What Is the Third Party Technique?
What Is the Third Party Technique?
An Exploration of the Propaganda That Sustains the Pandemic Industrial Complex
From having watched the world for a while, I have come to accept people in power (either politically or financially) lack many of the morality and ethical frameworks we assume everyone would use to guide their actions. In turn what determines if most of the immoral actions those in power might commit happen or don’t happen is simply how feasible the actions are and what potential consequences might occur from enacting a policy. This is why laws that protect individual liberties are so critical in any form of government; governments will inevitably do bad things to their citizens unless they are restrained from doing so.
For example, one of my primary concerns with the COVID-19 vaccinations was that they would adversely affect fertility. This was based on the design of the vaccines, the unprecedented nature of their rollout (as all women of childbearing age would get them), and the longstanding religion of the upper class in reducing the population of the lower and middle class to “sustainable levels.”
For this reason, one of the first articles I wrote here was a summary of the unethical and documented population control initiatives that have occurred in the Western world along with an article documenting how this has been done with vaccinations in the past. The key point of that series was that:
•The primary obstacle to these programs has always been their feasibility.
•That vaccines represent the ideal method of population control (as vaccines are universally trusted and easy to mass administer).
•That there have been decades of research into making vaccines that sterilize women, which in some cases have been covertly forced onto women of childbearing age against their consent.
Since the time I wrote those articles, evidence has accumulated suggesting the COVID-19 vaccines do in fact adversely affect the female reproductive system and that in many different countries, a decline in the birth rate can be correlated to COVID-19 vaccine uptake (along with an increase in the mortality rate). These subjects are also discussed within the popular recent documentary Died Suddenly.
My own belief is that two things account for the lack of morality repeatedly seen in these circumstances:
1. Human beings have a fundamental inability to be present to the needs and suffering of those they do not have some type of connection with. Once one achieves a position where they are in charge of a large number of people, those people stop being seen as individual human beings and rather become an abstract collective where the overall benefit of the group takes priority over each individual within it.
This means if something will harm a certain number of people to save a larger number (e.g. a vaccine with known toxicities) is proposed, it becomes possible to rationalize why those losses are acceptable and a moral imperative forms to sustain the policy regardless of the public opposition to it. The problem with this mindset is that the premises those policies are based on are often incorrect (e.g. the COVID-19 vaccines were not effective or safe) and those who recognize this are denied the option to challenge the policy.
Prior to the COVID-19 vaccines, the most disastrous erroneous policy in history that a large population was forced to follow was Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, which aimed to modernize China’s primitive agricultural system. Mao had a variety of erroneous beliefs (no one was permitted to challenge) over what was necessary for an agricultural system to work which he forcefully implemented in China (e.g. he thought sparrows caused famine because they sometimes ate crops, so he ordered them all to be killed, which was problematic because they also ate many more bugs, thereby resulting in an insect plague that wiped out China’s harvest). Mao’s “reforms” caused the Great Chinese Famine, which killed between 15-50 million people, in some provinces killing between 8-18% of the population (it’s difficult to appreciate what this was like unless you hear about it firsthand from survivors).
2. Most power structures naturally select for the most cutthroat and sociopathic individuals (conversely, while I would like to be in a political office to help the country, I am
fundamentally not willing to do much of what is needed to pull that off). Because of this, it is inevitable nasty people will eventually occupy the reins of power. The best book I know of describing this process is Political Ponerology (for those unable to read it, this is a shorter and free article on the subject).
From having studied many industries, I’ve come to realize they always rely upon reusing tools or approaches that have worked in the past and putting them together to solve the current problem they face. Many businesses, in turn, make money off of fulfilling this same need for many clients (e.g. the payment processors, or Amazon’s AWS service to host your website).
Note: Although this often offers convenience for businesses, it also a double edge sword as this dependency is frequently leveraged to destroy competition. For example, Amazon suddenly pulled AWS from Parler, effectively crippling the company once it became a competitor to Silicon Valley’s social media behemoths, payment processors more and more frequently deplatform businesses that go against the narrative and prior to COVID-19, when the state vaccine legislative battles were still occurring, Mailchimp abruptly pulled the accounts and mailing lists of many vaccine safety advocates (which was devastating for their businesses).
Frequently a government or a corporation will draw up a plan for something that is really screwed up and the public is likely to object to. At this point they appear to always resort to a very tried and true formula:
Can a PR firm working with us get the public to accept this policy? If yes, the policy and the accompanying PR campaign are enacted, if no the policy is not enacted (frequently the idea is tested in the popular media beforehand to see how the public responds; this used be very common within soap operas). To some extent, they also consider if they can legally enact the policy, but in many cases, this does not occur (e.g. Biden’s vaccine mandate was illegal but was pushed forwards anyways until it was later knocked down by the supreme court and had already had time to do its damage). In short, PR is the tool that makes it possible and routine for those in power to do things that would normally be considered completely unacceptable by the populace.
What is PR?
