non-profits pharma funding

Gardasil and the American Bald Eagle – What Would Rachel Carson Do?

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A mated pair of bald eagles twenty yards above me both tip their wings and set a synchronized dive wing-tip to wing-tip toward me. The Willamette River and the Oregon City’s Willamette Falls are the sources of interest for these youngsters. The raptors are giving me pause and hope – a certain sanity floods my head seeing things in balance, nature in action over a plugged-up Interstate 205, the gas guzzlers of the elite and the endless serpent of 18-wheelers looking like a monster to these eagles. These birds’ orange-yellow beaks and pitch-black body feathers remind me of this big web of life that is continually being disrupted, torn apart, and obliterated by the master species’ addiction to oil, chemicals, and industrial-strength-and-sized unnatural interventions.

Over the last few weeks, I have been thinking about Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) and her efforts to preserve the integrity of natural ecosystems from industrialized greed. I am reminded of all those foggers tooling through neighborhoods with DDT gas spewing out and kids chasing after in the vortex of the poison. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, synthesized in 1886, was deemed perfectly safe to life and limb by a battalion of scientists and medical impresarios backed by the likes of Monsanto. Carson, a biologist by trade, understood the dangers of these chemicals and fought arduously to inform the public. Through a series of letters and short chapters published first in the New Yorker and then compiled into the now landmark book Silent Spring, Carson’s efforts ultimately resulted in the banning of DDT but not before she was thoroughly castigated in the press.

For her robust scientific skepticism of the safety of all those government-approved and scientifically-proven chemicals polluting the landscape, she endured endless personal attacks. For me and countless other ecologists, Carson is the mother of the environmental movement. One such attack demonstrates the misogyny and scientific-technology chauvinism of her time:

Miss Rachel Carson’s reference to the selfishness of insecticide manufacturers probably reflects her Communist sympathies, like a lot of our writers these days. We can live without birds and animals, but, as the current market slump shows, we cannot live without business. As for insects, isn’t it just like a woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs! As long as we have the H-bomb everything will be O.K.—Letter to the editor of the New Yorker, 1962

Though tame by comparison to the vitriol of 21st century social media attacks, the playbook remains much the same, and sadly, so too are the battles. Fifty years after Rachel Carson felt the sting of the attacks on her character and intellect, we are still fighting against these chemical companies, only now we fight from multiple fronts. The same companies polluting our ecosystem, our rivers, streams, lakes and ground soil, pollute our bodies.

Poisons, and now the slide into poisoned and colonized minds, have taken me from my birth in 1957 to a truly Kafkaesque carnival show of incompetence, perverted power, and inverse logic at all levels of the societal ladder. I questioned the safety of Gardasil and was fired from a non-profit for doing so. My story is all over the internet, and that’s fine. See “Social Worker Helping Troubled Teens Loses Job for Questioning Gardasil Vaccine During Planned Parenthood Required Training”. This sort of cause célèbre doesn’t pay the mortgage and doesn’t restore my character and professional standing that have been sullied by the events of recent weeks, but it does, open a door to a perspective once blocked from view.

Call it the Pandora’s Box opening up, or the tip of the iceberg surfacing. Since the forced paid leave and then the sacking, I have delved into the nefarious connections between non-profits and their funding agencies. What I found was disturbing and points to a much larger problem, a forced collusion between medical marketing, non-profits, foundations and scientists, a relationship that demands acquiescence or risks the loss of funding. While I have long understood that money influences decision-making, the extent to which profits are blocking questions about medication safety from being asked is unprecedented. The implications are frightening. This collusion is forcing people, cultures and their ecologies to bear the burden of illness, disease, cancers, ecocide and inter-generational hardships because of greed, galvanized through the adoption of a wholly market-driven science.

Amidst this unholy trinity of ideology-economics-politics, I cannot help but wonder, what would Rachel Carson do? She would write, of course. She would write passionately and clearly not to the institutions capitalism is beholden to, but to us, the people most affected by these decisions. I will do the same.

It is common practice among these chemical companies to attack prominent scientists who speak out against their products. This is a well-known part of the chemical industry playbook, dating back to the battles against DDT and refined by the tobacco industry. To censure unknown, low level employees of non-profits, however, speaks to a new level of message control, one, even I, an old journalist, educator and environmental activist, find surprising. I think you will too.

