The Big Sick
Follow The Science by Sharyl Attkisson has shockers on almost every page about how badly we’re lied to and manipulated, all for Big Pharma profits. Follow The Science is a mix of reportage and memoir of how she “red-pilled” into finding out the sketchy activities involving pharmaceutical companies. Attkisson has spent decades covering the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Her behind-the-scenes stories of how companies tried to (sometimes successfully) quash her exposés are an additional layer of shock in the book. Credit to the (few) people at CBS who protected and fought for her. The stories they ran back then are unthinkable today.
Attkisson was a longtime reporter for CBS, and also worked for NPR—she was as mainstream as mainstream journalism can be. But starting shortly after 9/11, she was assigned to cover the US government’s intent to vaccinate military and other government workers against smallpox, which was supposedly of high concern at the time. People who were adults on 9/11 might vaguely remember this story, though it wasn’t as big as the anthrax scare around the same time. The smallpox vaccine rollout never produced the intended numbers, perhaps with the help of journalists like Attkisson who reported on some of the injuries, and deaths, suffered by military members received the shots, including Army Reservist Rachael Lacy, to whom Follow The Science is dedicated.
Follow The Science is a good addition to two big books to question what the pharmaceutical companies are doing. Robert Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci and Naomi Wolf’s The Pfizer Papers contain comprehensive and thorough data, meticulously sourced, that give readers a page-after-page horror show of what Fauci and Pfizer and other companies have been up to. Attkisson knows that a “story” is important, and doesn’t want to scare people off by sounding too academic.
One of the biggest of what Attkisson calls “eye openers”—is Attkisson’s finding out how much the trans movement is and has been funded and driven by Big Pharma money. One of the people she interviews (who’s gay) says:
People who think that this [i.e. the trans movement] is a grassroots movement that is giving rise to the transgender culture in the United States, this transgender moment that people say that we’re having, do not understand that this is more or a top-down dynamic that is at play, where you have really just a handful of organizations and... advocacy organizations that are driving the agenda. But they have such sway and such money, they’re influencing everything from schools to politicians, to corporate America.”
Like their other projects, a little money invested in the main groups and the messaging adds up to more money in the future: pushing trans rights messaging leads to more and more children requiring pharmaceuticals such as puberty blockers. Attkisson:
One example can be found in Lupron. It’s a prescription drug used to suppress puberty in some “transgender” children who wish to be the opposite sex, though it isn’t FDA-approved for that. One Lupron injection for children reportedly costs as much as $20,000. Some treatment plans call for monthly injections for years. AbbVie, the company that makes money selling Lupron, happens to generously support the transgender movement.
If Big Pharma wasn’t allowed to donate to these trans rights groups, those groups, and identity politics would dry up. According to Attkisson, “42.2 percent of Transgender people who are men living life as women are infected with HIV.” Higher among certain sub-groups.
Attkisson continues:
That adds up to a fantastically lucrative market for the makers of HIV medicine, like Gilead Sciences. Gilead has developed eleven HIV medications now on the market earning over $1.5 billion a month… Gilead happens to be the single biggest known funder of trans activist groups, providing $6.1 million in 2017 and 2018.”
And Big Pharma does this with everything. Every cultural or political issue in the United States is touched by their tentacles. The previous information is just a small section of Follow The Science. Attkisson spends a lot more time on the correlation between the increased vaccine schedule for children and the rise of autism rates. Vaccines are nicknamed the “Third Rail”—the subject journalists are never supposed to touch. If they do, the huge pharmaceutical machine goes into motion, working to quash any research. She devotes a chapter to Robert DeNiro, whose child is autistic, about the controversy surrounding his support and eventual pulling of the film Vaxxed, a documentary featuring evidence that vaccines do cause autism in children, from his Tribeca Film Festival. She eventually interviewed him for her tv program Full Measure, about the incident. Even DeNiro, someone with huge cultural cachet, gets shut down.
And, of course, the narrative constructed around the response to Covid. One sentence by Attkisson stuck me: “I’d learned to trust my cognitive dissonance and decided to investigate further.” This is key to Attkisson herself, and to many of us at that time: we experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance. The things we were being told to be scared about just didn’t seem to happen. For example, the “super spreader events.” Attkisson covers one, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, an annual biker meet-up in Sturgis, South Dakota in August. In 2020, this was a big mainstream news piece, but in Attkisson’s investigation, she found no real proof of any super spreading, but a lot of false narratives and “math tricks” used to exaggerate supposed deaths from Covid, and to hide deaths from the covid vaccines. Her main bad guy is Anthony Fauci.
Unfortunately, the people who might benefit the most from reading about any of these subjects are the ones who—like that one guy in The Matrix—keep taking the blue pill (now in shot form!) choosing to live in what they think is a safe world. These people still find comfort and relief in the idea of the bureaucracy of federal government—that no matter how bad any certain president and his or her administration is, that the United States government will continue to operate down at the unelected level and can hold off any radical, populist or sinister agendas. And that those agencies will protect us. There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, as Wolf’s and Kennedy’s books have already demonstrated. The title of Attkisson’s book, Follow The Science, says it all—a play on the famous phrase journalists are supposed to use, “follow the money,” to find out who is behind any big story.
Science, argues Attkisson, is and always has been influenced by money. And the government agencies who are supposed to be regulating private pharmaceutical companies are bought off by those same companies. In some cases, the higher-up supervisors of all the three-letter regulatory agencies—FDA, CDC, NIH—have financial interests in approving pharmaceuticals. Fauci as the head of the NIH is the best example. There’s also a “revolving door” in which people supposed to be monitoring companies, leave federal service and take high-paying jobs in the very companies they were supposed to be monitor.
What can be done to stop Big Pharma’s influence? (I didn’t vote for Trump or Harris.) Trump won his second term with the help of the MAHA movement (Make America Healthy Again), spearheaded by now Secretary of Health and Human Service Robert Kennedy Jr. So far, Kennedy has done some purging of the NIH and the CDC, including Fauci’s wife, who worked at the NIH and was famous for her video threatening nurses that they had to get the Covid shots or be fired. Supposedly the Kennedy’s next big agenda is to ban pharmaceutical companies from advertising on television. That would be huge: media companies would no longer feel pressure (or not as much) to maintain a narrative which benefits Big Pharma. It might allow journalists like Attkisson to return to mainstream reporting, but a book like Follow The Science might have more messaging power now than anything the legacy media could offer, even with more freedom to follow the science.