Author: Kevin Homer, MD

This is the story of how conflicts of interest have compromised the integrity of our government’s public health policies, favoring special interests instead of the best interest of Americans.  

When the pandemic first washed over us, it knocked many of us off our feet.  Policymakers shot-gunned solutions in reaction to terrifying mortality rates, especially among the elderly.  We needed treatments, ventilators, hospital beds, and vaccines; we needed them fast.  We were in no position to bargain.  

This chaos created opportunity.  Handsome rewards were promised to those offering remedies for the unthinkable.  Quoting Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “Nothing sells vaccine like panic.”  This has been especially true of Pfizer, the manufacturer of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.  

Who pays for Pfizer vaccines?  Not the vaccine recipients.  At least not directly.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Government pays Pfizer $24 for every vaccine administered against an estimated cost of $1.20, a profit of at least $22 per shot.  Every first dose, every second dose, every third dose to the immunocompromised, every booster, every accidental dose to someone previously vaccinated—all generate $22 in profit.  OSHA mandates, CMS mandates, and reductions in minimum vaccination and booster ages increase the target market, sales, and profits.

The result is a windfall for Pfizer.  According to its third quarter SEC filings, Pfizer’s YTD revenue as of October 3 2021, soared to $57.7 billion, nearly doubling its $30.2 billion revenue for the same period in 2020.  At the same time, Pfizer’s net income more than doubled, up 224% from $8.3 billion to $18.6 billion through the third quarters of these years, working out to $3.32 per share of common stock.  

The same government that pays for the vaccines regulates the product and mandates its use.  This creates a conflict of interest on its face.  Furthermore, no one involved in assuring the “safety and efficacy” of vaccines has disclosed a potential conflict and recused themselves from participation in the debate, acceptance, and approval of Pfizer’s vaccines and its reimbursement system.  Are we to believe that not one has a financial interest in Pfizer?  

If we disrupt their money machine, companies like Pfizer threaten us with the loss of wonder drugs.  Research and development costs money, they tell us, and many drugs never make it to market.  Pills have a high price because pharmaceutical companies must recoup these costs.  Don’t mess with us, they say, or you will lose the gumball machines that dispense the new and improved drugs keeping you alive and happy.  

Husain Lalani, MD, MPH, a proponent of universal vaccination to eradicate SARS-CoV-2, together with colleagues Jerry Avorn, MD, and Aaron Kesselheim, MD, published a recent article in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics which demonstrates that COVID-19 vaccines are the result of “decades-long taxpayer investments” prior to the pandemic.  Then we funded the clinical trials necessary to bring product to market. According to Dr. Lalani, “in total, over $18 billion dollars of US public funds have been invested in 6 [COVID-19] vaccine candidates.”  You and I have paid for these vaccines, so why don’t we own them, instead of Pfizer?

Under the guise of altruism, the pharmaceutical industry is robbing the public treasury while gouging its customers.  Government subsidies invalidate the industry’s justification for high drug prices.  It’s never been about your life and happiness; it’s always been about their bottom line.  The cost is spread across the population, like a tax.  The benefit is concentrated in a few companies and their shareholders, like special interest fraud.

The essence of capitalism is to assume risk.  Capitalists naturally seek to minimize risks and costs but using power and influence to offload them to the public is corruption.  It is easy to see.  Just follow the money.

Many see the pandemic as an opportunity to accumulate wealth and consolidate political power.  We need to love our freedoms more than we fear the loss of wonder drugs, more than we fear a germ.  Americans must stop bickering and start figuring out how to fight greed and evil.  The first step is to eliminate corruption.  Let’s start with the corruption we can see.

I am not talking to President Biden, Rochelle Walensky, Anthony Fauci, or anyone else conflicted by political or material entanglements with the pharmaceutical industry.  I am not talking to members of VRBPAC or ACIP, or principal investigators for NIH.  I am not talking to Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or anyone who has made billions during the pandemic.  I am not talking to anyone who has sold out.  If you would do anything to hold onto your research grant, to keep your airline running, or to protect your fiefdom, I am not talking to you.  I am not talking to media syndicates with synchronized messages.  I am not talking to those cynical about the American dream who think “of the people, by the people, for the people” is naïve and passé twaddle.  I am not talking to anyone numb to the pangs of conscience, sociopaths who prioritize greed and power over the lives of others.  I am not talking to you because you are already lost.  I have nothing to say to you.

I am talking to foot soldiers in the army of the people I am not talking to.  I am talking to leaders who have power over people and policies.  I am talking to those trying to keep their businesses safe for customers and employees.  I am talking to hospital administrators responsible for protecting patients from harm.  I am talking to doctors who care about the welfare of their patients.  I am talking to elected officials trying to best represent their constituents.  I am talking to leaders in the military and law enforcement who protect us from bad people.  I am talking to dedicated scientists in public health agencies.  I am talking to ethical small business owners.  I am talking to HR directors responsible for a healthy and productive workforce.  I am talking to all those who want to do the right thing.  I know you are out there.

You are leaning on what has worked in the past.  You steer a middle course.  But as the pandemic evolves, the paradigms have diverged.  It is no longer possible to keep one foot on the dock and the other in the boat; the middle ground is now under water.  You have chosen the orthodoxy proclaimed by all the people I am not talking to.  You feel safer there.  Afterall, you are in a delicate situation.  You know how things work.  You are expected to be a good soldier and toe the line.

I’ve got a question for you.  What if you are wrong?