Over the coming weeks, I will publish a series of articles exploring the influence of pharmaceutical funding to non-profits on the messaging and marketing of health related information. As you read these posts, we encourage you to look at your own circumstances and ask yourself how what you know or think you know about a given chemical might be influenced by corporate interests. If you work at non-profit tasked with disseminating health or environmental information, how are questions of efficacy and product safety dealt with? Are there certain topics that cannot be broached, even by lower level employees? Has anyone been terminated for asking the wrong questions? Then ask yourself, “What would Rachel Carson do?” and consider sharing your story with us.

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This article was published originally on November 7, 2017.

Death by a Thousand Cuts: Vaccines, Non-Profits, and the Dissemination of Medical Information

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The vaccine debate and prying into Planned Parenthood’s Standard Operating Procedure are two arenas I have not gravitated toward. Genetically engineered crops, industrial farming, confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), dams killing wild salmon, these are my fortes. The news daily is like death by a thousand cuts for me tied to new studies on collapsing ecosystems, indigenous people fighting against mines and other extractive industries, and more and more on climate change.

I never thought I’d be embroiled in a fight for my livelihood because I lightly questioned the efficacy of rampant vaccination of girls (and now boys) with the Merck-marketed HPV vaccine, Gardasil. To date, more than 270,000,000 doses have been distributed worldwide with the HPV vaccine (World Health Organization’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety), both the GlaxoSmithKline and Merck versions.

My story started when I was in a Planned Parenthood training, a mandatory course for social workers titled Fundamentals of Sex Ed. For a total of possibly 30 seconds out of a 16-hour two-day training (I was kicked out after day one), I voiced my opinion about the potential risks associated with Gardasil. On a slip of paper, then, in an anonymous forum, I went further with about 60 words answering this first day evaluation question: What could Planned Parenthood have done differently today in the training?

I am really disappointed that Planned Parenthood in Seattle is so lock-step in line with Big Pharma. Especially in the case of Gardasil, which is a vaccine that has gotten tens of thousands complaints about it. Anyone, including my 16 to 21 year old clients, could easily Google ‘Gardasil Dangers’ and find a plethora of very disturbing and legitimate information about its dangers. I wish Planned Parenthood showed more critical thinking and independent pedagogical standards, including informed consent.

Less than two hours after the training, I was called at my hotel room by my supervisor, who let me know:

The Planned Parenthood trainers said they do not want you back for the second day of training. I am putting you on administrative leave. I am looking into what happened in Seattle. Do not return to the office until further notice.

That was Oct. 15, and I have since been terminated, have been on the job market, am attempting to collect a few weeks of unemployment assistance, have a lawyer investigating my case, and started writing about my case on multiple forums. You can read my posts: Gardasil and the American Bald Eagle – What Would Rachel Carson Do?, My Fate as a Social Worker Sealed by a Vaccine Named GardasilPlanned Parenthood, A VaccineDouble-think Alive and Well in the World of Non-profits.

The Sordid History of the HPV Vaccine Marketing

I have collected a hundred reports, articles, documentaries and blogs tied to the HPV vaccine, which has been in use since 2006. The treasure trove is enlightening, intimidating, depressing and validating. Every drug and chemical in the world should have this amount of scrutiny, preferably before it is released, and yet, the depressing part is that these chemicals get very little advance review and once introduced into our systems of medicine, food production/ processing, and modern industrial existence, the unintended consequences and synergistic downsides are more difficult to elevate to a level of grave public concern. Indeed, it often takes 20 years before the FDA will take action and the lessons of our folly reaches clinical care. Why so long? Perhaps it has to do the intense marketing of these chemicals.

The PR firms, legal teams, government agencies, law makers, and politicians all have a stake in the game with billions of dollars in profits at stake. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry is the single largest contributor to congressional accounts in the United States, spending almost 4 billion dollars annually in lobbying efforts, more than double the spending of the defense industry. This is, of course, in addition to the many millions more spent on marketing their products. The issues whirling around Gardasil represent a microcosm of all that is wrong with our healthcare industry. It is difficult at best and impossible for most to speak out against the power purchased with these multi-million dollar budgets. For citizens, consumer groups, watchdog agencies or journalists going against the grain, the road to hell is paved with threats, lawsuits, and vitriol. We are labeled conspiracists, Luddites, anti-science extremists and crazies or nuts.

