From Statins to Paxil, Here’s What’s Wrong With a Lot of Medical Research | Maryanne Demasi

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Maryanne Demasi is an independent investigative journalist based in Australia and a former medical scientist with a PhD in rheumatology from the University of Adelaide.

For many years, she worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and gained wide attention for reporting on controversial medical topics, particularly the efficacy and safety of statins and psychiatric drugs.

Demasi was eventually suspended from her position at ABC in 2016 following controversies over her comprehensive and critical examination of statin drugs and other health risks. After leaving ABC, she continued her career as an independent investigative medical journalist.

In this interview, we discuss how science can be weaponized and drug data manipulated or suppressed, even for many common drugs prescribed to millions of Americans.

“Psychiatry is a classic example of where pharmaceutical companies have been sponsoring their own trials and burying data and then putting a spin on the medical journal, saying that the drug is safe and effective when the fact is, it’s not,” she says.

“This is not an exception. This happens commonly. Throughout history, pharmaceutical companies have been sued for designing trials [and] hiding, burying data.”

Demasi said she has been censored during her career as a journalist and understands the censorship and the pressures faced by journalists and medical professionals who challenge the data and narratives of the powerful pharmaceutical industry.

“COVID was the unmasking of how all of this censorship came about,” she said. “It really was an event that woke people up to just how corrupt the system is at every level, from the media to the academia to the agencies that are meant to protect us to the medical journals.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Maryanne Demasi, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Maryanne Demasi:

Thank you for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

I recently watched you talking about the weaponization of science and the corruption of science. Why don’t you give me the most acute example of this that you’ve come across in your long career? 

Ms. Demasi:

I think I first came across how systemic the corruption of science was when I started researching the area of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins. I was working in mainstream television at the time. In 2013, I did a documentary that questioned the overprescription of statins. The firestorm that that caused was really quite extraordinary. The pharmaceutical companies complained to the television network. The television network capitulated and censored the program. All of the critiques in the media didn’t really address the facts made in the program. It was all just working to censor the program. I knew something terrible was unfolding. 

I continued to look into this topic. In 2018, I actually published a narrative review of statins called, Have We Been Misled by the Evidence? In that, I revealed that the raw data that underpinned all of the clinical trials for statins had actually been held by one particular group called the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists [CTT] Collaboration. I tried to obtain access to that raw data, and they revealed that they had made an agreement with the statin manufacturers that they wouldn’t share that data with any third parties. 

So it’s been years that this drug has been on the market, and the entire data set is really under a cloud, because the CTT Collaboration that does these very influential meta-analyses that influence the prescribing guidelines has never really been independently authenticated. When you realize that the vast majority of statin trials are funded by the manufacturers themselves, they collect the data, they analyze the data, they publish the data in the journals, and that influences the doctor’s prescribing guidelines, you realize that every level of the scientific process has been influenced and corrupted by the drug industry. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Just very quickly, the bottom line, what are the issues with statins, which are still massively prescribed today? 

Ms. Demasi:

I think the issue is that there’s not enough informed consent when someone gets prescribed statins. The vast majority of people, about 75 percent of people that are on statins, are in the low-risk category, and so they don’t get an overall benefit from the medication. The clinical trials show that you can reduce your risk of having a cardiovascular event, whether that be a non-fatal heart attack or a revascularization or even angina. But what you don’t get is an overall total mortality benefit. You live the same length of time as the group that didn’t take the drug. So this is the issue. 

This is the issue that we have in public health, where they will implement a strategy that they want everybody to be taking a statin over the age of 50, even if you don’t have high cholesterol, with the idea that it will reduce your risk of having a heart attack. But you don’t actually live longer. So you’ve got to realize that maybe the statin might benefit you in one way but harm you in another way. Your overall benefit from the drug matches the group that’s not taking the drug. So there’s no doubt that statins are over-prescribed, and there’s probably a small population of people that do benefit from these medications, the ones that have established heart disease, and it’s probably not through the lowering of cholesterol. Ironically, it’s through the drug’s ability to have anti-inflammatory effects.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, fascinating, and of course, in some number of people, there’s also these kinds of side effects that come with any medication, which has some low level, hopefully very low level of side effects in certain kinds of people.

