Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
Old movies and new ones often turn on the theme of corruption. For generations, viewers have enjoyed discovering the ins and outs of a gang of people who are up to no good, financially and otherwise.
It’s always a shock to see the way the insiders treat each other so brutally, and how they lie, cheat, and steal to get their way. It’s especially satisfying when they get caught in the end.
Countless movies in the old days followed this basic plot.
One of my favorites is the American classic “On the Waterfront” (1954) with Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, and Karl Malden. It’s the story of a rough gang of thugs that has taken control of a longshoreman’s union. They pillage the workers for dues and make paychecks contingent on loyalty.
For years, everyone in the union is told to be “D&D” or deaf and dumb, never saying a word to the authorities for fear of bad outcomes. As the corruption gets worse, the tactics of enforcement grow more violent. New Jersey kicks off a crime commission to look into the problem with the focus on a murder. A local priest plays a role in convincing a worker who is tight with the gang to rat on the bad guys.
It all turns out well in the end, even if Brando gets badly beaten up. The bad guys are overturned and the workers get their union back. The movie is a brilliant reflection of a culture at the time: yes, there are imperfections but we are making great progress to root out the bad and replace it with the good, thanks to moral leadership and courage.
But notice how the plot absolutely depends on the existence of a not-corrupt higher power.
That’s almost always the case in the old movies. Once the authorities find out that something bad is happening, they work to clean it up. Their success turns on the ethical tenacity of one insider who is willing to stand up for what is right. To make that courage operational, you need means of redress that are not part of the problem.
That’s all great but we have a different problem in our own time. The higher powers on which we depend for redress are themselves part of the issue.
This truly came home to me lately with the Supreme Court hearing for Murthy v. Missouri, which documented how dozens of federal agencies worked with social media companies, directly and indirectly, to censor free speech.
Seems like a no-brainer of a case. But based on the oral arguments, a third of the court couldn’t see the problem at all. A third was confused. The last third got that this was a problem for the First Amendment.
This is alarming but a realistic accounting of where we are in the United States today: divided by thirds into clear, confused, and corrupt.
In other words, we can no longer count on the highest powers and the most authoritative institutions to save us from evil.
Let’s cite an astonishing example from this past week that should have been headline news but was utterly invisible to legacy media (speaking of corruption at the very top). The case involves the COVID medication Paxlovid. It was approved under “emergency use” in December 2021, and trumpeted by Fauci, President Biden, and the rest of the usual crowd. It was 90 percent effective, they said!
The White House authorized $11 billion and more to pay for it, and dispatched the whole army of media mavens to push this thing. The White House was able to claim it was free, if you had insurance but even that would last only for so long. Eventually, the consumer had to pay and it was nearly $1,500 for 20 pills.
In many places, the entire medical profession was insisting that this was the way to treat COVID, even as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were banned or impossible to get.
Paxlovid was greeted with all the usual hosannas from the drug company as echoed by big media. The drug is 89 percent effective, they kept saying. The governments of Canada, the United States, and the UK all celebrated and showered Pfizer with multiple rounds of billions of dollars.
But even from the outset, it seems there were many reports of rebounds. The drug would reduce symptoms for a few days even to the point of generating a negative test but then COVID would come back. This happened often enough that pharma skeptics grew deeply suspicious of it, especially because of such a very long run of patented failings in this realm.
Mr. Biden, for example, seems to have gotten COVID four times after being treated repeatedly with Paxlovid. So too with Biden’s wife. The same happened with Fauci himself. Most every prominent person reported something similar. But that did not stop the gravy train from running, with the entire medical professional rallying around this drug.
COVID-19 treatment pill Paxlovid in a box at Misericordia hospital in Grosseto, Italy, on Feb. 8, 2022. (Jennifer Lorenzini/Reuters)
From the outset, The Epoch Times was reporting skeptically about it, the only media venue to do so. More and more doubts emerged, not in official circles but online in alternative media.
Now we come to the kicker. Pfizer itself has finally published its randomized placebo-controlled trial of several hundred individuals with the Delta variant, which would have been two and a half years ago. The title of the results as published in the New England Journal of Medicine: “Nirmatrelvir for Vaccinated or Unvaccinated Adult Outpatients with Covid-19.”
Notice the absence of the word Paxlovid, making it all the more difficult for regular people to find. Nirmatrelvir is the clinical name.
And the conclusion: “Nirmatrelvir–ritonavir was not associated with a significantly shorter time to sustained alleviation of Covid-19 symptoms than placebo, and the usefulness of nirmatrelvir–ritonavir in patients who are not at high risk for severe Covid-19 has not been established.”
In other words: this drug does not work. At all. It is no better than nothing. It is not useful. Countless billions later and this is what we have, a completely useless thing. At best. In fact, that Pfizer itself admits that its own drug is useless, one wonders what the bad news is!
The drug was not a game changer at all. It was a vast waste of money.
This whole thing stuns me, even now, even after everything we know about the industry, its relationship to government, the way the media goes along with all the nonsense, the manner in which all top officials go along with the racket. This to me is as much a scandal as the vaccine in some ways.
You will notice that you have not seen this reported in any mainstream media, even though it appears in the top medicine journal in the United States. That’s because the mainstream media is entirely in the pay of pharma.
The conspiracy is out in the open, and all official channels are implicated. There seems to be zero accountability or appeal. It’s no wonder that RFK, Jr., is calling for racketeering investigations to be made against the whole industry and its industrial partners. This is aggressive robbery and fraud.
Very few people even know to care because they are not being told the brutal facts of the case.
One also wonders how it is that Pfizer held onto this study for two years before releasing it.
Why would Pfizer choose just now to announce that its wonder drug is actually useless? My own theory: its accounting ledgers are showing that the drug’s period of high profitability is at an end. There’s no more high-margin profits associated with it. Might as well retire it.
With a complicit legacy media, it has no egg on its face. It can just chalk up its wild Paxlovid push as profitable and done, like a seasonal beer or a pumpkin-spice latte. There is essentially no downside to moving onward to other products in its arsenal.
But think about what this means for this company and for the system that protects it. What does this say about the vaccine? What does it mean for the whole network of protection, from regulators to journals to media? They are all in on the game. And how deep and wide is this game?
What we have in operation here is a form of vampiric capitalism, an entire industry that has colonized our health and bodies in the interest of wealth extraction even though its products do not work and actually make us more sick, providing more opportunities to innovate products that do more of the same.
It’s time that this system came to an end, but where is the crime commission to investigate and stop it?
It doesn’t exist. That’s the great dilemma of our time.
