Brave New World of Zero Risk -
Covert strategy in British Science Policy is
Martin Walker's latest exposé of scientific corruption. The
book takes the chemical and pharmaceutical multinationals to
task for bending science in the name of industrial progress
and for riding roughshod over the human tragedies of people
suffering injury from toxic chemicals.
Supermarket Emma Holister
An incisive investigative writer, Martin Walker is widely
known for his monumental Dirty Medicine, which
documents the collusion of modern medicine with a
greed-driven pharmaceutical industry. In 2004 Walker took up
the fight for the chemically injured with another book,
Skewed. He examines the scandalous re-definition as a
psychiatric problem of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and a
related cluster of illnesses. Walker tells of the chemical
industry's collaboration with psychiatric and medical
"experts" who would have us believe that physical symptoms
of chemical poisoning are pure imagination and that the
sufferers need a dose of psychiatric drugs and perhaps some
motivational therapy.
Brave New World of Zero Risk,
available free for download
here, continues where Skewed
left off. But more than that - Zero Risk shows how
pharma, food and chemical giants deal with those who might
depress their already threatened profits even further by
exposing weak points. Vaccine researcher Dr Andrew Wakefield
fell from grace after finding a connection between the MMR
vaccine and autism. Dr Arpad Pusztai paid with his carreer
for insisting that the rats he fed GM potatos in what may
well have been the only properly conducted GMO feeding
experiment, suffered organ damage as a result.
- - -
Zero Risk contains extensive documentation on how
front groups such as the innocent-sounding Social Issues
Research Center, known for its strong support of hormone
replacement therapy, are slanting the debate the way
industry wishes.
"The pharmaceutical corporations can no longer be seen as a
part of some social superstructure", says Walker, concluding
a chapter on science and its apparently senseless direction.
"Their need for a research base, for trial subjects, for
organisations to agree licensing and other regulatory
matters, together with their need for markets and consumers
of their products, means that, like a metastasised cancer,
their growth now extends into all areas of society, which
has become a massive human laboratory. "
The question becomes: What kind of medicine are we going to
have - corporate or scientific?
The quackbusters, pharma's shock troops who attack doctors
that do not toe the line, are discussed with a fair bit of
history and pointers to their parent organization, the
so-called skeptics. 'De-bunking' activities are
generally directed towards health practitioners that use
cutting edge protocols such as mercury-free dentistry,
nutritional immune enhancement and detoxification for
chemical injury.
Mercury - Relax! Emma Holister
Genetically modified foods are pronounced safe and
promoted by industry groups. The decision process that led
governments to the unquestioning acceptance of genetic
modification as an element of science policy, according to
Walker, was arrived at behind closed doors. He describes how
the policy was put into effect in the UK with these words:
"In clearing the runway for bioscience, New Labour was also
clearing it of its citizens. There is no room for ordinary
citizens' input into the new world of science, so they have
dropped them utterly from the equation, and 'steak' holders
(the better fed citizens), are now the powerful vested
interests..."
Evidently, people are no longer needed, except as
'consumers'. Pressure groups supplant public input with a
vague concept of 'listening to the stake holders'.
Covering up the harm done by industry seems to be a common
practice. After citing two instances, the Spanish
"contaminated oil" scandal of 1982 that killed hundreds and
a 1988 Camelford (UK) water poisoning incident, where 20
tons of toxic chemicals ended up in the town's drinking
water, Walker highlights the rationale behind the crazy idea
that people suffering from chemical or other environmental
pollution are making it all up:
"When you deny the existence of illness presented by
patients, you also have to deny the mental health of those
patients. So much more so is this the case with
environmental illness, where the psychiatrist can first
attack the very mind frame of both patient and alternative
therapist. In a rational world, the subject who is affected
by invisible rays from mobile phones or computer screens can
be made to appear mentally unbalanced. If you can see the
cause, then it is the job of crisis management, psychiatry,
psychology or PR, either to convince everyone that it is not
there, or disguise it as something else."
"As the stakes get higher and the crack in the floodgates
widens, more subtle plans have to be drafted. These are
plans that start at the beginning by defining as mentally
ill, those who believe that modern technological ['wonders']
can produce chronic health damage. Mental illness is
undoubtedly the best fallback position for those responsible
for creating environmental illness. And so it is that
psychiatrists become part of the front line troops in
denfence of the state and its corporate partners."
Science is being used to cover up, rather than reveal, the
effects industrial 'progress' has on our health. Contrary
views are rigorously suppressed. Walker says that scientists
themselves have to look at how industry uses them to help
suppress the evidence of harm.
