(0:00 - 0:55) Sharyl Attkisson is one of the world's top investigative journalists. She worked with CNN as a reporter and anchor for seven years, then with CBS as an investigative journalist for over 20 years, before leaving in 2014 when the network began suppressing her reporting. Sharyl is a five-time Emmy Award winner, as well as a recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative journalism. She is also the author of several books, most recently Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures and Prevails. I contacted Sharyl for this interview after reading her book and her recent blog post 100 Health Priorities for the Nation in 2025. While written from an American perspective, Sharyl's insights are just as relevant to us here in Canada, and perhaps even more so. (0:56 - 1:24) In this interview, Sharyl exposes the many ways in which Big Pharma influences policy, the media and public perception. But more importantly, she suggests practical solutions for fixing our healthcare systems, so they can once again serve the health of the people, and not the bottom line of pharmaceutical companies. Sharyl, welcome to the show. (1:25 - 2:33) Thank you. And I appreciate your time so much today, Sharyl. We were talking just before the interview that I'm a little bit humbled to be interviewing you because you have decades of experience as an investigative journalist, and I've only been doing this for a few years. But I read... first contacted you in regards to your post 100 Health Priorities for the Nation in 2025, which really focuses on solutions. But also, I recently read your book, Follow the Science, How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures and Prevails. And once again, as an investigative journalist, you raised some things that even I hadn't known about. And I kind of like to start at the beginning of the book as sort of a framework, because there were two major events that sort of led you to where you are now and having read that book and done all of this. And that was the vaccines, the smallpox vaccines in the military, which killed a friend of yours, and the horrific baby oxygen study. Could you talk about those, please? Well, I just wanted people to understand that I didn't come into the issue of covering medical health scandals as someone that just doesn't believe anything and doesn't believe anybody. (2:33 - 3:03) I was like most people out there, trusted the medical establishment. My daughter got all her vaccines. There was no skepticism on my part. Probably, it deserved a bit more than I had because I'm a journalist, but it just never occurred to me that studies would be wrong and doctors wouldn't tell the truth and scientists would do unethical things. So, in the book, I've selected some of the true life accounts of the things that took me down this path of understanding what really goes on. And it began around after the 9-11 attacks in 2001. (3:04 - 6:48) CBS News assigned me as an investigative journalist to cover the restart of the smallpox vaccine program, which was the thought that now there could be a biological weapons attack using smallpox because the terrorists were, you know, out to get us. And the vaccine itself can be problematic even more so than other vaccines. So, they had stopped giving that routinely because the risks had not been considered big enough to validate or to have a reason to use the vaccine. Now, all of a sudden, they're like, yes, we want to use the smallpox vaccine. I learned pretty quickly to my surprise about all kinds of side effects and adverse events that can happen with smallpox vaccine and came to learn other vaccines too. But I just remembered that was an eye-opener to me. I didn't understand the biological mechanisms about a vaccine that could give you blood clots and myocarditis, problems with your heart and so on. But pretty early on, they had a very aggressive program in the government to follow the people getting the smallpox vaccine under this restart. They were going to start with military and first responders first, but they wanted to carefully monitor their health to see if there were adverse events and reactions. And there were. And unfortunately, some of them were among the military. And one of them was an NBC journalist, David Bloom, a colleague of mine, who was embedded with the army at the time covering Iraq. And he died of a blood clot. Some people may recall this, even though it was quite a while ago, it made huge headlines. And I was already covering the smallpox restart. And I understood that A, his death as someone who would have received the smallpox vaccine to be embedded with the military with a mandatory report for this database that was going to track any death or adverse event that happened after smallpox vaccine to see if there's a connection to the vaccine. So I knew he had to be reported. And I knew that that that was the first question that really should be asked. But nobody was asking it. And I started thinking I wasn't even a medical slash health reporter, just an investigative journalist. I'm asking these questions. Come to find out his death had not been properly reported by either the civilian authorities, because he was a civilian, or the military authorities who he was traveling and embedded with. So I saw that as a cover up, first of all, because they knew better. And second of all, I think it was just important people understood what the vaccine could do, as I was learning as well. Ultimately, I broke the story that his death had not been properly reported, that it could potentially be linked to the smallpox and slash anthrax vaccine, because you get more than one when you're in the military. And as a result of my reporting, his death was reported. And ultimately, because of other civilian injuries and deaths, the smallpox vaccine restart program was halted. They did away with it because they decided the risk of the vaccine outweighed the risk of the biological weapon. Again, a huge eye opener for me. And I remember asking someone as I was learning about vaccines, one of the scientists who was a source of mine in the government, for the first time I said to him and to myself, what about childhood vaccines? Like if occasionally a vaccine can cause these problems and someone can drop dead, a healthy, young, relatively young person, what happens when sometimes you give these to babies? And the person said to me, I'm not touching that third rail. I'm not going there. I didn't know it was a controversy, but that really got the wheel spinning in my mind. And it was something that kind of shocked me because when you went to cover the stories with the military, you showed up with your vaccine card and they ignored it and jabbed you again. (6:49 - 8:09) And so what that leads me to wonder about, and I don't know if you have any information on this, but if this is what they're doing to the military, giving the... And we've already... Something might discuss later on in the interview is the effect of being given a whole bunch of vaccines at the same time. The fact that the other thing you related in your story about the military vaccinations is that they're often not telling you what they're injecting you with. How much could this be contributing to making the military less effective by causing illnesses and reactions and health problems with our soldiers? Well, they would argue that it would be worse for them to go to these foreign countries and face these potential viruses that they're not protected against. But I think the other side of this coin is to argue that a lot of them are being farmed, sometimes in chronic ways that are not easily measured in the short term. I mean, sometimes, yes, it's catastrophic. I covered the case of the poor soldier, Rachel Lacey, who dropped dead after her multiple vaccines, and I believe it was