Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks on Anthony Fauci at Big Pharma CCA.
More than 1,000 students and visitors attended “Big Pharma,” one of the most popular Center for Constructive Alternatives seminars in college history.
The event, which was March 5-8 and the fourth CCA of the academic year, focused on COVID-19 vaccines, pharmaceutical companies, and their relation to the federal government. Speakers included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently hinted at a 2024 Democratic presidential campaign.
“More than 220 students enrolled, and almost 900 friends of the college attended the event,” said Matt Bell, executive director of programs. “I think the timeliness of the topic, with the current controversies surrounding Big Pharma, made it popular.”
Kennedy, author of “The Real Anthony Fauci,” spoke on Sunday about Anthony Fauci, who served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the American public health establishment.
In 2001, Fauci became the head of bioweapon development, which always includes the manufacturing of vaccines, Kennedy said. He claimed that during the Obama administration, three viruses escaped Fauci’s lab and, denying an appeal from the president to shut the operation down, he moved the project to Wuhan.
Big Pharma companies capture lobbyists who protect them from pollution charges, he added.
Other speakers discussed the line between operation of private businesses and necessary government intervention in the public health sector.
Jordan Schachtel, an independent investigative journalist, discussed on Tuesday the collaboration between the federal government and the pharmaceutical companies that have released COVID-19 vaccines.
“Pfizer has been interlinked with the federal government in ways that still kind of remain unexplained,” Schachtel said. “The U.S. government also jointly owns the Moderna vaccine.”
Naomi Wolf, CEO of the Daily Clout, spoke on the medical and legal content of the Pfizer documents. Ordered for release in January 2022 by a Texas judge, these documents contain information on the COVID-19 vaccine that was available to the FDA and Pfizer — but not the American public — during trials of the vaccine and immediately following its rollout. When the records first emerged last summer, thousands were released per week and those without proper medical and legal training could not have worked through them to a sufficient degree, according to Wolf. She called for a team of professionals to boil down the language in the documents, and more than 2,500 across the world rose to the challenge.
“Some of the results are scary. For example, Pfizer told women not to get pregnant during the trial stages. Of the 270 women who did, Pfizer lost the records of 234 of them and 80% of them lost babies from either spontaneous abortion or miscarriage,” Wolf said.
In his 2020 book, “Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America,” journalist Gerald Posner gives a comprehensive history of the American pharmaceutical industry, from its origins as a private sector to its relatively recent explosion in the 1960s when famed psychiatrist Arthur Sackler began to market drugs on a large scale to increase company profit.
“I know it’s a fine line — the line between private business and public health — but as long as we have companies serving both Wall Street and Washington primarily, patient health takes the backseat,” Posner said in his speech on Tuesday.
The mingling of science and public policy has raised questions about ethics and perverse incentives for pharmaceutical companies, according to Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy Allison Postell, who spoke at the faculty roundtable on Wednesday.
“One of the questions I would raise is ‘what is the point and purpose of drugs?’ The criticism of the Sackler family is that profit went ahead of patience, right? That’s not to say profit is bad, but health always needs to be the goal in medicine,” Postell said.“We want profit to be the proper reward for serving people. The argument is that there are just really bad incentive structures for Big Pharma.”
Kelli Kazmier, assistant professor of chemistry, also spoke on the panel Wednesday evening. She discussed the issue of trust raised by many speakers over the course of the seminar.
“I was mostly deeply sad because there seemed to be a pretty toxic mix of general misunderstanding and distrust,” Kazmier said. “Science is not inherently easy, right? You have to be willing to trust. We actually talk about this a lot in the scientific community about what we can do to better communicate things. And I don’t know that there are any really great options.”
Postell said students hoping to work in pharmaceuticals should consider how they can best influence the industry.
“Pharmacology students should be trained to see their expertise as contributing to patient welfare, and ethical panels should guide companies to avoid overvaluing or undervaluing risks,” Postell said. “Hopefully, the liberal education students receive here will inspire them to enter Big Pharma and improve it.”