The creator of PR, Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew) like many of his era believed that the irrational and destructive masses could not be trusted to direct society in a positive direction, especially as it was starting to develop an overwhelming degree of complexity. As such it was critical qualified experts and leaders instead filled that role (which of course was a message that appealed to the power-hungry oligarchs of the era and leaders who needed to sell wars to a resistant population). To address this problem, Bernays proposed using the new science of psychology at a social level which had recently proven itself during the first World War to create an invisible hand that did so he termed public relations or “PR.” To quote one executive from a PR firm:
You never know when a PR agency is being effective; you’ll just find your views slowly shifting.
One of the earliest articles I wrote here was an exposé of the public relations industry. This is a critical topic to understand for many areas of life (such as medicine). For those wishing to know more about how you are manipulated on a daily basis I would highly advise reading this article:
To synopsize it: Public Relations (PR) is a well-developed science that lies at the intersection of propaganda and marketing (marketing or communications majors often specialize in PR, and in many cases “PR” is used as a euphemism for propaganda). Although it is a mostly invisible industry, because of how effective it is, PR gets a lot of business (COVID-19 was a boon to PR—this year its global market was estimated at 100 billion, much of which was spent within the United States, and because PR gets results, the industry has been steadily growing since its inception a century ago).
Like many businesses, PR has gradually developed a reliable set of tools that have since been used over and over, although more creative PR campaigns also periodically emerge. One of the most iconic ones was near the start of Bernays’ career when the American Tobacco company hired him to break the longstanding cultural taboo against women smoking (as it was seen as a dirty habit unsuitable for women).
After some brainstorming, Bernays decided to juxtapose his task with the current protest movement aimed at earning women the right to vote. In 1929, he planted hired actresses (and journalists to photograph them) at a women’s liberation march who smoked at the rally as a form of feminine empowerment to protest sexism and rebranded cigarettes as “Torches of Freedom.” The meme went viral and before long generated enough publicity to rapidly destroy the cultural taboo that for generations had protected women from the many toxic effects of smoking and made his sponsor a lot of money.
The PR industry likewise took off, and as a result, sadly established a precedent of America’s cultural wisdom or values being defined not by generations of collective wisdom but rather by what campaign each corporate PR company wished it to be.
Much of the PR industry is described within this brief but excellent documentary from 2002.
In the twenty years since this was produced, the PR industry has attracted much more funding and thus R&D. In that timespan, I’ve watched the sophistication of the methods described above greatly increase (propaganda is much more hypnotic now and utilizes a variety of covert technologies not available in the past to directly manipulate the nervous system), but in most cases, at the core, the methods of PR have remained relatively the same.
Common PR Tactics
Some of the commonly reused PR techniques include:
•Crafting a highly controversial event that brings attention to your message. One of the most well-known examples was a (PR commissioned) fake testimony given in front of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus by a Kuwaiti girl stating Saddam Hussein’s army was taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floor. This fake story was presented in every media outlet by countless American leaders and overcame the popular resistance within the United States towards joining the Gulf War. Although the vastly overpowered Iraqis directly exposed our military to minimal danger, Operation Desert Storm also led to approximately 250,000 U.S. soldiers developing severe and permanently disabling conditions (which arose from a disastrous forced experimental anthrax vaccination program I suspect was a beta test for COVID-19).
•Focusing messaging to suggest the party at fault cares about its victims (this is why you always hear so many clearly fake and insincere apologies in the media).
•Having focus groups calibrate the language which will be the most likely to persuade the public to follow their sponsor’s objective (e.g. “election denier”). This is why our media landscape is overrun with so many empty scripted phrases.
•Rapidly flood the media with that message (this is the science of creating narratives).
•Monopolizing all expertise on the issue at hand both threatening or coercing (e.g. bribing) the available experts and by arbitrarily defining who can be an “expert.”
•Censoring dissenting opinions in every media venue.
•Using the third party technique.
The Third Party Technique
Although I would like to believe I have built up a fair degree of credibility here, I am fairly sure that if I were to tell you that I had a pill that could cure all COVID-19 vaccine injuries or I have a tincture that was guaranteed to make you live twenty years longer and I was selling it to my paid subscribers for $20,000.00, you would probably think I was a con artist and stop reading this newsletter. However, if all of the other prominent authors here on this platform wrote articles stating I indeed had, many of you would likely believe the claim and pay the $20,000.00.
Similarly, in dating, prospective partners will often make all sorts of flattering or self-aggrandizing claims about themselves you learn to take with a grain of salt (as they are often not true). Yet, if those around the individual (e.g. mutual friends or those seen around them) instead make those claims, they are likely to be believed.
This truth has been foundational to the PR industry, and much of PR is paying off a “neutral” third party to vouch for your product or policy. This approach is by no means unique to the PR industry; many humans recognize its effectiveness. To use the previous example, did you know people hire actresses (every now and then someone confides to me they do this for work) to be with them and convey their alleged positive qualities to their peers? Similarly, criminal enterprises use much worse third party persuasions to suck victims into scams that ruin or in some cases end their lives (e.g. the operator of a Ponzi scheme like FTX, a drug dealer pushing an addictive product, or human traffickers).
