Show Notes Links
🔗 Guest Websites & Books
Related Unstress Health podcasts:
- Dr. Tabitha Healey: Mental Health & Burnout in Medicine
- Burnout Recovery for Healthcare Providers with Tammy Guest
Timestamps for YouTube (Concise Highlights)
[00:00] Introduction & Overview – What is Corporate Capture?
[03:06] Dr. Clayton Baker: How financial incentives shape research
[05:03] Dr. Paul Marik: The truth about Tamiflu & research manipulation
[07:04] Dr. Ryan Cole: Why doctors prescribe statins for bonuses
[10:19] Dr. Toby Rogers: How Big Pharma impacts the global economy
[12:52] Decentralization in medicine: A new way forward
[15:47] Final thoughts & why public awareness is growing
Healthy Bite – Corporate Capture and the Business of Healthcare
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:00] Hi, my name is Dr Ron Ehrlich and welcome to the first Healthy Bite for 2025. It’s an opportunity for me to share with you something interesting that I’ve read, something that I feel is worth commenting on or sharing a webinar or something of interest. And this Healthy Bite, I want to share with you some of the work of a terrific organisation, which was called the Frontline COVID Critical Care of the FLCC. which has now, and this is the work of Pierre Kory and Dr. Paul Marik. Now, Paul Marik is a world leader in the use of repurposed drugs in the treatment of cancer. And Pierre Kory is a world leader in intensive care and both had an epiphany during the COVID. Now, this happened to quite a lot of practitioners during COVID. They have been. going along in their careers and thinking they’ve been practising evidence -based medicine and along comes Covid and suddenly they realise that all may not be well in the world of science that the world of evidence -based medicine and evidence -based marketing are very blurred and many practitioners had an epiphany during this time and Pierre Cory and Paul Marik two absolutely first class physicians who had this informed the Frontline COVID Critical Care network of the FLCCC which has more recently morphed into the Independent Medical Alliance and they had a webinar a few weeks ago which looked at corporate capture. Now, corporate capture is a story that is very easy to miss as a practitioner and certainly as a member as a member of the public. But once you become aware of it, very difficult to ignore. And this was the subject of this webinar and it was hosted by Dr. Ryan Cole. One of the members was Dr. Paul Marik, Dr. Toby Rogers from Sydney University, who I’m hoping to invite on to the podcast. and Dr. Clayton Baker. Now in this first section, and I’ve got three little snippets for you, they talk about corporate capture, how it affects research. They touch, actually Clayton Baker makes a statement in this, which I think, you know, how I miss this, I think he says, is to my eternal shame. And I think this is a message for every single medical practitioner in the world. I think we will have better public health if every practitioner had this kind of epiphany. But Clayton Baker shared that rather candidly with us. Paul Marik makes some very interesting observations about Tamiflu, the vaccine. And Ryan Cole shares a story about his brother being prescribed statins. Enjoy this snippet.
Dr Clayton Baker [00:03:06] to the advertising dollars in the TV industry. You pump a large amount of money into this industry. A lot of people’s labs get money. A lot of people’s salaries get paid to run these trials. And the reality is you become beholden to these people and you become beholden to trying to get positive results and burying negative results. And of course, during COVID, we saw that it all just went into hyperdrive. remember very distinctly, I was out running in 2020, very early on with a couple of buddies. One of them was the head of the hospitalist group at the main major hospital in my town. And I said to him, you know, I had friends who were orthopaedic surgeons and they went to the CEO and said, just keep one ward open, just one ward open, don’t shut the hospital down. we’ll keep doing our hip replacements, we’ll keep doing our knee replacements, we’re the biggest driver of money. Of course they wanted to earn money too. So there was a selfish, but they said we can get everyone out in 48 hours if it really gets swamped. Hospitals never got swamped. But the CEOs, they followed, they emptied out the hospitals and left them empty. The ICU’s were full and the rest of the wards were largely empty where I was. And… Why? Because they knew they were going to get paid off at the back end through the CARES Act money and through these other sources. And then when people did start coming through, they put them on the protocols, they do all the things that we had. We had one report in my county of a guy who died on a motorcycle and was a COVID death. So, you know, that’s, and that’s a documented fact now. So, you know, the extent to which the whole system from bottom to top is kind of infiltrated and paid off. is really, it’s really, it’s how I didn’t see through it before COVID is an eternal source of shame to me. I’ll leave it at that.
