How Big Pharma uses clinical trial gatekeeping to censor cures and cost lives

One would think the media learned their lesson after trumpeting a study dinging hydroxychloroquine funded by a porn star and then later retracted due to fraud. But the damage was already done, so instead, the media learned they can get away with promoting narrative-driven studies without any balance or circumspection.

Fast-forward nearly two years, and they are again frenetically promoting a study plastered on the front page of the New England Journal of Medicine website suggesting ivermectin doesn’t work against COVID, based on the “largest” randomized controlled trial, known as “The TOGETHER trial.” They know that this paper is so riddled with problems that anything else that is not narrative-protected would have been rejected on these grounds. But they also know that those issues are wonky and don’t fit on the bumper sticker and that the damage from the headline alone that this contrived paper was designed to elicit will already have been done, just as with hydroxychloroquine and anything else in the future that will threaten the Big Pharma greed and government control agenda.

Others have already thoroughly debunked the veracity of this study. You can read two comprehensive lists of flaws in the study here and here. However, these fatal flaws of the study are undergirded by a more fundamental problem in medical academia and research that will continue to plague medicine and cost lives well beyond COVID for years to come. It’s important to understand why Big Pharma created a self-fulfilling standard – brainwashing the public, media, and doctors into thinking that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are everything in medicine and that they completely trump cohort studies or meta-analysis as the gold standard of evidence.

First, only Big Pharma and Big Government (sorry for the redundancy) can afford large randomized controlled trials. This invariably allows them to be the gatekeepers of all evidence so that no competitors can break into the market. Also, randomized controlled trials, while definitely wielding certain strengths over others in the pool of scientific methods, can also be manipulated or fabricated more than other methods, and the smallest mistakes or deviations from protocol can make these trials worthless. The degree of transparency required to ensure that no such fraud took place is something that will never be demanded of the “cool kids” by the high-impact journals that are managed and funded by the same players involved in pharma (and media, tech, and government).

Thus, they have a brilliant marketing strategy whereby only large RCTs they control and published in journals like Lancet, NEJM, or JAMA and the like can make the cut. It’s no surprise that in the disclosure form of the study’s authors, they reveal they have taken money from all of the players that have manufactured or promoted the vaccines, remdesivir, Paxlovid, and molnupiravir – and trashed every other therapeutic approach. – READ MORE