Tag: Big Pharma

The Pandemic Treaty Fails Again: It’s Time to Talk About Replacing the WHO

Finalisation of the much-heralded Pandemic Agreement, the flagship of the World Health Organisation’s pandemic agenda, has just been postponed again after another failure to resolve disagreements. Despite heavy pressure from the WHO and European Union in yet another meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, a large bloc of African states is refusing to sign on to what the states consider a clear colonialist agenda. Which of course it is, aimed at putting Covid-era wealth transfers on a more permanent footing.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Dr David Bell

Finalisation of the much-heralded Pandemic Agreement, the flagship of the World Health Organisation’s pandemic agenda, has just been postponed again after another failure to resolve disagreements. Despite heavy pressure from the WHO and European Union in yet another meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, a large bloc of African states is refusing to sign on to what the states consider a clear colonialist agenda. Which of course it is, aimed at putting Covid-era wealth transfers on a more permanent footing.

The WHO, for reasons explained below, is doing what it is paid to do. Major financial sponsors of the WHO have much to gain from getting this agreement through. It has fallen on African leaders, attuned to the model of rich countries and their corporations imposing rules designed for wealth extraction, to protect the rest of us from the farce that the current public health approach to pandemics has become.

The fact that the agency tasked with building capacity and promoting sustainability of low-income health systems is instead doing the opposite now needs to become the central issue of this whole shabby episode. It is time for the international public health community to face itself and decide on which side – people or profit – it should stand.

The modern basis of multilateral health cooperation

There are obvious reasons for countries to cooperate in matters of health, as there are for neighbours in a suburban street: mutual interest in facing common threats where action by neighbouring states or access to their resources helps protect your own, as well as moral reasons based on the generally accepted ‘good’ of helping neighbours when they are in difficulty or lack resources through no fault of their own. Or because a stable and more prosperous neighbourhood (world) is good for business, and a sick one may not be.

Cooperation is not submission, and few self-respecting people would opt for that. Mutual interests and morality all dissolve fairly quickly when cooperation becomes coercion, and the interests of the most powerful player then become the goal. Health is well defined in the WHO’s constitution as physical, mental and social well-being. Accordingly, it rests on economics and social capital and is degraded by poverty and inequality. Neither aspect of wellbeing – mental, social or physical – is supported by forced compliance or slavery.

The basis of modern medical ethics hinges on Hippocrates’s assertions on physician conduct from around 400BC, commonly summarised as to do good rather than harm and respect a patient’s privacy (confidentiality). As a counter to fascism since the Second World War, we added voluntary informed consent, i.e., absence of coercion. This means the final decision in any aspect of medical care or intervention must rest with the individual concerned.

These basic medical ethics rest on the concept that all people are equal and their individual sovereignty (i.e., bodily autonomy) is inviolable. Accordingly, it is obviously unethical to force a person to be injected or undergo some other procedure just because someone else wants them to or for a third person’s benefit. Unethical, that is, outside a medico-fascist or similarly authoritarian approach that post-World War Two human rights law was supposed to suppress. There were very good reasons why we stopped all that, even if it made the streets look cleaner and we are assured it was for a ‘greater good’.

As the Hippocratic Oath and voluntary informed consent govern clinical medical practice, public health is consequently subject to the same requirements at a community, national and global level. Populations are the sum of individuals, each being imbued with equal rights and intrinsic sovereignty. Therefore, decisions made at a regional or global level can only be made by agencies over which those individuals, as a collective, exert control. This is the basis of the UN charter: sovereign states, being the best means we have of expressing the collective decisions of sovereign individuals. It is a massively flawed model – some states are dictatorships and many oppress minorities and ignore their individual sovereignty – but this is because we are working with flawed humans. Sovereign states are the basis of the modern world.

The alternative is a technocracy in which self-designated individuals make decisions and simply force or coerce others to obey – a form of fascism (an unpopular term for a relatively popular approach). This is the antithesis of modern understandings of human rights. It remains popular, including in the public health community, because it provides a sense of self-importance whilst also addressing the needs of wealthy sponsors. It also provides simple rules to live by and a group to belong to. But fundamentally fascism, like feudalism which served the same purpose in former times, relies on acceptance of inequality. This is why we need to name it when we see it, and insist on individual decision-making over any dictatorship of experts.

What should modern public health cooperation look like?

Once we accept basic human rights – individual sovereignty – as a prerequisite for legitimate public health, we can then decide what type of interventions might be useful. Given the heterogeneity of disease-risk related to differing population age structures and environments and the wide variation in human culture that influences what each of us define as important, such decisions would have to be taken at a decentralised level. Advice may be given from a distance, but action can only be decided in context or it is likely to be counterproductive. Subsidiarity rather than centralisation is therefore a prerequisite for effective decision-making, not just to protect individual rights but to achieve a meaningful and lasting impact on health. Though obvious to most people, this is really hard for many credentialled public health professionals to accept. We all have egos and think of ourselves as experts.