in boot camp. A recommendation came from that that you shouldn't give all the vaccines at once, but to my knowledge, they still do. You know, they were saying you can spread those out by weeks and weeks because everybody knows side effects can be worse when you give them together. But I feel like there really wasn't the recognition in the military. (8:10 - 9:12) They just seemed tied in with the vaccine industry at high levels. I learned that at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, there was a whole ward, a whole floor that was just vaccine injured for soldiers that if they could get there, because usually they were accused of malingering and ignored, and sometimes just ejected from the military when they got sick from vaccines. But occasionally, if they had enough documentation and someone who would listen, they ended up in this ward at Walter Reed, and there was just a huge, you know, not enough beds for all of them that were having the reactions. So, yes. And I think it probably contributes to what we consider post-traumatic stress disorder. They sometimes come out with concussive brain injuries from training and from bombs and so on. But the vaccines that can cause brain injury as well, sometimes in a chronic sense, not just an acute one-time thing, I feel like that contributes to the overall picture. And yes, some of the soldiers knew what vaccines they got. But typically, the soldiers who were injured told me they could never tell because they would give them together. (9:12 - 10:26) They weren't told sometimes when they asked what they were being given. And I came to believe that was by design. If you gave one shot at a time, it would be a lot easier to say the flu shot caused this Guillain-Barre paralysis in this soldier, which happens. But when you give them all at once, it's hard to say which one did it. It's hard to say, you know, if it was related. I just feel like it's easier to brush it under the rug. So, yes, when I was working for CBS News, they required us to stay updated on a battery of vaccines, including some unusual ones that aren't typically given in the States, so that if we had to, on a moment's notice, travel with the military, we were ready. So I had all my vaccines and my little, like you said, my little yellow card that proved everything. And twice when I showed up for missions, they didn't even look at the card. I just got more shots. And years later, after a battery of shots, and I spontaneously lost my sense of taste, and that lasted for about five years, by the way, never would have connected it to vaccines. I didn't understand what they caused back then. I had a doctor that asked me what vaccines I'd had. And so I did go to the military and I said, on this date, you know, you guys didn't tell me what you were giving me, but here's what happened. And they said, well, we don't have any records. (10:27 - 11:04) So how do you not keep records of what you're injecting into people? But I feel like that's all part of the plan, really. Yes. Now, everything we've just been talking about is relevant to informed consent, and I want you to talk about your ideas for fixing that. But before we do, I also wanted you to talk about this horrific baby oxygen study, which I don't know if a person could read it any other way than I did of these researchers did this knowing they were going to kill babies doing it. It's horrific. Well, just so to cover ourselves, they would say no. (11:04 - 12:50) They would say they didn't do anything like that on purpose. But what happened is prestigious research institutions here in the United States, some of the most prestigious hospitals and so on, used federal money in a federal study to enroll a whole bunch of premature, extremely premature babies into a controversial study, which mothers, most of them single African-American women, say they were pressured into signing a consent form, but not told, in most cases, that they were even entering their babies in a study. They were told, oh, this will help your premature baby. You want to help your premature baby? And they'd say yes, and they'd sign something. Well, they had consented to letting their babies take part in an experiment that was not to the benefit of any of the babies, which is a problem with a lot of research, by the way. It's to benefit future people and future babies, but it's not necessarily going to help and it may hurt the people in the study. So, how do you get people to volunteer for that? Well, a lot of times they just don't tell the truth. And that allegedly happened with this study. Babies died as a result. They were randomized into either a high oxygen group or a low oxygen group. Premature babies are usually put on oxygen. Usually, the oxygen is switched around for the baby's needs as they change. But in this case, and this wasn't even in the consent form, even if the parents had read it and understood it was a study, the oxygen monitors were rigged to give false readings of oxygen so that the people caring for the babies in the hospital would not be tempted to adjust the baby's oxygen for their own good. They would be left in their randomized, as someone put it, sort of like the roll of a dice. They would be left into the range that had been decided they would stay in for their study regardless of what they needed. (12:50 - 14:54) So, too much oxygen can cause problems. Too little oxygen can cause problems. I believe too much causes vision problems and blindness. Too little can cause death. They're trying to find a sweet spot. But as a result, some babies were blinded and some babies died. And long story short, an ethics body for the government that's supposed to look at this sort of thing got alerted to it that this was a huge violation of the consent forms and so on. So, instead of fixing it, I think this is where outrage is built upon outrage. The medical establishment comes down on the ethics body and says, you're out of line. You better retract your findings. They start publishing in medical journals. He got spanked down. I never heard from him again. He originally did an interview with me. But he got so spanked down that I think for the next X years, he just laid low in that position and did hardly anything because he found no support among the people he'd need to have support for to take some sort of enforcement action. So, that's just one horrific case. And I'll tie that to today because back then, they did hold a big seminar about kind of what went wrong, what should be changed. This is maybe 10 years ago. And I attended that. And I was shocked to hear half the researchers who spoke at the seminar said, well, you know, we really need to loosen up informed consent. Like the whole problem here was that they didn't give informed consent. But here they're arguing, well, why should we have to give informed consent? Who would want to be taking part in these studies if we told them all of these things? And how are we going to serve the greater good if we can't get people in our studies? I'm like, what? So, fast forward to today. In the past year, actually, now that we're in 2025, I believe it was in late 2023, Congress slash the government, I'm sure at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, passed a law that for the first time in this country, loosened informed consent and gave those researchers the wish that they've been wishing for for over a decade, something they've been pushing for. Believe it or not, now in our country, I'm not sure what your rules are. (14:54 - 15:34) Here, if the researcher decides that the risks of the study are minimal, just like the baby oxygen study, you know, researchers would have claimed, they don't have to even tell you about them. So, now you can enroll in a study and the researcher would have decided, I don't got to tell them anything because I