"At the centre of this almost surgical censorship, which has
developed like a cancer in society, are working scientists.
On questions of science, it is imperative that scientists
themselves wise up to the way in which they and their work
are being manipulated."
Caught your interest yet? You can download the PDF of Martin
Walker's book.
If, instead, you want to get an even closer look at the
subject matter, here is a message from Emma Holister, artist
and campaigner for health, who forwards a recent essay by
Martin titled "Realpolitik and ME",
which you can find below.
- - -
Chemical Warfare Emma Holister
Teensy weensy Emma Holister
Here is Emma's message:
Martin Walker once again takes us on a guided tour along the
sordid money trail of pharmaceutical funding that fuels the
psychiatric lobby's defining of M.E. [Myalgic Encephalopathy]
as a psychiatric condition rather than an organic illness.
I consider my own illness, Candida, to be a cousin of M.E.,
as it is also caused by chemical injury. Those
chemicals/drugs are the massively profitable products of the
very same chemical and pharma companies who are relentlessly
defining these illnesses as psychiatric conditions for which
they recommend yet more of their lethal products, anti
depressants. Candida is treated as both a 'minor fungal
infection' and a stress related psychiatric disorder by most
of the medical profession. It is also a major source of
profit in the pharma AID$ industry, candida being one of the
most common ailments of 'AIDS' sufferers.
As these issues are so close to my heart and personal
campaigns I have included some cartoons that I feel are
related.
Emma xxx
www.artmargin.com
- - -
8 November 2005
Realpolitik and ME
by Martin J. Walker
We live in a period where everything is spin, where the
truth is rarely told about public policy and where many
public arguments are disingenuous. However, during the
contemporary period, everything is confusion. Only when we
look back are we able to see clearly how social reality was
constructed.
This situation makes it very difficult for campaigners, or
those trying to voice a dissenting view to Government or its
agencies. While thirty years ago, it might have been
possible to engage in a peripheral dialogue with government,
today, government and its many agencies is a secretive,
shadowy organisation which often invites campaigners to
wrestle with phantoms. In contemporary society, there is, in
short, no point at which the clear demands of the people
might be put to government and a considered answer returned.
One of the principal reasons for this is that over the last
fifty years, the government has increasingly begun to act on
behalf of hidden constituents. Instead of gauging and
responding to the needs of the people, they have
increasingly, in the field of health, begun to act on behalf
of corporations, foisting their demands onto the public in
the form of policy. In some areas, this corporatisation of
government is easy to see and describe, in others, it lies
deeply hidden and anyone who attempts to unravel it is
quickly accused of advocating ‘conspiracy theories’.
The campaign to de-construct the neurological illness ME, to
ridicule its sufferers and, in the process, to redefine a
growing body of ‘mentally ill’ subjects, began in the mid
eighties. The principal character in the British campaign
has been Professor Simon Wessely. Over time, however, the
‘psychiatric lobby’ has gathered new adherents and a large,
increasingly organised body of combatants.
The psychiatric lobby is now marked by its financial power –
over 11 million being funneled into the network of clinical
centres and funding provided by the Medical Research Council
(MRC) to carry out the PACE and FINE trials; its roots in
major medical research institutions like the MRC and
increasingly its links to corporate lobby groups funded
especially by the pharmaceutical companies.
The patient, or ‘sufferer’ group which has been forged
simply by its opposition to the psychiatric lobby, has
inevitably consisted of disparate groups and individuals.
Inevitably, because unlike the psychiatric lobby, this
grouping has no common ideological purpose nor does it have
a hegemonous leadership. Mainly, as well, this group is
composed of people who are ill or their carers,
circumstances which leave little room for organised
campaigning. The only two defining criteria of this group
are, first, they seek effective treatments for ME and
second, they have pressed the research community to carry
out physical research in order to find the organic causes of
ME.
Delusional Emma Holister
While the psychiatric lobby is well organised, powerful and
educated to a unified purpose, sufferers, patients and their
families lack political, organisational cohesion. The
inability of this ‘community’ to form a united political
campaign has meant that they have faced a consistent series
of defeats, and while the ‘psychiatric’ lobby has become
stronger, the campaign of sufferers, patients and their
families have lost ground, broken off on the edges and
become divided within itself.
Objectives
What is inevitably confusing about the psychiatric lobby,
what makes them difficult to stand firmly against, is their
apparent lack of a reasoned and ultimate objective. It is,
of course, useful to define ultimate objectives in order to
organise opposition strategies. While an effective campaign
can be waged on a day to day basis, it is an understanding
of the final objective of the psychiatric lobby which should
in principle define the political movement against them.