Fact is Stranger than Fiction

What I am finding in my own nascent life tied to Gardasil and Planned Parenthood is a type of bearing witness, knowing there are deeper and more layered and nuanced ways of looking at the mad men in advertising, marketing, propaganda and more existential ways of contemplating the insanity of unlimited growth, the consumer assault and battery from the merchants of death. Decades ago, Rachel Carson wrote:

The crusade to create a chemically sterile, insect-free world seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies.

She believed that she was living in an era

…dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half-truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts.

The cross-pollination of a huge marketing campaigns with scientists and medical companies and pharmaceuticals is both bizarre and business as usual. Here, in 2006, from one of those marketing firms:

More than 95 insurance plans–covering 94 percent of insured individuals–have decided to reimburse Gardasil, according to Merck. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also added the vaccine to its Vaccines for Children Contract, making it available to Medicaid-eligible, uninsured, under-insured, or Native American children up to the age of 18.

Analysts are optimistic about the vaccine’s market potential. “It’s very clear that patients are going to be interested in it,” said John Lebbos, MD, therapeutic area director of infectious diseases at market research firm Decision Resources. “From what I’ve seen, it’s going to be a blockbuster.”

Education about the vaccine is going to be a critical piece–due both to a lack of understanding about HPV as well as early controversy that vaccination might lead to teen promiscuity.

Note the terminology of the purveyors of capital and profit-making health care: “vaccine’s market potential” and “it’s going to be a blockbuster.” These are the sentiments of a physician whose Hippocratic oath states first do no harm. More importantly, these are the sentiments that drive our healthcare industry. It is profit driven, not necessarily health driven, and therein lay one the many problems associated with the promotion of medications, vaccines, and/or environmental chemicals; profits and health need not align.

Setting the Stage

From the onset of Gardasil, after the fast-tracked shoddy FDA approval (Examining the FDA’s HPV Vaccine Records), Merck deployed the services of one of the world’s more powerful propaganda firms, AKA PR outfits:

The PR genius behind all stages of Merck’s HPV and Gardasil campaigns is the PR giant Edelman. The world’s largest independent PR firm, Edelman boasts more than 2,100 employees working in 46 wholly owned offices worldwide, plus the additional resources of more than 50 affiliates. Apparently Merck is hoping that most, if not all the states in the US, will mandate a vaccine against HPV as a pre-requisite for school attendance. And beat rivals to it, before GlaxoSmithKline gets FDA approval for its Cervarix.

In the dozens and dozens of articles in the New York Times, in reports by PR Watch and Judicial Watch, scant few mentioning of the untold physical incapacitation, chronic illness and deaths tied to Gardasil by many citizen groups with some scientists behind the calls to stop the Gardasil-Cervarix mass vaccination program (TruthWikiUS Court Pays $6 Million to Gardasil Victims Judicial Watch:a, bc, Are You Concerned Over Genetically Modified Vaccine? HPV Researchers, Planned Parenthood Win Prestigious Lasker Medical Awards).

But, 11 years ago, even before FDA approval, Merck and Edelman were on the PR war-path beating the cervical cancer drums:

Merck used its deep pockets to make sure that even before the FDA had approved Gardasil, there was a growing awareness of and concern about HPV and its link to cervical cancer. According to Bloomberg News, Merck spent $841,000 for Internet ads alone relating to HPV in the first quarter of 2006 — months before the FDA had even approved Gardasil (Part One: Setting the Stage).

Drug Marketing through Non-Profit Support and Favorable Legislation

How does this marketing affect the non-profit sector? A report in the New England Journal of Medicine found that “83 percent of the nation’s 104 largest patient advocacy groups take contributions from the drug, medical device and biotech industries,” and “one-fifth of the patient advocacy groups studied accepted $1 million or more from drugmakers, but exactly how much those groups accepted is fuzzy.” It is fuzzy because non-profit funding streams are not disclosed and/or are purposefully channeled through pharma subsidiaries in order to obfuscate obvious connections. If the organization’s existence depends upon funding from a product manufacturer, is it unreasonable to assume that the organization might be beholden to the views of their funders? I don’t think so. Check out the interview with one of the world’s richest men’s son, Peter Buffet, on the Charitable Industrial Complex here: My talk with Peter Buffett ,Warren Buffett’s son, about what’s wrong with philanthropy.