Fortunately, modern communications make decentralisation easy. Travel is easy, and we can meet instantaneously by digital means. Centralisation made sense for certain aspects of the Roman state – and in many ways for the WHO on its formation in 1948. The days of steam ships and elephants disrupting landlines are gone now, though the human desire for a comfortable life by a Swiss lake persists.

Decisions must also (rather obviously) be based on evidence and be amendable to change as new information emerges.  Efficiency dictates a focus on building systems and expertise that address overall health outcomes such as nutrition, sanitation and access to basic clinical care. It also suggests prioritising the largest disease burdens readily amenable to prevention or treatment such as endemic infectious diseases (malaria, tuberculosis etc.) rather than, say, diseases based on individual and deliberate lifestyle choice.

Evidence-based public health also emphasises the importance of building strong economies. Building national economies allows countries to maintain better health systems. Promoting impoverishment, such as through prolonged school closures, workplace closures or closing borders, sets everything back and so is expected to cause great long-term harm to health.

At a global level, diseases that cross borders and sudden crises such as epidemics are also good targets for cooperation. More time to prepare for an outbreak or better standards to collectively address it are a good thing. But such events are occasional and of low overall burden compared to the big killers of humankind. Addressing outbreaks in a way that undermines economies and the underlying determinants of health would obviously be foolish. As we saw during the Covid response, such poor public health responses promoted by WHO increased child marriage, child labour and deep poverty, and grew national debt. They did make some other people very wealthy, but had little impact on COVID-19 itself.

Why the WHO can no longer help

All the foregoing should be non-controversial. Some will push back on the Covid bit from a career or political viewpoint but in fact it’s orthodox public health. The agency meant to fill the role of coordinating all this today is the WHO. When the WHO started its work, colonial powers still admitted to being colonial powers and we gave Nobel Prizes for frontal lobotomies. However, WHO was supposed to help improve things. Its governance was based on one-country one-vote, and it was core-funded based on each country’s capacity. With its original intent of egalitarianism, evidence-based policy, prioritisation of low-income populations and contextual decision-making in mind, it is worth looking quickly at what the WHO has become:

  • The WHO is headquartered with over a quarter of its staff in headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, one of the most expensive cities on earth.
  • The bulk of the WHO’s work is dictated by individual funders who directly specify the use of their money – making the organisation a tool for those with the most money, rather than the populations who need more assistance).
  • The largest funder, Bill Gates, is from a wealthy United States background with no low-income country or hands-on public health experience but strong connections to the pharmaceutical and software industries.
  • The WHO’s second largest funder over the past two years was Gavi, a public-private partnership including multinational pharmaceutical corporations. The WHO acts as a de facto market development and access agency for those corporations (which enables executives from them to justify their involvement to their shareholders).
  • WHO staff receive good salaries, generous education subsidies for their children, good health insurance, are tax exempt and have a pension scheme structured to kick in after years of service and then rapidly accumulate, promoting longevity and institutional loyalty (i.e., to institution rather than mission).

The result is, as expected, a focus on commodity-heavy vertical programmes and a workforce incentivised to maintain such a model. Pharma company executives and their major investors are there to maximise return on investment, not ensure good nutrition. They may care, but their job is elsewhere. There are no large companies thriving off good diets or sanitation and accordingly no public-private partnerships to promote these. The WHO must comply with the priorities its funders dictate.

Time for a return to legitimacy

An international public health agency should prioritise building national health system capacity, independence and resilience. In contrast, the WHO has become a colonialist endeavour, serving the same partnership of powers and commercial interests while sanitising it as keeping the world ‘safe’.

The outcomes of the Covid response will be repeated: millions more children having prospects stolen and poverty ensured. Funding for nutrition – critical to build resilience against both endemic and epidemic disease – is falling while WHO and partners construct veritable fairytales to promote more profitable agendas. Resources diversion in public health is never value-neutral.

Advocating reform or replacement of the WHO is therefore not radical but intrinsically anti-colonialist, pro-human rights, pro-evidence and pro-public health. The Right to Health Sovereignty reports follow this model. But there is much invested in maintaining the status quo and a global health workforce strongly incentivised to support this.

