Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2703

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Walker M.
Brave New World of Zero Risk Covert Strategy in British Science Policy
The One Click Group 2005 Oct 31
http://www.theoneclickgroup.co.uk/

Keywords:
CFS Myalgic Encephalomyelitis

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:

Today (October 31 2005) a new book was launched which looks at British Health Policy through the prism of CFS ( Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome ).
The entire Chapter 24 is published on www.theoneclickgroup.co.uk and is reproduced here.

You may not agree with everything that Martin Walker has to say, but he certainly provides some food for thought and many of his points are insightful and conceptually profound.

Many of the issues canvased by Healthy Skepticism are explored here.

If you have a chance to read the entire book, please email us with your impression.

Full text:

Brave New World of Zero Risk
Covert Strategy in British Science Policy
By
Martin J. Walker

*************************************

“Questions have arisen about the policing of science. Who is responsible for the policing? My answer is: all of us.”
Serge Lang 1927-2005

*************************************

Today, One Click has the honour of being the pressure group for ME/CFS sufferers selected by Martin J. Walker to launch his new book, Brave New World of Zero Risk – Covert Strategy in British Science Policy.

In ‘Brave New World of Zero Risk’, Walker writes: “In 1997, New Labour brought to power a strange brew of liberalism, anti-socialism, public relations and corporate lobbying. While Thatcher had encouraged the pharmaceutical industry, Blair made it a partner in government. The National Health Service, set up originally to provide health care to the British people regardless of income, has been sold off bit by bit, mainly to pharmaceutical interests. The most serious consequence of ceding to corporate interests responsibility for science, medicine and health, is that the independence of science and any possible independence of health care has been sacrificed. Corporate lobby groups, in bed with Big Pharma, insurance companies and New Labour, now press for the least expensive and the most profitable health care solutions. They attack alternative medicine and campaign for animal testing and vivisection. They have politicised science and now control its methodology and its research results. Using spin, lies and propaganda they harass and isolate anyone who comes to conclusions critical of new technology or pharma-science. They preach zero risk and claim that new technologies can cause no harm.

This book examines the contemporary corporate politics of science in two areas, that of MMR (mumps, measles and rubella) vaccination and the illness ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis). It shows how those who have fought for independent science have been bullied, attacked and discredited, using political strategies that have nothing to do with science and everything to do with power and profit.”

Martin Walker has a stellar history of research integrity and diligence unparalleled in investigative writing, as has been illustrated in his other works such as Dirty Medicine that deals with the assault on complementary medicine by selected orthodox medical practitioners, pharmaceutical companies and industrial scientists and Skewed that focuses on the extent that industry will go to protect their vested interests over one the most maligned and misunderstood diseases of modern times, the neurological illness ME/CFS.

With ‘Brave New World of Zero Risk’, Walker has gone to the next level by providing, not just the ME/CFS community, but social commentators and health activists everywhere around the world with the greatest of gifts – a meticulously researched advocacy tool that can be used with deadly accuracy to combat the misinformation, so assiduously and comprehensively produced by vested interests such as those of the pharmaceutical industry et al, being promoted by ex members of the Revolutionary Communist Party in the United Kingdom and the neo conservatives elsewhere that have served to comprehensively corrupt science and scientific endeavour.

This seminal ‘Brave New World of Zero Risk’ book by Walker shows how the voices of millions upon millions of sufferers of unexplained and uninvestigated diseases such as ME/CFS, Gulf War Syndrome and LYME disease, to name but three, are having their voices and the symptoms of their illness professionally suppressed by intricate campaigns of discreditation, spun by the vested interests of corporate science and backed by the pharmaceutical industry and the government et al. Walker meticulously unpicks and exposes the structure and strategy of these organisations that masquerade under the label of ‘science’, ‘medicine’ and ‘health’ and illustrates how and why scientific independence in these fields has been deliberately stamped on and eradicated.

The iatrogenic death rate (induced by physician activity) that a recent study concluded is the leading cause of death in America alone and running at some 783,936 per annum, is an indication of how far we have gone down the road of attempting to suppress and diminish information that is key to our very survival as human beings. The old joke of doctors having the facility to bury their mistakes is now being perpetrated on a massive scale by the evidenced corruption of science.