don't think there's very much risk. Problem is, as you see in the book, Follow the Science, many times, researchers have lied or been mistaken in their judgments of these things. So, it's just shocking to me that we've quietly loosened the rules and I would never consent personally to be in a study under the current conditions. Right. And not to mention that by default, if it's a study, they don't know the outcome. (15:34 - 18:04) Right. Absolutely. Now, this gets us into, as I said, informed consent, and you made a number of suggestions in that post about how we can fix this. And I don't think we even need to get into the COVID vaccines because I've covered that in depth in many other interviews about how people were not informed of the risks of those. So, what are your ideas then, Sharyl, for how we could change the system to guarantee that people would be informed? Well, I think we have to go back. That was actually a law and then policy change that said we don't have to get informed consent anymore. So, that has to be changed back. But then even when it's changed back, if it's changed back, the researchers and the industry has to be held accountable when they don't follow it because they haven't followed it. And nothing, it's very rare that I found researchers taken to task where there's any punishment when they make the most egregious sorts of violations. So, something has to be done in terms of punishing or holding people accountable when they violate these rules. And I think there's a big role to be played by medical ethics groups and medical associations that unfortunately have been, I will say, bought out by the pharmaceutical industry. They should be stepping in and making sure standards are kept by the doctors and the people who have licenses to conduct research and so on. So, I think the whole industry needs to be told you got to start doing your job and doing what people expect would be done for you to be able to do experiments on humans. There has to be informed consent. And then lastly, when you go to the doctor, I mean, I don't know about your experience, but I've taken a lot of people to the doctor and I've visited doctors. I don't think I've ever been sat down and told for vaccines what the adverse events are, for drugs other than maybe a passing note, or if I asked what the side effects might be. That's supposed to be done for everybody on the front end. And I'm sorry if they think it's going to scare people away from using a medicine. If knowing the truth scares you away, you deserve to know the truth and be scared away. But I don't think it will have that effect. I think when people have full information, it will simply make it where they watch more carefully. If they may have an adverse event, they understand better if they shouldn't be on a particular medicine based on their own personal risk factors. I think it's actually helpful to the system and I don't think it harms ultimately the notion that people just won't take any medicine. I don't think that happens, but I think we deserve regardless full information on what we're taking and what's being done to us. (18:05 - 18:44) Yeah. And I had an idea when I was reading your points on that, that I wanted to run past you because it goes a little beyond what you were talking about. My own past experience for a long time, I was a realtor and we ran into situations where the market was very hot and people would make unconditional offers and there were risks attached to that. And because I wanted to make sure that my clients understood the risks and that I was also covered, I actually took the initiative to draw up a sheet that listed those risks. I sat down with the client and went over with them saying, these are the risks you're taking on if you make an unconditional offer and I need a signature from you right here that says I explained these risks to you. Now that wasn't required in our industry at the time, but I took the extra step to do it. (18:44 - 21:18) So when you start talking about informed consent and doctors and studies, what do you think of the idea that there should be a list, a printed list of all of the risks and there should be a space at the bottom for them to sign saying this person or doctor or whatever explained all these risks to me, I understand them and I decided I'm going to go ahead anyway. Do you think that would fix a lot of it? I think that's a great idea. And by the way, that's supposed to happen or was supposed to happen with studies, a very explicit signed piece of paper. That's something that's also changed. Even if they decide they are going to give you risks or if the risks are significant and they have to disclose for a study, another change in the law says basically they can chit chat with you, you know, is how I read it. They don't have to do the written thing anymore because I think they're afraid people will read that. And again, the argument is, well, how can we do research to benefit society if nobody volunteers? It's like, well, if nobody volunteers because you told them the truth, then they deserve to know the truth. You have to find another way to do that research. But I think it's a good idea to get something explicit. And if you're like you or me for your own protection, you would want that because you don't want people coming back later saying they misunderstood or they didn't understand or that didn't happen. So it's kind of a no-brainer. And the reason that they don't do it would imply, you know, they're intentionally, they don't want a record. They don't want to give this explicit information. Right. Now, the next area of your points I wanted to get into has to do with limiting the influence of big pharma. And I think one of the best illustrations of that was a story in your book about Aduhelm, the Alzheimer's medication. Could you relate that story, please? Well, not long ago, this drug Aduhelm was understudied by a drug company, had a couple studies going, and they stopped the studies midstream, all the futility finding because they can see early on it's not going to go anywhere. It's just not working. They don't want to waste money and potentially endanger patients in the study by continuing along. Lo and behold, they come back some months later and say, I know we didn't finish those studies, but we kept looking at the data and we found some good stuff in there. It actually does work a little bit for some people. So we want this FDA approval without even one completed study, by the way, one completed large study that's usually required, usually a couple are required. And then the outrage on top of that, the FDA partners with them and makes a joint presentation to the FDA advisors that give advice on this sort of thing. The advisory board is convened. (21:18 - 23:06) The advisors who are typically, by the way, pro-pharma and pro-pharma companies, most of them have contracts with them. They're shocked because FDA is making a joint presentation saying how wonderful this drug is. But the advisors are looking going, there was no study. And you're not allowed to like change parameters of a study midstream to find good things out. You're supposed to the way science works. You come up with a study and your endpoints and all that stuff. You can't like mess with them because they didn't come out right. So there's shock that FDA is making not a neutral presentation, but a non-critical sort of cheerleading presentation about the drug. I think there were 12 members of the advisory committee. None of them said it should be approved. There's safety risks with it. There is no evidence in their mind that it works. So, if it doesn't work and it could harm and the cost was astronomical, it's going to be something like $57,000 a year for a prescription. Think of how many people in Medicare, they said that would bankrupt the Medicare system