Ms. Demasi:

I think the problem with knowing what the true side effects are is that because the majority of statin manufacturers sponsor their own trials, they’re able to design a trial in a way that underplays those harms and therefore exaggerates the benefits. If you speak to cardiologists, most of them will say about 20 percent of our patients experience muscle pain on statins. But when you look at the randomized control trials, the gold standard, the muscle harms are no different in the statin group compared to the group taking placebo. But it’s because they use these strategies to hide or mask the muscle harms. 

For example, in one trial, they did what they call a run-in period where they gave everybody the medication, and those who experienced muscle harms or couldn’t tolerate the drug were excluded from the trial, and then they began the randomization. So of course all of those people who probably would have experienced those harms during the randomization of the trial were already excluded, and that’s how they can mask the effects. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, absolutely fascinating. So you have a very interesting background for a journalist. Of course, you’ve been a journalist for a very long time, but also you’re a scientist. Actually, give me your story. Where did you start? What got you interested in first, and how did you end up in media? Then we’ll talk a little bit about what happened as you became more bold in your assertions.

Ms. Demasi:

I did medical science at university and then started a master’s degree, and that converted into a PhD. They called it a PhD in medicine. My specific area was in rheumatology. It was all about learning and understanding genes and the way they behaved in response to particular drugs and looking at the inflammatory side of rheumatoid arthritis and also the autoimmune aspect of it. 

Once I finished my PhD, I became interested in some of the things that arose while I was conducting my PhD, and we were looking at the harms of a drug called Vioxx. That was a sort of a new blockbuster drug at the time which promised anti-inflammatory relief for patients with rheumatoid arthritis, but it had the gastric-sparing effects that you wouldn’t get with your normal non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which cause you stomach upsets if you take them for too long.

Mr. Jekielek:

Just to be clear, the bottom line is they didn’t cause the stomach upset like the others.

Ms. Demasi:

Right. So the claim from the drug company was that you don’t get the stomach ulcerations that you get with the normal anti-inflammatory medications. So this was like a fantastic blockbuster drug. But we noticed at the time that it was also increasing the risk of myocardial infarction in some people.

Mr. Jekielek:

So a type of heart damage.

Ms. Demasi:

Yes. So it was increasing the risk of heart attacks. It had the anti-inflammatory relief, but it also increased the risk of having a heart attack in patients that have rheumatoid arthritis. This was really quite concerning, and we looked at ways in which perhaps the medication could be causing this. Some of the mechanisms we determined were probably through increasing the patient’s ability to clot. Clots were the basis for these heart attacks. 

The company resisted for many years in informing the public, and the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] was on their back about putting up the warnings. We all know that the drug was eventually withdrawn from the market, but not before tens of thousands of people died from heart attacks. I thought that was a really interesting case because the clinical trials were sponsored by the manufacturer. The FDA was pretty weak in its regulation of the drug, and thousands of people died. The result was a settlement out of court for the company. Nobody went to jail. No individual. went to jail, nobody was held, no individual, no CEO was held responsible for this absolute disaster. 

The public really needed to understand that this is how the industry conducts itself behind closed doors. I guess that’s why I decided to get into journalism, to try and convey these things. I had a behind-the-scenes look at how these situations arose, and I thought that it was important to continue to tell these stories publicly. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And just very briefly, you know, why were you so sure that this wasn’t a one-off?

Ms. Demasi:

Just because I’d worked in science for a long time, I could just see how conflicts of interest would bend the science and influence people’s opinions. It was asked of us at the time to disclose our conflicts of interest. It was clear to us that you could have your opinions influenced by getting funding from universities or from drug companies. It was important to disclose. 