Here’s just one example of non-profit collusion with the pharmaceutical companies and health care for-profits. This is a three-part series written for PR Watch in 2017 by journalist Judith Siers-Poisson:

According to their website, “Women in Government is a national 501(c)(3), non-profit, bi-partisan organization of women state legislators providing leadership opportunities, networking, expert forums, and educational resources to address and resolve complex public policy issues.” The campaigns that they feature on their home page deal with kidney health, Medicare preventive services, higher education policy, and the “Challenge to Eliminate Cervical Cancer,” which was publicly launched in 2004.

On February 2, 2007, Texas Governor Rick Perry, against the wishes of his conservative base and to the surprise of critics, signed an executive order mandating HPV vaccination for girls entering seventh grade. Then, unfortunately for Perry and Merck, details of his many connections with both Merck and Women in Government became public.

Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe noted, “It turned out that Perry’s former chief of staff is now a lobbyist for Merck. Did that look bad? Whoa, Nellie. Did it look bad that Merck had funded an organization of women legislators backing similar bills? Whoa, Merck.” USA Today reported that Perry’s current chief of staff’s mother-in-law, Texas Republican State Representative Dianne White Delisi, is a state director for Women in Government. Perry’s wife, Anita, a nurse by training, addressed a WIG summit on cervical cancer in Atlanta in November 2005. Perry also received $6,000 from Merck’s political action committee during his re-election campaign.

In 2004, more than 20 WIG funders were pharmaceutical companies or entities heavily invested in health care issues that could come before state legislators. A short list includes both Merck & Co., Inc and Merck Vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline (which will soon have the second HPV vaccine on the market), and Digene Corporation (which manufactures an HPV test). Other drug interests listed as donors to WIG include Novartis, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, Bayer Healthcare, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb (both the company and their foundation), and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, also known as PhRMA, one of the largest and most influential lobbying organizations in Washington representing 48 drug companies.

The funders of Women in Government today, as I am looking at their website, are still those big ones listed above and others in the for-profit health care fields.

So here the pharmaceutical companies funded a non-profit organization that then supported legislators and legislation favorable for the companies and products. By all accounts, a common practice. What happens when they also fund the organizations tasked with providing healthcare, organizations such as Planned Parenthood? Can we tie Planned Parenthood to the makers of Gardasil? I think we can. Here is just an introduction to their funding.

According to a Washington Post article run in August 2015, during the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2014, Planned Parenthood affiliates around the country received $528.4 million in government funds (a combination of state, federal and sometimes local government dollars). Those federal dollars were the single largest source of money coming into the organization and its local affiliates, by far. Another $305.3 million came from non-government sources, about $257.4 million reached the organization after private donors and foundations made contributions and bequests. The organization also raised another $54.7 million in fees charged for its services. Government funding, with federal dollars comprising the biggest portion of this part of the organization’s budget, are absolutely critical to Planned Parenthood’s total operation, but so too are the private funds. How and from whom those private funds come aligns quite clearly with the organization’s view on certain drugs and vaccines. On the surface, this seems perfectly reasonable. Why wouldn’t a private foundation support an organization that aligns with its goals? It would be illogical to support an organization with contrary views. What becomes clear though, once we begin to unravel these connections, is just how deeply entrenched these alliances are. It begs the question, if a significant portion of one’s operational budget comes from a foundation and/or a manufacturer who supports a particular product or set of products, is it possible to question those products in any meaningful way or at all? Probably not.

Just recently, Peter Doshi, associate editor of the British Medical Journal, published a scathing report about the specious relationships between vaccine educators like Every Child by Two, the Immunization Action Coalition and even the American Academy Pediatrics, the CDC and the pharmaceutical industry. Each organization received millions of dollars in funding both directly from the CDC and from industry, and as a consequence, their recommendations regarding vaccines are in lockstep with their funders. When pressed about these relationships and whether any of the organizations had ever questioned the safety or efficacy of the products they recommend, each admitted that they had not.

So just how independent and reliable is the health information put forth both non-profit organizations like Planned Parenthood, who receive their funding from industry or foundations supported by industry? Moreover, how closely must the organization’s employees adhere to the accepted party line? If my case is any indication, pretty damned closely.

Stay tuned for part three in this series, where I’ll detail the complicated and compromising funding sources of Planned Parenthood and its affiliates.

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Bamboo shoots. Photo by David Inouye.