The job of leaders of modern states is to ensure the welfare of their people, and this is the only legitimate mechanism from which meaningful change can come to international health. The United States’ withdrawal from the WHO offers an opportunity, but it is the low-income countries on the receiving end of the WHO’s capture who need to drive change. The pushback on the Pandemic Agreement suggests that this may be happening. The global health workforce needs to cease its subservience to vested interests and stop blocking progress. We need international health cooperation based on sovereignty, ethics and integrity, not a continued slide back to the failures of a bygone colonial era.

Dr David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was programme head for malaria and acute febrile disease at FIND in Geneva and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.

Why Trump‘s ‘Gold Standard’ Executive Order is Essential to Restoring Truth in Science

President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’ on May 23rd, 2025, aiming to overhaul research-integrity policies and ensure that federal government-sponsored science is “transparent, rigorous and impactful”. The order sparked concern among scientists who fear it could lead to political interference in scientific research and undermine independent scientific inquiry.

From The Daily Sceptic

by Tilak Doshi

President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’ on May 23rd, 2025, aiming to overhaul research-integrity policies and ensure that federal government-sponsored science is “transparent, rigorous and impactful”. The order sparked concern among scientists who fear it could lead to political interference in scientific research and undermine independent scientific inquiry.

Thus, STAT News – owned by Boston Globe Media, operating as a for-profit media outlet focused on health, medicine and life sciences and funded by Big Pharma and biotech firm ads – claimed that “Trump’s ‘gold standard’ order is a blueprint for politicising science”. According to the New York Times, the executive order puts Trump’s political appointees in charge of vetting scientific research and gives them the authority to “correct scientific information”, control the way it is communicated to the public and the power to “discipline” anyone who violates the way the administration views science.

In an open letter boasting 9,700 signatures (of which 2,700 chose to keep their information private), a group called ‘Stand Up for Science‘ compared President Trump’s executive order to the Lysenko affair – which condemned millions to starvation by conducting bogus genetic research in the Soviet Union – and the ‘science’ of eugenics in state-sponsored programmes in Nazi Germany which led to the genocide of millions of Jews, people with disabilities and homosexuals.

In the no-holds-barred confrontation between President Trump and his detractors, starting even before his first term in office, comparing him to Hitler and Stalin is par for the course and should elicit no surprises among observers. But in a hyperbolic and highly charged political climate, President Trump’s latest executive order may go down as one of the most consequential policy interventions in defence of scientific integrity.

It does not seek to suppress speech, cancel dissidents or blacklist platforms. It does something far more radical: it demands that science — particularly in contested domains like climate change and public health — return to first principles. It insists that government-funded science must meet the highest standards of evidence, transparency and falsifiability. That’s not censorship; it’s scientific sobriety.

Far from undermining science, this order represents a necessary corrective to the pervasive problem of regulatory capture – the process by which regulatory agencies become dominated by the interests of those they are charged with regulating, rather than the public interest. As George Stigler, the Nobel laureate economist, argued in his seminal work on regulatory capture, bureaucracies often serve the interests of the regulated rather than the public good. In areas like climate and health policy, this dynamic has fuelled propaganda masquerading as science, necessitating a return to the philosopher Karl Popper’s gold standard of falsifiability to restore trust and integrity.

The Crisis of Trust in Science

Public trust in science has plummeted in recent years, and for good reason. The executive order cites a “reproducibility crisis” as evidence of a broader malaise. The crisis, also known as the replication or replicability crisis, refers to the growing number of published scientific results that other researchers have been unable to reproduce or verify. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories that build on them and can call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.

A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Centre finds the share of Americans who say science has had a mostly positive effect on society has fallen and there’s been a continued decline in public trust in scientists. Overall, 57% of Americans say science has had a mostly positive effect on society, down 16 points since before the start of the coronavirus outbreak. This erosion stems from repeated instances where scientific claims, particularly in climate and health, have been manipulated to serve political ends.

The executive order highlights examples from the Biden administration, such as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) COVID-19 school-reopening guidance, which was edited by the American Federation of Teachers to discourage in-person learning, leading to detrimental educational outcomes. Through emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the backroom dealings between a powerful government agency and a powerful public sector labour union was exposed by the New York Post.

Regulatory Capture and the Corruption of Science

This example of the corruption of science by regulatory capture crisis is not merely anecdotal. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) notes that the federal government, as the world’s largest funder of scientific research, has “supercharged” the reproducibility crisis by subsidising studies which support reigning narratives, allowing activist bureaucrats to commission research that justifies radical regulations. The result is a scientific ecosystem where truth is subordinated to power, as Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture predicts. When agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) align with corporate, academic or ideological interests, the public suffers.