Dr Paul Marik [00:05:03] And you know what, what makes it works is they control the research. If you think about how research in this country And you know what? is designed. They design the study and they design it with a specific endpoint in mind. They conduct the study and they can obviously influence the study. They collect the data. They evaluate the data so they can decide whether an outcome is or is not an outcome or a side effect is not a side effect because it’s all unblinded. They analyse the data. where they want to. They then get ghost writers to write the paper for them. They obviously then get influential clinicians’ name to put on it. So it’s a complete and utter con job. It’s scientific fraud. That’s what they do and that’s what they get away with. It’s truly astonishing that it happens and that we let them get away with it. One of the things I find astonishing is the so -called antiviral Tamiflu, which gets pushed every flu season. And almost every Western nation has stockpiled millions of doses of Tamiflu. We know Tamiflu has no antiviral properties. It’s an antiviral with no antiviral properties. There’s no antiviral activity. All it does is it maybe reduces the fever by a few hours because of its anti pyretic effect, but yet they have altered the science. They have infiltrated health care agencies, all in the face of making money for no benefit, and it’s truly astonishing that they could get away with such a crime.
Dr Ryan Cole [00:07:04] Yeah, I mean, to give a personal example, my brother, my younger brother’s type 1 diabetic has been since age 10, and his endocrinologist said, hey, I want to put you on a statin. And my brother and I had conversations, I said, you don’t need a statin. and next time he goes in, hey, I want to put you on a statin. No. And so third time he goes in, he says, look, let me just prescribe it to you. You can take it home, throw it in the garbage, do whatever you want with it. But if I get 80 % of my patients on this statin, I get a $40 ,000 bonus from the system I work for. And so I think having these types of incentives and the patient doesn’t have informed consent that if the doctor’s putting you on a medicine that you’re going to end up buying them their new minivan or whatever for their family, and not all doctors do that, but there are incentives within the system that unfortunately aren’t in the interest of health. I think you bring up a great point, Dr. Merik, about these companies designing the studies. That’s the frustration. They have the endpoint. that’s why Remdesivir, you know, got its emergency authorisation. It was a horrible study. The end point kept shifting, and at the end of the day, they said, oh, look, it shortened stays, which technically really didn’t. And then they authorised it, and people were killed because of it. So these awful incentives and just allowing.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:08:34] Sobering, isn’t it, to hear clinicians, really experienced, highly respected clinicians, coming together and making these kind of observations in 2025. Now, I have often said that if you want to make sense of our health system, which seems so confusing, so contradictory, and if the evidence is anything to go by, we are not doing really well. Public health is a major problem and actually practitioner health is also, which is a major focus of Unstress Health going forward. I truly believe if we can get health practitioners to have epiphanies, not just about the way the system is, but about their own health. I mean, burnout rates in medical practitioners are shockingly high. I mean, an AMA report in 2020 put the figure of general practitioners and medical students suffering from burnout as somewhere between 65 and 75 percent in Australia. And the figure for nurses is very high, around 60 percent. We recently did a programme with Lorre Laws, which I would encourage you to go back and listen to, or with Tammy Guest. We talked about transactional or transformational experiences in a healthcare setting. But Toby Rogers is a researcher and economist and a researcher at Sydney University. And I’ve often said that to make sense of our health care system, if you preface it with the words business model, it goes a long way to explaining how this works. Toby Rogers has a very eloquent way of describing this.
Dr Toby Rogers [00:10:19] And to put this in economic terms, the pharmaceutical industry is consuming the rest of the economy. So every other sector of the economy is losing out right now. People who are sick and unable to leave their house are not going out shopping to buy a new car, to buy Nike shoes, to go to Walmart or whatever else. The pharmaceutical industry… is consuming all of the rest of Wall Street, all the rest of Main Street. They’re consuming the entire economy. It’s become this sort of monster squid that is consuming everything. If we can get some good people into government, and if they proceed to do radical transparency, as Bobby Kennedy was talking about today, and really release all the data, and let people make informed decisions about medicine, and we’ll find that a lot of the drugs that we’re taking are useless and cause harms and all the rest. If we have access to all that data. The economic benefits to the United States and the world economy are going to be astonishing. We’re spending somewhere in the neighbourhood of $500 billion a year on treating vaccine injury and injury from other pharmaceutical products. If we cut back on iatrogenic injury, on physician caused injury from doctors who are not doing the proper research are not reading original studies. If we can reduce the number of people who are just harmed by vaccines and SSRIs and statins and the rest, all of that $500 billion that we’re spending on injury every year will go back into people’s pockets and they can improve their house and they can buy a new car and they can go on a vacation with their kids and we can invest in society again. So what’s gonna happen in the next few years, quite literally, is if we don’t do anything about this problem, on the current course that we’re on, we’re gonna have economic stagnation, crisis, and collapse. And the only way out of this is to stop poisoning the society. And instead, to help people make people healthy again, and then they can spend that money on things other than medicines. And then the pharmaceutical industry won’t be consuming the whole rest of the economy and the whole rest of society and culture right now.
