How Health Stories Make the News

The following comes from Jon Rappoport, an investigative reporter I have a lot of respect for.

PROMOTING SWINE FLU FOR FUN AND PROFIT

Jon Rappoport
nomorefakenews.com

OCTOBER 23, 2009.
***

During my 20 years of working as a reporter, I have seen public relations efforts gain more and more power over the press.

I’ve uncovered some simple common denominators when it comes to PR. I’m talking about the kind of PR that provokes reporters into doing pieces that adhere to a planned message.

I’ll boil it down.

First, you have a Group. That Group has some combination of prestige, money, and cultivated authority. It has connections.

The Group has a goal. And it wants the public to agree with the goal.

For example: EVERYONE SHOULD GET VACCINATED.

So the Group formulates a PR plan. It doesn’t operate randomly.

There are meetings and conferences, and a Group leader lays out the steps of the plan.

The plan will involve telling certain stories to reporters. These stories will feature hooks that evoke feelings in the public consciousness. Fear and sympathy, for instance.

Designated members of the Group will contact a list of reporters with these stories. The list is time-tested: the reporters will be friendly. They won’t want to dig deeper or ask embarrassing questions.

Because after all, the stories contain lies.

That’s why there is a need for PR.

A PR agency might be hired, or the PR might be run by the Group’s specialists, who already have good media contacts.

Now, by and large, mainstream medical reporters are lazy when it comes to discovering facts and details on their own. They spend a lot of time talking to experts who can feed them fully formed stories.

Therefore, to serve the reporters, the Group has to have these experts on tap. The experts can be Group members, or they can be friendly outsiders.

BUT THEY MUST BE RECOGNIZED EXPERTS IN THEIR FIELD.

In this case, professors of medicine, researchers, medical bureaucrats, prestigious doctors.

Experts are absolutely vital to the Group’s PR plan. As I say, medical reporters, on the whole, love experts, because then the work is easy. There is no need to question the expert’s reliability or look beyond his statements. There is a rarely a need to find an opposing view to “balance out” the piece.

Medical reporters become pets. They open their mouths, and their owners put food in.

The Group anticipates some degree of resistance from less friendly reporters and from the public. The Group’s plan won’t be a complete cakewalk. But by inundating the friendly reporters with stories that have the ring of authority and evoke fear and sympathy, the Group believes it will carry the day.

There is an interesting wrinkle on the “expert strategy.” The Group funds an advocacy organization, and that advocacy organization will assume the status of an expert, cultivate media contacts, and give statements to reporters who are writing stories on certain issues.

For example:

New York Times
Drug Makers Are Advocacy Group’s Biggest Donors
By GARDINER HARRIS
October 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — A majority of the donations made to the National Alliance on Mental Illness , one of the nation’s most influential disease advocacy groups, have come from drug makers in recent years, according to Congressional investigators.

The alliance, known as NAMI, has long been criticized for coordinating some of its lobbying efforts with drug makers and for pushing legislation that also benefits industry.

End NY Times clip

Then we have the infamous case of CHADD. I wrote about that advocacy group ten years ago, and to give you the flavor of how egregious such a situation can get, I’ll quote myself on it at length:

The PBS television series, The Merrow Report, produced in 1996 a program called "Attention Deficit Disorder: A Dubious Diagnosis?" The Educational Writer's Association awarded the program first prize for investigative reporting that year. The piece managed to catch a government official in the act of realizing he had made serious mistakes.

In the film, John Merrow, the series' host, explains that, unknown to the public, there has been "a long-term, unpublicized financial relationship between the company that makes the most widely known ADD medication [Ritalin] and the nation's largest ADD support group."

The group is CHADD, based in Florida. CHADD stands for Children and Adults with ADD. Its 650 local chapters sponsor regional conferences and monthly meetings---often held at schools. It educates thousands of families about ADD and ADHD and gives out free medical advice. This advice features the drug Ritalin.

Since 1988, when CHADD and Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), the manufacturer of Ritalin, began their financial relationship, Ciba has given almost a million dollars to CHADD, helping it to expand its membership from 800 to 35,000 people.