Regulatory agencies such as the CDC, over time, come to serve the interests of the industries or groups they regulate rather than the public. This dynamic is evident in climate and health policy, where entrenched interests — be they green energy corporations, pharmaceutical giants or activist scientists — shape narratives to secure funding, influence policy or maintain power. In climate science, for instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its associated models have been criticised for exaggerating catastrophic scenarios to justify sweeping economic interventions. Dr John Clauser, the 2022 Nobel Physics Laureate, has called the climate emergency narrative a “dangerous corruption of science” that threatens global economies and billions of lives.

Clauser’s critique, echoed by other Nobel laureates like Ivar Giaever and Robert Laughlin, points to the pseudoscientific nature of much climate research. He argues that climate models, which underpin global policy, are based on flawed assumptions and fail to account for natural forces like cloud cover, which he estimates is underestimated by a factor of 100 to 200. These models, far from being falsifiable, are often treated as sacrosanct, with dissenters silenced, as Clauser himself experienced when his IMF talk was abruptly cancelled after he challenged the climate crisis narrative. This is a textbook case of regulatory capture, where the scientific or policy establishments, funded by government grants, suppresses alternative viewpoints to maintain grip on policies preferred by favoured constituencies.

In health policy, the ‘noble lie’ has become a disturbing justification for scientific misconduct. Some activist scientists argue that exaggerating risks or suppressing inconvenient data is acceptable if it ensures public compliance with policies they deem necessary. This was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic when public health officials, backed by pharmaceutical interests, downplayed uncertainties in public health science to push universal mandates. For instance, throughout much of 2020-2022, the CDC and NIH largely ignored or minimised the protective effect of natural immunity from prior infection.

Karl Popper’s Gold Standard: Falsifiability as the Antidote

The antidote to this corruption lies in returning to Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which defines the gold standard as falsifiability. Popper argued that for a hypothesis to be scientific, it must be testable and capable of being proven false through empirical observation. Popper’s approach demands scepticism and transparency, rejecting claims that cannot be rigorously tested. President Trump’s executive order explicitly embraces this standard, defining “Gold Standard Science” as research that is reproducible, transparent, falsifiable, subject to unbiased peer review and free from conflicts of interest.

In climate science, for example, the IPCC’s reliance on models that continually predict higher temperatures beyond those empirically observed violates Popper’s criterion. Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today. Of course, none of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true. Similarly, in health policy, the refusal to engage with data on vaccine side effects or alternative treatments during COVID-19 reflects a rejection of falsifiability in favour of dogma.

The National Association of Scholars endorses the executive order for committing federal policy to countering the reproducibility crisis, noting that it “places the weight of the federal government on the side of ensuring that scientific research provides true knowledge about the natural world”. By requiring agencies to adopt policies that prioritise falsifiability and transparency, the order aims to dismantle the structures that enable regulatory capture. This is a direct challenge to the entrenched interests — green energy firms, Big Pharma, academic institutions and activist scientists — who benefit from a system that rewards conformity over truth.

Critics of the executive order claim that the order ‘hijacks’ scientific language to undermine rigour. These critics, however, ignore the irony: their defence of the status quo protects a system already captured by ideological and corporate interests. The fear of ‘political interference’ is a red herring when the current system already allows bureaucrats and special interests to manipulate science for their gain. Stigler’s insight reminds us that regulatory capture thrives in the absence of accountability, and the order’s emphasis on transparency and falsifiability is a direct counter to this. The politicised role of state agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Department of Interior in pushing the Biden administration’s green agenda has been widely noted in these pages and elsewhere.

Compare the Situation with the EU

It is instructive to briefly compare President Trump’s efforts at inculcating gold standard science in government-sponsored research with the situation in the Europe Union. Under Ursula von der Leyen’s leadership, the Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA) and AI Act collectively enable the EU Commission to police content on social media platforms like X and TikTok. Posts that contradict ‘authoritative sources’ on issues like climate, COVID-19 or energy transition can be algorithmically demoted, removed or even criminally sanctioned by the EU’s digital commissars.

Von der Leyen defends these draconian steps as necessary to combat disinformation — but what she’s really fighting is narrative pluralism in the marketplace of ideas, since the science is already ‘settled’. A particularly egregious example of the authoritarian approach to the ‘settled science’ was exhibited by the often grinning Jacinda Ardern, who claimed before stepping down as New Zealand’s Prime Minister that her government was the “sole source of truth” in public health issues during the Covid lockdowns. She naturally got rewarded for her Covid response, first with a damehood awarded by Prince William during a ceremony in the UK and then by the United Nations as the ‘Champion for Global Change’ which recognises “extraordinary individuals and organisations whose work embodies the values and purposes of the UN”.

