Pharmaceuticals

Some years ago, the then vice-president of Monsanto Robert T Fraley asked, “Why do people doubt science”. He posed the question partly because he had difficulty in believing that some people had valid concerns about the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture.
Critics were questioning the science behind GM technology and the impacts of GMOs because they could see how science is used, corrupted and manipulated by powerful corporations to serve their own ends. And it was also because they regard these conglomerates as largely unaccountable and unregulated.

There’s an interview of Bill Gates in which Gates reveals more than he might have intended. Rosemary Frei details many of the Orwellian aspects of Gates’ plans. In particular, consider these comments by Gates from disparate parts of the interview:

Preparing for a pandemic requires understanding that a change in the relationship between people is primary and the production of things is secondary and flows from social factors. Investors in profit-based medicine cannot comprehend this concept. Nothing could exemplify it more clearly than Cuba’s response to the corona virus (COVID-19).

The coronavirus pandemic is sweeping the globe. There seems to be no way of containing it at this point, and health systems are struggling to keep up. The virus is exposing inadequacies in health systems all over the world, especially the U.S.’s abysmal health infrastructure. Health workers on the ground continue to provide care during the pandemic despite the severe lack of resources and dangers to their personal health.

It takes only a cursory scanning of what counts as journalistic product in the significant mass media to see that whereas it may be impossible to keep public hospitals sterile, what passes for news and public debate is beyond normal standards of sterility—it is clearly a vacuum. We can largely discount the alternative media—including where I have been able to post—because this is NOT what feeds the public debate or motivates public action, whether official or unofficial.

My deceased mother-in-law, not a pious person but one of utterly conventional morals, used to say when someone over 70 — she died of heart failure somewhere in her mid-70s after our divorce — was diagnosed with some serious illness, “well, at least they can’t die young.” I say she was conventional because she certainly had all the usual ideas about what to do and say among polite people. Maybe having lived through the Second World War — on the losing side — and knowing enough people who did die young just gave her a certain sobriety in matters of life and death.

In 2017, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Hilal Elver, and UN Special Rapporteur on Toxics, Baskut Tuncak, produced a report that called for a comprehensive new global treaty to regulate and phase out the use of dangerous pesticides in farming and move towards sustainable agricultural practices.

On Tuesday, February 4, Donald Trump delivered his third State of the Union (SOTU) address. As expected, it was filled with contradictions, falsehoods, and distortions. Among other things, Trump spoke for close to ten minutes about health care in the U.S., claiming that he “will always protect Medicare.” However, neither Trump and the Republicans, nor the Democrats can be trusted when it comes to health care.