IMA President Dr. Joseph Varon joined investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson on Full Measure to discuss a problem hiding in plain sight: the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the world’s most prestigious medical journals. As Dr. Varon explained, journals that draw more than half their income from Big Pharma have a built-in incentive to publish favorable research. The segment features striking examples of retracted and compromised studies from publications like The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, alongside corroborating testimony from former NEJM editor-in-chief Dr. Marcia Angell.
It’s exactly this dynamic that led Dr. Varon and IMA to launch the Journal of Independent Medicine—a peer-reviewed publication built from the ground up to operate free from pharmaceutical industry influence. Watch the full segment above and read the complete transcript below.
Have a look below for the full interview transcript. And check out these links for more on the Journal that is changing the medical science landscape for the better:
Transcript
Attkisson: This week, an upstart medical journal bucking the system, claiming to be free of pharma influence.
Welcome to Full Measure. I’m Sharyl Attkisson.
It’s been an open secret for decades. Some of the most prestigious medical journals in the world are the source of biased or even incorrect medical information at the highest levels. Information that’s distributed to our doctors and medical institutions, where it’s then used to mistreat and sometimes harm us.
Now, a bold new medical journal has launched with a mission to publish unbiased scientific research free from pharmaceutical industry influence.
For decades, the world’s most prestigious medical journals have been trusted as the gold standard for scientific research. But many doctors who rely on them don’t know a shocking truth: much of the information is slanted or untrue.
Dr. Varon: There is no question that these journals have been taken hostage by Big Pharma. There is no question about it.
Attkisson: Doctor Joseph Varon is a critical care specialist and president of the Independent Medical Alliance. The group started in 2020 as the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance for medical professionals who developed treatment protocols for COVID that often contradicted mainstream narratives.
Dr. Varon: We recognized that all these journals were being kidnapped. We were even sending our papers of good data, and they were getting rejected because we did not have a big pharmaceutical backup behind us. So very early, even before we became the Independent Medical Alliance, I had the idea that we needed a journal—an independent journal that would allow independent practitioners, independent key opinion leaders to write papers that were clean, were bias-free.
Attkisson: Doctor Varon has now started a new publication, the Journal of Independent Medicine, aiming to tease the bias out of medical publishing.
Insiders like Doctor Marcia Angell have long sounded alarms about deep conflicts of interest in the journals. She was editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and spoke with me in 2017 about what she learned working at the journal starting in the 1970s.
Dr. Marcia Angell: Starting about then was when you saw the drug companies assert more and more control, until finally, over the next couple of decades, they began to treat the researchers as hired hands. They would design the research themselves. You can do a lot of mischief in how you design a trial. “We’ll test this drug and we’ll tell you whether it can be published or not.” And so if it’s a positive study, it’s published. If it’s a negative study, it never sees the light of day.
And so I became extremely distrustful of most of the research that was published. We did our very best. We often rejected things because it was clearly biased. But anything we rejected always ended up in another journal.
Attkisson: Doctor Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, has also cited flagrant conflicts of interest. In 2015, he wrote: “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
Dr. Varon: These journals—they want the revenue. Let’s just be honest. They want the advertisements that they can add to their journal. And unfortunately, good science is being lost, or at least it’s not being distributed in a way that people can look at it.
Attkisson: It’s not just advertising. Journals also rake it in when drug companies buy reprints of favorable studies to promote their products, often paying hundreds of thousands to millions per article. Drug makers pay journals to publish sponsored supplements, which critics say disguise industry-backed content as science. And pharma pays collective billions each year for journals to offer selected articles free to anyone—open access, without a subscription—so that more people can see them. It’s estimated that just six major publishers collected $2.5 billion related to open access fees in 2023.
Dr. Varon: When you have journals that get more than 50% of their income from Big Pharma, you know that they’re going to publish things that are favorable to these particular companies, so you lose credibility.
Just to give you an example: there is a study that was published a few years back in the New England Journal of Medicine related to vaccines. And when you look at the authors, over 90% of the authors work for the company that made the vaccine. If I was the editor-in-chief of that journal, I would say, “No, this paper doesn’t come in, because that’s a huge conflict of interest.” But obviously, if you are getting money, if you’re getting revenue—you’re not going to say, “I’m not going to accept you,” because if not, you’re going to shut down.
Attkisson: Here are just a few prominent examples of problematic published studies.
The EXCEL trial in the New England Journal of Medicine, paid for by stent maker Abbott, concluded stents were better than heart bypass surgery. Critics later alleged data manipulation and withholding evidence showing there were actually more deaths with stents.
In The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, there was rushed publication of two studies claiming the drug hydroxychloroquine harmed COVID-19 patients. Both studies were later retracted amid fraud concerns, but only after they’d steered people away from treatment that might have saved lives.
The chief medical officer at New York cancer center Memorial Sloan Kettering, Doctor José Baselga, authored dozens of articles promoting cancer treatments in leading journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. But he failed to disclose he’d received nearly $3.5 million in payments from drug companies whose products were favorably mentioned. After The New York Times and ProPublica exposed the scandal, Baselga resigned.
Merck published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine promoting its painkiller Vioxx, but the study omitted key data and downplayed cardiovascular risks. Vioxx was later pulled from the market after tens of thousands of heart attacks and deaths.
And GlaxoSmithKline published a study on Paxil claiming the antidepressant was safe and effective for teenagers. That wasn’t true, and now the medicine carries strong warnings about risk of suicide in young people.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: I’ve come here today to announce my candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
Attkisson: Before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became President Trump’s head of Health and Human Services, he was running for president. Then, he highlighted what he considers corruption in the journal industry.
Kennedy: I will call the medical journals into the Attorney General’s office, and I will tell them that we’re going to prosecute you, because the journals are now lying to the public—lying constantly. They’ve become vessels for mercantile propaganda from the pharmaceutical industry. And so I’m going to call them in and tell them that we’re going to file racketeering suits against them, because they’re lying to the public, they’re committing fraud. And they are the object of huge injuries to the public, because doctors are relying on what they saw in those journals.
Attkisson: Doctor Varon says it’s not only what the journals publish, it’s also what they refuse to publish that matters. And he’s looking to give ink to some of those articles.
Do you have an example of a study or two that you’ve published that you think might not have seen the light of day otherwise, that has important data?
Dr. Varon: Well, we recently have a couple of papers, especially as it pertains to the use of alternative treatments for the treatment of cancer. I can tell you that particular paper, done by Doctor Paul Marik and Doctor Justine Hope, would not have seen the light of day in any other journal. And it’s good data—scientifically sound. It went through a full peer review, and we got it in. And it’s one of the most downloaded papers that we have.
Attkisson: Have you been getting pushback from the journal industry, or do they care that you’ve started this journal for the reasons that you’ve done so?
Dr. Varon: Oh, we’ve had so much pushback, it’s not even funny.
Attkisson: What kinds of things happen?
Dr. Varon: For example, editors-in-chief from other journals, well-renowned journals: “Oh, you guys are not going to be able to make it,” or “You will not get indexed.” “You guys are just putting stuff about ivermectin.” It’s like—no, we’re doing narrative reviews of medications that we believe are important repurposed drugs that can be used for other things. We’re not pushing the narrative one way or the other. We’re just wanting to put in good science.