Conclusion: Speaking Truth to Power

President Trump’s executive order on “Gold Standard Science” is not an attack on science but a defence of its core principles. By anchoring federal policy in making scientific research reproducible, transparent and falsifiable, it seeks to liberate science from the clutches of regulatory capture. The order confronts a scientific establishment that, in areas like climate and health, has too often justified policies that serve vested interests over the public good. As scientists such as John Clauser and others have shown, the cost of this corruption is not just economic but existential, threatening the credibility of science itself.

The path forward is clear: federal agencies must adopt rigorous, transparent and falsifiable standards to ensure that science serves truth, not power. Critics may decry the order as political overreach, but their protests defend a system that has already been politicised by entrenched interests. For the sake of the public, the economy and the integrity of science, Trump’s executive order is a necessary step toward restoring trust and accountability. Let us hope it marks the beginning of a new era where science is once again a beacon of truth, not a tool of propaganda.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

It’s a 1775 moment says Vivak Ramaswamy — but the deep state “is a machine we are up against”

Vivek Ramaswamy has a plan. It’s quite something to listen to. He has an extraordinary combination of skills.

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Vivek Ramaswamy has a plan. It’s quite something to listen to. He has an extraordinary combination of skills.

This is a man who is only 38, and has studied molecular biology*, made millions in biotech, understands Big Pharma, but he’s also done a law degree at Yale. He is that rarest of combinations — the CEO who understand biology and science, and the lawyer who reads the constitution, and the investor who has played and won on Wall Street. He is all of these things.

I’ve never heard a Presidential candidate speak like this — with an eight year plan grounded in the legal foundations of the nation. He knows employment laws make individuals unsackable, but whole departments can be razed. Nothing can stop the President from dismantling the FBI if he wants to. Ramaswamy is already assembling a team, picking the players. He can list what he will get done by 2033 when he leaves office and his youngest starts high school.

Last week I played a small extract of this interview with Shawn Ryan — where Ramaswamy described how the FDA is captured by Big Pharmaceutical firms. ( “Big Pharma is the worlds biggest lobbying organisation”)  But the whole interview is compelling and I’ve listened to interviews before about his books, about Woke Inc, about Strive (the Capital Fund he set up that runs counter to BlackRock and ESG) but this is  about Ramaswamy himself, and his plan for the US, the Deep State and this strange moment in history.  As the child of Indian immigrants he can explain what makes America Great better than many Americans can.

His role in this campaign will surely change it — his competitors must be listening to interviews like this, taking notes.

“It’s a machine that we are up against”

Ramaswamy describes the Deep State as a machine which needs puppets to represent them  — the people we elect to run the government are not the ones who run the government. It’s no accident we have a gerontocracy, he says. It’s designed to be that way. The real laws of this country are not made in Congress, they’re made in the halls of bureaucracy.

The machine in the Monster that we have created. There are many good individuals doing what they think is a good job inside the machine. The waterfall of power flows from the President to the administrative state, to executives in social media, to managers in third party firms to AI. The decisions are not even being made by humans. The AI has learnt to spot US Flags in social media as a risk factor.

We the People cannot be Trusted to run the country

In the old world, Ramaswamy says, people got together in smoky rooms in the back of Palace Halls to decide how to run countries. Now it’s the enlightened elite making these decisions. We the People cannot be Trusted to run the country and decide about issues like climate change or racial injustice. The real divide now is not Republican or Democrat, it is between the managerial class and the citizen.

We fought a revolution to say Hell No to that theory and that We The People in this constitutional republic must be the ones who decide.

Now that old monster is rearing its head again, he says, except this time the power is diffused. We might think the power is at the back of a three-letter-government building in Washington DC, but there’s no smoking hall there. Maybe the power lies at the corner office of BlackRock, but it’s not quite there either. Instead the power is woven into a machine of the managerial class. It’s very hard to identify. It’s very pervasive…

Vivek Ramaswamy – EXPOSES Deep State, BlackRock, Big Pharma, Central Bank Digital Currency | SRS #71

It’s a two hour interview. You can convert it to Mp3 and listen as you jog, drive or cook. It was compelling starting from 3 mins in.

*Molecular biology is my favourite science — it’s not possible to understand the human condition, life, viruses, medicine and biotechnology without it.

What’s in the Pfizer Documents?

The modern pharmaceutical industry has in many ways proved itself a great benefit to mankind, making health- and life-saving drugs and vaccines widely available.

From Naomi Wolf

The modern pharmaceutical industry has in many ways proved itself a great benefit to mankind, making health- and life-saving drugs and vaccines widely available.

But its reputation has come under attack in the wake of America’s opioid epidemic and the COVID pandemic.