in like this if all the people who would qualify for it got the medicine at that price. Well, what does FDA do? They ignore the advice of all their advisors and they approve the drug. So, this has happened multiple times. This is just one of the most egregious examples because even people who might normally let it slide were just appalled. There were investigations on Capitol Hill. There were all kinds of probes about why this could have happened. And in Congress, they found it shouldn't have happened. And yet, as usual, nothing ever, no one was held accountable. The drug ultimately was pulled from the market because no one wanted to use it because even the medical industry wouldn't prescribe it and Medicare wouldn't cover it, kind of unusual. So, what happens next? Same company produces a similar drug and under similar circumstances gets that one approved. That comes on the market against similar expense. (23:06 - 24:03) And I believe Medicare is covering it now. And people think there's an Alzheimer's drug that cures Alzheimer's. Maybe it does. I hope it does. But none of the advisors thought that was the And that's on the market today. And I think this raises a point that's a little bit left field, but I think it's something important to talk about is how difficult it is to get the truth across to people. Because in your book, you briefly related the story of a friend of yours who was very excited for her aunt because there's now this drug that was gonna cure Alzheimer's. And you'd already done all this research. And you said, I didn't have the heart to tell her. It's a difficult problem, isn't it? Because the pharmaceutical industry wants to position itself as being the cure-all for everything that sooner or later they'll find a cure to everything. But they're convincing people of that by not telling them the truth. And so, when you and I try to tell people the truth, they don't wanna listen. (24:03 - 24:31) Yeah. Some people do and some people don't. And I've had to use my judgment when people say something or even ask me a question I happen to know something about. It's too much to lay on them because sometimes all the stuff that we've learned and the stuff I've learned over 20 years can't be imparted in one quick conversation. And if you try to summarize it, it all sounds crazy because they don't know the documentation and the citations. It's too much for them. (24:32 - 26:00) And also, with vaccines, I'm not saying don't get vaccinated, but people want specific advice. Well, if this could happen, then what do you suggest? Well, I can't give advice. That's up. The government needs to develop protocols and do good studies that give better advice on an individual basis. So, you get this sticky point where a lot of people don't wanna know or they're overwhelmed. Even if they wanna know, they can't process all the stuff that's taken me 20 years to process. It's not easy to believe and understand and to research this. So, it is hard to get the word out. But then, probably the people watching you and a lot of people that watch me, there are people who do wanna know and are seeking information. And I would argue more so after COVID. So, those information seekers, at least now, there is more information for them to find and be informed about. You make a very good point, Sharyl, that it took you 20 years to get to where you are. I myself, I was a paramedic when I was younger. I was a big believer in allopathic medicine and thought anything else was quackery since then. And it took me years to reach a point where, and I'm not putting words in anybody else's mouth, certainly not yours, I myself have become an anti-vaxxer. I do not believe there's any such thing as a safe vaccine. So, and this is from somebody who in 2016, I went on national television as a spokesperson for the Canadian Cancer Society because I'd had stage four throat cancer caused by an HPV infection. And I went on national television telling people to get their kids vaccinated against HPV. (26:00 - 29:43) I really wish I hadn't done that. And if I'd known then what I know now, I certainly wouldn't have. So it is, it's, the point I'm trying to make is that the depth of deception is so great that it takes people like you and I years, people who are naturally asking questions, years to get to the point of understanding just how deep it goes. So we talked about Aduhelm as one example, but it's just one example of big pharma control because we know they're got influence with the FDA. And it was the FDA that flipped this whole thing around, but they use other strategies. Most of my viewers are well aware of the fact that they buy out most of the medical journals, so they control them. But there's other things, there's ghostwriting. This is from your own list, ghostwriting, hired guns, manipulating data, study money. Could you talk about that a little bit about how big pharma is just controlling the whole narrative? People may not know that the federal government controls pretty much all the public research money. And researchers have long told me that if they want to find out the answer to an important research question, but it's not a priority of the federal government slash their pharmaceutical industry partners, like it's not going to lead to an important drug being discovered or invented, they typically can't get the money. It's much harder. So they have to contort themselves to try to frame the health question or the research in a way that would please the government and make them think of profits to be made by, you know, by discovering this thing or the research doesn't get done. And there's so much important research on causes of disorders, chronic disorders and illnesses, not what to treat it with, but the causes of what's in our food, our water, our medicine, what genetic vulnerabilities we have that contribute with our exposures that make us sick. Those types of research are not getting done because of that reason. I think one more thing that we have to address in regards to big pharma's control of the narrative is their influence over mainstream media. I don't know about what it's like in the U.S., but here in Canada, first of all, our government gives mainstream media $2 billion a year. So expand that for a population of the U.S. 10 times our size, it's like giving the U.S. media $20 billion a year. And we know that our government is getting money from pharmaceutical companies for pushing their drugs on Canadians. So we've got this problem with many times mainstream media is a mouthpiece for governments. And if you've got big pharma financing them, corporations, they're a mouthpiece for them. Do they allow prescription drug ads in Canada on TV? Not on TV, although the laws seem to be changing. For the longest time here, it was completely illegal to advertise prescription drugs, but I'm starting to see signs outside of drug stores. So clearly, and I think I heard an ad on the radio the other day, so I think clearly they've changed those laws now. Well, we're one of the only countries, maybe us and maybe Australia, that legalize prescription drugs on television and in advertising. And that was done in partnership. The broadcast networks, lobbyists at the corporate level, lobbied alongside the pharmaceutical industry on Capitol Hill to get this laws or policies changed where this advertising would be allowed. And from the moment that happened, you know, looking back now, because we're talking the early 2000s to mid-2000s, when it started to become very prolific, the media, in my view, became bought out because no longer were they pursuing the original and interesting questions that impact so many people about medicine and vaccines. (29:44 - 30:38) I was assigned to cover those in the early 2000s. All of a sudden, mid-2000s, L.A. Times, Washington Post, New York Times, the