As the years went on, I realized that disclosure wasn’t quite enough. There has to be accountability and transparency of data. I felt that it was important to be communicating these messages, and that’s how I got into journalism. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Absolutely. And just to put a pin on this, Vioxx should have obviously never been licensed in the first place. Deadly, deadly. I write about China’s forced organ harvesting industry, and I’m very desensitized to those realities. I talk about them very casually. You’re talking about this very casually. The reality is literally tens of thousands of people died that wouldn’t have died because they took this drug. Of course, they weren’t told that there’s a significant possibility you could have a heart attack from this. So there’s also this lack of informed consent element that plays in here, which seems to be a common thread. Could you comment on that a little? 

Ms. Demasi:

It’s not just a lack of informed consent. It’s the censorship that happens when these situations arise. And it was only through legal battles and discovery that it was revealed that Merck actually had a hit list of doctors that they planned to neutralize in various ways if they were talking poorly about the efficacy and the safety of Vioxx. So they were threatening doctors with withdrawing their funding, not giving them opportunities to present at conferences. So it’s not just about not telling the patients what the data says; it’s the inability of those speaking out to communicate these messages to the public.

Mr. Jekielek:

Incredible, right? And so what do we know about what this company knew at the time while it was doing this? Like, did they know they had a drug that was so deadly?

Ms. Demasi:

They knew they had a drug that was so deadly. They knew they had a drug that was increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease. When they finally had to admit that the drug was increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease, it was off the back of their own trial. There was the final trial that they did, and it showed a two-fold increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease. So it was the drug company’s decision at the time to withdraw the drug from the market.

Mr. Jekielek:

To comment on this as well, that’s a massive finding, right? Because heart disease is relatively common, so a doubling of the likelihood—I mean, that is just, I’m getting shivers up my spine and not in a good way. 

Ms. Demasi:

And when you think about how they have such an exclusion criteria to get into a clinical trial, you know, often they’re choosing healthy patients or patients who’ve had them exclude patients who might have harms or adverse reactions to the drug. I mean, they’ve got such a clean specimen of participants in the clinical trial, you know, that doesn’t actually apply to the generalized public when they’re taking the drug. So this is the absolute best data that you’re going to get, and even then when they did that, they still found a two-fold increase in cardiovascular disease.

Mr. Jekielek:

I don’t want to belabor this point, but my point is this happens, and this happened, and you’re basically contending that this is not an exception, like in terms of how these things are conducted.

Ms. Demasi:

This is not an exception. This happens commonly. Throughout history, pharmaceutical companies have been sued for designing trials, hiding, and burying data. Psychiatry is a classic example of where pharmaceutical companies have been sponsoring their own trials and burying data and then putting a spin on the medical journal saying that the drug is safe and effective when the fact is it’s not. And children have been harmed by these things. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, you know, you recently actually wrote about the Paxil example and there’s generally, you know, I’ve had recently on the show I’ve been doing more on the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs, especially SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] because they have these various effects that are often, even some doctors I’ve learned, aren’t even aware of some of the effects of some of these drugs. But let’s use that one as an example. What do we actually know happened with that drug?

Ms. Demasi:

So the drug Paxil or paroxetine is a really interesting case. Again, corruption at every level you could possibly think of. So in the late 90s, the manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline [GSK] did a series of trials and found that the drug was no better than placebo. And this one particular study…

Mr. Jekielek:

I just want to emphasize this. It means that it did nothing.

Ms. Demasi:

Yes, it literally did nothing. This was just untenable for them. And later, through legal discovery, there was an email that was sent to staff where GSK said that it would be commercially unacceptable to disclose the poor efficacy data of this drug. So instead of telling the truth, they hired a PR firm to write the medical journal for them, to ghostwrite the article and put a positive spin on it. And then that’s long before the regulators in the U.S. and also in Europe discovered that the drug actually was increasing the risk of suicidal ideation. It was doing the exact opposite. 

But the drug continued to be marketed off-label. And because the prominent journal had published this peer-reviewed paper, GSK purchased thousands of preprints and sent them out to all their representatives. And then they went to doctors giving free samples saying this drug is safe and effective for children. And I think within a time span of three years, GSK made over a billion dollars in sales from a drug that had never proven to be safe or effective in children and adolescents. 