Of particular interest to the ME/CFS community in ‘Brave New World of Zero Risk’ is Walker’s detailed analysis of the PRIME Project that has been set up to strip the ME/CFS community of its politics, to overcome the resistance to the scientifically fraudulent PACE trial and to assist in “the long-term plan of manufacturing mental illness on a huge scale.” For the last twenty years, the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry have been trying to gain control of the millions of ME/CFS sufferers – 240,000 in the UK alone, 40,000 of them children and young people – for experimentation and research. Over the next few weeks, One Click will be publishing extracts from ‘Brave New World Zero of Risk’ and the PRIME Project material currently stands at the top of our agenda.

Where is my personal interest in all this, and what impact does Walker’s new book have for me, for my family, for Angela Kennedy, her family, the One Click Group and the work that we do for ME/CFS patients around the world? The publication of ‘Brave New World of Zero Risk’ means that we have at our fingertips the most comprehensive reference work with which to produce material to combat the psychiatric paradigm of ME/CFS being so damagingly and erroneously foisted on patients.

When my son was struck down with ME/CFS at the age of ten subsequent to contracting the Viral Encephalitis that very nearly killed him, I was forced to give up my public relations career that consisted of devising, developing and implementing international mass communication concepts and strategic campaigns worldwide and turn my attention to getting the most formidable education that could possibly be obtained on ME/CFS.

I saw my very young and previously thriving child treated so badly by the very professionals supposedly obligated with a duty of care for him. Like all parents of ME/CFS children, I saw that once the ME/CFS label had been attached to him, in-depth investigations and tests were denied, not only on the recommendation of selected doctors, but at the behest of the ME/CFS charities that are supposed to serve the best interests of ME/CFS children just like him. It was my personal experience of the injustice and maltreatment directed towards ME/CFS sufferers and the campaign of misinformation being promulgated worldwide in regard to this neurological disease that prompted me to set up the One Click pressure group in October 2003 with my colleague, sociology lecturer Angela Kennedy. We have been given no other choice.

Because of our fight for independent science to explore and research the organic ME/CFS issue, we have been bullied, attacked, libelled, vilified, persecuted and our severely ill children personally harmed. Not just by the psychiatric lobby, but from some of the most surprising quarters attempting to protect their vested interests, as has been evidenced in The One Click Story. Martin Walker’s book ‘Brave New World of Zero Risk’ shows how and why these political strategies have been employed that have nothing to do with science and everything to do with power and profit.

We urge our readers to visit the dedicated Zero Risk Group website and join the widespread public debate about many contemporary scientific issues including that of genetic modification and the MMR vaccine (mumps, measles, rubella). We also encourage you to make a small donation to the Zero Risk movement so that the stellar work of Martin Walker and others can continue for the benefit of us all.

To Martin Walker we have these final words to say – THANK YOU!

Jane Bryant
The One Click Group

**************************************

“I am not here concerned with intent, but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis and a hole in the ground.”
Serge Lang 1927-2005

**************************************

We publish today for the benefit of our readers the final chapter in Brave New World of Zero Risk. Tomorrow, we publish the PRIME Project material.

Extract from Brave New World of Zero Risk

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

From Political Party to Corporate Science Lobby

“They are very dangerous people, people who put trees and flowers before people, you can’t reason with them.” (1)

“The third industrial revolution will be knowledge-driven, science-driven and enterprise-driven. In this new world, we will need the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee as never before, to bring together the scientists who open up the possibilities of the future, the men of enterprise who harness their discoveries and the legislators who must enable both to flourish for the betterment of the people”.
Margaret Thatcher (2)

Ex-RCPers [Revolutionary Communist Party] now clearly believe, to the letter, what Margaret Thatcher said. But the policies of neo-liberalism as enacted by Thatcher, while clearly in support of progressive, fast developing, national high-technology industry, also dismantled many of the organs and institutions of representative democracy.

In both Britain and America, the corruption of science has come as a direct result of policies that have privatised much of society, handing over its administration and giving unfettered rights to corporations.(3) While it might be possible to argue about the economics of these strategies, and while there clearly are alternatives to big government wielding huge public spending deficits, the curtailment of public involvement and the cauterisation of a public discourse has had a deadly effect on the health of democracy.

One of the consequences of the gradual dissolution of the civil service and government departments in the UK has been the formation of non-governmental groups, which discuss and feed policy into the Government. While these quangos, focus and lobby groups appear to open up the democratic process by providing a wide range of extra-government forums for consultation, they have actually concentrated policy discussion and the policy implementation process in the hands of an elite network of individuals and organisations, which are completely dominated by corporate interests.