other networks, they had all been covering these stories. Now they're not covering them. Now they're starting to use the newly invented anti-vaccine term. That term didn't exist if you look in the literature or if you even look in popular culture before the 2000 time period, at least to any meaningful degree. That was a propaganda effort by the pharmaceutical industry to be sure that if anybody looked at vaccine safety, which it's natural to do and should be done, product goes in almost every American child, probably every Canadian child too, anybody that looks at that and raises questions, scientists, media, and so on, to be called anti-vaccine. And that really resonated and took hold for some reason, makes people quit thinking critically all of a sudden when they hear that phrase. But the media took up the mantle. They quit independently looking at these stories. (30:39 - 33:21) They started to understand where their bread was buttered. And I would argue today, they don't even have to affirmatively reach into the newsrooms like they used to do in lobby, not to have the stories done. The media just knows not to do them. It's a self-censorship that's become a reality because everybody understands where that money comes from. So once again, talking about solutions, clearly we have a problem here with big pharma having far too much influence over the narrative, over drugs being approved, over the FDA, the CDC. How do we shut that down? I think that's probably beyond what I can advise. And I think Robert F. Kennedy has thought more about this than any other person who may be in a position of power to do something about it. He's talked about before he got named to, we'll see if he gets confirmed, but before he got nominated for HHS secretary here in the States, he talked about eliminate advertising, make it like it used to be, make it like it is in every other country because that would go a long way toward not only people not seeing the influence themselves of drugs maybe they don't need that they're going to press their doctor to give them. Maybe more importantly, it releases the media from making so much money off the industry that they then can't report fairly on the industry when it's really so important to do so. So I think that's a huge thing that can be done. As far as pulling out the influence of the drug industry with our agencies, I don't know how you do it. It is so intertwined. I mean, at nearly every level, so many people benefit from that relationship and it's gone on for so long. So I'm not sure, I'll bet they have a plan and I'm not sure what the plan is and how it will be executed, but something's got to be done if we're serious about this. And I agree. I think it would be extremely difficult to prevent corporations, even big pharma from giving money to independent media organizations, even if they're big ones. But here's one thing I do think could be done. And this comes to some of your comments about transparency. I think that all of these media outlets should publish on their websites how much money they've gotten and from who. I agree. I think that's a fabulous suggestion. I think beyond the media, people would be shocked to know how many innocuous sounding nonprofits that sound like they're for the patient actually were started by or funded by or controlled by the pharmaceutical industry or chemical industry. American Cancer Society, Every Child by Two, a vaccination advocacy group. These are places that are taking tons of money from the people that they speak about as if they are neutral. (33:22 - 34:27) The American Medical Association, all of these groups have now been touched by, I would argue and allege, the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and the money. But if they had prominently on everything you read on their websites, and I mean on their homepage, not hunting around, you know, hey, funded by Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, we're funded by a lot of money from Merck, you know, tons and tons of money from Merck. So when you read our vaccine information page that contains misinformation, at least you see at the bottom brought to you by a vaccine maker. At least people can do, you know, it's easier for them to do their critical thinking on that. And I would say that's as simple, at least in the U.S. as federal legislation. If Donald Trump was to pass a law that says every organization out there that is receiving money that is not, you know, directly going into, say, an ad that's gonna be put on a screen so people can see what it is, who's receiving money for something that the people wouldn't see, they have to publish that information prominently online, on their website, and there will be severe penalties for withholding information or misrepresenting. (34:27 - 38:37) And I think that's... Particularly if you limit that to in the states, if you say, it's any group that receives any federal money or benefit, and most all of them take tax benefits, most all of them are somehow connected to the federal government and get some benefit, and you can regulate them because they touch the federal government. I'm not sure you could maybe also try to regulate entities that have no connection to any tax benefit or federal government, but I think it'd be simple to regulate the ones that do. Right. So now we get into, and we've kind of touched on this a little bit, but we need to go into more depth, overhauling these various organizations that control all of this, the CDC, the FDA, HHS, hopefully that's happening now under Donald Trump and RFK Jr., and Jay Bhattacharya has been nominated to head up the NIH. Of course, for those who don't know, he's the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a very well-established epidemiologist. But we have these organizations, government organizations that should be protecting people have been so heavily infiltrated by big pharma that they're doing the opposite, they're hiding information. And one example I wanted to address on this was the link between MMR vaccines and autism, which has been going on now for 25 years plus. You know from your research that there very definitely is a link. I know there's a link. I interviewed Andrew Wakefield, who was the first doctor to raise the alarm on that. And during the interview, he mentioned that he had since been exonerated that a whistleblower had come forward from the CDC to verify that link. And he didn't mention a name, but I'm kind of wondering, because I'm going to read a quote from your book, Dr. William Thompson, regarding the CDC study on vaccine autism link. And this a direct quote, folks. We scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the study. They're actively hiding it. They knew and they were actively hiding it. There are many examples of that, and I've chronicled some of it in the book and some of my websites over the years. The notion that the government still implies or people still say vaccines can't cause autism or there's no link is so ignorant and wrong that I don't know where to begin with that, because there's so much proof of the opposite, including not just that study, many studies. But this is one concrete example that you mentioned, where the CDC senior scientist, Dr. Thompson, said, we defrauded, we meaning he and his CDC colleagues, we defrauded the public. We literally threw data in a trash can, you know, because we wanted the data to come out differently. It was a study on MMR vaccine and black boys in Atlanta. And the results were pretty alarming and the link between autism and when they got the shots. When they teased the data, this happens all the time with studies, they keep working with it, working with it, taking out some of the population, taking out some of the kids that are older that might be more likely to be, you know, diagnosed with autism, adding