However, while the third party technique has always been with us, the PR industry takes it to an incredible degree of sophistication and complexity that no parallel exists for in history. There are a couple of major ways this often comes up.
Media Monopolization
One of the dirty secrets about the news is that much of the content that airs, although presented as coming from the presenting news station, is not produced there. Rather it is produced by a PR firm on behalf of a client and then mass distributing it to news stations who will often default to this airing their commercials as “news” because they are eager to present high-quality content they would never have the resources to produce on their own (many examples are given in the above documentary).
It has also been argued this option is often chosen because the staff are lazy and would rather not have to produce their own content. This builds upon the observations of the founder of this practice (which began in the 1920s), who realized the more information his clients provided to reporters, the less likely the reporters would be to go out and investigate for themselves.
Note: this same pattern of ownership continues down to the local news stations and can also be seen within the print media, but cannot be shown within a single image as there are too many of them.
Likewise, due to the centralized control of the media shown above (almost every television news outlet is owned by 6 companies), it is possible to rapidly disseminate each carefully crafted message across the media landscape, and this frequently happens. This is one of the best montages I have seen, but by no means the only example:
Note: I don’t agree with the title because everyone in the media does this.
Most news stations largely air content they are assigned to by the larger media company overseeing them, and to quote what a White House physician told a good friend: “having been in the White House for decades, it still astounds me how much control they have over the American media (although I would argue the Trump administration was the exception).”
There is also often a commingling between the two (e.g. the spouse of a senior member of the White House occupies a key position at a major network). Many outside the United States recognize this, and for example in, China the entire U.S. media is viewed as nothing more than government propaganda and many are amazed Americans don’t recognize this. This behavior of the media was also the focus of a popular campaign advertisement by the Republican Candidate for Governor of Arizona (who having previously been a popular news anchor was well versed with this subject).
Buying off the media is so important because not only does it provide a way to rapidly disseminate a message across America and have it become the topic of conversation, but it also provides a monopoly over the creditability of a narrative. One of Bernays’ early accomplishments a century ago was creating the concept of “professional journalists,” and the cultural belief that anyone without this designation was not credible (e.g. I am a “non-professional” journalist). This distinction was important because it could only be earned by working for an established news agency that was amenable to government or corporate influence (the best summary I have found on all this can be found here).
In essence, while many people would doubt a message if it came directly from a corporation or a president with a clear conflict of interest on the topic, if the media is paid off to promote that exact same message, people will believe it. This is part of why big Pharma spends so much money paying the media to advertise their products.
Front Groups
Another common PR approach is to create or fund groups with nice sounding names that promote industry interests rather than what their names’ suggest.
Other similarly named industry-sponsored organizations that advance their sponsor's interests include the Foundation for Clean Air Progress, the National Environmental Policy Institute, the National Wilderness Institute, the Science and Environmental Policy Project, the Council for Solid Waste Solutions, Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain, and the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy. It is also very common for industry to fund think tanks that will publish papers promoting whatever policy the sponsor needs.
The front group problem is also extremely common within the medical field. In a previous article, I illustrated how “independent foundations” are used by industry to launder money (not subject to legal oversight) to the federal government, with the CDC, through its foundation, being a frequent recipient of pharmaceutical money it uses to advance industry interests.
Most commonly, the front group approach is observed through “patient or disease advocacy groups.” Some of these foundations are massive (e.g. consider how much pharma gives to the American Diabetes Foundation). These groups reciprocate this investment by promoting unhealthy products (the American Heart Association is notorious for putting its seal on unhealthy junk food), rapidly producing experts to defend industry interests, and always producing guidelines necessitating the use of expensive pharmaceuticals.
Frequently to sell a drug, a market must first be created for it by reframing something previously viewed as normal to a disease of concern (termed disease branding). To my knowledge the two most successful campaigns of this nature were those that convinced large portions of the population their innate immune system was insufficient to handle a previously inconsequential infection (e.g. chickenpox), hence requiring a vaccine and conditioning much the population to believe they were depressed and hence needed antidepressants.
To brand a disease (which is slightly easier for the childhood vaccines since a streamlined system exists for the pediatrician to do the marketing), third party groups must be made which bring attention to the disease, often under the guise of “advocating” for patients. Similarly, once a disease exists, those same groups are necessary to make potential customers aware of the condition and funnel them toward the medications produced by the sponsors of the patient advocacy group.
As so many of these groups exist, I will just share one memorable example. Last spring on the migraine forum of Reddit, there were numerous discussions of severe migraines which lasted for days following COVID-19 vaccination and did not respond to medications (this is one of the most common vaccine side effects I and colleagues come across, especially in those with preexisting migraine disorders).
At some point in this discussion, the moderators decided to settle the issue by pinning a definitive article on the subject at hand from “the” authoritative source on the matter, The American Migraine Association. Their article predictably repeatedly emphasized the risk COVID-19 had of causing long-term persistent headaches and stated:
Remember, the headache, even if it is slightly worse than the one from the first vaccine, is short-lasting and mild. The headaches and other vaccine side effects may make you uncomfortable for a few days. But it is a small price to pay considering that COVID-19 can be deadly or lead to long-term disability.
