How Big Pharma Captured Public Health: Toby Rogers
[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “250 years of economic and political liberalism, and then it disappears in the blink of an eye in early 2020,” says Toby Rogers, a medical freedom advocate and a fellow at the Brownstone Institute.
Over the last two years, he assessed every FDA and CDC expert advisory committee meeting for COVID-19 vaccine approvals—and what he discovered was shocking, he says.
“It’s preposterous, the level of junk science that’s being passed off as actual science by FDA and CDC right now,” Mr. Rogers says.
How did pharmaceutical companies capture our public health apparatus? And what will it take to turn things around?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Toby Rogers, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Toby Rogers:
Thanks for having me. I’m a huge fan of your work and you’re doing amazing interviews. I’m so honored to be on your program.
Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you. I just witnessed a most fascinating presentation that you gave about what has happened to our society and the profound changes that we’ve seen. As you have described, you come from the left of the Left. Please give us a sense of who you are and where you come from.
Mr. Rogers:
I grew up in southern California in a family that loved education. I got a bachelor’s degree in political science from Swarthmore College in Philadelphia. Then I worked for every good lefty nonprofit I could find. I’ve worked for farm workers, small business assistance, anti-poverty programs, environmental programs, anti-toxin waste programs, electric buses, and LGBT issues as well.
I found that I loved school and school came easy to me. I got a master’s degree at Berkeley, a good lefty institution. I found that I liked teaching while I was at Berkeley. Then I went down to the University of Sydney in Australia and got a PhD in Political Economy. The University of Sydney has this legendary political economy program that combines moral philosophy, political science, and economics, all as one subject.
That’s how one should approach the topics of politics and economics. You need to talk about morality, politics, and economics as one subject. I was actually working on Adam Smith’s views on slavery and spent about a year on that. Things took a turn and I went in a different direction that led me on the course to where I am now. I’m a Brownstone Fellow and associated with small-l libertarians in this fight against the pharmaceutical industry and their takeover of American society.
It has been quite the political journey. I find that small-l libertarians understand what is happening right now with the morality, the politics, and the economics of this current crisis in the United States. The Brownstone Institute and Jeffrey Tucker are doing absolutely amazing work, and I’m delighted to be associated with them now.
Mr. Jekielek:
Please describe the current crisis as you understand it.
Mr. Rogers:
We have lived with economic and political liberalism for the last 250 years. Everybody loves political liberalism. That means elections, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, courts, rule of law, and constitutions. There is widespread agreement that political liberalism is fantastic. Then Adam Smith introduced us to economic liberalism, which is free markets, free trade, the right to make money, and the right to entrepreneurship. That’s the system that we’ve lived under for 250 years.
What is strange about the present moment is that in March of 2020, all that disappeared. Political liberalism goes out the window, and freedom of speech is banned. There’s censorship across the internet. Freedom of religion is banned. You’re not allowed to meet in churches, and you’re not allowed to sing in a choir. Freedom of assembly is banned. All that disappears in early 2020. That’s strange.
We have 250 years of economic and political liberalism, and then it disappears in the blink of an eye in early 2020. A lot of what I’m trying to unpack on my Substack, and the work that I do for the Brownstone Institute, is trying to understand what on earth happened. How is it that we went from one system to this entirely new system?
If I may describe it, the pharmaceutical industry dictates what’s on the mainstream networks of CNN, MSNBC and the rest. The pharmaceutical industry dictates what the regulatory agencies do in Washington, DC. The pharmaceutical industry dictates the papers that get published in scientific journals.
It is a radical remaking of society, whereby the pharmaceutical industry, Big Tech and government collude to rewrite the economic and political rules for our whole society. That happened just in an instant in March of 2020. It’s profoundly strange.
Mr. Jekielek:
Many people were caught off guard. Not many people were thinking that this is what should happen. There’s been a profound shift in how we function as a society, but a lot of people haven’t really noticed. Isn’t that interesting as well?
Mr. Rogers:
It is strange. There has been this rupture between pre-2020 and post-2020. It is this rupture in the fabric of society and in the rules of the game. It is this rupture in how our economy works by locking down and shutting down the entire economy and then hoping that it will start up again. There were trillions of dollars of stimulus money, cash being sent to families, and small businesses being shut down.
