The Lancet COVID-19 Commission
*Seems complicit. A critique that is more polite than me, Brownstone Institute link.
“The Lancet recently released its long-awaited COVID-19 commission report. The report well reflects the current state of public health science and addresses the business needs of the Lancet. It may have been naïve to expect further, but health is an important area and should be taken more seriously.”
A Critique of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, by David Bell, Brownstone Institute, https://brownstone.org/articles/a-critique-of-the-lancet-covid-19-commission/
A brief Time Capsule precedes the critique of the Commission report:
We have long relied on medical journals to act as a conduit for information from researchers to medical practitioners and the public. This is a plausible model if journals are independent and the staff and owners of the journal promote truth above politics or company profit.
This was once the case; the Lancet, a subject of this article, was once family-owned and that could hold to the values of Thomas Wakley and his descendants, standing against medical authorities up to 1921. It has since been owned by other for-profit companies, now a subsidiary of a larger Dutch-based publishing conglomerate, ‘Elsevier.’
Elsevier in turn is owned by RELX group (back in London), a large company with a typical list of major institutional investors including BlackRock (and so its major owner Vanguard), Morgan Stanley and Bank of America – the same list as major pharmaceutical and biotech corporations whose products Lancet publishes on.
The above does not tell us there is intentional wrong or malfeasance, just intrinsic conflicts of interest of the type journals such as Lancet are supposed to guard against. Lancet’s ultimate ownership has a duty to shareholders to use their portfolio of assets to maximize return; on this measure alone Lancet should favor certain pharmaceutical companies. The only thing that could stand in the way is lack of competence by the owners, or a moral code that rates investors below integrity.
In this context, Lancet’s track record over COVID-19 has been checkered. In February 2020 it published a major letter on COVID-19 origins that ignored major conflicts of interest in which nearly all authors were implicated in the alternative lab origin hypothesis. It published clearly fraudulent data on hydroxychloroquine that were significant in halting early treatment studies.
A lack of early effective treatment was necessary to secure Pharma profits for later COVID-19 medications and vaccines. The later exposure of the fraud was subsequently described by The Guardian and was one of the biggest retractions in modern history.
#complicit
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