Dr Ryan Cole [00:12:52] So you say if we just simply stop poisoning people we might be healthier and have a better economy?
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:12:59] And that’s from an economist. So I couldn’t agree more actually. We have become so entrenched in thinking that this is the way a health system works. It was referred to as the tobacco playbook when it was known in the 1940s that tobacco was carcinogenic and addictive. And the tobacco playbook created doubt saying, oh, there’s insufficient scientific evidence and there were plenty of doctors and so -called key opinion leaders and professors who were creating this doubt. And that was the tobacco playbook, which is now morphed into the pharmaceutical playbook. But there is another way. Now, the narrative is another word that came out of the pandemic. I always used to think the narrative was just about a story, but it turned out that the news became the narrative. And if you’re a regular listener of this podcast, you will know that the way the pandemic was handled and the way the mRNA vaccines were rolled out was anything but great science. However, if you have restricted your reading to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Guardian, the New York Times, the mainstream media, CNN, MSBC, whatever it is, MSNBC, you would think that the last five years have been absolutely incredible. What a scientific achievement this has been. And I’m sad to say, I think probably 70 or 75 % at least of the population still think that. But a growing number of people, and these clinicians are included here, a growing number of people recognise that There is a better way and what’s going on. It’s also so interesting in America to see how the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy as head of the Health Department is being viewed as an attack on public health, as though you’re trying to protect the worst health system and worst health outcomes in the world. This is what the status quo is. And people are complaining and freaking out that Kennedy is going to upset this status quo. So I think this is really interesting. This next part, I think, is a wonderful accolade to that narrative, to people waking up, to what is going on. An increasing number of people are, and like Toby Rogers finishes on, I would applaud the Independent Medical Alliance and encourage you to support them and tune into them because this is a group of doctors that have seen the light. and are going to change public health. So enjoy this last section and stay tuned.
Dr Clayton Baker [00:15:47] Terry, folks, you got to take care of these health care students, and you’ve got to take care of the 15 colleges that are still doing this madness. And I think that would be a low -hanging piece of fruit that he could end tomorrow. That would be just a small thing, small ask, I think that would really help.
Dr Toby Rogers [00:16:02] Dr. Rogers, do you have anything you’d like to add? Well, I would add that it’s a different political moment than 2020. So when Larry Ellison was at that press conference on the second day of Trump’s administration and they announced this Stargate thing of mRNA cancer vaccines and $500 billion and all the rest, I mean, there was a riot on Twitter, now X, immediately. Thousands of people leapt in. who are now very knowledgeable about the dangers of mRNA to point out the problems with this idea, to push back. We have millions of people now who are aware of what’s going on, aware of the dangers of mRNA, aware of the pharmaceutical industry playbook. We’re in a different moment now. So there’s gonna be some bad ideas that are floated out, you know, over the next four years. But we have You folks, Independent Medical Alliance, who have done brilliant work throughout COVID and now into this next era, and we have millions of people who know what’s going on. So more than 75 % of adults are rejecting COVID boosters, and more than 90 % of parents are rejecting COVID shots for their kids. I mean, these are really large numbers. And so I think that the public groundswell against bad ideas. will be very helpful going forward. And as you point out, Kelly, the way forward, the lesson of the last five years is decentralised, decentralised, decentralised. This notion that we’re gonna defer to 15 captured bureaucrats in Washington DC has to disappear altogether. We know that if 15 people in DC are making a decision, there is 100 % chance that they will be captured. 100 % chance. If we instead decentralise decision -making to the 1 million doctors out there and the 330 million Americans out there who are now actually pretty wise about how these things work, we’re gonna get much better decisions over the long run. Decentralisation is the way forward in everything related to medicine. And you folks have been the pioneers in showing that this is the better way to do medicine. And my hat is off to you. You’ve done remarkable work.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:18:27] this is a healthy bite and I’m hoping to put out a few more healthy bites along the way and I’d encourage you to join our Unstress Health community it’s a it’s a wonderful resource with a lot of resources a lot of benefits a focus on mental fitness training which if you go onto our website you’ll see what that’s all about your mind can be your best friend or your worst enemy and that is something worth making your best friend for sure. Hope this finds you Well, until next time. This is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Be well.