Everything is different post-2020 for us. We are now three-and-a-half years into it, and it still continues. Everything that we did in response to Covid failed. There has been no course correction. We don’t have a government by consent of the governed anymore.
Mr. Jekielek:
You are saying that we don’t have a government by consent of the governed. Please break that down for us.
Mr. Rogers:
In an earlier era when we were growing up, politicians at least went through the ritual process of trying to make it look like there was popular support for what they were doing. There was at least some attempt to triangulate, to pick off some independence, and to assemble a majority coalition. Now, so much of what happens is dictated by the administrative state.
You have the CDC and the FDA putting forward recommendations about masks, treatments, and vaccines. Those aren’t elected officials. You have the Biden administration that knows that Tony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky are very unpopular. They somehow get shown the door in the run up to the midterm elections, but then they get replaced by clones who are exactly like them.
There is no sense in how the current administration is responding to the data in any way. It seems that the Biden administration knows that the Covid policies are a political loser. Yet, they’re unable to come to grips with the failure of Covid shots, with the failure of Remdesivir, and with the failure of the hospital protocols. There has been no course correction. There has been no mea culpa. There has been no reassessment of the path that we are on.
It just feels like elected officials and bureaucrats and the administrative state in DC tell people what to do. There is very little effort on building a majoritarian coalition of popular support around any of these policies. It feels top down. It feels forced, it feels arbitrary, and it is not based on science whatsoever.
Mr. Jekielek:
But in many cases, we are told that it is.
Mr. Rogers:
We are told that it is. I have watched every single meeting of the FDA’s and the CDC’s expert advisory committee meetings for all vaccine approvals in connection with Covid shots over the last two years, and these meetings are shocking. They are very long, eight-hour meetings, but it’s all political theater. It’s all sorts of science-adjacent sounding things.
The statistics in these meetings are absurd and they would not pass a high school biology class. They would not pass an introduction to statistics class in a college. It’s this kind of pandemic theater, but the actual science is abysmal. Over time the standards have gotten weaker and weaker and weaker. The initial Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials in adults had about 22,000 people in the treatment group and 22,000 people in the placebo group.
By the time the clinical trials reached children, they had only a few hundred children in the clinical trials, not enough to be able to know if there are harms coming from these shots. For the boosters, they have decided to skip clinical trials in humans altogether. The initial booster was only tested in eight mice. The new booster that is on the way is going to be tested in even fewer mice.
These people are not doing science. They’re doing this profitable corporate-government collusion, but they’re not doing proper science. It’s not even close. The level of junk science that’s being passed off as actual science by the FDA and the CDC right now is preposterous.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’re not new to the realm of pharmaceutical-oriented science. This is something that you ended up focusing on. Please give us some of that background.
Mr. Rogers:
I was one year into my PhD program at the University of Sydney. I had a topic that I liked, and I liked my life in Sydney. It was fantastic. My then girlfriend’s son was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, and I knew a little bit about autism. My mom was a special education teacher when I was growing up. I had a passing familiarity with autism, but I had never really studied it in depth.
On a Saturday, I set aside eight hours to read everything I could about autism. I just wanted to wrap my head around what was happening with autism. Then I was going to go back to working on my doctoral thesis on Adam Smith. When you’re in a PhD program, you’re required to read original sources, and you can’t read secondary sources. You have to go back and read the original sources.
The CDC has this narrative about what’s happening with autism, but I started looking up their sources. Like I now see with the Covid shots, the underlying sources they were using to make their argument were weak. The data did not support their narrative, and it fell apart fairly quickly. One day of research turned into two days of research, and then turned into three days of research.
I’m a political economist, so I was curious about the costs of autism. The costs of autism are through the roof. Back in 2015, we were already seeing annual costs of autism in the United States at $268 billion a year, and projected to reach $1 trillion per year in the United States by 2025. The U.S. defense budget is at about $800 billion a year. Autism costs are projected to exceed U.S. Defense Department costs by 2025.