In science this process is particularly noticeable, principally because science has never come within the ambit of popular or local authority democracy in the same manner that education, apprenticeships or parks and gardens might do now or have done in the past. The Department of Trade and Industry itself, in concert with the Policy Unit and the Cabinet Office in Downing Street, are now running with science policy-making which is, as far as citizens are concerned, almost completely untouched by public hands. It seems astounding that, in dealing with the most important issue of the 21st century, New Labour has handed over policy to the corporations involved.

In the area of health, the pharmaceutical industry and the new bio-pharmaceutical industry represent the key government partners. Doctors and other representatives of the medical profession, or for that matter those in the field of alternative health, are consulted less and less. The older, more traditional approaches to mapping illness epidemiologically and then providing local services to fit community needs, have been replaced by a multi-billion-pound discourse, which looks to the future needs of the pharmaceutical industry and its political
projections.(4)

So, for instance, in the field of public health, interdisciplinary discourses about poverty, housing, family size and nutrition have been replaced by discussions about combined multiple vaccines and the eradication of infectious diseases, some of which have not even reached our shores. This switch in the determination of health policy and its influence by corporate science has been effected very quickly.

Various science organisations have tried for years, in a relatively laid-back manner, to introduce science to the general population. Their experience has been swept aside and New Labour has done nothing to erect any form of democratic or popular structures within which the major advances in science can be debated. Worse, in fact, New Labour has whored its powers, granting ‘major stakeholder’ concessions to corporations and lobby organisations with political and financial vested interests in the future of science and health.

Anti-Science or Real Science

The assault upon environmentalists, sufferers from environmentally- induced illness and those doctors and therapists who treated these conditions, was a major platform of the early Campaign Against Health Fraud. This platform led the CAHF to deny the existence of any environmentally-created illnesses, including allergy, chemical sensitivity, ME and pesticide exposure.

When the CAHF was at its most prominent, its principle figures manipulated information, which went into reports, news stories and other media, to deny the existence of environmental illnesses and ME. ‘Expert witnesses’ associated with the campaign gave evidence in a number of legal cases.(5) Since the mid-Nineties, a great deal of ‘official’ information has been produced, which gives credence to environmentally-induced illness, adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals and various dangers from developing technology. But health fraud campaigners, ex-RCPers and other skeptics have perversely refused to report any of this.

To argue obsessively that there are no detrimental health effects consequent upon remaining industrial and new post industrial means of production is clearly, for scientists and physicians, scientific misconduct. However, as always when people who are part of the establishment offend against professional rules, they are not investigated. While Arpad Pusztai and Andrew Wakefield suffer personal vilification, and while thousands of ME sufferers have been abused over the past decade, those experts who create these intricate campaigns walk away unquestioned, with the support of scientific organisations and government agencies. And while this situation continues, more and more ordinary citizens and consumers suffer the consequences.

The ‘campaigners for science’ quoted in this book consider high levels of ‘collateral’ damage to be a fair price to pay for the survival of unhampered scientific production. This is a clear sign that they have drifted into some kind of anti-social ideology, which they are pursuing with a criminal disregard for public health. We have moved within the space of a few decades, from a position where there were always a few industrial companies who endangered the public health, to a position where there is now an incessant war on many levels between the people and global corporations.

When members of the Revolutionary Communist Party took on the news media with their assertions that ITN journalists had manipulated the image of a Serbian transit camp, whether they were ultimately right or wrong, they took on people who were powerful enough to strike back. When they besmirched the whole environmental movement and manipulated its spokespersons, Channel 4 had to issue an apology and the film-makers’ wrongdoing was made public. When, however, the subjects of their mendacity are research workers, ME sufferers and parents of autistic children, they can win hands down, because all these maligned people are powerless in contemporary society.

• * *

The front that corporate science has organised to protect its financial interests is as complex as a serial killer’s alibi. But at the heart of its disinformation campaign is the basic lie of all propagandists, that ‘Science, because it’s science, is inevitably right’. As the cracks begin to widen, with the dust kicked up by pharmaceutical science and the global epidemic of death and disease that it is fostering, the scientific stalwarts need to resort more and more frequently to spin.

The professionalisation of medical research, its policy implications and its reporting, all take us nearer to a society where the individual ceases to have ownership of his or her own body. The number of people who could be said to be ‘against science’ per se could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. The number of people who have serious and rational arguments about the damage done by corporate science, in terms of both health and democracy, in the developed and developing world, is growing daily.

Although groups such as the Science Media Centre and Sense About Science maintain that they are struggling to explain science, they are actually apologists for bad industrial science, supporting insupportable arguments against the common people, who are not anti-science but who are critical in varying degrees of the corporate exploitation of science and its politicisation. The recent social conflicts around MMR have not actually been about the use, benefits and risks or even the science of vaccination.