This fourth and final CCA of the 2022-23 academic year will consider the rise of Big Pharma, its role in the declining state of American health, and ideas for reform.

Exercise therapy is “better than drugs” for common type of heart failure

A new review of studies came out a few weeks ago pointing out that trials of 700 people with the most common kind of heart failure show they did better after an exercise program than they did with drugs.

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Image by DanaTentis from Pixabay

A new review of studies came out a few weeks ago pointing out that trials of 700 people with the most common kind of heart failure show they did better after an exercise program than they did with drugs.

I’d like to say “Big Pharma won’t be happy” but Big Pharma probably couldn’t care less. The money, the industry, the regulatory agencies, Hollywood, and a lifetime’s habit means most people will keep returning to largely well-meaning but busy doctors who will prescribe the latest something, whatever it is.

But ultimately the people who get out there and do supervised exercise of any kind a few times a week  get more benefits than those taking the latest patented drug. They’ll also have a higher quality of life. In this study they’re looking at people with the most kind of common heart failure called HFpEF. The exercise is supervised because there is some risk in people who may be quite unfit or unhealthy.

How much of our lives is spend working to pay for a bloated health-care system that finds expensive ways to employ many people to do what we could have done better ourselves?

This, from the abstract, is medical-speak for “the drugs were useless”, and we already know exercise works much better:

Until recently, most pharmacological intervention trials for HFpEF [a common type of heart failure] yielded neutral primary outcomes. In contrast, trials of exercise-based interventions have consistently demonstrated large, significant, clinically meaningful improvements in symptoms, objectively determined exercise capacity, and usually quality of life.

Exercise therapy is safe and helps improve recovery, study finds

By Annie Lennon in Medical News Today

Heart failure occurs when the heart can no longer pump blood and oxygen around the body. The condition represents around 8.5% of heart disease deaths in the United States.

Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) causes around half of heart failure cases in the U.S. It happens when the heart’s left ventricle stiffens, increasing pressure inside the heart.

For the study, the researchers analyzed results from 11 randomized controlled trials investigating supervised exercise therapy on HFpEF outcomes.

The studies included over 700 participants, mostly aged between 60 and 70 years old. Participants engaged in various activities, including walking, Greek dancing, and high intensity training three times per week for 1-8 months.

We can’t get exercise in a pill:

“The benefits of exercise cannot be duplicated by medication or procedures. Regular exercise of 2.5 hours weekly or that equivalent increases life expectancy, reduces the incidence of heart disease complications, and has been linked to reduced risk for some cancers, such as colon.

A similar review 5 years ago in Europe showed much the same thing. Except in that case, they studied mortality too and an increase in peak oxygen uptake of 13% translated into 11% lower all-cause mortality.

The European study saved lives: Mortality was down 11%

Professor Emeline Craenenbroeck in 2017 explains how big the problem is and how remarkable exercise can be:

More than 14 million Europeans suffer from heart failure (HF). Despite significant improvements in the treatment of HF, morbidity and mortality remain unacceptably high [1]. In addition, the costs for HF care approach 2% of the healthcare expenditure in Western Europe. One of the hallmarks of HF is severe exercise intolerance with pronounced fatigue and dyspnoea, even at low workloads, resulting in a markedly decreased quality of life.

With regard to benefit on exercise capacity, a meta-analysis of 29 randomised controlled trials (RCT) including 848 patients revealed a mean improvement of VO2peak of 2.16 ml/kg/min [4]. Although modest in absolute terms, this means an increase of 13% which translates into a considerably better quality of life [5].

This study showed in an intention-to-treat analysis that exercise training was associated with an 11% lower adjusted risk for all-cause mortality or all-cause hospitalisation and a 15% lower adjusted risk for cardiovascular mortality or HF hospitalisation.

Any kind of exercise will help:

Supervised exercise called better than drugs for common type of heart failure

By Clyde Hughes, UPI

March 21 (UPI) — Supervised exercise like walking, stationary cycling and even dancing about three times per week was more effective than drugs in helping people with symptoms of one of the most common types of heart failure, according to a new scientific statement.

The studies that were examined looked at numerous types of exercise, from walking, stationary cycling, high-intensity interval training, strength training and dancing in facility settings and home-based training.

The statement characterized supervised exercise therapy as being conducted three times per week, and the duration of the programs varied from one month to eight months.

“Exercise capacity is an independent, clinically meaningful patient outcome, and research has indicated that guided exercise therapy is actually more effective at improving quality of life for people who have [heart failure with preserved ejection fraction] than most medications.”

From the paper itself: Peak oxygen capacity was improved in every study in this latest review:

Sachdev et al

Peak oxygen capacity is so important it actually predicts all cause mortality.