In 2015, there was a publication in the BMJ journal looking at a reanalysis, called Restoring Study 329. And researchers went and looked at what the regulatory data, what the documents actually showed. And they found that the drug was no safer than placebo, but they also found that there were suicides that were hidden and buried in the data, or they reclassified them as things like emotional liability or worsening depression. So they weren’t categorized as suicidal ideation; they were recategorized as another adverse event, so that masks it and helps it disappear from the data. 

So it was really terrible behavior on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry to be doing this. And the authors on the papers, I think there were 21-odd authors on the paper and over half of them hadn’t disclosed conflicts of interest or hadn’t even seen the raw data. They just accepted what the ghostwritten article had said, continued to market the drug, continued to profit, continued to go to conferences. 

In the meantime, children were dying from this, and the journal refused to retract the paper, despite the fact that I think it was in 2012, the Department of Justice [DOJ] managed to get GSK to admit to fraudulently promoting the use of Paxil in adolescents, and they paid a three billion dollar fine. Restoring Study 329 was part of that settlement, and it was the biggest in medical history at the time of that fine, and the journal still refused to retract the paper. 

It turns out that recently a lawyer who had been litigating this case for some people who were harmed by antidepressants started digging out all the evidence and decided to sue not just the journal, but also the publisher, Elsevier.  And I suspect that a retraction might be on the horizon because the journal has acted since finding this out, and they’ve put an expression of interest on the paper. 

Mr. Jekielek:

How many years from publication to, again, maybe a retraction? 

Ms. Demasi:

It’s been over two decades, so it was published in 2001. And this drug is still used? This drug is still prescribed to children and adolescents off-label for the treatment of depression when there has never been any evidence to suggest that it works.

Mr. Jekielek:

Do you find that astonishing?

Ms. Demasi:

Flabbergasted by it. This is, I mean, just reading the lawsuit that has recently been filed, just kind of goes through all the events and you just, you can’t believe that at every stage, nobody said, okay, I think we’ve stepped over the line here. You know, children are being harmed by this; we need to pull the plug. No, like, so at so many points in the process over the last 20 years or so, nobody’s ever had a conscience to say, we need to fix this.

Mr. Jekielek:

 How do you think this actually happens, given that you’ve been in the, I don’t know, say the bowel, you’ve seen it from the inside many times in many different orientations? And how does this happen?

Ms. Demasi:

I don’t know how it happens. I can’t get into these people’s minds. And I don’t know what they’re thinking. I don’t know why they don’t feel conscious that they’re violating their oath to first do no harm. And I actually asked the question to the lawyer who’s filed this recent lawsuit, why at no point did any of the authors who are like practicing psychiatrists, why didn’t anyone just think, you know, this is unscrupulous behavior, we should call this out, we should blow the whistle on GSK. 

And he said, it’s just the power of the seduction of the money, the prestige, the grants, the future positions that you hold; it’s all just too overwhelming for them. I think it just must be a cognitive dissonance thing where they compartmentalize what they’ve done and refuse to understand the ramifications that children actually died because of their actions and focus on how this advances their own professional careers.

Mr. Jekielek:

You said that they paid $3 billion in some kind of a settlement, but that didn’t actually even connect with withdrawing the drug?

Ms. Demasi:

No, even when presented with the evidence from the DOJ, the journal still refused to retract the paper. They said that as far as they were concerned, it had been investigated and there was nothing more to say.

Mr. Jekielek:

But what about, like, the use of this drug at all, I mean, if they’re paying a $3 billion fine for misrepresenting their findings, I guess, right? And is it causing harm?

Ms. Demasi:

It was for the illegal promotion of the drug. So they were promoting the drug off-label. I see. The drug was not licensed for children and adolescents. But it’s pretty powerful when pharmaceutical reps come to the doctor’s office and they give them free samples. They say, look, here is a peer-reviewed paper showing that the drug actually works in children and adolescents. It’s safe. It’s effective. Here’s some free samples. And you can read the paper as proof.

