Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), Breitbart News senior editor, and author of Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, observed on Monday that governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were partially driven by “vested commercial interests” and a corrupt fusion of industry with the state.
Schweizer was joined by his GAI colleague Eric Eggers in co-hosting Sean Hannity’s eponymous radio program.
They interviewed John Leake, co-author of The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, and Dr. Brian Tyson, a physician and co-author of Overcoming the COVID-19 Darkness: How Two Doctors Successfully Treated 7000 Patients. The four discussed what Tyson described as “the biomedical industrial complex” in relation to government decrees and edicts ostensibly issued to reduce COVID-19 transmission as “public health” measures.
Tyson critiqued the top-down bureaucratic construction of ostensibly health-related policies and the logistical disconnections of decision-makers from physicians and healthcare experts treating patients with COVID-19.
Partial transcript below.
PETER SCHWEIZER: Dr. Tyson, tell me, how do you think decisions are being made at the highest level in government today? You heard what John was talking about — this sort of ‘biomedical industrial complex’ — I know certainly you’ve been critical of how the response has happened. This is kind of a systematic problem, right?
We have leaders in Washington, they’re making decisions based on vested commercial interests, in part, maybe another part is based on bad science, but what’s your take on what is driving so much of this bad policy in Washington?
BRIAN TYSON: I think part of the problem — number one — is you have people making decisions who aren’t taking care of patients, first and foremost. To this day, nobody from Washington or even the public health department wants to sit down and have a conversation with me, who’s been taking care of COVID-19 patients for three years now, and we have a substantial amount of data.
We have a great track record, We’ve been using effective early treatments from monoclonal antibodies to repurposed drugs, and nobody wants to seem to have a conversation, but those who are making the decisions tend to be making it on a financial incentive and [for] control issues rather than actual science.
We’ve looked at the data. We’ve seen the data, and we all know that what they did didn’t work, so why are we repeating those same steps? Makes no sense.
Leake described the “biomedical industrial complex” as a “monster” on a path of continuous growth. He noted liability protection extended to pharmaceutical companies within the framework of federal legislation marketed as a tool for emergency governmental responses to crises.
“We’ve seen this monster just grow and grow,” he said. “It really took off in 2005, with the PREP Act — the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act — which granted blanket liability protection to pharmaceutical companies making any kind of so-called pandemic ‘countermeasure.’ The thing that these guys really have erected a religion of are vaccines, but any countermeasure could fall under the PREP Act, and it provides blanket liability.”
Leake explained, “[The [PREP Act] provides the Department of Health and Human Services with the legal authority to declare an emergency, and once that emergency is declared, then you have tens of billions — if not hundreds of billions — in public funds flowing to the beneficiary of this ‘countermeasure’ concept.”
The PREP Act’s fusion of industry and government is too much of a risk of corruption, Leake held. He said it provided “too much of a temptation” for parasitism “when you get that kind of money flowing from public coffers, combined with liability protection, combined with the government assuming all responsibility for marketing.”
“Hence we have this constant lurching from one emergency to the next even when it’s just laughably not an emergency,” he concluded.
Eggers noted that many advocates of abusive government policies such as school closures were less affected by such decrees than most Americans. He referenced the National Center for Education Statistic’s (NCES) annual report on what it dubs the “learning gap,” which contrasts students’ educational performance between ethnic, racial, economic, and other demographic categories. It also compares aggregate performance between fiscal years and against its own pedagogical standards of competency in math and reading.
According the “Nation’s Report Card” published by the NCES, 2019 saw aggregate declines in student performance in both math and reading. It emphasized the dual regressions for students in grades four through eight. Eggers highlighted the report’s identification of the greatest performance declines occurring among the lowest-performing students.
“We now have a generation of students whose lives will be impacted by your point policies that were created by people who won’t actually be impacted by them,” Eggers stated.
Schweizer concurred. He remarked:
Let’s be honest about this and blunt about it. The people that were pushing mask mandates and shutdowns the most were frightened wealthy suburbanites who could do their jobs from home. They’re basically keyboard commandos, right? They work in corporate offices. They work for consultancies, and it’s not a problem. They’re at home with their kids. What happens to the person that works in the food service industry or works in manufacturing? They can’t do their job from home.
So if the schools are shut down and both parents are working, the kids are screwed. The kids are stuck by themselves, and they don’t really have great options. So the damage that was done was primarily done to poor and minority students, and the problem is, these wealthy people in the suburbs in a mad rush, a hyper-rush to, quote — ‘protect themselves’ — ran over people in the process and did all the damage.”
He concluded, “This highlights a really, really important point and that is that there are people making these monumental decisions that never actually feel the impact of their failures.”
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.