This is a massive political economy story. No government in the world is asking why this is happening, and how this happened. There’s no plan to raise additional revenue to meet the additional cost challenges. I ended up spending six weeks doing nothing but reading about autism for 12 hours a day, seven days a week. I had a very difficult conversation with my supervisor, and I explained what had happened. We had several very hard conversations, and eventually I changed my doctoral thesis topic to the political economy of autism.
I spent the next four years reading everything that has been written about autism and trying to understand both the politics and economics of autism. I discovered that the pharmaceutical industry has captured regulatory agencies; the CDC, FDA, and NIH, but they’ve captured even more than that. They’ve captured the mainstream media.
They have also captured the knowledge production itself throughout science and medicine. Textbooks and medical schools are produced by the pharmaceutical industry. Professors are bought off through grants and speaking engagements. Continuing medical education is controlled by the pharmaceutical industry.
Now, conversation is forbidden about the root causes of autism, such as the various toxic chemicals from mercury and coal-fired power plants, to the ingredients in vaccines, Tylenol, and SSRIs. Various pharmaceutical products are problematic, and we have very good data on this now. I discovered that the pharmaceutical industry’s playbook, meaning the ways in which they manipulate the conversation, really controls what is allowed to be said by the government, by academic journals, and by regulators.
Mr. Jekielek:
I might add within their own companies as well.
Mr. Rogers:
For sure. They have this level of power and control that is unprecedented. They have this level of intrusion into our lives, which is also unprecedented. The pharmaceutical industry literally transgresses our bodies with their products. What we have is this capture of our whole society.
Autism is less of a scientific mystery. We actually have a pretty good understanding of the root causes and the ways that various toxicants increase autism risk. I finished my PhD in 2019, and I came out into the world. My theory at the time was that the costs of autism are so enormous that politicians will surely want to have a conversation with me about what is happening and why this is happening. Indeed, I had a few conversations with a few politicians who would meet with me during that time. But in 2019, the pharmaceutical industry was running vaccine mandate bills across all 50 states.
This was pre-Covid, and it focused on the childhood schedule to kick any kids out of school who are not vaccinated. That eliminates the unvaccinated control group that would show that unvaccinated children are actually healthier than vaccinated children. I immediately jumped into the fight and started working with state-based groups to push back against the pharmaceutical industry and try to knock down some of these bills.
We won some of these fights and we lost some of them. Then six months later, Covid happens. But when Covid happens, I already know the pharmaceutical industry’s playbook. I understand how they buy off politicians, how they control regulators, and the ways that they control the knowledge production system. Sure enough, they did it all over again with Covid.
What I had seen them do to society in connection with childhood vaccines and the autism debate, they were now doing to adults and seniors with Covid shots. It is this entire process of capture, so it becomes a takeover of the state by the pharmaceutical industry.
Mr. Jekielek:
Everything you’re describing agrees with what many people on this show have told me, and which we have verified. But it is unbelievable that one industry could have that much power in society. At the same time there are other big players. You mentioned Big Tech and the administrative state. You actually mentioned 10 power centers.
Mr. Rogers:
I wrote an article on Substack about the 10 cartels that control the United States. Big pharma is at the top of the pyramid, but it’s also defense contractors and high-tech industries. Big philanthropy is also incredibly influential. We have this concentration of power in a few industries, and these industries are not traditional capitalism. It is not competition. It’s not the small business world that Adam Smith was writing about, as far as the baker, the brewer, and the butcher.
It’s oligopolies and monopolies and it’s concentrated power. They use their concentrated power to buy off the political system. It is cheaper for the pharmaceutical industry to buy a politician or to buy regulators than it is to do research and development on a new product. Research and development can take up to 10 years for a new product and cost billions of dollars.
You can buy off the political system and you can buy off regulators for a whole lot less than that. Then if you buy off the political and regulatory systems, with the Covid shots you can force the public to take your shots and to consume your product. It’s cheaper than actually doing proper regulation. But to your point, yes, it is bewildering what we are going through right now.
When I started working on the political economy of autism, I felt like I was losing my mind. Every single day for six weeks I broke down crying, because the data was so bad, and it did not match what the CDC was saying. I felt like I was losing my mind. I kept going back to original sources, original sources, original sources, original sources. Don’t read what the CDC is saying about the data. Read the actual data for yourself.