Mr. Jekielek:

May I ask, how does it work with these samples? Who does the doctor give the free samples to? Do they take them themselves? Like, I’m confused by this.

Ms. Demasi:

They give them to the patients. So I was actually in the situation where I had sustained back pain. A doctor had just been visited by a pharmaceutical rep who was giving out free samples of Vioxx. And the doctor said to me, look, you know, if you’ve had this back pain for a couple of weeks and you’ve been on a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, this might be harsh on your stomach lining. I’ve got some samples of this new drug that’s on the market. It’s called Vioxx, and it’s supposed to protect your stomach while also giving you anti-inflammatory relief. 

So I took those samples and I went home and had about six days’ worth of Vioxx myself. Fortunately, I didn’t have any adverse effects, but that’s how it happens. And it’s happened so many times, even with psychiatric medication. A doctor says, well, you know, I’ve got some free samples. Why don’t you just give it a try? And if things get better for you, we can write you a prescription.’ It’s a really quite powerful marketing tool.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wow. I didn’t even understand that this happens. And I mean, presumably, especially with psychiatric medications, something that takes a bit of time. But there’s also the doctor’s endorsement, which plays, I think, a profound impact on the psyche. You know, it’s someone you trust deeply. I mean, there’s so many things going on here. And again, so they got fined massively for misrepresenting, you know, basically for fraudulently marking illegal marketing, right? And then they said, okay, we won’t do that anymore, but that’s it. 

Ms. Demasi:

Well, it still continues, and the fact that the peer-reviewed study that shows it’s allegedly safe and effective is really quite powerful. And, um, the lawyer that filed this lawsuit said that he had deposed a few people and some doctors who had prescribed this medication to children who said that they read the article in the journal. And that’s what persuaded them to prescribe the medication. It gives them that sense that the data is there. OK, so the regulator hasn’t approved it, but there’s a peer-reviewed study in a reputable journal. Let’s give it a go.

Mr. Jekielek:

I don’t want to belabor this one particular example, but it’s just really kind of unbelievable.

Ms. Demasi:

Yes, it’s unbelievable.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s go back to you becoming a journalist. And then, you know, what are some examples of what you tackled? And then, so, you know, I became aware of your work during the COVID-19 pandemic time because you had some, well, just, frankly, very interesting work that you did that I benefited from greatly. 

Ms. Demasi:

I started out quite a few years ago in mainstream media, doing small documentaries, short documentaries about medical issues. And I first came across this issue in 2013 when I did a documentary about statins and questioned whether they were overprescribed. And that’s when I really started to realize the force of the pharmaceutical industry and how powerful and persuasive they could be. 

Those programs were censored from the network, but I continued, I managed to keep my job for several years later, but I continued to do programs where I talked about the unnecessary and overprescription of medications, medicine chasing numbers and surrogate markers that they can prescribe medications for, but not actual medications that help the patient benefit overall. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And just with these markers, I just want to clarify that. You’re basically saying that they use some kind of related measure that suggests that this thing is actually effective. But then when you look at how it is, is it actually helping somebody? Well, maybe not. But there’s an elevated marker of some sort that suggests that it might, it’s plausible that it might be effective. Something like that?

Ms. Demasi:

Yes. So for example, in cardiovascular disease, they say that LDL [low-density lipoprotein] cholesterol is causative of cardiovascular disease. But then you give somebody a statin and their cholesterol level drops 50 percent. But does that actually translate into a benefit in cardiovascular risk? For most people, it doesn’t. And so it tells you that LDL might have a small role, but it’s not the major role. 

And so we’re chasing the wrong thing in cardiovascular disease. You probably should be chasing something else, like, for example, insulin resistance, which has a greater risk of developing cardiovascular disease than something like LDL. But you can’t—there’s not a drug to treat insulin resistance. There’s a drug to treat LDL. So that’s where the pharmaceutical industry favors the prescription.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s continue. I just wanted to make sure everyone understood.