You require vaccines for your employees, you urge boosters for your patients, because aggressive vaccination policies keep the public safe; the unvaccinated are a threat to the health of others.  Vaccinate your employees, vaccinate your patients, vaccinate your children.  Use the carrot, use the stick, but get it done.  But what if universal vaccination will not eradicate the virus?  What if the vaccinated can become infected and spread the virus to others?  What if indiscriminate vaccination pressures the virus to mutate into more dangerous forms?  What if antibody dependent enhancement causes devastating infections in the vaccinated?

You tell others that vaccines are safe and effective.  You encourage your patients, your family, your friends to get boosted.  Vaccine complications are rare, you say; COVID will shred your lungs, destroy the pleasures of taste and smell, and put you face down on a ventilator.  But what if vaccine safety data has been deceptively manipulated?  What if you learn of death spikes in populations after vaccines were introduced?  What if there is collusion to suppress adverse vaccine safety information?  What if the industry reports of vaccine efficacy deliberately leave out measures of absolute risk reduction?

You believe we must protect our children by early vaccination.  But what do you do with the evidence that healthy children don’t die of COVID, that vaccination risks for kids far outweigh benefits, and that natural immunity in children is durable?

You say this crisis is no time to question the wisdom of our government’s healthcare policies.  Afterall, they’ve been guided by the greatest minds on earth.  But how do you feel when you learn that USA has more total per capita COVID-19 deaths than 90% of the nations on earth, and that during the pandemic, average lifespan of Americans has dropped by nearly 2 years, 8.5 times the rest of the developed world?  How do you account for the thousands of physicians and scientists who have signed the Global Covid Declaration?

When the FDA tweets, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” you like it, you share it, but for sure you won’t prescribe Ivermectin or dispense it in your pharmacy.  Afterall, there have been no adequately powered, well-designed, well-conducted clinical trials that support the use of Ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19.  You know that treatment for severe COVID is hospitalization, Remdesivir, steroids, and mechanical ventilation.  But what if you learn that Remdesivir’s approval was based on inadequately powered, uncontrolled clinical trials that showed shortened hospitalizations instead of improved survival?  What if you learned that early treatment keeps people out of the hospital?  What if chloroquine prevents infection and spread of SARS viruses?  What if the use of approved, off-label, unpatented, repurposed drugs by physicians is really generating the outstanding success rates reported by Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, American’s Frontline Doctors, and the Pandemic Health Alliance?  What if there has been a deliberate attempt to suppress alternative therapies for COVID-19?  What if the leaders of institutions you have trusted for health guidance are manipulating you to enrich themselves and others?

Are you sure that your actions, your decisions, your influence, your mandates are not harming people?

Your decisions affect the welfare, livelihood, and very lives of others.  And you are not just deciding for us; you are deciding for our children too.  And their children.  And all that come after.

Maybe you have been deceived.  But what if you are wrong?

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries 

but between authoritarians and libertarians

–George Orwell, 1948

The President is losing patience.  Six quarters into the emergency, the FDA has authorized COVID-19 vaccines down to five years of age.  The CDC maintains these vaccines are safe and effective.  Vaccinations are mandated by powerful employers, high ranking generals, and top government officials.  Most of the medical community are on board.  Failure to comply costs income and freedom.   It’s intimidating.  Many have submitted to the pressure.  These policies have concentrated authority and power in a few “experts” who presume to know what’s best for everyone else.  It’s not just arrogance.  It’s slavery.

Slavery doesn’t need a plantation and rows of cotton.  Slavery occurs when one person owns the thoughts and actions of another.  Motives don’t matter.  Good intentions don’t justify coercion.  Masters who treat their slaves well are still slaveowners.  The core moral flaw of slavery is the notion that one person can own another.  Slaves exist to serve masters, not the other way around.  

Masters cannot make decisions in the best interest of their slaves.  The interests of the slaveowner always have precedence.  If you own my decisions, you own me.  You can’t make the best decisions for me because you don’t know what’s important to me.  The individual taking the risk must have decisive control.  Today’s public health policies transfer choice from individuals to powerful experts just like slaves surrender control to their masters.

We don’t need experts to understand the issues of the pandemic.  COVID-19 is bad.  Many people have died, more than should have.  But we’ve learned to identify those at risk.  Sound, compassionate public health policy would focus attention on the vulnerable and protect them with more than vaccines.  Instead, our masters are using only one tool and applying it universally. 

Vaccines have risks.  Many people have died, more than should have.  Vaccines were rushed to market with only a thin veneer of study and testing.  What we know of vaccine risks—myocarditis, blood clots, neuromuscular disorders, death—is scary enough.  What we don’t know is even scarier.  Some of these potential future problems can be deduced from the studies requested by the FDA in its COMIRNATY approval letter.   

Yet our experts cling to a universal vaccination policy that seems to be less in the public interest than in that of vaccine vendors.  Our impatient masters have cornered us into a company store where there’s only one shoddy product for sale.  We must break free.

America is founded on liberty.  Yes, our history is filled with cognitive dissonance on this point.  The institution of slavery is baked into our founding documents, right alongside guarantees of individual rights and freedoms.  But the understanding of liberty is also baked into Americans, so much so that we were willing to shed blood to purge slavery from our land, without the assurance that we could.  

We’ve reached a similar moment.  Echoing notes from the Gettysburg Address, history has given us the opportunity to purge a more occult and subversive form of slavery from our land.  Our public health policies have devolved to the coercion by the few over the lives of the many.  These policies have shifted from information to dogma, from recommendations to requirements.  Like the slaves of old, we must adopt the religion of our masters and submit to their commands.  Otherwise, we are promised discomfort.

To those subjected to these policies, my message is simple.  Resist this coercion like it’s slavery.  It is.