Without any understanding of the lobby’s objective, we are
left to weigh up each new assault, each new gambit, on the
apparent sincerity of its proposer.
Before going on to look at the present strategies being
employed by the psychiatric lobby, I would like to try and
define their long-term objectives.
With New Labour, the biotech industry and the pharmaceutical
companies have planned a far-reaching programme of ‘drug’
research. They are committed to being world leaders by the
year 2015 in the production of biotech and genetically
engineered ‘person altering’ substances. These substances
will not be medicines in the sense that we recognise them
presently and the purpose of many of them will not be to
treat illness. In fact, it might be the case that we have
come to the end of the period of human pharmaceutical drug
use, at least on the scale we have witnessed it over the
last fifty years.
These new patented substances will be used primarily to
change people. Apart from a number of physical changes,
there are many mental outlooks which might be affected: a
person might be made happier, more serious, more creative,
to have, for example, a better memory, or to be more
empathetic, more attractive to the opposite sex.
Presently, the pharmaceutical industry, which has recently
begun to join with the biotech industry, considers that it
suffers over-regulation. Limitation on animal experiments
and strictures on human drug trials are increasingly
considered an obstacle to profit. The big problems, however,
lie in the future: Will these corporations be able to
convince governments - in the face of anti-vivisection
protests – that the rules for animal testing can be
stretched to include mood-altering compounds which are not
specifically ‘treatments’? Even if this problem is resolved,
in second stage testing, corporations are going to need
considerable access to human volunteers, particularly those
with certain psychological portraits.
I can see no other reason why the North American State has
embarked upon a mental health audit of the whole population,
nor why British psychiatrists should want to push half a
million adults and children through a network of clinical
centres which evaluate their psychological status.
The Ongoing Battle
With this possible long-term objective in mind, we can
return to reviewing the psychiatric lobby’s present
strategies. The battle between the psychiatric lobby and the
vulnerable patients and sufferers campaign has always been a
massively uneven battle. Fairly recently, however, it has
taken a major turn in favour of the psychiatric lobby.
The report of the Chief Medical Officer in 2003, ultimately
only strengthened the hand of the psychiatric lobby,
awarding them even greater funding to carry their case
forward. However, because in some general respects this
Report gave powerless succour to patients and patients
groups who had been arguing that the origins of ME were
organic, the report angered the psychiatric lobby. Weeks
before the end of deliberations, in an infantile gesture,
the psychiatric participants resigned en masse.
Since the end of the CMO’s Report, the psychiatric lobby
strategy might be said to have four prongs.
The PRIME Project and PACE
The PRIME Project appears to be giving the kind of time and
attention to ME sufferers which many of them have always
wanted. However, despite its protestations that it is
evaluating the kinds of treatments best used with ME, the
project is nothing more than a softening-up project, working
to shovel sufferers into the PACE trials and its network of
clinical centres.
The PRIME Project is firmly rooted in the camp of the
psychiatric lobby and has no intentions of either raising
the funds for or designing any programmes of organic
research into the causes of ME. The complete exposure of
this strategy is written up on the One Click site in The
One Click Story – The Underbelly of ME/CFS Politics Revealed.
Assault on the Political Opposition
The third strand of the strategy has involved an all-out
assault upon the One Click campaign, the only patient
advocacy group opposed to the psychiatric lobby which has a
political perspective. This assault has been varied in its
implementation, including, character assassination,
threatening letters, police intervention, arrests, the
interference with telephone and computer services and, in
the case of [One Click founder] Jane Bryant, the
confiscation of her computer. It has been singular, though,
in its objective, to shut down the principal opposition to
the psychiatric lobby. This strand of the strategy is also
written up on the One Click site.
The ‘Independent’ Inquiry
The fourth strand of the strategy, which has emerged over
the last six months, has exhibited itself in Dr Ian Gibson
MP’s ‘Independent Inquiry’, which was set up to examine
other than psychiatric causes of ME.
The emergence of the ‘Independent ‘ Inquiry manifests one of
the greatest differences between the two lobbies involved in
this ongoing battle being fought over ME sufferers. The
philosophy of those who are asking for serious scientific
biological research into the causes of ME, can be reported
simply and without embellishment. For twenty years now, they
have wanted no more than any other patient group in Britain:
to raise the issue of, and the funding for scientific
research into the cause and treatment of their condition.