And the US study improved VO2 almost exactly the same amount as the European one, so presumably it would have saved lives too:

[The Review] found that supervised exercise training may lead to increased peak oxygen uptake 12 to 14%, increased total exercise time by 21% and improved quality-of-life scores on the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure questionnaire 4 to 9 points.

Earlier this month, a University of Cambridge study suggested that brisk 11-minute daily walks can be enough to lower a person’s risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer.

The kind of patients this study was aimed at were:

Dr. Hermel added: “Supervised exercise programs such as cardiac rehab have demonstrated significant benefit for patients with recent heart attack or another acute coronary syndrome, chronic stable angina, congestive heart failure, pulmonary hypertension, after stent placement, coronary artery bypass surgery, heart valve surgery or cardiac transplant.”

As usual, the most important scientific work is often done by volunteers:

This scientific statement was prepared by a volunteer writing group on behalf of the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology.

In the three weeks since this important review was released the article metrics tell us it was picked up by 24 news outlets, bogged by 2 and tweeted by 144. In other words, hardly anyone.

REFERENCE

Sachdev et al (2023) Supervised Exercise Training for Chronic Heart Failure With Preserved Ejection Fraction: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology, Circulation

Nine Elements Shared by Climate and Covid

At some point the IPCC morphed from a team of scientists into activists.

From Science Matters

 By Ron Clutz

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Ramesh Thakur writes at Brownstone Institute Beware Catastrophizing Climate Models and Activists.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

All true believers of The Science™ of climate change have taken careful note of the lessons offered by the coronavirus pandemic during 2020–22 for managing the ‘climate emergency.’ The two agendas share nine items in common that should leave us worried, very worried.

1. Elites’ Hypocrisy

The first is the revolting spectacle of the hypocrisy of the exalted elites who preach to the deplorables the proper etiquette of abstinence to deal with the emergency, and their own insouciant exemption from a restrictive lifestyle. Most recently we witnessed the surreal spectacle of Britain’s Parliament interrogating disgraced former Prime Minister Boris Johnson on allegations that he serially broke the lockdown rules he had imposed on everyone else—but not questioning the anti-scientific stupidity of the rules themselves. Possibly the most notorious American example was California Governor Gavin Newsom and his cronies dining maskless in the appropriately named French Laundry restaurant at a time when this was verboten, being served by fully masked staff.

Similarly, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, Al Gore, and John Kerry have all been widely mocked for jetting around the world to warn people about global warming. I wonder if anyone has done a calculation of the total carbon footprint of each annual Davos gathering where CEOs, prime ministers and presidents, and celebrities fly in on private jets, are driven around in gas-guzzling limousines and preach to us on the critical urgency of reducing emissions? I understand the hookers do quite well during that week, so perhaps there is a silver lining.

2. Data Challenged Models

A second common element between Covid and climate change is the mismatch between models that inform policy and data that contradict the models. The long track record of abysmally wrong catastrophist predictions on infectious diseases from the Pied Piper of Pandemic Porn, Professor Neil Ferguson, is if anything exceeded by the failures of climate change alarmist predictions. The most recent example of the drum roll of “The end is nigh and this is absolutely your last chance to avert the end of the world from climate collapse” is yet another Chicken Little Sixth Assessment Report from the indefatigable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

At some point the IPCC morphed from a team of scientists into activists.

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the report warns us. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it a “survival guide for humanity.” But a one-time climate action journalist-turned-sceptic, Michael Shellenberger, described the UN as a “Climate Disinformation Threat Actor.”

Calls for urgent climate action based on the language of “edging towards ‘tipping points” have been made over many years. Atmospheric scientists and former IPCC members Richard McNider and John Christy note that climate modeling forecasts have “always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.” A few examples:

♦  In 1982, UNEP Executive Director Mostafa Tolba warned of an irreversible environmental catastrophe by 2000 without immediate urgent action.
♦  In 2004, a Pentagon report warned that by 2020, major European cities would be submerged by rising seas, Britain would be facing a Siberian climate and the world would be caught up in mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting.
♦  In 2007, IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri declared: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”
♦  Most hilariously, in Montana the Glacier National Park installed “Goodbye to the glaciers” plaques, warning: “Computer models indicate the glaciers will all be gone by the year 2020.” Come 2020, all 29 glaciers were still there but the signs were gone, taken down by embarrassed park authorities.

3. No Dissent Allowed

Third, the rapidly consolidating Censorship Industrial Complex covered both agendas until Elon Musk began releasing the Twitter Files to expose what was happening. This refers to the extraordinary censorship and suppression of dissenting voices, with extensive and possibly illegal collusion between governments and Big Tech—and, in the case of the pandemic, also Big Pharma and academia.