At the time I read that article, I was with a small group of strangers at a spa (including oddly an ex-Pfizer rep) and was inspired to survey them to see if any had gotten an mRNA vaccine and developed migraines. One raised their hand and told me it had become a chronic condition since the time of vaccination. I then went and checked their sponsorship page, and sure enough, like many “patient advocacy” groups, they had extensive pharmaceutical funding.
Expert Monopolization
Another common approach is to create the mythology that only “experts” are qualified to debate a subject, buy out all the “impartial” experts and then relentlessly promote them on television to advocate for your position. I first became aquatinted with this at a young age because I found whenever I tried to debate a health-related subject, regardless of the points I raised, I would be told (as I am sure many of you also have been) that I was not qualified to discuss the subject because I was “not a doctor.”
Interestingly, after I became a doctor, I found the same people who refused to listen to me still did but cited different excuses. Similarly, because COVID-19 was so egregious that it caused many doctors to dissent from the party line, all of those doctors were censored by the mass media, and the standards were redefined on what constituted acceptable expertise (e.g. you could not have an opinion on COVID-19 treatment unless you were an infectious disease specialist even though it's debatable how relevant that training even is to addressing COVID-19).
In summary, the third party technique (per the authors who first exposed me to this subject) offers 3 key benefits to those who employ it:
•It encourages conformity to a vested interest while pretending to encourage independence.
•It replaces factual discourse with emotion-laden symbolism.
•It offers camouflage (e.g. so the sponsor is not laughed at).
The Third Party Technique and Medicine
Many of you are familiar with the recently released study in a peer-reviewed journal which claimed that vaccine injuries are a result of evil anti-vaxxers stressing them out:
On many levels this article is absurd (e.g. while extreme stress can occasionally cause some of those symptoms, the stress the vaccinated experience is nowhere near that degree, and there is no mechanism to explain how the unusual blood clots found in the vaccinated could be due to vasoconstriction).
This article instead follows a long tradition within allopathic medicine to blame severe medical injuries within patients on psychological factors that are not the responsibility of those prescribing the medications. Since it absolves the medical profession of responsibility, this has been an appealing meme (the earliest examples I know of come from Freud). Because medical gaslighting has affected many close to me, one of the first series here was an exposé of what it is and why physicians always seem to do it (which many injured by the COVID-19 vaccines have been forced to discover over the last two years).
Consider however the impact of this message was it to be presented in the manner it was (a peer-reviewed journal), versus if it had been a press release from Pfizer (e.g. Pfizer has discovered that the nocebo effect is causing vaccine injuries). In its present rendition, many gullible or blue-pilled individuals will take it up as being true, while if it had come directly from a Pfizer press release, even the most gullible members of society would be at least been skeptical and most likely laughed at anyone gullible enough to fall for it.
Although the information to determine if that study’s author was being paid off is not available, scientific journals only publishing industry-friendly or industry-neutral research (because so much of their funding comes from pharmaceutical companies) was a longstanding issue prior to COVID-19. For example to quote two highly regarded physicians (Richard Smith in 2005 and then Marcia Angell in 2009):
"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
“Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry”, wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, in March 2004 [1]. In the same year, Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, lambasted the industry for becoming “primarily a marketing machine” and co-opting “every institution that might stand in its way” [2]...and the editors of PLoS Medicine have declared that they will not become “part of the cycle of dependency…between journals and the pharmaceutical industry” [4].
Similarly, Richard Horton, editor in chief of The Lancet said this in 2015:
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue”. [note: this was also substantiated in 2005 by one of the most popular papers in metascience, “Why most published research findings are false”]
As the above quotations show many of the more honest members of the medical profession, including senior editors of our most prestigious medical journals have been trying to sound the alarm bell over the corruptive creep of pharmaceutical money into every facet of the medical profession.
In the case of the journals, there are a variety of ways this bribery occurs:
•Critical in-journal advertisements are only offered to industry-friendly journals. This likewise is how pharmaceutical companies can pressure news networks that heavily rely upon their advertising dollars to not air stories critical of the industry (the penalty for non-compliance was recently demonstrated by Pfizer, a key advertiser for Twitter, when it stopped paying for advertisements in response to Musk terminating censorship of vaccines on the platform).
•Pharmaceutical companies often make agreements with journals to buy millions of reprints of issues containing a favorable study (e.g. this accounts for 41% of The Lancet’s income [many other premier medical journals declined to comment on that figure when asked]).
•Many of the journal editors (who ultimately approve or deny an article being published) are also being bribed. Although those editors understandably will refuse to disclose those conflicts of interest, if they are paid through Medicare (due to the Affordable Healthcare Act), the pharmaceutical payments they receive are public record.