With respect to those who maintain that ME is first and
foremost a psychiatric condition, their philosophy, its
campaign and their strategies have been anything but
straightforward. Baroque in its intrigue, infinite in its
dissembling, practised like a card sharp in deceit, it has
resembled nothing less than a psychological operation
constructed by the CIA or some other secret policing
instrument. The campaign has buried itself inside medical
research like an engorged maggot; at every turn, new money
comes to hand, more mercenary researchers rush to its aid.
With each turn of the ratchet in its offensive, new sponsors
from the corporate world emerge, new velvet gloves hiding
iron fists, new words of reconciliation which conceal venom
and forked tongues.
Because the patient community is unable to adopt a cohesive
political line, they get duped every time the psychiatric
lobby hides its stick behind a large carrot. In the case of
the phantom ‘Independent’ Inquiry, Dr Ian Gibson New Labour
MP for Norwich North, approached Kevin Short and Professor
Malcolm Hooper. After a discussion Gibson went to the
nearest phone box and having changed into his familiar red
and blue suit, flew out exclaiming; ‘It’s about time
something was done, I will set up an Independent Inquiry’.
Within days of Gibson’s offer, Short was energetically
digging another hole for ME groups to bury themselves in.
Neither Kevin Short nor Professor Hooper, or for that matter
a number of others who quickly tendered evidence to what has
turned out to be an entirely bogus offer, seem to have given
Gibson’s offer a moment’s political reflection. It was as if
the words ‘Independent Inquiry’ mesmerised the listeners and
they immediately suspended their political judgement. ‘I’m
an MP’, said Gibson, ‘trust me’.
Had either Professor Hooper or Kevin Short reflected for a
moment on Gibson and his offer, they would have found cause
to be concerned. Before he became an MP, in 1997, Gibson was
Dean of the School of Biological Sciences at the University
of East Anglia (UEA). East Anglia was the base, until the
mid nineties, of Fisons, the agricultural chemical company.
Funding from the company helped shape research at the UEA,
more so when Fisons was bought up by Rhone-Poulenc in 1996.
In 1999, Rhone-Poulenc joined with Hoeschst Marion Roussel
to form Aventis. UEA has had a funding input from all these
companies and, in 2003, it was in the top twelve
Universities receiving funds from the BBSRC, the bio-tech
quango which dispenses massive funding – some of it from the
coffers of the Sainsbury family. Gibson himself has declared
funding received from Rhone-Poulenc for taking part in
scientific meetings.
Up until last year, Gibson was the Chair of the All Party
Science and Technology Committee (APSTC), the watchdog
committee which oversees science policy in the Commons for
the Science Ministry which is situated within the Department
of Trade and Industry (Dti). The APSTC is funded in part by
Astra Zeneca, the Dti and bioscience companies.
Together with Dr Des Turner, Tony Wright and Dr Richard
Taylor – also a member of the Associate Parliamentary Group
on Health, set up by the pharmaceutical lobby group
Networking for Industry – Gibson is a member of the All
Party Group on Cancer, which is heavily funded by all the
leading Big Pharma names, including Novartis, Pfizer Lilly
and Merk. He is also a member of the All Party Group on
Pesticides and Organophosphates, which, until they became
more focussed on bio-engineering, were staple product of
Fisons and Rhone-Poulenc.
Gibson is a leading member of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science, now called simply the BA, which
in the early nineties played a considerable role in
promoting the ‘quackbusting’ Campaign Against Health Fraud.
Gibson sits on the editorial committee of the BA’s magazine,
Science and Public Affairs, the magazine is again a
public arbiter of government science policy and Gibson
shares his editorial role with personnel from the Royal
Society of Spin, The Financial Times, the Parliamentary
Office of Science and Technology (POST) – the science
policy-making centre of government, and the Wellcome Trust.
Involvement in the higher echelons of corporate science and
government has brought Gibson into contact with the new
generation of science lobby groups. Sense About Science –
funded by the ABPI and various chemical and pharmaceutical
interests; The Institute of Ideas – funded by Pfizer and the
Science Media Centre, also funded by the ABPI and a variety
of powerful corporations. These lobby groups work in
partnership with New Labour, POST and the Dti.
Although they profess a focus on science, these groups, are
actually involved in corporate PR and spin. They are linked
in North America to right-wing libertarian groups heavily
involved in ‘quackbusting’, campaigning rabidly against
alternative medicine, environmentalists, and patient
advocacy groups. In Britain, they have been involved, in
partnership with the Royal Society and the Royal
Institution, in pushing corporate interests in Genetically
Modified crops and pharmaceuticals. In 2004, Science in
Society, the magazine of the Institute of Science in
Society, one of the most independent and radical science
campaigning groups, informed its readers of the collusion
between Professor Derek Burke a leading member of Sense
About Science, and Dr Ian Gibson, in defending GM crops on
the grounds that they were perfectly safe for human health.
