Science’s Turn Towards Darkness
By Jordi Pigem, Brownstone Institute
In light of RFK, Jr.’s confirmation hearings to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, it is good to remember that much of what is presented to us as science stems from vested interests and an outdated mechanistic worldview.
Science is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. But it is not infallible — that’s why it is science and not dogma — and is sadly not immune to the virus of corruption. For many decades, the mirror of science has become increasingly blurred by a storm of vested interests, particularly when research and the communication of results are linked to large corporations.
The BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal), one of the leading medical journals, published an article in 2022 on “The illusion of evidence-based medicine.” As stated in its introductory sentence, the solid scientific foundation claimed by medicine “has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialization of academia.” In this context, the authors assert that:
Unconcerned governments and captured regulators are unlikely to initiate necessary change to remove research from industry altogether and clean up publishing models that depend on reprint revenue, advertising, and sponsorship revenue.
We were warned long ago. Back in 2005, the prestigious PLoS Medicine published one of the most quoted scientific articles of the 21st century, with the remarkable title “Why most published research findings are false.” Building on complex mathematical models, the renowned researcher John Ioannidis reached the conclusion that “most research findings are false for most research designs and for most fields.”
The two top medical journals in the world are The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. Marcia Angell, the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the former, wrote in her 2009 article “Drug companies & doctors: A story of corruption:”
Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published […]. 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.
As for The Lancet, its director, Richard Horton, in 2015 devoted an article to a meeting with prominent scientists and government officials that he had attended the previous week at the Wellcome Trust. Observing Chatham House rules, they were asked not to take pictures or to disclose names. The article started by quoting one of the anonymous experts: “A lot of what is published is incorrect.”
Horton himself concluded: “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” The Lancet’s editor-in-chief acknowledged that, in scientific articles of the most highly ranked journals, authors often “sculpt data to fit their preferred theory,” and he didn’t spare from his rebuke the editors (they prioritize impact over truth), nor the universities (they prioritize their need for funding), nor the best scientists (they don’t do much to change the situation). Horton summed up his confession (it sounds like one) by declaring that “science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
Worth underscoring: “Science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
In 2013, exactly a century after the Rockefeller Foundation had begun its program to recast medicine on a technocratic model, Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, was compelled to denounce the corruption of institutionalized medicine in Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.
There is no scarcity of books on the matter. In Empire of Pain (2021), Patrick Radden Keefe shows how the fortune of the Sackler family, estimated at $12 billion, grew from the massive and misleading promotion of the painkiller OxyContin, owned by Purdue Pharma. Commercials recommended it as a drug “to start and stay with,” thus contributing to the opioid crisis. According to Keefe, between 1999 and 2017, “200,000 Americans had died from overdoses related to OxyContin and other prescription opioids.”
For two thousand years, health care was led by the motto primum non nocere, “First do no harm.” During the 20th century, this sensible ideal was corrupted into primum lucrari, “First make profit.” Profit-making became the first priority of Big Pharma: what matters is the “health” of its profits, over and above the health of men, women, and children, over and above any scientific truth.
The fines that Big Pharma has to pay from time to time are more than offset by the profits it makes. Big Pharma is also the world’s leading spender in influencing the media and buying opinions. It lobbies health ministries and medical associations, captures regulators, and shapes all research to serve its interests — disregarding people’s health and disregarding evidence.
Richard Smith, former editor-in-chief of The BMJ, wrote in the summer of 2021 that “the system” directly encourages fraud in biomedical research:
Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting […]. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously have proved to be false, and, 40 years on from Lock’s concerns, we are realising that the problem is huge, the system encourages fraud, and we have no adequate way to respond. It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary.
In this context, the “Follow the science” we were told since 2020 should have been taken with a pinch of salt. It was more about “Follow authority” or “Follow marketing.”
As the history of science shows again and again, what seems to be firmly established today, tomorrow may turn out to be incorrect, or only valid under certain circumstances. Lord Kelvin gave a famous lecture in 1900 in which he advised young talents not to study physics, because, by then, virtually everything had already been discovered. So it seemed. There remained only “two clouds;” that is, two minor questions about what light is. From one of those questions emerged quantum physics, and from the other one emerged the theory of relativity. The flow of understanding cannot be congealed: frozen science is no science.
In 2020, a barrage of misleading data broadcast, through mass media, from governments, international institutions, and medical journals, combined with the censorship of millions of us (including Nobel laureates Luc Montaigner and Michael Levitt and countless other experts) who didn’t toe the party line, coalesced to create the greatest scandal in the history of medicine.
Until then, most people would have considered the trial of Galileo by the Inquisition to be the greatest scandal in the history of science. But Galileo’s trial resulted in the lockdown of just one person, Galileo himself, who would spend his last years confined to his scenic villa in the countryside, il Gioiello (“the Jewel”), where he wrote some of his most important work, including his Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences. That is not comparable with the lockdown of billions of people, and the suffering and fatal or long-lasting adverse effects inflicted on many men, women and children, for reasons alien to science.