Ms. Demasi:

So, you know, I continued doing programs where I looked at the poor oversight and regulation of chemicals in our water supply and in our food. So I was attacking the chemical industry and also looked at the lack of studies for the safety of electromagnetic radiation from our wireless devices and cell towers. So there was also the telecommunications industry—lots of industries that I was questioning over a period of years. And eventually it just got too much for the network that the pressure from those industries to censor me, to fire me, to take the programs down was just absolutely extraordinary. I hadn’t experienced anything like that in my career. And it was a very sustained and well-organized machine. 

So I didn’t find out until later that I was put on a hit list similar to the Merck hit list. This was a hit list that was going after journalists and academic researchers who were talking about the harms of highly refined carbohydrates in the diet. And so, of course, those industries—all the breakfast cereal industries—decided that they would gather together and hire influencers to counter or neutralize the messages that I was saying publicly. And they would publish opinion pieces in the major papers saying that I was saying things that were pseudoscientific. So it was really quite an orchestrated campaign to neutralize any of the negative messages coming from people like me. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And this is already—you’re still working for this TV network and this is coming out. And then so what happens?

Ms. Demasi:

So eventually I did a documentary in 2016, and I was exploring the possible health effects behind our exposure to electromagnetic radiation from wireless devices and other kinds of devices that we use all the time. And I mean, it wasn’t really that controversial. It was just to say that we’ve rolled out this technology really quite quickly over the last decade without really understanding what the long-term health implications would be. That was about the extent of the program, but you wouldn’t believe it when you looked at how the program was characterized in the media. 

The telecommunications industry was just full-on attacking the program. The program was censored. So then even if people were curious about what I said in the program, you couldn’t go back and reference it because it had disappeared off the website. It caused so much angst within the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]. What we realized we were doing was spending far more time defending the programs than we were actually making the programs, so it was a really bad business model. They needed to decide what they wanted to do, and in the end decided to completely restructure the program and the entire department was axed, which was really quite unfortunate.

And the thing that strikes me the most about that whole situation was that I was working for the factual department, the factual science department within the ABC, and something really quite stunning—one of my supervisors said to me at one point—he said, ‘I just don’t know that this is about the facts anymore because we’ve got the facts right. It’s just about perception.’ And I thought, how curious that I’m working for factual programming and facts don’t matter. I kind of could see the writing on the wall at that point. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I encountered you, I guess, in 2020, I guess. 

Ms. Demasi:

So for a few years there, I was pretty radioactive. I couldn’t get work in Australia. I went back to doing some research, and it was about two or three years ago that I decided to start writing on Substack as an independent journalist. And I’ve slowly built up my newsletter from there. 

Substack has been an incredible opportunity for independent writers who’ve been kicked out of the mainstream. COVID was really the unmasking of how all of this censorship came about. It was an event that woke people up to just how corrupt the system is at every level, from the media to academia, to the agencies that are meant to protect us, to the medical journals. There’s a level of corruption that is really quite overwhelming.

Mr. Jekielek:

It just, you know, would you say, this is what I’ve been thinking, would you say that it, just sort of like, a highly enhanced, or maybe kind of an augmented version of everything we’ve been talking about, like, every element, right, there was this bit of media capture, there was this, you know, people being influenced by the money, there were, you know, all these things, but somehow, in the kind of way this whole COVID thing seemed to get elevated or, you know, more extreme somehow. Is that, would that be fair?

Ms. Demasi:

So people ask me, did it just all happen at COVID? I think it’s been happening for decades. 

Mr. Jekielek:

But at this level?

Ms. Demasi:

Yes, I think that the rot has been there for decades. The difference is that far more people are awake to it now. And so that’s why it feels more obvious because we’re talking about it more. And, you know, we’re not as censored anymore. We have social media platforms now like X that don’t censor people’s thoughts and opinions. So I actually think it’s been there for quite a while, and it’s just that people are more awake to it now.

Mr. Jekielek:

As you first encountered the reaction or the response to COVID-19, what were you thinking?

Ms. Demasi:

I was thinking, I’ve seen this before. I know how this story goes. I know that there were people trying to speak out, and I could see that their careers were going down the toilet. And it came at an extraordinary cost.