This interest in corporate science is, of course, quite
natural for a man who has been an academic scientist prior
to entering the Commons. For ME sufferers, however, Gibson’s
involvement with the various groups above must sound alarm
bells. As I explained in Brave New World of Zero Risk, the
lobby groups which are presently spinning news on behalf of
corporate interests and New Labour are the joined up version
of the quackbuster group HealthWatch (in fact, members and
ex - members of HealthWatch actually write unattributed copy
for members of these lobby groups).
One of the prominent founding members of HealthWatch was
Simon - now Professor - Wessely. Wessely is now a senior
member of the Science Advisory Panel for the Science and
Media Centre, a member of the US American Council on Science
and Health advisory panel, a leading member of the R,RSA, an
obscure group inside the Health Protection Agency, set up to
spin all public health threats, and he is still deeply
involved in the corporate manipulation of ME information.
Yet another prominent member of this new generation of Lobby
organisations is Michael Fitzpatrick, an East London GP who
has written in purple prose about false beliefs held by
people who claim that they have the physical symptoms of ME.
The fact that the ‘Independent Inquiry’ into the skewing of
government policy on ME towards the psychiatric lobby, which
Gibson promised, turns out to be neither an ‘Inquiry’ nor
‘Independent’, is par for the course. Before even the
composition or the personnel of the Inquiry had been
announced, the Independent Inquiry suddenly metamorphosed
into a ‘Scientific Group on ME’ situated in the offices of
Tony Wright MP, the last Chair of the Parliamentary group on
ME.
So, after twenty years of getting by on a wing and a prayer,
without the slightest evidence to support their bizarre
belief that ME is a psychiatric condition, the psychiatric
lobby has wised up. How much better it would be for the
psychiatric lobby to colonise the area of physical
scientific research into ME. Of course, there is a vast
difference between gathering information about scientific
research into ME – little of which has been done for obvious
reasons – and supporting this same research.
We have a good example of how the corporate science lobby
groups deal with scientific research in the position that Dr
Fitzpatrick and others have taken on Dr Andrew Wakefield’s
research. There is only one genuinely scientific resolution
to an argument within scientific research, that is, to
independently replicate research and compare results.
Instead of doing this, the ‘science lobby’, supported by
government and pharmaceutical companies, used research
reviews like the recent Cochrane Review, which compared
studies focussed either on MMR or Autism, to discredit
Wakefield.
Inevitably, there has been precious little physical
scientific investigation into ME, in Britain. The reason for
this is obvious; all the money and the power is held by the
psychiatric lobby the posturing of which, over ME suits the
government and the corporations. Once again, with the
declaration of an ‘Independent’ Inquiry, the ME community
has been thrown into confusion by a honeymoon offer from
their detractors. The singular lack of political analysis
amongst some of the most prominent figures in the ME
community, has yet again led these long-suffering
individuals down another blind alley.
The conflict between the psychiatric lobby and those who
believe that ME has a physical aetiology is now intractably
dominated by vested interests. The PRIME Project, the
‘Independent’ Inquiry and the network of clinics set up by
the NHS, under the guidance of Professor Pinching, all
constitute major advances by the psychiatric lobby.
Unfortunately, after twenty years of denigration, many ME
sufferers and their carers are still avoiding crucial
political questions and failing to work autonomously towards
what should be their two main objectives.
The first, a political objective has to be the organisation
of a far reaching independent and judicial investigation
into the psychiatric lobby and, the second, more practical
objective, the establishment of an ‘independent’ national
research fund, which will be used to establish and conduct
research entirely into the physical causes of ME by medical
researchers unaligned to either corporate or psychiatric
interests.
There comes a time in all political struggles when accepting
the hand of friendship from a suspected or traditional
enemy, or even entering into a dialogue with them is simply
to commit Hara Kiri, in public without the honour. Until the
ME ‘community’ has built a solid and cohesive movement
opposed to the psychiatric and corporate lobbies, until they
begin to close in on either of the two objectives above, it
would appear wise for them to adopt the ‘precautionary
principle’ and maintain a moratorium on listening to or
consorting with anyone who comes bearing gifts or
‘Independent’ Inquiries.
Martin J. Walker
8 November 2005
