Big Pharma uses Big Tobacco’s strategy to defeat Ivermectin, by Justus R. Hope, M.D.

Beware of big pharmaceutical companies offering to conduct studies, especially when the studies are of products that compete with their products. From Justus R. Hope, M.D. at thedesertreview.com:

In the 1950’s scientists Richard Doll and Bradford Hill published a study from the UK finding that the risk of lung cancer was related to the number of cigarettes smoked per day, and this risk was 25 times higher in those who smoked more than 25 cigarettes per day.

Other scientists, namely Ernest Wynder and Evarts Graham, found a strong association between bronchogenic carcinoma and smoking. 96.5% of men with bronchogenic carcinoma were heavy chain smokers compared to 73.7% of the general population. Several extensive studies within one year of each other found the same thing, cigarette smoking is strongly related to lung cancer, and the more one smoked, the higher one’s risk.

The tobacco scientists argued that lung cancer was caused by genetics: if you were born with cancer genes, you developed cancer, and if you weren’t, you didn’t get it. Cigarettes might be associated with cancer, but they argued that more studies were needed if one were to actually “prove a causal link” between cigarettes and cancer. The actual cause of lung cancer, the tobacco scientists concluded, was faulty genetics and not cigarettes.

To assist with these studies, the generous Big Tobacco even offered to fund the research by founding the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. The TIRC is described further in The Emperor of All Maladies, a book I strongly recommend everyone read. The author writes how this ingenious strategy kept the tobacco companies in business and record-breaking profits for the next 50 years despite causing many millions of lung cancer deaths.

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