And a lot of people could see and understand that it was just too dangerous to question and stayed quiet for a lot of the time. But I saw the patterns. I saw the censorship. I saw the threats. I saw the spreading messages of fear. I saw the punishment. If you didn’t comply, they were all things that I had experienced in the past.

Mr. Jekielek:

So how did you enter the fray?

Ms. Demasi:

I just stuck to the data as I normally do and continued to write cautiously about the things that I was observing and the evidence that was coming out. I mean, people are trying to rewrite history now to say we didn’t know, we did the best we could at the time, but we did actually know early in the pandemic what the right things to do were. It’s just those people who were trying to tell everybody else that they were being censored and punished. 

So I just continued to keep writing. I had nothing to lose being an independent journalist. I wasn’t constrained by the normal editorial shackles that I had experienced at the ABC. So that’s how I have been able to tell my story. And I’m very grateful now that I have a level of intellectual freedom that I’ve never experienced in my career.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wow. So what’s the difference between the weaponization of science and the corruption of science? Or is weaponization just like a particular piece of the ladder?

Ms. Demasi:

I think the weaponization of science is the systemic corruption of science, and it happens at every level from the regulatory capture to the conflicts of interest to the institutional cowardice. It all comes together; it’s not just one or two rogue figures. This corruption is systemic, and it’s not isolated. I think that when you really start to pull the thread on who controls the science, who captures the data, who pays the regulators, who influences the guidelines, you’ll see that it’s really quite a corruption that infiltrates every aspect of science. So we have a new administration here in the US. It’s quite controversial. There are a lot of people being attacked. 

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s unusual because there are people in the system now who previously were playing a role similar to yourself, quite a number of them. We know some of them mutually. How do you think that’s going for them?

Ms. Demasi:

I think there’s always going to be resistance. This corruption didn’t happen overnight. So I don’t think it’s going to be dismantled overnight either. And I’ve worked as a ministerial advisor, looking at policy within the government, and I’ve seen for myself how slow things can be in trying to implement the kind of change that people like HHS Secretary Kennedy are trying to do. I think he’s made some really positive strides. 

One of the most positive I see is the dismantling of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices [ACIP] and replacing them with new, fresh experts who have bright ideas and are asking the right questions. I think that’s going to be quite significant over the next few years because they’re really starting to interrogate the questions that we’ve all been asking for decades. And I can see some positive things happening. 

We’ve seen it already with the COVID vaccines and, you know, moving from a situation where it’s recommended for everybody to now only being recommended after you have a conversation with your healthcare provider, moving to a situation where it’s more about informed consent is a positive thing in my mind. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And so that’s actually very interesting because it really changes dramatically how this product is, I guess, discussed, right, or offered, because there has to be some kind of, every time you can, it has to be considered between the doctor and the patient, and a discussion has to happen. But for some people, it’s not obvious that this is something, you know, monumental and groundbreaking. Why is it? 

Ms. Demasi:

I just think people have overlooked the importance of informed consent. And it doesn’t just happen with vaccines; it happens with all kinds of medications. In my parents’ generation, there was a sort of white coat phenomenon that if the doctor was telling you this was the right thing to do, then you would just believe it and do it. But that’s really not the way medicine should be conducted; doctors should be conducting themselves. 

It was interesting when there was all this backlash regarding my statin program. It was the cardiologists that were coming out complaining, saying that we’re really upset that we have all these patients coming into our clinics now questioning their statins. And I thought to myself, isn’t that exactly what you hope your patients are doing, questioning their medications and asking, should I be taking this medication? 

What if I don’t take this medication? What will the consequences be? Talk through the risks and the benefits and the number needed to treat. It was really an eye-opener to see how some doctors really rejected the idea that a patient would question their prescribing decisions. They didn’t see it as a relationship between a patient and a doctor making an informed choice. They saw it as the doctor gives the prescription and the patient just complies.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and there’s this other dimension too, that, you know, you really have to focus; the doctor needs to focus on the individual patient and their particular realities. Like, for example, I’ve had something called Guillain-Barré syndrome in my life. And so that makes a dramatic difference in terms of how a doctor should, for example, suggest a vaccine or something like that, but so that conversation that, you know, might actually facilitate a doctor catching something they might not just because they’re in a routine of prescribing a certain way. I don’t know, I can think of all sorts of benefits. 