They were from the beginning about how the scientific community should deal with research that disclosed critical aspects of the combined triple vaccine of measles, mumps and rubella. There are well laid-down procedures for dealing with new research results. Other scientists working in the same field are asked to replicate the original research. Why was this not done in the case of Dr Andrew Wakefield’s work?

The conflict that has been created by the refusal of the medical establishment to review research into ME and CFS is even more pointedly not a row between hysterical sufferers and rational, humane physicians; it can be specifically described as a conflict between those who believe in scientific inquiry into the bio-medical causes of disease, and psychiatrists aligned with the corporate economy, who have hidden designs. There is, in this case, the question of ‘experts’ and the matter of whether or not psychiatry should even be included under the heading of ‘science’.

There is less and less reality to the order in which we live. Take, for instance, the Guidelines on Science and Health Communication. These are apparently predicated on the notion that a large number of journalists are writing critical articles about pharmaceutical companies, physicians, GM crops, MMR and HRT. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. The number of good investigative journalists in the press and other media has gradually fallen to an all-time low. Important investigative questions of vested interests and corruption have been replaced by investigations into roofers who rip off consumers. Very few news journalists ever bother to research powerful conflicts of interests.

At a time when dissidents and those with alternative views find themselves up against the forces of global corporatism, there are fewer and fewer outlets for their voice. At the centre of this almost surgical censorship, which has developed like a cancer in society, are working scientists. On questions of science, it is imperative that scientists themselves wise up to the way in which they and their work is being manipulated.

There have to be two immediate goals for scientists. First they must fight to maintain their integrity in the face of the ‘we can buy anything’ culture of the corporations. They must put energy into creating their own critical forums, which discuss and plan the regulation of their own work. Clearly, many of their former representative organisations and professional bodies have been bought up, so it’s time to form new ones. Scientists themselves, working in industry, need to grasp the nettle, to understand that they are scientists first and company hacks second. Or, indeed, that they are human beings first, scientists second, and company hacks a very distant third.

Secondly, scientists have to take the discussion about important developments into society. We have seen that science lobby groups and politicians cannot be trusted. Working scientists, with academics and others, have to introduce all the contentious subjects of their work to the community in forums and debates. The doors to these events have to be locked against corporate interests. The object of discussions and debates at community level has to be the framing of policy at the level of local democracy.

The organisations that need to be set up must not be part of New Labour’s attempt to sanitise democracy and to railroad us into the science-future, but organisations of scientists that are truly inclusive, encouraging open debate, first about science policy, and, second, about the adverse results, not simply of pharmaceutical drugs, but of contemporary products such as mobile phones and phone masts, computers, processed foods, and pesticides. Scientists should drag back from industry, from PR, from spin companies and faceless consultants, their own area of knowledge production, gain control of their own science and re-establish their own community rules.

While science is a perfectly useful tool for measuring and restructuring material reality, as a life belief system it has nothing to offer and is positively dangerous to the human condition. While people who have respect and love for animals are a positive boon to our social culture, those who base their social relationships upon complete rationality without feelings or empathy, are usually called psychopaths and are a positive danger to the development of human society.

Britain and the United States seem, however, to have slipped into a period of democratic darkness. There is no progressive thinking about social models among the most powerful. We are led by cohorts of cultural incompetents. Everything is shrouded in the murky and stagnant air of spin and conspiracy; all concessions to social participation are rejected as if they generated disease. This has to change.

References

1. The sardonic CIA agent Jedburgh, describing environmentalists in Edge of Darkness, the BBC thriller directed by Martin Campbell, written by Troy Kennedy Martin and starring Bob Peck.

2. Margaret Thatcher, speaking at the 50th Anniversary Lecture of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee, December 6, 1989.

3. This privatisation is epitomised by the claim of individual scientists and companies to have patent rights over new ‘life’ forms such as GM plants.
Scientists have gone much further than their historical counterparts, the industrial bourgeoisie, in that they claim ownership over a multiplicity of life forms, not just the physical body of the worker.

4. This is not to say simply that these corporations are planning this future solely to make a profit from it. Those who administer these corporations do have a model of a future society in mind, it’s just that this model might be a thousand miles from that which the public desires or envisages.

5. Op. cit. Walker, Dirty Medicine.

***********************************

ONE CLICK on Brave New World of Zero Risk to read this book by Martin J. Walker