more younger babies that are too young to even be, you know, diagnosed with autism. Then they finally get it where it doesn't look so bad. So, the study was ultimately published and it did show an association between MMR vaccine and autism in these black boys in Atlanta. But as usual, like when the studies like that come out, even though that was bad, it wasn't as bad as it had been before they, I will say, toyed with the data. And secondly, all of a sudden, all the propagandists come out and spin the study and the press is too ignorant to read for themselves. All of a sudden, that's not a study that shows what it shows. It's something quite different. So, it's pretty shocking. That's just one really egregious example because that scientist ultimately, his conscience got the better of him. He said that there were multiple instances of this sort of thing happening over the years. He filed a sworn affidavit. He saved the original data in a safe and called a lawyer. So, you think, oh, this is what we're waiting for. Finally, an inside whistleblower at a senior level, he's going to talk, he's willing to talk to Congress. (38:37 - 39:03) What happens? Congress won't do a hearing on it. The Democrats and Republicans here at the highest levels will not allow it. And I've done stories with Democrats and Republicans on camera saying so, that their leaders will not allow it. So, this scientist finally tells the truth and he's a cry in the dark because no one's going to hold a hearing or do anything about it. To my knowledge, he's still employed at CDC, kind of keeps his mouth shut and there it is. All that data is there. (39:04 - 41:34) There's also examples, not just NMR vaccine. There are many things scientists believe. Autism is just what we call certain forms of brain damage. It's documented that vaccines can cause brain damage, encephalopathy. That's not controversial or in question. So, the government has long tried to say, well, maybe it causes some brain damage, but not this specific form of brain damage that we've labeled as autism. And yet I had a whistleblower tell me, and I've documented this, many cases in federal vaccine court that have been paid for kids who had encephalopathy, brain damage, after vaccine that was autism in form. But as long as they didn't say autism in their original complaint and it was just encephalopathy, they got paid. The government knows and admits it. They just know not to say autism in the complaint form because that opens up a can of worms. And then lastly, I'll just mention there's so many. There was a case in vaccine court of a little girl named Hannah Poling. I don't know if you're familiar with it, some years ago. And a bunch of cases were about to be heard in vaccine court to set the standard do vaccines for any various reasons, the mercury in them or the MMR vaccine or the DTP vaccine, do they cause autism for these various reasons? And I got called in, this is in the book, by a source of mine, high-ranking source in vaccine court. I worked at CBS and he says, well, decision's about to come down. And at least one of these cases, these test cases that we're working through to determine this answer is going to be founded that, yeah, the vaccine's caused autism. I'm like, whoa, this was years ago. So he says, I'm only telling you so you can be prepared because you know I was covering the issue heavily at CBS News. So he gives me a brief, he says it's going to bankrupt the trust fund that pays these kids because there's too many autism cases. So many are going to be filed. We're going to have to figure out a new way to fund the trust fund because the pharmaceutical industry doesn't pay it. You know, through a special arrangement with Congress, we pay fees on our vaccines and that goes to the victims if they get hurt. So I go back to CBS. I let them know there's going to be a big decision in this case in the next couple of days. Time goes by, time goes by, no decision. Finally, the decision comes and little of the court says parents are crazy to think that vaccines could cause autism. It didn't cause autism in any of these test cases. They're all thrown out. And I'm thinking, what happened? Because I knew from the best source that was not what they were going to find. We found out through a leak a couple years later about the case of Hannah Poling. (41:34 - 41:50) Hannah Poling was a test case that they were going to admit vaccines caused for autism. Why were they going to finally admit it? Well, their expert witness on behalf of the government vaccine industry. He came around to saying, changing his mind, vaccines do cause autism after all sometimes. (41:50 - 41:54) That was a huge sea change for him. He testified two later. Nobody knew it at the time. (41:55 - 43:11) So he thought vaccines caused for autism. So if he's admitting it, they don't have a defense anymore. Number two, her dad was a Johns Hopkins neurologist. They can't paint him as a crazy parent that doesn't know what he's talking about. Her mom was a nurse and a lawyer. They can't paint her as a crazy parent that just thinks the kid got autism from vaccines and didn't. What do they do? They quietly paid his family a lot of money for the child's care. They have the case sealed. So no one would ever know that they'd admitted to it. And then they in front of the public went out and said, there's no link between vaccines and autism. Everybody knows that. That's just one egregious example. There is a major stock market crash coming that will rival the crash of 1929. But there is a way to not only protect your wealth, but profit in the coming crash. The stock market chart today looks exactly like the charts prior to October, 1929. Banks are disastrously over leveraged and several major US banks have already failed. And the CDIC, the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation, doesn't have nearly enough money to cover depositors. 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By clicking the link below to contact New World Precious Metals, you will also be helping to support our efforts to bring Canadians to truth as we are an approved affiliate partner. And that just... And once again, you and I know this link. We know the statistics and what changed. Today, one in 36 kids are diagnosed with autism. You and I are about the same age. When I was a kid, I didn't know what autism was. We didn't have autistic kids in the school. You and I got a handful of vaccines. Now, I don't know what the stats are in the U.S., but here in Canada today, the average child gets 72 vaccines and many of them at the same time, sometimes as many as 16 at the same time. And yet, they continue to cover this up and they're doing it by controlling the government organizations like the CDC, the NIH, the FDA. Here in Canada, they control Health Canada so that that information does not get out. Now, hopefully, we're going to see some improvements as we were talking about earlier with some of the people that Trump was appointed to take over these organizations. But it's deeper than that. There's only so much a person who's a head of an organization can do when many of their underlings are being paid by Big Pharma or are plants from Big Pharma. And how many times have you and I done our homework and found that somebody who was in one of these organizations either worked for Big Pharma before they came in or went to work for them afterwards? How do we solve this? Well, it's a good question. It's interesting to see in the last week or so, the Trump administration is suggesting big things like shut down the Department of Education or closing USAID, the Agency for International Development. All the employees are locked out so we figure what's going on. Those are big things. It's got to be... I'm not saying they should do that or I know what they should do. But you're