From Dopesick To Vaxxsick

Tactics From The Opioid Crisis Continue To Be Employed Today

I recently finished watching Dopesick on Hulu. It covers the opioid crisis. To be more specific, it discusses the abuses and manipulations of Purdue Pharma in regard to its prized pain medication OxyContin.

The show, based on true events, follows The Sackler Family who ran Purdue Pharma, patients in a mining community in Lee County, Virginia, attorneys at the U.S. Justice Department trying to prosecute Purdue Pharma, agents at the D.E.A., and a doctor not only willing to serve as a pill mill but who gets hooked on OxyContin himself.

What makes the show so powerful is it demonstrates how Purdue Pharma created the opioid epidemic through what Brightwork Research & Analysis deem “vertical integration.” In other words, there was no real independent oversight for the drug’s development and approval. Citing the New Yorker, the same Brightwork Research & Analysis noted: “The Sackler empire is a completely integrated operation in that it can devise a new drug in its drug development enterprise, have the drug clinically tested and secure favorable reports on the drug from various hospitals with which they have connections, conceive the advertising approach and prepare the actual advertising copy with which to promote the drug, have the clinical articles as well as the advertising copy published in their own medical journals, [and] prepare and plant articles in newspapers and magazines.”

In short, the Sackler Family relied upon nearly every trick in the book—creating dummy organizations—maintaining doctors on the payroll—working operatives within the FDA etc.—to push a narrative of an epidemic of untreated pain that required increasing doses of Oxycontin.

Through these mechanisms, too, they convinced the FDA to put a label on oxycontin declaring it virtually non-addictive, which was of course patently false. Indeed, Business Insider reports that deaths from prescription opioid overdose quadrupled between 1999 to 2019. In total, over the last two decades, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 247,000 deaths from prescription opioid overdose, many from Oxycontin.

Further, as reported in The Sun Sentinel, salesmen were instructed to tell doctors OxyContin was “non-habit forming” when this was a blatant lie. OxyContin is now known to be highly-addictive and to lead to various negative downstream effects. In fact, over the course of the show, Purdue execs tell salesman to encourage doctors to up the dose. (They start at 10mg and by the end of the show are pitching a 160mg pill.)

What were the result of all these shennanigans? While Purdue Pharma eventually had to pay a 600 million dollar fine, the Sackler family now does quite well. In fact, according to Forbes, as of December 2020, the Sackler family had a net worth of 10.8 billion dollars. Meanwhile, Curtis Wright, the executive at the FDA who helped the Purdue Pharma write this bogus product label, shortly thereafter obtained a 400,000 a year job at Purdue Pharma.

An argument could be made that LITTLE HAS CHANGED. Big Pharma continues to employ similar tactics. A few examples are below.

REVOLVING DOOR

As stipulated above, the regulators like Curtis Wright knew that if they were friendly towards pharmaceutical companies a lucrative job awaited them in the private sector. That’s equally true today.

Scott Gotleib went from being FDA commissioner to on the Board of Directors at Pfizer. Stephen Hahn went from FDA commissioner to Chief Medical Officer of the venture capital firm behind Moderna. James C. Smith is CEO of Reuters (with its army of fact-checking censors) AND on the Board of Directors of Pfizer. The fox still guards the hen house.

DATA MANIPULATION

During a key scene in Dopesick, the U.S. attorneys try to locate a study that Purdue Pharma cited regularly to support OxyContin. The attorneys called up various doctors and reviewed medical journals where the key finding was supposedly located. Finally, they stumbled upon the information in A LETTER TO THE EDITOR. The doctor who wrote this five sentence letter later testified he never meant what he wrote as medical advice. It was solely an opinion. No matter. Purdue Pharma took what he said and ran with it.

Something similar takes place today. Data manipulation is par for the course. There was manipulation of the study date during the Pfizer trial (check out the BMJ Report). Then, too, Pfizer produced a 95% effective number by relying on RRR (Relative Risk Reduction) rather than ARR (Actual Risk Reduction), when RRR clearly distorts the benefits. Finally, the FDA and Pfizer are now coordinating to block transparency of their original study. (The FDA has requested 75 YEARS TO RELEASE THE DATA THEY OBTAINED FROM PFIZER). It’s the same old playbook. Print money while LEAVING UNSUSPECTING SUCKERS IN THE DARK!