Ms. Demasi:

I think that’s where the vaccine mandates were really quite terrifying for me because doctors stopped looking at patients as individuals, and they stopped looking at their previous clinical notes and their experiences with other medications or similar medications. It was all just, you know, it’s mandated; you must take it. And, you know, that’s the end of the conversation. And I think that’s why I objected so much to vaccine mandates at the time.

Mr. Jekielek:

And just something strikes me, right? Because it’s not just bad for the patient, but it’s bad for the doctor. Like, the doctor stops thinking somehow, 

Ms. Demasi:

In Australia, there was a situation quite early on in the pandemic where the medical regulator sent a note to all healthcare providers warning them that if they talked to patients in a way that undermined the rollout of the COVID vaccine, that there would be potential ramifications for their medical license. So that really scared doctors into just advising all patients to get the vaccine. There was very little discussion about the potential harms, very little acknowledgement that this was a vaccine that only had provisional approval, which was approved through an expedited pathway, and that there was no medium to long-term data. None of those things were discussed with the patients. 

And I think it’s just because the doctors were really concerned about being reported to the regulator, having their license revoked, and not being able to practice anymore. So that was a real shame that that happened. I think a lot of the time, the doctors feel as if they have to just follow the prescribing guidelines. Because if something does happen to the patient, the patient will come back and say, well, you know, why didn’t I take this medication? Because this is what the guidelines say I should have been taking this medication. 

So it’s almost like a defensive mechanism, that they don’t want to be in trouble for not doing what the guidelines recommend them to do. So they’re just rote learning. And it’s cookie-cutter medicine really, and that ends up harming people. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And the guidelines end up having a much more, being much more powerful in terms of affecting implementation than you might, than they’re on the surface supposed to be, right?

Ms. Demasi:

And we have guideline committees that sometimes involve up to eight or ten people, and half of those people have conflicts of interest. It’s really quite extraordinary when you think about a guideline committee. So, for example, with statins, it’s such a small committee that makes a decision for the entire population. That committee in itself might have conflicts of interest or financial ties to the manufacturers of these drugs. It’s really quite outrageous. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Do you have one or a few prescriptions for how to positively affect change to start that? You mentioned it’s a long process. There’s no magic wand. There’s no quick fix. But what are steps that you haven’t seen, or maybe even that you have seen, aside from the ACIP committee being replaced that move us in the right direction in your view? 

Ms. Demasi:

I think it has to go in stages. So there has to be acknowledgment that they’ve done the wrong thing. People need to understand that there is acknowledgment that terrible things have happened to people, and there needs to be better transparency because if there’s any chance of trying to regain trust in the medical profession and the agencies that are meant to protect us, there has to be a much more rigorous emphasis on transparency.

Mr. Jekielek:

And admission of, you know, that things didn’t go as planned or at least went wrong. And I guess you mean this for every product where that’s been demonstrated to be the case?

Ms. Demasi:

Yes, there has to be an admission. There has to be transparency going forward. But it’s also really important to have accountability. As I mentioned, in the Vioxx scandal, not one CEO went to jail, despite making decisions that resulted in tens of thousands of people dying from these medications. So I don’t think that company fines are enough of a deterrent to stop this bad behavior. You need to make the individuals responsible for this. 

And I think as soon as an individual at a pharmaceutical company is made accountable for the decisions under their watch, I think that this behavior will stop overnight because nobody is going to take that risk. At the moment, they think they’re sheltered, they’re protected by the company. And in fact, some of the time, they’re rewarded for their behavior and promoted in other companies. That really has to change. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. So what’s next for you? What are you working on now?

Ms. Demasi:

I’m just going to continue writing and working on Substack and truth-telling. That’s where my focus is. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Maryanne Demasi, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Demasi:

It’s been a pleasure. Thanks, Jan.

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.