right, little things aren't going to change the culture and what's been embedded in these agencies for decades. It's got to be a big thing. And I don't know what the big thing is. I actually don't think... There's a school of thought, wow, if you were to let go of all the smart people at CDC tomorrow, the agency would fall apart. Listen, even CDC's biggest supporters after COVID said it needed to be blown up from the bottom up. It failed a job wanted. It's the critical mission. Everyone thinks CDC is a mess. I don't think if you blew up CDC, and I'm not saying everybody should be fired, just by way of example, let's say you wipe out everybody at CDC, I don't think you lose that much. We didn't make many, if any, good decisions during COVID and I would argue those people should be gone. And fresh people should be brought in that proved to be correct about these things. It's easy to look at a track record now and say, why would we want to keep all the same people that gave us misinformation and wrong information? Why wouldn't we want to sweep in a lot of people who proved independent thinking and correct in retrospect about important things? Why don't we want them in our federal health agency? It's so big, but something very big needs to be done if we're going to wipe away this influence. Yes. That brings us to something that's that... And you didn't really refer to this in your book, but I'm sure you know this. This goes back well over a hundred years, all the way back to John Rockefeller taking over the medical colleges and training doctors to basically be drug pushers for big pharma. And it's gotten so bad that I won't even almost go to a doctor anymore because all they're going to do is want to write me a prescription rather than perhaps addressing what the root problem might be. This is another huge one. They fund these colleges, they give incentives to doctors to push their drugs on people. How do we fix that one? Again, I think the colleges, the medical associations, the ethics board that are supposed to firewall for this sort of thing, private industry's supposed to do that. They're not. I don't know how you make them do the thing that they're supposed to do. I don't know how government steps in and do it. I'm not a big proponent of the government stepping in and doing a ton of stuff, but something has to be done. I mean, can we talk about the Merck Manual for a moment, which some people call the most popular medical reference used in med school, published by medical pharmaceutical vaccine maker Merck, publishing the medical reference teaching doctors. So for the book, I looked in it to see what information they had, and I found so much false information and misleading information just at a glance. One example, well, what does Merck say about their controversial HPV vaccine in their manual where they're teaching doctors? They falsely had a paragraph in there that said there had been no serious adverse event reports. I about choked when I saw that because you look at the label for the HPV vaccine, it warns of everything from paralysis to death, but doctors are taught in the Merck Manual that Merck's vaccine has no serious adverse events reported. And since I've been talking about this, they removed that line from their online version of the Merck Manual. Did they replace it with the truth, what the real adverse events are so doctors understand and know what to look for? No, they just left a blank there. You know, it's not addressed at all. So doctors aren't taught to look for this, to your point. Doctors are steered, you know, in innocuous way that they may not even recognize in medical school on to not look for root causes, to not look for medical side effects. And this is why we're treated the way we are when we go to our doctors. It's not that they're intentionally trying to make us sicker and not make us well. They don't know better unless they're critical independent thinkers that have time to do a lot of extra research. They know these things that are taught to them in med school. Right. And I have to confess, I don't have a solution either. The reason being that it would be extremely easy, even if you got a government to pass legislation that says that a big pharma company can't give money to a medical college. Well, they have all these shell organizations and charities. (50:34 - 50:59) They always find a way around it. They could funnel money in. They always find a way around it. So I think we have to agree, we don't really have a solution for that one, but we sure do need to find one. I heard Dr. Jay Bhattacharya say, I think he told me, more research, you know, people think NIH is an amazing research institution, National Institutes of Health. I don't think they do any research. Maybe they do a little bit. They fund research. They hold the purse strings and they dictate what everybody gets. (51:00 - 56:28) He suggested that more research needs to be done, I believe this was him who suggested it, by the National Institutes of Health, more independent research, not in partnership with the drug companies and funded by taxpayer money. Instead of farming it out to all these special interests, more research needs to be done by the NIH, which I think people would be surprised to know is not being done right now. That's a question I'll have to ask him. I've got an interview with him coming up. Now we've got a few minutes left, Sharyl, and there were certain points that really hit me out of your list of a hundred, and I'd like to have your comments on them. Starting with point number 21, reform the process that collects vaccine and other drug adverse event data. You and I, and most of my viewers are well aware that these vaccine adverse event reporting systems, such as VAERS in the US, we have one here in Canada, there's one in Europe, they're all over the world, and yet they're voluntary. And one of the major problems with them, and I've discussed this with the doctors that wanted to report adverse reactions of COVID vaccines, it takes, I don't know what the process is in the States, I think it's about the same, it takes about an hour for that doctor to fill in all of that paperwork. So you've got a doctor who's probably just done a 12-hour shift, and now they're supposed to take an extra hour per patient who's presenting with an adverse reaction, and the adverse reactions are so common, doctors' offices are flooded with them. We've got to streamline this process, and I think we also have to make it mandatory that if a doctor even suspects that someone is presenting with an adverse reaction to a vaccine or a drug, they have to report it. But to make that practical, we have to make it way more streamlined for them. I think this is, there is an easy solution, and this should have been done and could be done based on technology, you know, years ago. They don't want to do it. It's not just whether a doctor suspects a drug could be causing something. The doctor's not supposed to, at least the way it works in the States, doctor's not supposed to make that decision, and that's a fallacy that they think they're supposed to know, oh, the medicine might have caused this. Well, the point of the database where you report adverse events is they don't know what adverse events are caused by it. If you only report the stuff you already know the drug may cause, you'll never find the new adverse events. You're supposed to report everything that occurs after a medicine or a vaccine, and that goes into a database where someone will then cull through and decide this stuff is unrelated, this stuff, oh, look how many, I broke the story, look how many reports of blindness we have in Viagra. Nobody ever thought of that, but only by looking at this database did they see, does Viagra really cause blindness? Yes, but doctors weren't reporting it because no