The motto of the Royal Society in England, the oldest scientific society in the world, is Nullius in verba, which means take nobody’s word for it. Examine the evidence for yourself and do the study for yourself. You should actually read the study, not the New York Times. Take on the study, but not in the way that Rachel Maddow talks about the study in the evening. Read the study itself.
When you read the study itself, you will find that the CDC is lying, the FDA is lying, and the NIH is lying about Covid shots, about the childhood schedule, about autism, about Lyme disease, and about a number of other things. The way that I stay sane is to actually read the studies. When Covid happened, the people who have been through the autism wars weren’t surprised at all.
We had seen this playbook before. When it started to play out in similar ways, we manned the barricades. We immediately started to push back, fight back, and try to stop this further takeover of society by the pharmaceutical industry.
Mr. Jekielek:
A lot of the policies came from the public health establishment. Is your contention that big pharma was deeply involved in this decision-making at the beginning? Do you have any evidence around that?
Mr. Rogers:
When you watch the FDA and CDC meetings where these expert advisors are weighing in on the data, what one would want is a rigorous back and forth. You would want skepticism. In the military it would be a red team to challenge the plan by the blue team. You would want pushback from the experts to question all aspects of the data, to be skeptical, to be curious, and to make sure that the data is robust. That was my expectation going into these meetings.
That is not what happens at all. These insiders, these so-called experts, see themselves as allies with industry. There are no hard questions. In fact, at a recent meeting, the so-called expert advisors apologized to Moderna for asking a single hard question about the data. They often use the word, “we,” to refer to FDA, and the pharmaceutical company that’s applying for licensing of these vaccines. They see themselves as in the same business together.
It’s really just about getting the approval process across the line, getting these things authorized, getting these shots into arms as quickly as possible into as many people as possible, and then hopefully gathering data about possible harms later. But then that sort of falls apart. The FDA had this system called V-safe during the initial rollout of Covid shots. They have dismantled V-safe now.
It was the only active surveillance system they had on vaccine harm. They’ve given up on that. There’s the longstanding system called VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. It’s passive and it’s not ideal. They always pour cold water on it and say that it’s not reliable. We don’t have a vaccine safety system in this country. We just don’t.
We would want these doctors and scientists to be acting in the public interest. They’re not. They’re actually acting in the interest of the pharmaceutical industry. They tend to be rewarded for that, either with NIH grants or with a revolving door where they actually get jobs as vice presidents of these various vaccine manufacturers. It’s a completely corrupt system.
Mr. Jekielek:
I have to believe that most doctors and research people go into their fields to do good. Maybe they want to do well for themselves, but they’re not looking to be in the structure that you’re describing. How could it be possible that so many distinguished, decent people are completely oblivious to this? In fact, they say, “This is preposterous. This is conspiracy theory.” You hear that a lot. This is the difficulty you are facing today in any area where you are defying the so-called correct view.
Mr. Rogers:
That’s very well said. Many people in the movement for medical freedom tell a story of monsters, evildoers, and nefarious actors behind the curtain who want to do harm and who enjoy harm.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to jump in and say that we know those exist too.
Mr. Rogers:
Fair enough.
Mr. Jekielek:
There are some, but that’s not going to be everybody.
Mr. Rogers:
Exactly. This is more a story of structural incentives that are misaligned. I’m sure most pediatricians went into that line of work with the best of intentions to help children thrive and live their healthiest life. But then you come out of medical school with a quarter million dollars or more in debt, you go through the hazing process of residency, and you end up staying up all night and being yelled at by the chief resident.
Finally, you make it into your private practice or maybe you’re working at a hospital. You’re told that you will get a bonus if 60 percent of your patients are fully vaccinated. You say, “Okay, I’ll take the bonus this year. It’ll help me pay off my debts.” Next year it is 70 percent of your patients have to be fully vaccinated, and then 80 percent of your patients have to be fully vaccinated.
By that point, you’ve gone along with the system for a while and it seems to be okay. It’s a series of baby steps over a long period of time. I actually watch the FDA and CDC meetings to see what they’re up to. These doctors don’t have time to do that, so they just take somebody else’s word for it. They just say, “If it’s okay with the CDC and the FDA, then it’s probably okay.”