The recent bipartisan House of Representatives report on the “Coronavirus Pandemic,” published on December 4, 2024, includes headings showing that “The Six-Foot Social Distancing Requirement Was Not Supported by Science,” “Masks and Mask Mandates Were Ineffective at Controlling the Spread of COVID-19,” “Testing for COVID-19 Was Flawed,” “Public Health Officials Disregarded Natural Immunity,” and “Vaccine Mandates Were Not Supported by Science.”
It also acknowledges that school closures “Adversely Impacted Academic Performance that Will Continue for Years,” “Made an Already Alarming Trend in Declining Physical Health Worse,” and “Significantly Contributed to Increased Instances of Mental and Behavioral Health Issues.” Four sections of the report show how “Government Perpetrated COVID-19 Misinformation.” In fact, as Martin Makary told Congress in 2023, “the greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic [was] the United States government.” The worst misinformation did not come from below, but from above, from power.
Science was not calling the shots. For instance, the Covid policies mandated by the German government claimed to be based on scientific recommendations from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German equivalent of the CDC. But when in 2024 the proceedings (Protokolle) of the RKI internal meetings were released, it turned out that the RKI scientists had been following the government, not the other way around. In the meeting of September 10, 2021, these scientists complained about the pressure put on them by the BMG (Bundesministerium für Gesundheit, Federal Ministry of Health), and they explicitly acknowledge that “the BMG technically oversees the RKI,” which “cannot claim scientific freedom.” After all, “the RKI’s scientific independence from politics is limited.”
Eight weeks later, on November 5, 2021, the proceedings show that the RKI scientists disagreed with the government’s rhetoric about “vaccines” stopping Covid infection and there being a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” But they chose to remain silent about their disagreement; they argued that their public communications could not be changed because “it would cause great confusion.”
However, shifting your perspective in light of new evidence was precisely the point of the scientific attitude. Galileo and Darwin did not stop speaking their minds because “it would cause great confusion.”
The scientific seal of approval was given to unscientific policies, and the German people were misled into believing that there was a scientific basis where there wasn’t.
The most striking evidence of malfeasance, in any case, can be garnered from another body of internal documents: the “Pfizer papers.” When a Freedom of Information request demanded the release of documents related to the licensing of the Pfizer Covid “vaccine,” the FDA asked to be given 75 years (until 2096!) to be able to process and print the documents. Fortunately, the judge didn’t buy that. More than 450,000 pages of technical documents were eventually released and examined by a team of 3,250 volunteers that included doctors from all specialties, biologists, biostatisticians, and medical fraud investigators.
Their key findings have been summarized in a book edited by Naomi Wolf and Amy Kelly, The Pfizer Papers. According to Pfizer’s own documents, within three months after the rollout of its “vaccine” in December 2020, they knew that it did not work to stop the illness (the documents speak of “vaccine failure”), and caused multiple types of “serious adverse events” (among them “death”). Shortly after, Pfizer was aware that its “vaccine” was damaging the hearts of young people. One of the most shocking revelations is that, long before this mRNA product was strongly recommended to pregnant women, Pfizer knew that its materials entered breast milk and poisoned babies as deaths of newborns after “maternal exposure” to the “vaccine” are recorded in these internal documents. In four cases, breast milk had turned “blue-green.”
But it was not just Pfizer. Similar evidence is surfacing from Moderna and other companies and institutions that knew one thing and said another, and pretended to be heroes while flirting with evil. The Moderna Papers are due to be released this summer.
There was, on many fronts, a multi-pronged attack on our physical and mental health as well as on all standards of decency. Where did all this come from?
This question was asked in about 50 interviews with US and European high-ranking officials and global health specialists (which were “granted anonymity [for them] to speak candidly”) in an investigation conducted over a period of seven months by two media outlets, the German Die Welt and the American Politico. This investigation found that governments were not calling the shots either, but toeing a line:
much of the international response to the Covid pandemic passed from governments to a privately overseen global constituency of non-governmental experts.
This “privately overseen global constituency of non-governmental experts” did have “significant financial and political connections that enabled them to achieve such clout at the highest levels of the US government, the European Commission, and the WHO.” And who was privately overseeing this “global constituency of non-governmental experts”? As the joint investigation by Die Welt and Politico reveals, at the core of this network were several entities associated with a big name of fraudulent profiteering (initially through his tech corporation): Bill Gates. The German edition of this joint research is entitled Die Machtmaschine des Bill Gates: “Bill Gates’ Power Machine”. The next question is: What lies behind Bill Gates?
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Jordi Pigem has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona. He taught Philosophy of Science at the Masters in Holistic Science at Schumacher College in England. His books include a recent trilogy, in Spanish and Catalan, on our present world: Pandemia y posverdad (Pandemics and Post-Truth), Técnica y totalitarismo (Technics and Totalitarianism) and Conciencia o colapso (Consciousness or Collapse). He is a Brownstone Institute Fellow and a founding member of Brownstone Spain.