A 2017 study used this database to evaluate the editors of the 52 most prestigious American medical journals (as this analysis would not be possible in a country without Medicare) and found approximately 72.1% of editors (713/988) were eligible for inclusion in Open Payments and of those, 50.6% (361/713) received general payments in 2014 and 19.5% (139/713) received research payments (which can also function as direct payments).
The payments varied widely (the two most highly paid editors, in just a year, received $1,264,234 and $10,981,153 respectively) while other editors received much smaller payments (for things like attending dinners promoting a pharmaceutical product…I never liked these because they would always serve junk food which I assumed was because they deduced anyone who wanted healthy food would not push pharmaceuticals). These are some of the results from the study:
In the old days, journal corruption was relatively straightforward:
•A third party was hired to produce industry-friendly research (or sign off as the “independent” author of industry research) and a journal was paid to publish it.
•This research would then be promoted to physicians who in turn would trust the third party and push those drugs on their patients or be taken up by the press where uninformed science reporters would trumpet miraculous claims about the study that were often not substantiated by its data.
Similarly, prestigious academics other physicians deferred to (known as key opinion leaders) would be paid off to promote medical practices that advanced pharmaceutical interests, and like the journal articles, the medical community would defer to them.
The rigidity of this information hierarchy and the corruption within the medical field gradually increased as the years went by (and extended far beyond the medical journals). However once COVID-19 happened, as many longtime observers of this issue have noted, everything went into overdrive.
The Third Party Technique in the Age of COVID-19
One of the things that informed me the COVID-19 vaccines were going to turn into a debacle was how aggressive the PR campaign to sell them was; I had never seen anything similar in my lifetime and almost every stop that could be pulled out to promote the vaccines was and as far as I could gather from observing the entire process (ironically one of the vaccine injured individuals I know of worked for Moderna’s campaign). Because of this, we were able to witness extreme examples of the third party technique being utilized:
•Countless celebrities and media programs promoted the vaccinations (including many disgusting examples like Sesame Street characters becoming vaccine pushers).
•Authoritative third party messaging and in-person experts supporting the COVID-19 vaccination narrative were given a monopoly throughout the mainstream news (excluding a few exceptions on Fox news).
•All academic publications worked in lockstep to censor anything dissenting from the narrative.
•All of the Big Tech platforms (the primary source of information besides the mainstream media) declared only information from authoritative sources (corrupt third parties) could be shared on COVID-19. Anything else was deplatformed and censored.
(The Biden Administration, as FOIA’d documents revealed, also put further fuel onto this fire by paying hundreds of millions to major news networks in return for favorable press coverage on COVID-19 vaccination).
Ivermectin and PR
Near the end of 2019, I began to have a very bad feeling about what was transpiring in China as I knew how many similar situations had been handled by the American medical field in the past. On New Year’s Eve, I was hit by a vision of what was likely to unfold in the coming years, and since then my life has been a surreal experience of watching a slow-motion nightmare become reality. Near the start, once it became clear no one was interested in a virus from China, I set my eyes on trying to identify the one thing which could stop this future from coming to pass, an effective treatment that would become the standard of care for COVID-19.
Like many others I corresponded with, I burned the candle at both ends throughout the pandemic in the faint hope of bringing a cure for COVID-19 to the public. Ultimately, like many other research teams pursuing countless other effective therapies, our efforts fell on deaf ears and there are now numerous clearly effective treatments for COVID-19 few have even heard of.
Of the COVID-19 treatments that did come to prominence, ivermectin occupies a special place in my heart because its threat to the narrative provoked an unprecedented PR campaign that was blatant enough to red-pill a large portion of the population. Unlike many treatments which were covertly suppressed in the past, for ivermectin, much of the public watched what happened firsthand, with the situation being made particularly absurd on account of the coordinated PR campaigns claiming a highly regarded and extremely safe drug was suddenly dangerous and unfit for human consumption. As you might expect a lot of third parties were recruited for this campaign.
At a journal level, prestigious medical journals refused to publish numerous favorable studies on Ivermectin while simultaneously publishing a few clearly fraudulent studies debunking Ivermectin. Simultaneously, previously objective organizations such as the Cochrane Collaboration (recently bought out by the Gates foundation) tasked with reviewing these studies instead published inaccurate reviews stating the opposite (the author of one key review admitted on camera he published a flawed review to avoid upsetting his sponsors). Pierre Kory throughout his substack and upcoming book has put a lot of time into breaking down how that fraud occurred. This 12-minute video for example highlights the key fraudulent studies promoted by the medical journals (if you watch it, note just how many third parties are utilized to sell the narrative):
One of the most important observations Kory made throughout this entire process was the coordination the PR campaigns had with the medical journals (best synopsized within this article):
I can recite the above five studies without thinking because the day each appeared on the website of their respective medical journal, I had to wake up to the FLCCC team’s numerous emails, texts, and phone calls letting me know we “had to do something” because with each publication and the media storm that ensued, the FLCCC was asked to defend our position or were condescended to as “you guys got it wrong.”
