In the era of the post-war years when the subject of biochemistry was being built from its beginnings, scientists had considerable academic freedom and steady funding which was issued with an eye on the long term.  The advances made in science during those years form much of the bedrock of much modern medicine.

But in the 1970s the level of scrutiny on the outcomes of government funded projects increased sharply, and perhaps inevitably after the mass university building of the 1960s created a lot more competition for funding.  While it may well have reduced waste on frivolous projects, it also created drag on all research since those allocating the funds could not possibly have a sufficient understanding of the potential of grant requests.

Then in the 1980s there was a dramatic shift in the philosophy behind research with a drive for more commercial funding of science, which in the case of medical research meant an ever increasing reliance on the pharmaceutical industry which came to dominate the American medical budget over subsequent decades.[102]  There is an obvious divergence between working to understand biological processes, and the mechanisms behind illness leading ideally to its prevention or otherwise to its cure, and the goal of generating maximum revenue from drug sales.  Four decades of medical research ever increasingly motivated by financial return has proved extremely successful at the task with the pharmaceutical sales worth an estimated $603 billion in 2022 in the US alone. [122]  It is a backdrop against which it makes only too much sense that more than half of American children now have chronic illnesses requiring lifelong drug prescriptions.

There has long been evidence that research paid for by the industry is far more likely to promote drug sales than independent research.[103 - 111]  Meanwhile the regulatory capture of both the CDC and FDA is well documented with both agencies now working in collaboration with the industry that they are supposed to be regulating.  In 1994 10% of the FDA drug budget stemmed from industry paid user fees, whereas by 2023 it had become more than two thirds.[112]  And to give just one example of how the same individuals can occupy senior positions in both industry and regulatory authorities, as head of the CDC Julie Gerberding fast tracked the approval of the HPV vaccine made by Merck, and also supervised the cover up of evidence of harm being caused by the MMR vaccine made by Merck[113], and then left the CDC to become head of vaccines for Merck.[114,115]

There has been discussion of the problem in scientific circles.[116]  Foundational research, purely for the sake of venturing into the frontiers of knowledge for its own sake, can only be conducted with public funding which is allocated without prior knowledge of potential applications and with the expectation that some wrong turns will be made.  There need to be more sources for public funding which operate independently of each other so that one body will not be too dominant if it becomes too imbued with a monocular view, or becomes corrupted by outside interests.  Finally, academic research must meet commercial research at a carefully controlled interface.  The ultimate goal is a funding structure of medical research which sees life destroying illness as a problem to be solved rather than a bonanza to be reaped.

At the same time, independent investigatory bodies must assess the harms being caused by modern environmental exposures rather than the investigation being conducted by the authorities that allowed the exposures in the first place.  That sentence ought to be a statement of the obvious.
 

Taking a step back

It is hard for anybody with a sense of human decency to reconcile with the sheer magnitude of the corruption of modern medicine.  That the single industry most devoted to human compassion, with an extremely highly qualified workforce, could have become so destructive seems unfathomable.  The facts are however clear for anybody who cares to look.

In the 1840s Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis demonstrated at a hospital in Vienna that by washing their hands with a lime and chlorine solution before presiding over childbirth, doctors could reduce mortality caused by fever (now known as sepsis) from 18.3% to 1.3%, and that washing medical instruments reduced the number of fevers still further.  Some doctors, mostly in Hungary, took the findings to heart and protected their patients, but the greater part of the medical establishment rejected the idea that doctors were harming their patients, with the majority of doctors continuing to let their patients die.  For a good number of years the mortality rate under the direction of Dr. Semmelweis in what is now Budapest was 0.85% while in Vienna and Prague it was 10 - 15%.  Dr. Semmelweis was ultimately sent to an asylum in 1865, where he died of sepsis.[117]  That same year the work of Louis Pasteur on the role of microbes in illness was taken onboard by the surgeon Joseph Lister, who demonstrated that cleaning surgical instruments with carbolic acid reduced infection and mortality following surgery dramatically.  It was only then that medicine as a whole finally started to change its procedures.

Technology has advanced over two centuries but human nature remains the same.

Future generations will study the early twenty first century, mystified as to just how, and why, so many scientists and doctors, along with political leaders and media, failed or refused to see what was happening right in front of them, and for so long.