PR Firm Repping Vaccine Manufacturers Now Promotes Doctors Group Denouncing Alleged COVID Vaccine Disinformation

Among the many social changes wrought by the pandemic, physician certification groups now clamor to defend the biopharmaceutical industry.

7 minute read

Over the last century, perhaps no other profession has shown more willingness than medicine to shed its dignity before hopping under the covers with corporate interests to peddle bad science.

“Tobacco companies sought to exploit the faith the public had in the medical profession as a means of reassuring their customers that smoking was safe,” explained Stanford Professor Robert Jackler, who documented a 50-year propaganda campaign, beginning in the 1920s, that physicians in hock to the tobacco companies created to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking.

But American medicine’s best of besties has always been the pharmaceutical industry. Recent decades are littered with incidents of doctors selling themselves to Big Pharma for kickbacks and career advancement, with few facing any repercussions.

Doctors groups are now bonding with Pfizer over their COVID-19 vaccine, but just a handful of years ago, Pfizer was paying tens of millions of dollars over kickbacks they paid to physicians.

Why so little skepticism about the company, today? After years of this sordid history, why is the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) partnering with the PR firm for Pfizer and Moderna to counter “disinformation” in medicine and go after the certifications of physicians who don’t trust pharma? Why hasn’t American medicine learned anything?

It's pretty obvious why: the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most powerful in the United States and US physician groups are almost always willing to do their bidding for a nice price.