Listen to top scientists and editors from esteemed medical journals and you can’t help but conclude there is such a thing as a “scientific establishment.” And it’s been as corrupted by politics and misinformation as many in politics and the media.
In my 2017 investigation into “Fake Science,” Dr. Marcia Angell, the first woman to serve as Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, explained why she says a large percentage of published studies are not to be believed.
“I came to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1979,” says Angell. “Starting about then was when you saw the drug companies assert more and more control until finally they over the next couple of decades, they began to treat the researchers as hired hands. They would design the research themselves. You know you can do a lot of mischief in how you design a trial. Or ‘we’ll test this drug and we’ll tell you whether it can be published or not,’ and so if it’s a positive study, it’s published; if it’s a negative study, it’ll never see the light of day.”
Watch my investigation into Covid-10 origins, separating fact from rumor.
That sentiment is shared by Dr. Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of the British journal Lancet. In 2015, he wrote a scathing editorial saying, “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue; science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
Dr. Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief, Lancet
These scientists are joined by many others who say that industry and special interests have co-opted the research process, academic institutions, federal agencies and public health groups to such a degree that it can be impossible to get unconflicted, accurate scientific information. At the very least, it’s difficult to know what can be trusted and what should not.
This phenomenon was never more important than during the Covid-19 pandemic when so many voices are shouting “Follow the science!” and when perfectly valid opinions and scientific findings are being censored, silenced and controversialized by Big Tech and some in the media.
All of this helps explain what happened last year when President Trump took what seemed to many to be the perfectly reasonable step of ordering a halt to U.S. taxpayer funding of the Communist Chinese research lab in Wuhan that could have been the source of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In April 2020, the Chinese had refused to provide samples, allow an inspection of the Wuhan lab, or otherwise cooperate on steps necessary to help figure out the pandemic and its origins. When Trump got word that the U.S. was sending taxpayer money to the lab and its scientists, he ordered it stopped. Funds were blocked to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance that was responsible for dispensing some U.S. taxpayer money to the Wuhan lab.
What happened when the funding stopped?
The scientific establishment kicked into action.
Scientists told the press— which dutifully reported it— that the funding cuts were political in nature. Uncalled for. Going to cost lives.
The backlash was so strong that most people probably don’t know this, but not long after the funding was cancelled, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reinstated the grant to EcoHealth Alliance.
At least there were some conditions this time. Under orders from Trump, the China bat coronavirus part of the grant was suspended pending the Wuhan Institute of Virology granting a request for an outside inspection.
NIH also made the project contingent upon getting responses from the Chinese to outstanding inquiries regarding the lab’s practices and the Covid-19 outbreak. NIH also wanted EcoHealth Alliance to obtain a virus sample from the Wuhan lab.
EcoHealth Alliance and its leader Peter Daszak criticized the commonsense conditions saying they made their crucial research “impossible.” The press covered the story in lockstep, in a one-sided on-narrative fashion. Here’s what NPR said: “The U.S. government has suddenly terminated funding for a years-long research project in China that many experts say is vital to preventing the next major coronavirus outbreak.”
As for the theory that Covid-19 could have originated at the Wuhan lab, the same NPR story dismissively wrote: “As noted in an NPR story published last week, many scientists have discounted that theory as nearly impossible.”
But as I’ve reported, many scientists did not discount the theory as “nearly impossible.” Numerous scientists directly involved in the genetic analysis, and in related projects, had already concluded the Chinese lab was the most likely culprit, and genetic analysis by U.S. government scientists had already revealed hallmarks of man’s intervention within the virus. You just didn’t hear about it much on the news or online because the discussion wasn’t allowed.
Of course, the “experts” the media were citing were often the very conflicted scientists involved in controversial research with the Chinese to begin with. This was not disclosed in most of the news reports.
Sixty Minutes went a step further and published what, in hindsight, is an embarrassingly obsequious report on EcoHealth Alliance’s Daszak. Instead of pointing to Daszak’s controversial research partnerships with China and “gain of function” work, the story portrayed him largely as savior of all things viral, a man unfairly undercut by an unscientific and political White House under Trump.
And the Sixty Minutes story didn’t reveal that, behind the scenes, Daszak and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, were working to discredit the “lab theory,” usually without publicly disclosing their own roles in securing U.S. taxpayer funds for controversial research partnerships with the Communist Chinese scientists at the lab.
Then on Aug. 27, 2020, it was announced that the National Institutes of Health had awarded an even larger grant of taxpayer money, $7.5 million, to EcoHealth Alliance.
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