Merrow interviews several parents whose children are on Ritalin, parents who have been relying on CHADD for information. They are clearly taken aback when they learn that CHADD obtains a significant amount of its funding from the drug company that makes Ritalin.

CHADD has used Ciba money to promote its pharmaceutical message through a public service announcement produced for television. Nineteen million people have seen this PSA. As Merrow says, "CHADD's name is on it, but Ciba Geigy paid for it."

It turns out that in all of CHADD's considerable literature written for the public, there is rare mention of Ciba. In fact, the only instance of the connection Merrow could find on the record was a small-print citation on an announcement of a single CHADD conference.

In recounting CHADD's promotion of drug "therapy" for ADD, Merrow says, "CHADD's literature also says psychostimulant medications [like Ritalin] are not addictive."

Merrow brings this up to Gene Haslip, a Drug Enforcement Agency official in Washington. Haslip is visibly annoyed. "Well," he says, "I think that's very misleading. It's certainly a drug that can cause a very high degree of dependency, like all of the very potent stimulants."

Merrow reveals that CHADD received a $750,000 grant from the US Dept. of Education, in 1996, to produce a video, Facing the Challenge of ADD. The video doesn't just mention the generic name methylphenidate, it announces the drug by its brand name, Ritalin. This, at government (taxpayer) expense.

We see a press conference announcing the release of the video. The CHADD president presents an award to Dr. Thomas Hehir, Director of Special Education Programs at the US Dept. of Education.

This sets the stage for a conversation between Merrow and Dr. Hehir, providing a rare moment when discovery of the truth is recorded on camera.

MERROW: "Are you aware that most of the people in the film [Facing the Challenge of ADD---referring to people who are giving testimonials about how their ADD children have been helped by treatment] are not just members of CHADD ... but in the CHADD leadership, including the former national president? They're all board members of CHADD in Chicago. Are you aware of that? They're not identified in the film."

HEHIR: "I'm not aware of that."

MERROW: "Do you know about the financial connection between CHADD and Ciba Geigy, the company that makes Ritalin?"

HEHIR: "I do not."

MERROW: "In the last six years, CHADD has received $818,000 in grants from Ciba Geigy."

HEHIR: "I did not know that."

MERROW: "Does that strike you as a potential conflict of interest?"

HEHIR: "That strikes me as a potential conflict of interest. Yes it does."

MERROW: "Now, that's not disclosed either. Even though the film talks about Ritalin as [one way of] taking care of treating Attention Deficit Disorder. That's not disclosed either. Does that trouble you?"

HEHIR: "Um, it concerns me."

MERROW: "Are you going to look into this, when you go back to your office?"

HEHIR: "I certainly will look into some of the things you've brought up."

MERROW: "Should they have told you that all those people in that film are CHADD leadership? Should they have told you that CHADD gets twenty percent of its money from the people who make Ritalin?"

HEHIR: "I should have known that."

MERROW: "They should have told you."

HEHIR: "Yes."

This funded video, in which CHADD devotes all of twenty seconds to mentioning Ritalin's adverse effects, is no longer distributed by the US Department of Education.

CHADD has now told its members that it receives funding from Ciba. It says it will continue to take money from Ciba.

This is an example of how a corporation can, behind the scenes, bend and shape the way the public sees reality.

So that’s what I wrote ten years ago. An advocacy organization can become a very powerful “expert” for the Group and thereby influence the public. In CHADD’s case, it managed to work directly through a government media outlet, the US Department of Education.

For a third example, one could do far worse than highlight the fundraising machine called the American Cancer Society (ACS), a billion-dollar non-profit. ACS exerts its considerable influence along many fronts: promoting chemotherapy and funding chemo research; affecting media reporting on cancer treatments; and diverting attention away from non-drug cancer prevention that involves removing chemical carcinogens from the environment. ACS also has become a self-proclaimed authority on alternative cancer treatments---which it labels Quackery.

