One of the ironies of the medical community is that, at a superficial level, “conflicts of interest” are taken very seriously. But most of the time — if you look just an inch below the surface — the most obvious and severe conflicts of interest are routinely ignored. There are all sorts of guidelines about how physicians can’t directly take cash from drug companies in order to prescribe certain medications, for example. But at the same time, it’s completely fine for Big Pharma to hire doctors as, say, consultants or speakers. And then if those doctors, in turn, happen to prescribe a lot of drugs from Big Pharma, who’s to say there’s any connection?
We saw something similar during COVID. Every medical journal is supposed to inform readers about conflicts of interest that exist in any of their articles. And yet, when every single virologist who was conducting dangerous bat experiments in Wuhan wrote that infamous letter in “The Lancet” explaining that this new virus definitely didn’t come from their dangerous bat experiments in Wuhan, there was no disclaimer at all. Instead, virtually everyone in the scientific community took that letter as gospel. After all, why would the people involved in making a Frankenstein virus ever lie about their role in creating it?
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