one of the largest catastrophes of our lifetime that came from the medical

community. And so again, we have physicians whose the pump is prime because of these conflicts of interest. Is that going down or is that going up? This is the most recent article looking at this. a study now. This is the Journal of American Medical Association, JAMA, industry payments to U.S. physicians by specialty and product type. Not a very interesting article or a study headline, but then you go into the reporting on this and it says this, in bed with big pharma. Corruption fears as report finds U.S. doctors receive record 12 billion in pharma payments in past

decade. And it says this, almost six in 10 doctors in the U.S. received more than 12 billion in payments from pharma firms in the past decade. An analysis has revealed from August 2013 to 2022, American drug and device manufacturers made more than 85 million payments touting 12 billion to 826,33 of the 1.4 million eligible doctors in the US. That's over half the doctors in the US. And if you go to the images in this article, you can see what specialties are getting the most.

We have orthopedics, we have psychiatry, cardiology, oncology, So cancer, blood clots, heart attacks, SSRIs, those are the major billion dollar industries. These pharmaceutical companies are targeting. You look at the top drugs related to industry payments. You see drugs for blood clots are the top two, then arthritis, diabetes. And it's interesting, you don't see any pediatricians on there because the pediatricians already sewed up. They are already taken care of.

They already have a system in place where they get paid for the vaccination. So the pharmaceutical companies are not really targeting them. You can see the low-hanging fruits they're targeting now is, again, oncology, cardiology, and diabetes and things like that. So same thing happening in Australia. This is an article in a medical journal there, pharmaceutical company payments to Australian doctors. And it says in this article, a total of 33.44 million was paid or transferred. Payments range from $369,161 to $2909,161. and the median payment was $1,500.

And again, you go into here and you see the top specialties receiving this money. You have oncology, cardiology, top one and two. And so this is obviously a major issue, and we can only go up from here. We have to recognize this. Independent organizations must really step up because it's really flooded out there with conflicts of interest. And not even in the medical communities, particularly, but we have the vaping community. This is an investigation in stat magazine, and you can check this out. This is the title NYU professor who defended vaping, didn't disclose ties to Jewel documents show.

Jewel is the largest, most popular vaping manufacturer in the world. And how did this happen? Well, it says at the height of the youth vaping crisis, remember, these were collapsing lungs, putting holes in kids' lungs, when many public health experts were calling for sweeping action that could upend the entire industry, David Abrams and Ray Nayara emerged as two authoritative voices willing to defend vaping, despite its growing popularity among youth as an effective public health strategy to help adults cut back or quit smoking. Abrams, a frequent commentator. Pay attention to this, because you notice these people get fast-tracked right to the major media positions.

Abrams, a frequent commentator about vaping in the news media, including CBS this morning, CNN, and the New Yorker, coordinated extensively with Jewell on public messaging in 2017 and 2018, according to the company emails. Abrams asked Jewel officials for talking points, allowed company executives to review an academic article prior to publishing and attended Jewel Scientific Advisory Board meetings all without disclosing these connections to journal publishers or the public. So when you see a talking head on TV, look at their conflicts of interest because this is often what comes out. And this is why we have to be more diligent with the people we choose to get our information from when it comes to medicine and health. Amazing reporting, Jeffrey. I mean, boy, and now you know the flood gates have just opened.

I mean, all of those emails now calling out Francis Collins and Tony saying, I'm working with them on the side. Well, now we've got to bring them back in. Now we're going to ask them, what exactly were those conversations were happening? And then who's going to get thrown into the bus? They're going to start with the little guy, right? Try to stick it all to one person like an assistant, like, you know, someone's sharing those stupid emails, but now is when they start turning on each other. Where is this all going to land? Super interesting, right in the shadow of the WHO pandemic agreement, which is mostly based on all of this corrupted science that was happening here in the United States of America. Just keep up the great work, Jeffrey. I mean, we're in, we're in our heyday, right?

right in this moment. I gotta say for you out there people, like you know, you think of Woodward's Burdenstein right now, you know, Jackson and Big Tree are all over this. We've been in it from the beginning and it is starting to get juicy.