The ACS has, of course, intimate connections with pharmaceutical companies. Saying the ACS fronts for these companies vastly underplays the power it has gained over the years. ACS has risen to the position of equal partner with the cancer-drug industry and, indeed, the US National Cancer Institute, world center for toxic chemo research.

Which brings us to the CDC PR plan for inducing millions of Americans to receive vaccinations for Swine Flu. Or any flu.

A 2006 article in Harper’s lays it all out. The author, Peter Doshi, focuses on the 2004 National Influenza Vaccine Summit, a conference at which Glen Nowak (CDC) used slides to present messages the CDC would project to the public through US media outlets.

Doshi writes, “The [CDC] recipe, as Nowak revealed, relies on creating ‘concern, anxiety, and worry’---its main ingredient, in other words, is fear.”

Doshi continues: “Government officials and health experts following the recipe are instructed to ‘predict dire outcomes.’”

This recipe was, in part, based on experience garnered two years earlier. Doshi: “From a 2002 focus group, the CDC determined death statistics in its flu-prevention literature were ‘eye catching and motivating.’ Participants in the study [focus group] believed ‘20,000 deaths was compelling, frightening,’ and ‘should be part of the headline.’”

Doshi continues: “Another way to ‘motivate behavior,’ the CDC recipe notes…is to describe a flu season as ‘very severe,’ ‘more severe’ than previous years, and ‘deadly’…Yet that winter’s flu season was later ruled typical and ‘medium in terms of impact.’”

Then Doshi unleashes a different kind of blockbuster in the article. Speaking to the CDC ‘deadly’ label, he notes: “After looking at more than three decades of data, scientists at the National Institutes of Health last year [2005] concluded, ‘We could not coordinate increasing vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group.’”

The year 2004 was a strange one for the CDC flu-promotion efforts, and it reveals how disconnected CDC PR can be from the notion of truth. Doshi describes the situation:

“…the [CDC] recipe emphasizes that the public must be made to grasp the ‘seriousness of the illness.’ When 50 million doses of vaccine suddenly became unavailable in 2004, Americans understandably panicked…and medical experts predicted a public-health ‘catastrophe.’ The CDC, with its knowledge of PR, downgraded its scary portrayal of the flu [in general] to ‘an annoying illness’ from which most people ‘will recover just fine.’ It stressed the protective benefits of regular hand washing. And once the alleged crisis abated, the agency [CDC] returned to its strident communications plan. By the next fall, the CDC director was publicly stating that the flu is not ‘a benign illness. Many people don’t appreciate that it can result in hospitalization, various complications. For about 36,000 people every year, death.’”

A few final points. The CDC, through one of its departments, the Epidemic Intelligence Service, sometimes nicknamed “the medical CIA,” recruits young doctors who do a period of work in the field, with various health departments, looking into potential disease clusters and possible epidemics.

After this time of service, these doctors, returning to their practices, remain on call. They are trained to remain loyal to the CDC, and it’s likely that, wherever they work---for health agencies, in other government positions, in hospitals---they push the party line. They promote adherence to CDC PR. They are useful PR alumni.

Some years ago, I learned that the CDC sends a certain number of its people to the CIA for training. (I confirmed this with a Health and Human Services employee.) These people return to the CDC with higher security clearances. In 2009, with the PR lines between “epidemics” and bio-terrorism blurring, it’s certain that the CDC-CIA connection has become more solid and unified.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Every (fake) CDC pronouncement of an epidemic or pandemic, by association, becomes a kind of reference point for the CIA, as it promotes (to the Congress) its own need for greater funding to combat potential bio-terrorism.

Having an ally like the CIA can’t be bad for the CDC. When it comes to telling lies and launching propaganda, the CIA has a great deal of experience. And CIA media contacts are legendary.

Jon Rappoport has worked as an independent investigative reporter since 1982. The LA Weekly nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize, for an interview he did with the president of El Salvador University, where the military had taken over the campus and was disappearing students and burning books. He has written for In These Tines, Village Voice, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, CBS Healthwatch, Stern. He is the author of AIDS INC., The Secret Behind Secret Societies, and Oklahoma Bombing: The Suppressed Truth. His website is nomorefakenews.com