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Kim Iversen and Dr. Aseem Malhotra discuss his new film, “First Do No Pharm” which documents how Big Pharma has gained control over every aspect of the medical system, from doctors to regulators, and what people can do about it.
by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. |October 17, 2024 | The Defender
“Every single person in America — actually in the world — needs to watch this film,” journalist Kim Iversen said about Dr. Aseem Malhotra’s new documentary, “First Do No Pharm.” “It’s jaw-dropping.”
The film explains “how we ended up with this corrupted medical system that is just keeping people sick, rather than actually helping people stay healthy or get healthy,” she said.
At the start of her interview with Malhotra on a recent episode of “The Kim Iversen Show,” Iversen played a series of clips from the film that revealed shocking facts about the industry.
For example, between 2003-2016, fines imposed on pharmaceutical companies for fraud or other illegal activities amounted to $33 billion.
Malhotra told Iversen the film is being censored and suppressed by Meta, Facebook’s parent company. He said almost anything he posts is shadowbanned, and major celebrities who came to the film’s U.K. opening couldn’t post about it on social media without their posts being taken down.
An insider at Meta told him the censorship has nothing to do with so-called fact-checking. “She said anything that interferes with their corporate partners or sponsors will be flagged and shadowbanned,” he said. It is common knowledge that there are links between Pharma and Meta.
Iversen noted that critiquing Big Pharma used to be thought of as a left-wing position — promoted by politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — but since the COVID-19 pandemic was announced, the media treats criticism of Pharma companies as a “right-wing conspiracy theory” and discounts it.
“It just goes to show how easily our brains are manipulated just for political tribalism,” she said.
Malhotra agreed, adding that both Democrats and Republicans have been captured by major corporations. “Bernie Sanders is apparently the fourth largest recipient in Congress of Big Pharma money,” he added.
Part of the problem is that agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. and its U.K. equivalent, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, get 65% and 86% of their funding, respectively, directly from Big Pharma.
Iversen said the film lays out new information about corruption at every level of the medical industry, beginning with the doctors, who often get their medical information from pharmaceutical representatives.
Malhotra said part of the problem is that doctors aren’t even aware that “medical knowledge is under commercial control.” Doctors, including him in the past, have “blind faith” in the top medical journals, like the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The BMJ.
However, “journals themselves are businesses,” he said. Pharma pays millions to the journals to buy back the clinical trial reports, which they carry out and the journals publish, for use as marketing material.
Even a former journal editor conceded in the film that those payments influence the journals’ decision-making about what to publish, Malhotra said.
Worse yet, companies themselves conduct their own product testing and control the data from the trials. They generally only summarize it for the regulatory agencies and they never provide it to peer reviewers.
The regulatory agencies are also compromised because top agency officials often take high-paying work in the private pharmaceutical sector when they leave the agencies.
Malhotra called for an independent evaluation of all drugs. “If we had that before the pandemic, this so-called mRNA vaccine genetic therapy would not have been approved in the first place for any human being.”
Iversen said she thought it all came down to the fact that “Big Pharma has a monopoly from start to finish,” and they are under no obligation to act in the public interest.
Malhotra said he would take things a step further. “It’s more than a monopoly, it’s now a tyranny.”
Even doctors who understand what is happening are afraid to speak out. “When people are afraid to say what they think,” he said, “When people are being silent, that’s when you have a real oppressive tyranny.”
To win this battle, he said, “We have to all come together and we all have to start speaking out.”
Watch here:
Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., is a senior reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.