Each day was a PR crisis in terms of having to defend our credibility and treatment recommendations. I hated each and every one of those days. Hundreds of doctors arrogantly tweeting and posting “see I told you it didn’t work”, journalists writing hit jobs, calling us “advocates” or worse, “fringe anti-vaxxers” etc. It was a shit show. And it was exhausting beyond belief.
Notice the dates of publication of these trials. I point this out because it seemed to me, with my front row seat, that these studies and mass media campaigns were spaced out in timed intervals. It was like a cannon firing every few months, with each propaganda round sounding louder and traveling farther… until everyone in the world thought the same thing, “ivermectin doesn’t work.” This hypothesis might explain why the TOGETHER trial (the most fraudulent and impactful of them all) took literally 9 months to appear after the study was terminated and the preliminary results were announced in an NIH presentation. I think they held on to it in order to time its impact for whenever there was a “dry spell” of bad news against ivermectin.
Note: The recent FTX scandal defrauded over a million investors to the tune of 8 billion, and was used to funnel a lot of money (e.g. the aid given to Ukraine to fight Russia) back to many Democrats in Congress that have also promoted the war on COVID-19 (along with a few Republicans doing the same). Recently it was discovered FTX also allocated 18 million of their (defrauded) investor’s money to fund one of the pivotal studies used to remove off-patent drugs from consideration in the treatment of COVID-19 (which was also funded by Gates and many large pharmaceutical companies). This is completely inappropriate to do with investors’ money but helps to illustrate how interwoven these corrupt industries are and where their priorities lie. Lastly, this is a detailed summary of why that pivotal study was fraudulent.
Guideline Committees
I was originally inspired to write this article upon having the epiphany that the guideline committees we have had so many difficulties with over the last few years are another form of the third party technique. As a brief overview, within our current practice of medicine, most doctors are required to follow health care “guidelines” (as if they do not do so insurance will not reimburse them for their work, corporate employers will sanction them, medical boards or law enforcement agencies may investigate them, they open themselves up to malpractice suits because they "violated the standard of care,” etc.).
The theory behind guidelines is that the practice of medicine is so immensely complex that it requires a committee of qualified experts to dig through the existing evidence and produce guidelines physicians (who do not have time to review the evidence themselves) can adopt into and improve their general practice with. The problem unfortunately with this approach is that the committees always seem to be filled with individuals taking pharmaceutical money who recommend (or mandate) giving as many of their sponsor’s pharmaceuticals as possible.
This situation highlights one of the most transcendent forms of the third party technique, as there are so many degrees of separation between a pharmaceutical company to “evidence-based guidelines” many will not even think to question the objectivity of those rules. However, as Angell’s 2009 quote illustrates, this has long been an issue (similarly, the flawed guidelines that pushed statins onto the American population were a result of a clear misinterpretation of the existing evidence by committee members shown to be taking money from statin manufacturers).
In COVID-19, the third party guideline technique was repeatedly utilized. One of the most blatant examples was the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel of the NIH. Its members were directly appointed by Fauci, with the majority receiving money from Gilead, the manufacturer of Remdesivir, Fauci’s pet drug he wanted approved to treat COVID-19. Each of the chairs of course had close ties to Fauci.
Note: To illustrate how deep this corruption goes, one of Fauci’s appointees, Masur, back in 2004, had been a lead author of sepsis treatment guidelines that were part of a PR campaign sponsored by Eli Lily to promote and sell a dangerous drug that was eventually pulled from the market (his guidelines, of course, required administration of Lily's drug and created other major issues in the practice of critical care medicine Paul Marik worked for years to debunk).
The NIH’s committee in turn voted to only produce guidelines endorsing highly profitable treatments for COVID-19 regardless of how dangerous or ineffective they were (what Fauci did with Remdesivir through his committee was virtually identical to what he did with a somewhat related drug, AZT during the AIDS crisis). Simultaneously, many far safer and more effective drugs that could not be commercialized were blacklisted by the NIH committee, including ones that had robust evidence for them from trial sites around the world. In short, the committee’s actions were likely responsible for the deaths of nearly a million Americans.
While that is pretty bad, it’s still not in the same league as what has transpired with the COVID-19 vaccines. For example, consider the case of the FDA which was paid 2.8 million to approve Pfizer’s vaccine (the FDA like many branches of the federal government has become coopted by pharmaceutical money and to my knowledge what they did to approve and then cover up the dangers of antidepressants is the best case study that exists for what is presently transpiring with the vaccines). That corruption predictably led to the FDA’s committee approving the COVID-19 vaccines despite clear evidence against doing so and mass public protest against those actions, which in turn has led to countless jurisdictions mandating the vaccine (along with a few FDA officials who oversaw the process quietly resigning).
Note: Scientists within the Federal government and federally funded researchers (who often end up on guideline committees) are entitled to massive royalty payments for drugs they helped discover. This incentivizes them to push those drugs to approval (either directly or through their colleagues), and I suspect is the overall largest source of corruption in this entire process, although since this was first revealed, Fauci and the H.H.S. have worked very hard to hide who is being paid off.
