How Big Pharma Captured the Public Health Apparatus

Toby Rogers, author at Brownstone Institute, in Connecticut on Sep. 8, 2023.(Patrick Mauler/The Epoch Times)

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek talks with Toby Rogers, a medical freedom advocate and a fellow at the Brownstone Institute. Over the last two years, Mr. Rogers has assessed every FDA and CDC expert advisory committee meeting for COVID-19 vaccine approvals—and what he discovered was shocking.

Jan Jekielek: I just witnessed a fascinating presentation you gave about what has happened to our society and the profound changes we’ve seen. As you’ve said, you come from the left of the Left. Please give us a sense of who you are.

Toby Rogers: I got a bachelor’s degree in political science from Swarthmore College in Philadelphia. Then I worked for every lefty nonprofit I could find: farm workers, small business assistance, environmental programs, and more. I got a master’s degree at Berkeley, and then earned a PhD in Political Economy from the University of Sydney in Australia. That program combines moral philosophy, political science, and economics.

Things then took a turn, and I went in a different direction. I’m now a Brownstone Fellow and associated with small-l libertarians in this fight against the pharmaceutical industry and its takeover of American society. The Brownstone Institute and Jeffrey Tucker are doing amazing work, and I’m delighted to be associated with them.

Mr. Jekielek: Please describe the current crisis as you understand it.

Mr. Rogers: We have lived with economic and political liberalism for the last 250 years. That means elections, freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, rule of law, and constitutions. Adam Smith introduced us to economic liberalism, which is free markets, free trade, and the right to entrepreneurship.

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In March 2020, all that disappeared. Political liberalism went out the window, and freedom of speech was banned. There was censorship across the internet. Freedom of religion was banned. You weren’t allowed to meet in churches. Freedom of assembly was banned.

250 years of economic and political liberalism disappeared in the blink of an eye. It’s a radical remaking of society, whereby the pharmaceutical industry, Big Tech, and government colluded to rewrite our economic and political rules. We no longer have a government by consent of the governed.

Mr. Jekielek: Please break that down for us.

Mr. Rogers: In an earlier era, politicians at least tried to make it look like there was popular support for what they were doing. There was some attempt to assemble a majority coalition. Now, so much of what happens is dictated by the administrative state.

I’ve watched every single meeting of the FDA’s and the CDC’s expert advisory committee for all COVID vaccine approvals over the last two years, and these meetings are shocking. The statistics presented wouldn’t pass muster in an introductory statistics class in a college. The actual science is abysmal.

The initial Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials had about 22,000 adults in the treatment group and 22,000 in the placebo group. They had only a few hundred children in the clinical trials, not enough to know whether harm might come from these shots. For the boosters, they’ve skipped clinical trials in humans altogether. The initial booster was only tested in eight mice. The new booster is going to be tested in even fewer mice.

Mr. Jekielek: You’re not new to the realm of pharmaceutical science. Please give us some of that background.

Mr. Rogers: When I was in Australia, my then girlfriend’s son was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, and to help I started to read up on autism. I learned that the CDC has this narrative about what’s happening with autism, but the underlying sources and data didn’t support their narrative. I’m a political economist, so I was also curious about the costs of autism, which are through the roof. Back in 2015, we were already seeing annual costs of autism in the United States at $268 billion a year. It’s projected to reach $1 trillion per year in the United States by 2025.

This is a massive political economy story. No government in the world is asking why or how this is happening. There’s no plan to raise additional revenue to meet these challenges. Eventually, I changed my doctoral thesis topic to the political economy of autism.

I spent the next four years reading about autism and trying to understand both the politics and economics of autism. I discovered that the pharmaceutical industry has captured regulatory agencies, the CDC, FDA, and NIH, but they’ve also captured the mainstream media. So they have this level of intrusion into our lives which is unprecedented.

By the time COVID happened, I knew the pharmaceutical industry’s playbook. I understood how they buy off politicians and control regulators, and the ways they control the knowledge production system. Sure enough, they did it all over again with COVID.

Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts as we finish up?

Mr. Rogers: We need skepticism and curiosity. That’s not happening because the pharmaceutical industry has the power to shape the conversation, the ways the media reports on it, and the ways politicians and regulators think about these issues.

This notion that we’re going to turn to 15 bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. to make all the decisions for our lives has failed. Centralizing public health decisions has been a catastrophic failure. We must empower individuals, parents, and families to make their own decisions. We have to shrink the size of the federal government.

We need to take public health out of the hands of corrupt bureaucrats, but that’s only going to happen if there is a political revolution from below. People of good faith from both parties need to demand that their candidates address these issues.

When we centralize power in Washington, D.C., as we’ve seen over the last three-and-a-half years, bad things happen. Society falls apart. We need to get back to our roots and values, and to 330 million people making their own decisions, not captured bureaucrats telling us how to live.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.