Even truth was no defence, for example with accounts of vaccine injuries, if their effect was to promote narrative scepticism. The social media Big Tech censored, suppressed, shadow banned and slapped labels of “false,” “misleading,” “lacking context” etc. to content at variance with the single source ministries of truth. “Fact-checking” was weaponized using fresh young graduates—with no training, skills or capacity to sift between authentic and junk science—to put such judgmental stamps on pronouncements from world-leading experts in their field.

4. We Want You to Panic

Fourth, an important explanation for the spread of Covid and climate catastrophism is the promotion of fear and panic in the population as a means to spur drastic political action. Both agendas have been astonishingly successful.

Polls have consistently shown the hugely exaggerated beliefs about the scale of the Covid threat. On climate change, the gap between the stringent actions required, the commitments made and the actual record thus far is used to create panic. The notion that we are already doomed promotes a culture of hopelessness and despair best epitomized by Greta Thunberg’s anguished cry: “How dare you” steal my dreams and childhood with empty words.”

5. Only Trust Science Authorities

A fifth common theme is the appeal to scientific authority. For this to work, scientific consensus is crucial. Yet, driven by intellectual curiosity, questioning existing knowledge is the very essence of the scientific enterprise. For the claim to scientific consensus to be broadly accepted, therefore, supporting evidence must be exaggerated, contrary evidence discredited, sceptical voices stilled and dissenters ridiculed and marginalized. This has happened in both agendas: just ask Jay Bhattacharya on one and Bjorn Lomborg on the other.

6. Government Empowers Itself

A sixth shared element is the enormous expansion of powers for the nanny state that bosses citizens and businesses because governments know best and can pick winners and losers. Growing state control over private activities is justified by being framed as minor and temporary inconveniences in the moral crusade to save Granny and the world.

Yet in both agendas, policy interventions have over-promised and under-delivered. The beneficial effects of interventions are exaggerated, optimistic forecasts are made and potential costs and downsides are discounted. Lockdowns were supposedly required for only 2-3 weeks to flatten the curve and vaccines, we were promised, would help us return to pre-Covid normalcy without being mandatory. Similarly, for decades we have been promised that renewables are getting less expensive and energy will get cheaper and more plentiful.

Yet increased subsidies are still needed, energy prices keep rising,
and energy supply gets less reliable and more intermittent.

7. Self-Inflicted Damage

Seventh, the moral framing has also been used to discount massive economic self-harm. Alongside the substantial and lasting economic damage caused by savage lockdowns to businesses and the long-term consequences of a massive printing of money, the obstinate persistence of excess deaths is painful proof of collective public health self-harm.

Similarly, the world has never been healthier, wealthier, better educated, and more connected than today. Energy intensity played a critical role in driving agricultural and industrial production that underpin the health infrastructure and comfortable living standards for large numbers of people worldwide. High income countries enjoy incomparably better health standards and outcomes because of their national wealth.

8. Elites Thrive at Others’ Expense

Eighth, government policies in both agendas have served to greatly widen economic inequalities within and among nations with fat profits for Big Pharma and rent-seeking Green Energy. A lot of money was said to be required to keep Mahatma Gandhi in the style of poverty he demanded. Similarly, a lot of money is required to support Covid and climate policy magical thinking where governments can solve all problems by throwing more money that must neither be earned nor repaid.

In the triumph of luxury politics, the costs of the rich suffused in the golden glow of virtue are borne by the poor. Should a billion more Chinese and Indians have stayed poor and destitute over the last four decades, so Westerners could feel virtuous-green? Alternatively, for post-industrial societies, climate action will require cutbacks to living standards as subsidies rise, power prices go up, reliability comes down and jobs are lost.

Attempts to assess the balance of costs and benefits of Covid and climate policies are shouted down as immoral and evil, putting profits before lives. But neither health nor climate policy can dictate economic, development, energy and other policies. All governments work to balance multiple competing policy priorities. What is the sweet spot that ensures reliable, affordable and clean energy security without big job losses? Or the sweet spot of affordable, accessible and efficient public health delivery that does not compromise the nation’s ability to educate its young, look after the elderly and vulnerable and ensure decent jobs and life opportunities for families?

9. Global Bureaucrats Gut National Sovereignty

The final common element is the subordination of state-based decision-making to international technocrats. This is best exemplified in the proliferation of the global climate change bureaucracies and the promise—threat?—of a new global pandemic treaty whose custodian will be a mighty World Health Organisation.

In both cases, the dedicated international bureaucracy will have a powerful
vested interest in ongoing climate crises and serially repeating pandemics.