The most well-known offender in this guideline process has been the ACIP, the CDC’s “outside” third party panel of qualified experts. The ACIP nearly without fail has voted to recommend every vaccine ever FDA approved onto the American population (sadder still its chair has been documented to be willfully refusing to examine evidence challenging those decisions).
Like the FDA, the CDC is entrenched in corruption (extensively documented here), but due to the public trust in its brand, it once again serves as a third party that can effectively advocate for the pharmaceutical company’s interests (and in many cases produces guidelines that are treated as law, whereas if Pfizer directly produced the same guidelines, they would never be mandated)
Are Guidelines Law?
At the start of the article, I remarked upon the challenge always faced by those in power: the feasibility of their immoral actions. A key constraint (and foundational feature of any republic) on those sociopathic tendencies of power are laws prohibiting that conduct. In turn, games are always played to find ways to create the authority to do something the authority never existed for. For example, many departments of the Federal Government conduct actions they were never legally sanctioned to do, which Robert Malone provides a fascinating discussion on and relates to Trump’s Supreme Court Justices (who previously voted against Biden’s vaccine mandates because they were administrative overreach).
Guidelines are another area where legal grey zones are abused. Despite not having the legal authority to regulate many facets of medicine, through amenable third parties, entities like the NIH can arbitrarily create committees that produce guidelines that are viewed as the objective rendition of reality and then, despite never having been approved by a legislative process, become de facto laws.
Although these laws are normally unchallenged (as no one thinks to question the third party the institution they are within chooses to enforce the “guidelines” of), there was an interesting case in the past where the Lyme community sued the Infectious Disease Society of America (which has also published widely cited COVID treatment guidelines I and others strongly disagree with).
The lawsuit challenged IDSA’s (clearly flawed) guidelines that argued against the use of antibiotics for chronic Lyme disease, which was frequently being used by insurers to deny payment for those treatments and as a basis for authorities to crack down on those treatments being administered in private practices. IDSA defended themselves by stating their (flawed) guidelines were only advice and thus they could not be liable for them, a defense the judge agreed with, dismissing the case (his dismissal is why Lyme docs are left alone now):
“IDSA’s guidelines…make clear that adherence to the guidelines is voluntary, with the ultimate determination regarding their application to be made by the physician in light of each patient’s individual circumstances.”
This ruling is quite important, as to my knowledge it represents the only case of its kind and the current precedent is thus that guidelines cannot supersede a physician’s judgment.
Recently the FDA was sued for their (essentially illegal) attempt to take down ivermectin, which, like the parties mentioned previously, involved a coordinated PR campaign (e.g. pushing the horse dewormer meme alongside constant strong warnings against its use in humans). This campaign had its intended effect and immediately led to both hospitals and pharmacies along with many doctors discontinuing the administration of the drug. Many suspect the FDA or Fauci also directly applied pressure on those parties, but at this point, unless a whistleblower comes forward, there is no way to prove if that happened.
Like the IDSA, in court the FDA argued:
“The cited statements were not directives. They were not mandatory. They were recommendations. They said what parties should do. They said, for example, why you should not take ivermectin to treat COVID-19. They did not say you may not do it, you must not do it. They did not say it’s prohibited or it’s unlawful. They also did not say that doctors may not prescribe ivermectin,” Isaac Belfer, one of the lawyers, said during a Nov. 1 hearing in federal court in Texas. “They use informal language, that is true. It’s conversational but not mandatory.”
Given the FDA’s conduct on ivermectin, the idea that it was just a “suggestion” is a hard pill to swallow, and highlights how little accountability exists for misusing a third party to promote a sponsor’s interests.
The Business of Pushing Drugs
When studied, pharmaceutical companies on average make approximately twice as much as the other top corporations in America. Something many do not recognize is that the primary role of pharmaceutical companies is to market and sell pharmaceuticals, not to produce medications that can benefit humanity (drug development is typically outsourced to other companies which are later bought out; e.g. Pfizer’s vaccine was developed by BioNTech, a company Gates invested 55 million into two months before COVID-19 officially emerged in China and made at least 500 million off of).
So despite all their claims they need more and more of your money to develop the drugs we need, that’s a lie and most of it goes into creative ways (e.g. bribes) to get unsafe drugs approved, convince doctors the drugs are great and create lavish PR campaigns so the public believes they need them.
To quote Peter C. Gøtzsche MD, one of the leaders in exposing pharmaceutical fraud and corruption within medicine:
‘The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs… virtually everything we know about drugs is what the companies have chosen to tell us and our doctors… if you don’t believe the system is out of control, please e-mail me and explain why drugs are the third leading cause of death.’
Fortunately, over the last 7 years, there appears to have been a gradual public awareness of the insidious creep of PR into our lives, and as the PR has gotten more and more aggressive, more eyes have become opened. For example, a significant amount of attention was recently drawn to the fact that the CDC’s vaccine division uses the same PR firm as Pfizer and Moderna (which means any doubt they are not working together on vaccine PR campaigns can be dispelled).