It’s a series of structural incentives that are not aligned with the public interest. It’s a slippery slope and they are trying to fit in. Look, these people are selected for their ability to fit in and for their ability to obey orders. Medicine is very hierarchical and it’s organized along military lines. You see these FDA and CDC officials who have military rank. This is not a normal workplace that we’re talking about.
Over time you just slide down the slippery slope of not asking questions, and then it becomes too late. You’ve been doing this for 10 years. You’ve looked the other way when things have gone sideways with a couple of your patients, and now you’re culpable. There is a mental process that we don’t understand very well where people eventually buy in and become true believers.
They do not realize that they’re causing harm, that they’re recommending shots that are not tested against proper placebos, and that have not been shown to produce the benefits that are claimed. It’s a process over the course of years and it’s subtle. It’s a story of very good people who end up doing bad things in some cases.
Hannah Arendt dealt with this in trying to understand what happened with Nazi Germany. That was a story of monsters, lots of Nazi monsters. The SS was horrible, and a lot of society was horrible. But she told a story of bureaucrats, and the banality of evil and the ways that bureaucracies create various incentives that lead to outcomes that nobody would have wanted in the beginning. It is a sociological story of how societies go off track. I think the United States society has gone off track.
Mr. Jekielek:
You described a situation where accountability, which we believe is there, is not really there. What do you think is there instead?
Mr. Rogers:
Profit motive, fitting in, not rocking the boat, and belonging. We live in a society where faith in God and religious practice has declined. In its place we worship this pharma junk science. It’s become an idol. It’s become a belief system. It has become divorced from science itself—the rigorous, rough and tumble of science itself.
That’s not the proper way to do medicine. We must have skepticism. We must be curious. We must demand the most rigorous standards. That’s not happening right now because of the power the pharmaceutical industry has to shape the conversation, shape the ways that the media reports on it, and shape the ways that politicians and regulators think about these issues.
Mr. Jekielek:
That seems terribly daunting to conceive of and imagine. At least some parts of this incredible system that the Founding Fathers of America conceived of still exist. There’s a legal system which seems to be functioning and pushing back in some very significant directions. We’re in this moment and society has changed, but there is also a growing pushback to some of that change. People are becoming more cognizant that something bizarre has happened and they need to wake up. What do you think people should be doing here?
Mr. Rogers:
We have this economic and political system that over time has become corrupted. We have corporations getting larger and larger and larger, that eventually collude with the state. Then they take over the state and weaponize it to increase their profits in ways that make us poorer. It also hurts people when the pharmaceutical industry is pushing products that are not safe for the general population.
Let’s take this in two different pieces. The first piece is what to do about big pharma, the 800 pound gorilla. Let’s start there. During my doctoral thesis, I researched the history of the successful regulation of other toxic products that caused harm; asbestos, tobacco, DDT, various pharmaceutical products, and thalidomide.
I went back a long way to the beginning of the regulatory state that emerged with the progressive era. Government doesn’t really want to fund the studies that are going to smash an industry and lead to a product being withdrawn from the market. The way that you get good science in connection with dangerous products is through the courts. It’s through the toxic tort system.
Basically, a plaintiff’s lawyers will take a look at whatever data they can find about a toxic product. They will calculate the odds of winning a toxic tort case, and then they will actually fund the scientific research to figure out how dangerous this product actually is. That’s how the system has worked.
Mr. Jekielek:
Since industry isn’t doing it, is that how this research actually gets done?
Mr. Rogers:
Correct.
Mr. Jekielek:
That’s fascinating.
Mr. Rogers:
You actually need the court system. You need the deep pocket plaintiff’s attorneys to spend $10 to $20 million on a study so that you actually have the data to figure out how harmful a toxic product is. That’s the way our system works. The pharmaceutical industry knew that they were losing in court in the 1970s and early 1980s when it came to lawsuits over harms from vaccines.