one ever said Viagra could cause blindness, it's like a loop. So, anyway, every time you get prescribed a medicine, I argue, the next time you go to the doctor or maybe even sent to your home, there should be a voluntary simple check form that asks you if you have anything new has happened to you, you know, has anything changed with your body or your health? And if the answer is yes, all that stuff, it's easy to check off and put into databases, a newly designed database. You would have so much data, which is fine because we have artificial intelligence and we have computers today, so it's not like you're handwriting all of this stuff, we want more data. They don't want it or this would have been done years ago. Your doctor probably doesn't even usually ask you. When someone goes to the hospital, very rarely, I think, does a doctor ever say, what vaccines have you had lately? Did you have the COVID vaccine? They may say what medicines you're on, but they're not even thinking about reporting any kind of adverse event or looking at your illness in that context. And then when you go back to your doctor after he's prescribed you a statin or something, my husband has a statin that he's a double-challenged patient for rhabdomyolysis, a potentially fatal kidney disorder. I diagnosed him because I was covering a story on this. His doctor never asked. He was crawling up the stairs after taking this medicine and getting shots in his knees because they thought something was, he had bursitis or something, and it finally clicked to me because in my stories I said, oh my God, you have that weak leg thing, and sure enough, but nobody had asked. Nobody had said, hey, you're on statins, that's the first thing they should have thought of, you know, and nobody, so anyway, it's changing the mentality that I think is intentionally not there because they're taught not to look at that stuff. They don't realize they're taught not to look for that. And then there are simple ways smart people can create databases to capture a lot more data to find side effects much sooner than we're uncovering them now. I have to say, I think that's a brilliant idea. Very good. Number nine, notify commonly used resources such as YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, WebMD of any changes to make sure they reflect the new information, and I highlighted this one because that would be a 180-degree change from, say, what YouTube is doing now and censoring that information. I myself have been banned on YouTube twice for reporting the truth about vaccines. I mean, they need to, right now, I looked yesterday, doing a story on finarasol, mercury in vaccines, which many entities, including CDC, falsely says was taken out of vaccines in 1999, false, you know, I'm putting together the documentation that shows how many years it continued to be in childhood vaccines and how it's in flu shots today given to children. (56:29 - 1:00:04) They're getting more finarasol today, probably, than they were years ago because flu shots are recommended every year. You know, maybe they would get a couple in shots earlier that were problematic, but that was a two-time thing. Now, they're being told get a flu shot every year. But anyway, that false information still is on, I see the CDC website changing, but that false information is still on there, and I'm looking for it to, someone's got a big job to do and to correct all the things they claim are myths that are actually true, and to go through all the misinformation, start over again, that's a big job. But then, yes, someone needs to affirmatively notify Wikipedia, well, there's no way to notify Wikipedia, it's just a propaganda campaign by individual editors, but they have to get the word out that says, if you're quoting the official government position in censoring people or claiming, you know, myth from fact, here's the official government position now, and make sure that they have the record set. Sharyl, I've saved my favorite of your 100 points for last. I broke into a great big grin when I read this one. Number 75, reward whistleblowers, allow them to recoup a percentage of money saved. That's brilliant. Absolutely. I mean, as we all know, not just in the health context, but in any context here, the whistleblowers are punished, the people they call out are rarely held accountable, the careers who are destroyed are the people that tell the truth. I mean, it's so upside down, but if yes, you gave them a stake, even a small stake in what they reveal is being done to the taxpayer without them having to file what we call a key TAM lawsuit, it's a way to do that here, but they have to lose their job, it may take 10 years, yada, yada. If you could have a good way set up for them to blow the whistle and recoup a bit of the money saved, absolutely. I think that would really go a long way to rewarding the right thing and making sure the wrong thing is punished. And I think we also need to add to that protections for whistleblowers, which I believe used to exist, at least in the US. I don't know if they do anymore. They certainly don't in Canada. There's nothing that really helps. I mean, very little meaningful protection. They have all kinds of rules and laws, but a lot of it's just not been, you know, not being enforced or the mentality or the bureaucracy that still frowns upon it in a way and no one's ever held to account. So. Cheryl, I invited you to this interview, not just because of the things that you reveal in your book, Follow the Science. And of course, you've got decades of experience of it as an investigative journalist, and it really shows in the book. I've been reporting on this stuff now for several years and you revealed a few things that even I didn't know, but also because of that list of 100 points of how we fix the system. And the very fact that there are a hundred points is in itself revealing because it shows just how broken the whole system is in the US, in Canada, around the world. The control of big pharma is just out of this world. Do you have any final thoughts for the viewers on how we turn it all around and we put the power back into the people's hands? Well, knowledge is power. And I'll leave with a hopeful thought that the COVID experience took a lot of people that wouldn't have believed this stuff or weren't really thinking about it and made activists out of them on their own behalf. And I think that's a good thing because they're seeking more information. And a lot of doctors who are kind of going along, they've broken away from what you say, like allopathic or mainstream medicine. (1:00:04 - 1:00:58) They're as good of doctors, if not better than they always were, but they've sought out independent organizations and new ways to treat people so that they get at the cause, so that they're outside the influence of the insurance companies and pharmaceutical industry. So, I'm seeing the growth of a lot of new physicians organizations who are trying to figure out a way to do this. And I think something good will be born of it. And we just have to keep sharing information, getting ourselves informed and looking for these other groups and rewarding these other groups when you see them popping up outside this corrupt mainstream. Cheryl, thank you so much for your time today and for all the hard work that you've put into your investigative journalism, not just in this book, but over the decades, you've had a very illustrious career with five Emmy Awards and the Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative journalism, all very well-deserved. And so, thank you again for all of your efforts. (1:00:58 - 1:01:09) Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. And for our viewers, there will be a link directly beneath the interview to Cheryl's 100 points, as well as to her book on both amazon.com and amazon.ca.