Note: This PR firm has also worked to develop online initiatives to have AI help big-tech censor competing content (e.g. “When your Doctor Prescribes Misinformation”). This gradual encroachment of censorship onto all platforms for anything that is not supported by a “trustworthy” third party represents the next evolution of the PR industry and fulfills a longstanding aspiration of the PR field. Many of us previously would have found this difficult to imagine this could ever happen, yet in parallel to this, campaigns have also been waged to enact those policies in the real world, such as California’s recent physician censorship law, which unconstitutionally outlawed any physician from sharing information that contradicted that provided by “trusted” third parties.
Conclusion
One of my favorite fables is The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs, which concludes with the owner deciding he wants more gold than the goose can produce by laying eggs and cuts it open to get the rest, only to discover nothing is there and losing everything as a consequence of his greed. The nature of many industries are to voraciously expand as much as possible, and since the pharmaceutical industry has established a monopoly on the practice of medicine (and thus “life or death”), this “growth” can be gotten away with to the point the ever-growing healthcare spending now accounts for one-fifth of our GDP.
My sincere hope with COVID-19 was that the flagrant greed of the pharmaceutical companies would finally awaken the populace to their conduct and end pharma’s Golden Goose (a few signs of which are now emerging as childhood vaccine uptake has dropped). A critical reason why this awakening is possible now is because the traditional form of propaganda, regardless of how much further developed it becomes, is no longer able to function in the modern environment created by the internet.
A fascinating article (by a multidisciplinary collaboration aiming to reform propaganda) I read on this subject makes the case that since anyone can now create their own evidence for competing narratives, the vertical advantage previously held by those with the resources to monopolize the airways with a tailored message has evaporated. For example, with no cost except my own time, I can take a day out of my life to put together a well-thought-out rebuttal to the media’s current propaganda campaign which is seen and believed by thousands upon thousands of people. If it was just me, it probably would not matter, but there are many, many, many, more people doing the exact same thing as we speak and it is my belief that they have played a large role in shaping the direction of history over the last seven years.
Because of this, the old models of propaganda simply don’t work anymore, and each media platform has been trying to combat this reality with stricter and stricter censorship (especially online) alongside more and more audacious lies. Each time they do it, however, it simply leaves the public with the side effects of excessive propaganda: being more confused, fragmented, polarized, and less trusting of authoritative sources than they were before, exactly what every propaganda campaign for a national interest strives to avoid.
At this point, the article’s authors see three paths forward. Continue our current path (which will likely prove disastrous), adopt a Chinese-style system of complete internet censorship (which many in Big Tech and likely other industries are pushing for but many are effectively resisting), or adopt the alternative to mass propaganda originally proposed when all of this started a century ago (Elon Musk through his conduct at Twitter and elsewhere appears to endorse this option).
A central debate that waged since the early days of propaganda was if it was acceptable in a Democracy. Its proponents argued that society had become too complex for the average citizen to be able to make decisions of importance, that propaganda was remarkably effective in meeting the needs of the nation (e.g. winning the world wars), and if the government did not use it, others like the Nazis would use it against us and take over the world. Its opponents however were adamant a Democracy could not exist if it was run by propaganda and argued the solution to all of this was to improve the educational standards so the masses could understand and actively participate in the complex decisions of the modern era.
These two sides vied for control (e.g. America used propaganda throughout World War 2 on its citizens, but after the war, doing so was banned by the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948). In tandem with increasing corruption in our government, in 2012 Obama signed the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, essentially repealing the 1948 law under the need to support the war on terror. This rapidly accelerated the glut of government propaganda citizens were fed and I suspect that glut played a key role in killing the government’s Golden Goose of propaganda.
In many ways, it appears the tables have reversed from how they were a century ago, as it is now the propagandists rather than the crowds that lack the sophistication to keep up with the complexity of the current era (e.g. message boards at the periphery of the internet can produce meme campaigns that run circles around institutional sources of propaganda like the CIA or CNN).
For all of these reasons, as the authors of the aforementioned article mentioned it may be in everyone’s interest, including those in power, to take the third choice and switch to the model originally advocated for by John Dewey. Focus on creating an educational system that creates critically thinking citizens who actively participate in the decision-making process in order to arrive at the best result for society (e.g. not sacrificing citizens is secret for the “greater good”) and design internet platforms that foster an open discourse rather than aggressively promoting specific narratives while censoring dissenting opinions or incentivizing inflammatory and polarizing content.
With everyday citizens empowered by the Internet now seeking and gaining access to databases for themselves, we face a choice. Either drop the pretense of being an open society, close off access, and solidify the gap between “the masses” and the “expert class,” or build the education and information infrastructure necessary to become a more open society.
I am very hopeful for this future but simultaneously recognize that power is one of the hardest things to let go of, so we will likely see a very rocky transition as we move towards it. In the meantime, I believe one of the most important things you can do is begin to open your eyes to the common PR techniques out there. Once you do, it's astounding how differently everything looks.
They Live provides excellent metaphors for much of the PR industry.
Comments
Post a Comment