In 1986, they got Congress to pass the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and that gave them liability protection. You cannot take the pharmaceutical industry to court if your child is harmed by a vaccine because of the 1986 Act. There is a separate court system which doesn’t work very well. The government stands in on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry, rather than the pharmaceutical industry representing itself.
The way to solve the problem of toxic vaccines being forced upon the population is to remove liability protection for the pharmaceutical industry. Put it back into the courts. Let’s fight it out in the courts. Let’s have a conversation about the data in the courts in an adversarial system, not with the CDC and the FDA that are captured. But you would have to repeal the 1986 Act. You would also have to repeal the PREP Act that happened in the early 2000s after the events of 9/11.
If we do that, the pharmaceutical industry would have an incentive to create safer vaccines. Right now the only incentive is to add as many vaccines as possible to the schedule because it’s all profit. There’s no risk because they can’t be taken to court right now. That’s how we should deal with the pharmaceutical industry.
The pharmaceutical industry is one big cartel, but there’s 9 or 10 other cartels that are problematic. We need to do a couple things. We need to bring back antitrust laws. We need to break up some of these oligopolies and actually force these companies to compete with each other so that the market decides. The administrative state has grown too big, so we no longer have elected officials and legislators making decisions.
The administrative state, the bureaucratic state, is making over half of the new policies that govern our day-to-day lives. It’s completely out of control. The administrative state needs to be completely reigned in. The size of the state needs to be reduced significantly, and power needs to be decentralized. We need to take matters of health out of DC and not just move them to the states, but move them to families and empower families and local jurisdictions to make decisions.
This notion that we’re going to turn to 15 bureaucrats in Washington, DC to make all the decisions for our lives has failed. This was an experiment over the last three-and-a-half years about how we might respond to a pandemic or to a crisis. Centralizing power in Washington, DC, and centralizing public health decisions in Washington, DC has been a catastrophic failure. We must empower individuals, parents, and families to make their own decisions. We have to shrink the size of the federal government so the populace can’t be captured, and so the government can’t try to take over all aspects of our lives.
Mr. Jekielek:
That makes a lot of sense. But those institutions that would help do that have been captured as well.
Mr. Rogers:
I’m saying we need a political revolution in this country to seize power back from corrupted industries and from a corrupted government. Half measures aren’t going to do it. Gradualism is not going to do it. In my PhD work, I found that the cost of autism is so enormous. It is the same thing with diabetes and cancer. The cost of the mismanagement of the Covid crisis has generated trillions of dollars for the pharmaceutical industry and left us sick and poor, with rampant inflation and massive budget deficits.
The federal government is completely out of control. Our political system is completely out of control. There are various politicians running for president who are promising small tweaks around the edges, but that’s not going to do it. We need a wholesale reconceptualization of our government. We need to return to a smaller government.
We need to take matters of public health out of the hands of corrupt bureaucrats, but that’s only going to happen if there is a political revolution from below. People of good faith of both parties need to demand that their candidates address these issues. It’s a political organizing problem.
We have a massive problem now because we are getting sicker by the day and we are not well cared for by government officials. We are in a moment of crisis. Not only have we been in crisis for the last three-and-a-half years, but probably for at least 35 years since the 1986 Act passed. We need a revolution from below to restore sanity to our broken system.
Mr. Jekielek:
This has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. A final thought as we finish up?.
Mr. Rogers:
I have a couple of thoughts. This seems like a very complicated story, but it’s actually relatively straightforward. If you follow the money you can actually figure out what’s going on. This is a relatively straightforward story of the way that a society loses its way, of the ways that power corrupts, and of the ways that corruption takes over a corporation, an industry, and a government.
If you follow the money, there is a money trail here that is pretty obvious. Who is getting rich off of this, and who has no liability for the harms, the injuries, and the suffering of individuals and families? At the end of the day, who do you want making these decisions?
When we centralize power in Washington, DC, as we’ve seen over the last three-and-a-half years, bad things happen. Society falls apart. Capture leads to dangerous products being forced upon the general public. We need to get back to our roots, to our values, and to 330 million people making the best decisions for their own lives, not captured bureaucrats telling us how to live.
Mr. Jekielek:
Toby Rogers, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Rogers:
Thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed our conversation so much.
Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Toby Rogers and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
