The entire medical and health establishment must be investigated for corruption.
Covid has unveiled the lies we have been living through for the past 100 years. Society suffered and medical credibility was destroyed.
In the words of Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal: “We have little evidence on the effectiveness of peer review, but we have considerable evidence on its defects. In addition to being poor at detecting gross defects and almost useless for detecting fraud, it is slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, something of a lottery, prone to bias, and easily abused.”114
Doctors for too long have been trusting the information published in so-called established journals.
RCTs, which are regarded as the gold standard to test for efficacy and safety of drugs compared to epidemiological and observational studies are all fraught with corruption and bias because the researchers in most instances have to produce results that are favourable to their funders, so they won't hesitate to manipulate their data even though the information is detrimental to the health of the public.
During COVID, repurposed drugs like ivermectin and HCQ with excellent safety profiles for over sixty years were unfairly attacked by big pharma, academics, research institutions and the media because most of the critics of repurposed medication were heavily paid by big pharma to denigrate repurposed drugs and promote highly toxic and ineffective drugs like remdesivir and paxlovid, and mechanical ventilation.
Independent doctors and scientists as well as honest journalists who are not on the pay roll of big pharma should replace many of the editorial boards of medical journals and a law should be passed prohibiting funding of doctors by big pharma if society is to be protected by these wolves in medicine.
Millions of lives were saved in India, Africa and South America through the liberal use of Ivermectin and HCQ, VIT D3, Vit C and Zinc but these successes were discarded as anecdotal rubbish by the scientists and doctors who sold their souls to big pharma. This will go down as one of the biggest crimes in the history of the world.
Frontline doctors, who came to the world's rescue need more recognition for their work.
Observational clinical outcomes should be regarded as an important modality to appraise the safety of a drug or a protocol.
The experiences of frontline doctors have for a long been ignored by academic institutions.
During COVID, scientists in epidemiology, who merely work with figures, manipulated or not, had the biggest say on the policy even though none of them touched a single patient.
Millions lost their lives because of this bizarre policy that only recognises the information from professors that operate from their ivory towers.
The respect I once had for people with the title of professor has been completely lost after my experience treating patients with COVID and reading about the successes of other frontline doctors in the world. How tragic that the academics of the world joined hands with the low-life MSM to denigrate the true heroes of the COVID pandemic.
Hopefully, during the post COVID era, medical training and the approval of drugs will change; the regulatory health authorities throughout the world will be fully investigated for being complicit in harming society.
We need to get rid of a number of local and international organisations like the WHO and replace them with more transparent, viable and accountable organisations.
Lastly many politicians in the world are equally guilty of the the huge loss of life because they willingly sided with big pharma. They too must be held accountable for not protecting society.
Dr E V Rapiti
Cape Town
November 25, 2024
Observational studies can be quite appropriate for treatments using repurposed drugs with acceptable safety. The reason is because one is trying to distinguish between neutral vs positive effect; negative effect is already ruled out knowing the safety profile of the medicines, how they work, and how the disease works. This is in part why, for example, an observational study is sufficient to argue that parachutes reduce mortality for people that jump out of airplanes. For something new however, e.g. a new vaccine, a randomized controlled trial should be required, because the problem there is to distinguish between three possibilities: (a) negative effect; (b) neutral effect; (c) positive effect. There, one needs an unbiased measurement of the effect to rule out the possibility that it is negative.
One problem in academia is that the smartest people end up in the hard sciences, so there are not enough of them left to go into epidemiology. The other problem is that even without direct Pharma funding, academics are funded by government grants, and Big Pharma buys the government and the media that control the political narratives. Just as academics are under an academic freedom framework (which works well, to some extent), we need a similar framework to protect the patient-doctor relationship. As one example, I don't understand why anyone should even entertain investigating any complaints against doctors not initiated by the patient (or next of kin).