Danish Professor Emeritus of Medicine Peter Christian Gøtzsche, has worked closely with Big Pharma and the medical industry and can give an informed opinion about the whole area. Here it is in a nutshell: "My employment in the drug industry when I had been educated as a biologist and knew very little about drugs, opened my eyes quickly to all the fraud I observed in clinical research and marketing. Healthcare is much more corrupt than people think, and industry money goes everywhere, to politicians, medical journals, newspapers, other media, etc.," Gøtzsche said in an interview with Freedom Research. "Much of what the drug industry does fulfills the criteria for organised crime in the U.S. law. And they behave in many ways like the mafia does. They corrupt everyone they can corrupt. They have bought up every type of person, even including Ministers of Health in some countries. So there is a huge amount of corruption," Gøtzsche has said.

"Drug regulation is hugely dysfunctional. If it worked as intended, our drugs would not be the leading cause of death, which I have documented they are," he also said. Naturally enough the corrupt system that he correctly described come down hard on him, cancelling him, despite his qualifications, or perhaps, because of them. It shows the evil that we are up against.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/05/15/cochrane-founder-peter-gotzsche-healthcare-is-much-more-corrupt-than-people-think/

"Anyone who has taken an interest in the dark side of the profit-driven pharmaceutical industry is most probably familiar with the name of Danish Professor Emeritus of Medicine Peter Christian Gøtzsche. Gøtzsche can be regarded as one of the greatest figures of evidence-based medicine of our time. There are probably not many people in the world who know and understand the pharmaceutical industry, clinical trials, the regulatory oversight of medicines and the whole system surrounding the field better than Gøtzsche. He holds Master's degrees in chemistry and biology. He started his career at the Astra Group and continued in Astra-Syntex, a joint venture between the Swedish pharmaceutical company Astra and the U.S. pharmaceutical company Syntex. Astra is the same company that later merged with the British Zeneca group in 1999, so the first half of the AstraZeneca name is its direct descendant. At Astra-Syntex, Gøtzsche established a medical department responsible for conducting clinical trials and submitting applications for the registration of new medicines.

"My employment in the drug industry when I had been educated as a biologist and knew very little about drugs, opened my eyes quickly to all the fraud I observed in clinical research and marketing. Healthcare is much more corrupt than people think, and industry money goes everywhere, to politicians, medical journals, newspapers, other media, etc.," Gøtzsche comments in an interview with Freedom Research.

Co-founder of Cochrane

While working at Astra-Syntex, Gøtzsche also started pursuing a medical degree and became a specialist in internal medicine. His thesis, written after he left the pharmaceutical company, examined the claims of clinical trials for non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, a group that includes ibuprofen and aspirin, and showed their bias. Gøtzsche also strongly criticised the marketing practices of his former employer, Astra-Syntex, pointing out that no good evidence existed for their claim that the higher the dose, the better the effect. After leaving the pharmaceutical company, he worked at hospitals in Copenhagen, the capital of his native Denmark.

In 1993, Gøtzsche was one of the co-founders of Cochrane Collaboration and founder of the Nordic Cochrane Centre. These are organisations whose aim is, via analyses of medical research, to help health professionals, patients and policymakers make evidence-based health decisions. Cochrane's meta-analyses, which show what dozens and sometimes hundreds or more studies conclude about a treatment, a medical problem or a medical intervention, are considered the gold standard in the field. The network has currently thousands of members from 190 countries around the world. In fact, many of Cochrane's best-known conclusions – for example, that the placebo effect may in fact be a myth, or that mammography is unlikely to reduce breast cancer mortality and turns healthy women into cancer patients because of overdiagnosis – come from Gøtzsche's research.

In 2010, Gøtzsche became a Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen. He has published more than 100 papers in the world's five leading medical journals, including the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the Lancet and JAMA. He has also been one of the most influential medical voices in the media for the past many years, exposing and criticising the oftentimes dishonest and corrupt working practices of large pharmaceutical companies.

"Much of what the drug industry does fulfills the criteria for organised crime"

Gøtzsche has also written several books on this dark side of the pharmaceutical industry. His most widely acclaimed book to date is Deadly medicines and organised crime: How big pharma has corrupted health care. It is a painful read that describes how large pharmaceutical companies systematically buy off doctors and scientists as well as officials in regulatory agencies responsible for allowing drugs on the market and making sure they are safe. Or, alternatively, the drug companies are simply so intertwined with these agencies through the 'revolving door' phenomenon, whereby specialists and senior managers working in regulatory agencies are offered high paying jobs in drug companies, that the whole system becomes corrupt. Recruiting former officials also allows the finding and exploiting of loopholes in the regulatory system by the very people who helped build it and have valuable personal contacts there. "Much of what the drug industry does fulfills the criteria for organised crime in the U.S. law. And they behave in many ways like the mafia does. They corrupt everyone they can corrupt. They have bought up every type of person, even including Ministers of Health in some countries. So there is a huge amount of corruption," Gøtzsche has said.

As medicines always have side-effects, i.e., they potentially do harm to the patient instead of good, it is quite natural that any intervention with medicines should always be carefully considered. However, the interests of the pharmaceutical companies are at odds with this, because their aim is to maximise the profits from the sale of their products. "Drug regulation is hugely dysfunctional. If it worked as intended, our drugs would not be the leading cause of death, which I have documented they are," Gøtzsche writes to us. While back in 2013 he estimated that drugs were the third leading cause of death, he has now concluded in his recent article that they are the leading cause, ahead of heart disease and cancer. …

Criticism of Covid policies

Of course, Gøtzsche was also vocal in his criticism of the policies used in the Covid pandemic, and rushing the Covid vaccines onto the market under emergency rules and without proper safety trials. Whistleblowers have subsequently described in detail the shoddy and sloppy way in which these trials were conducted, including the falsification of data. Adverse reactions to the vaccines were not properly addressed and often not properly documented. At the same time, the pharmaceutical companies, the national regulators who authorised the drugs on the market, and, in their wake, most of the press, repeated that the vaccines were safe and effective.

However, as is now well known, these vaccines are associated with very serious side-effects that can cause permanent injury and even death to people. Gøtzsche's work has also demonstrated the seriousness of this problem. He points out that when an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and senior editor at the BMJ, Peter Doshi and colleagues reanalysed the pivotal mRNA trials, they found that one serious adverse event occurred for every 800 people vaccinated with the vaccine. "Drug companies behaved during Covid as they always do, published flawed clinical trials in major journals of the vaccines," Gøtzsche comments to us now, with hindsight.

Gøtzsche, along with several other doctors and scientists, was also among the authors of a public letter published in December 2021 in the medical journal BMJ, opposing vaccine mandates, i.e., directly or indirectly forcing people to vaccinate. The letter stated that there is no evidence-based argument in favour of those mandates. "However, there is considerable uncertainty about the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines, some serious short-term complications, and a lack of data on long-term harms. In this situation, it is imperative that people are able to make a fully-informed choice about whether to have the vaccine or not," the authors of the letter noted at the time.

However, Gøtzsche considers the most damaging Covid policy to be the lockdowns. "The lockdowns were the most damaging aspect of the Covid pandemic. Sweden did not lock down and had one of the lowest excess mortalities in the world. They did the right thing and were heavily criticised for it," he notes. Gøtzsche has discussed the question more elaborately with the former Harvard Medical School Professor of Medicine and one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration Martin Kulldorff here.