BREAKTHROUGH PAIN VS. NOCEBO EFFECT

In Dopesick, the Sackler family learn OxyContin doesn’t always last the twelve hours they promised. They devised a way to hide this fact while also increasing sales: invent a new medical term “breakthrough pain.”

The idea was the sufferer had pain so bad it broke through the effect of the medicine, requiring a higher dose. In such a situation the doctor needed to DOUBLE THE DOSE. If that didn’t work he should DOUBLE THE DOSE AGAIN.

Doctors at first were resistant since they never heard of “breakthrough pain,” but they went along with it when experts on the Purdue Pharma payroll recommended it. Further, Purdue Pharma had pain management organizations recommend these actions, an easy feat since these organizations were shell companies they funded (including the American Pain Foundation and the American Pain Society). In short, the key players accepted “breakthrough pain” as legitimate even though it HAD ZERO BASIS IN LEGITIMATE SCIENCE.

Could big pharma be trying something similar today? Turns out there have been a recent spate of articles on the “nocebo effect,” a dubious medical term I’ve never seen used with other vaccines.

What is the “nocebo effect”? As stipulated in the image below, it is essentially a negative placebo effect whereby the side effects caused by a vaccine are all in your head.

The Guardian explicitly states, “Scientists in the US examined data from 12 clinical trials of Covid vaccines and found that the “nocebo effect” accounted for about 76% of all common adverse reactions after the first dose and nearly 52% after the second dose.”

My best guess is this meta-analysis is largely bogus. Certainly, it seems a way to gaslight the countless individuals who suffer from horrible adverse effects from these MRNA jabs.

Don’t recognize the pain. Don’t start a fund for victims. Just contrive a medical term to convince victims who have a problem it’s all in their head.

Meanwhile, in reality, the number of serious adverse events on VAERS continues to grow: 22,607 deaths, 29,716 cases of myocarditis, 40,069 permanently disabled, 25,777 life threatening cases etc. Worse still, according to Steve Kirsch and Jessica Rose, the real numbers are as much as 40X what’s on VAERS (since very few medical professionals have the time or inclination to file these reports into an incredibly clunky system.)

INDIVIDUALIZE THE DOSE VS. MIX AND MATCH BOOSTERS

When the double dose wasn’t juicing Purdue Pharma profits enough, they devised an even more flexible protocol. INDIVIDUALIZE THE DOSE. To help in this regard, the Sacklers went from selling 10mg pills to 20mg, 40mg, 80mg and 160mg pills. They also had pharma reps encourage doctors to write scripts for a wider range of issues. As Brightworks Research points out, “it is jaw-dropping that opioid manufacturers extended opioid approval for coughing and diarrhea.”

Something similar has happened with these vaccines. Based on scant empirical evidence we’ve been encouraged to mix and match. For example, you can have two Pfizer doses followed by a Moderna. Or a J&J topped off with two Pfizer. It almost sounds like accessorizing at Hot Topic!

CONCLUSION

Dopesick obtained very strong reviews in liberal media outlets. The New Yorker claimed: “it conveys the pain and the havoc wrought by corporate recklessness and greed.” NPR deemed it “a compelling, heartbreaking series — tallying the human cost of a crisis that started in company boardrooms…and turned the country upside down in the process.”

Yet these same liberal outlets seem oblivious to the numerous parallels today. Through data manipulation, bogus medical terms, the revolving door, and other forms of vertical integration, big pharma continues to dupe its customers in order to obtain windfall profits.

Let’s just hope the individuals most responsible for this global atrocity—Albert Bourla, Stéphane Bancel, Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci—face consequences for their actions. Without that, sadly, we will continue to see the collapse of our storied institutions and the decimation of public health.

If you enjoyed Shot O, you might like my humor book, “Do Not Feed The Clown. Thanks!