How Big Pharma Blocks Accountability

Jeffrey Tucker summarizes multiple examples of cause and effect.

Author: Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute

Originally published by Epoch Times as “The Dangers of Investigating Big Pharma” on 9/22/2023, Updated: 9/27/2023

My family is from Texas (since 1830), so I have a focused interest in the well-being of that state. But I quickly got lost in the strange thicket of confusion when Attorney General Ken Paxton was impeached by the Texas House.

In a series of wild allegations, they accused him of misconduct, including bribery, obstruction of justice, and misappropriation of public resources.

In an instant and with no warning about what was coming, Paxton had to pack up his things, was blocked from doing his duties, and was forced to step aside from the office that the people had three times elected him to hold.

Last week, he was exonerated of all charges and his name was fully cleared. Hardly anyone can even explain what the charges were. From a distance, it sure looked like a big political takedown attempt, but why?

Paxton just sat for an extended interview with Tucker Carlson, who now runs the planet’s most-watched show, which appears on X, formerly Twitter, and has no advertisers at all. In one portion of the interview, Mr. Paxton explained that three weeks before the impeachment, he had initiated an investigation against the COVID-19 vaccine makers for engaging in deceptive trade practices under the laws of Texas.

I recall being very excited about this at the time as a hugely important step. At the national level, the vaccine manufacturers are completely indemnified against liability from harms, which are plenty and also well-documented. Millions were forced to have this product injected into their bodies, and when something goes wrong, there's no one to sue. It isn't the way we are supposed to do business in America.

Paxton was all over the case and ready to start a serious inquiry.

“As soon as I did that,” he told Mr. Carlson, “that blew up my world. I became a target of Big Pharma, Big Tech, and obviously the Biden administration.”

Mr. Carlson then asked him why that would be the case.

“Big Pharma gives a lot of money. ... I was doing it because the federal government has this immunity for them. This is wrong," Paxton said. "They didn’t test this thing. They didn’t tell us about the side effects. They had an obligation to test it, even if they weren’t liable.

"They had an obligation to tell my people there are some risks here. You should decide but here are the risks. Instead, they said everything is good, it prevents it, you won’t spread it. None of that was true. That’s a deceptive trade practice. If they did that ...”

Mr. Carlson interrupts and says, “It seems like they did that.”

Then. Mr. Paxton says he will know more in the coming weeks and months, because he's picking up the case again. He should watch his back.

We need to be clear on what might be going on here. A state attorney general merely decided to apply existing law to the vaccine makers who provide most of the revenue to the drug approval side of the Food and Drug Administration. They fund 75 percent of television advertising and have moles embedded at all the commanding heights.

They are so powerful that they manage to get Congress and the president to grant them full freedom from liability for any of the effects of a vaccine. That only incentivized the firms to call gene therapy a vaccine even though it didn’t work like any vaccine in history.

How can it be possible that such tax-funded corporate agents, which own the patents to their drugs, and can even force their product on unwilling customers, can unseat a duly elected official in a state? It’s amazing ... and terrifying.

But that might be only the start of it. Mr. Carlson’s show on Fox was canceled just after he started asking hard questions about the vaccine, while Russell Brand was smeared the world over as he started to raise questions. It’s happened to many public figures.

Look at the unseating of the founder of Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe, which occurred after he exposed a Pfizer employee bragging about how much money the company would make by creating new strains of viruses against which they can vaccinate. It was easily the most spectacular exposé of the institution’s history—and then, boom, he was fired.

Now, Mr. O’Keefe runs his own outfit that continues to chase down pharma executives.

As for Project Veritas, it just pulled the plug and fired all but a few employees. It has ceased operations, which isn't surprising. When you get rid of the highest-performing person, the fumes you are left with don’t last long.

Think about it: This awesome operation was wrecked because some powerful people got squeamish about exposing the vaccine makers.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the biggest and most learned critic of Big Pharma on the planet, faced what might have been an assassination attempt last week. It didn’t even make the newspapers (The Epoch Times excepted). Meanwhile, he's still being denied Secret Service protection even though he's a serious candidate and faces non-stop threats on his life.

As president of Brownstone Institute, I see examples several times a day of what happens to doctors, professors, statisticians, or anyone who asks questions about this industry, which somehow has emerged as among the most powerful in U.S. politics. The dirty dealings of the industry in canceling critics are legion. Any study that questions the effectiveness, safety, or necessity of their products is nearly always rejected by the mainstream journals. Even letters to the editor that expose statistical errors end up in the dustbin.

As for Big Tech, they too are fully beholden. We have ironclad proof that Facebook and Twitter blocked any posts critical of vaccines. They went so far as to block “true information” about vaccine side effects that might contribute to an environment of “vaccine hesitancy.”

We must ask again: How did Big Pharma buy control of so many governments?

At this point, this problem has become a genuine threat to democracy and freedom. No industry has greater power to extract tax funding of its operations, retain intellectual property control over the results, enjoy indemnity from harms, and then even force its products on consumers. This is indefensible.

Any warrior who dares stand up to this deserves the support of everyone who believes in what was the American system.

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