Merckosoft: Unethical minds think alike?

Summary: Weeks after the massive Elsevier/Merck blunder, Microsoft reaches a business agreement with Merck

OUR main post about Elsevier and Merck colluding to deceive the public was aptly titled "The Pharmaceutical Cartel". A lot people are not aware of ethical issues that surround this industry, where intellectual monopolies are basically used to monetise death [1, 2, 3]. Considering the nature of what Merck has been doing, it is not entirely surprising that Microsoft shakes its hands. It's a lovely pairing.

Microsoft is getting into genetic data management through an agreement with Merck.

What Bill Gates once said may sound like he's part of this industry, which he is [1, 2]. He said about poor people in China: “They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.” According to Associated Press, Gates will now invade the WHO (World Health Organization) just as he did the UN and the White House, but the media will forced out as though there is something to hide.

Chaib says media will be excluded from the meeting.

It's just like the Rockefeller scam all over again. The media glorifies the felons,, turning them into heroes in the public minds using words like "philanthropy" and similar half-truths. Here is the latest example.

Speaking of the WHO, Richard Stallman pointed to this article a couple of days ago. He summarised it as "US threats in 1995 made the World Health Organization cancel and bury a study which had found that cocaine was not very dangerous."

In the case of cocaine there is an even more striking precedent for evidence being ignored: the World Health Organisation (WHO) conducted what is probably the largest ever study of global use. In March 1995 they released a briefing kit which summarised their conclusions, with some tantalising bullet points.

"Health problems from the use of legal substances, particularly alcohol and tobacco, are greater than health problems from cocaine use," they said. "Cocaine-related problems are widely perceived to be more common and more severe for intensive, high-dosage users and very rare and much less severe for occasional, low-dosage users."

[...]

At the point where mild cocaine use was described in positive tones the Americans presumably blew some kind of outrage fuse. This report was never published because the US representative to the WHO threatened to withdraw US funding for all its research projects and interventions unless the organisation "dissociated itself from the study" and cancelled publication. According to the WHO this document does not exist, (although you can read a leaked copy at www.tdpf.org.uk/WHOleaked.pdf).

It does put the WHO in a different light, does it not? And to say more about Merck, there is nothing ethical about its dodgy pharmaceutical practices, let alone the fact that it is corrupting once-respectable journals. This is a true shame... or just shame because there is no truth or honesty. For some updates on the situation see:

Elsevier Reveals More Details About Its Fake Journal Division

Remember how Elsevier and Merck were caught putting out a fake journal that had articles favoring Merck drugs, implying peer reviewed articles that weren't? Soon afterwards, it came out that Elsevier had a whole division for such things. However, following an internal investigation, it looks like Elsevier is backtracking a bit and saying that, while the group's practices were problematic, most weren't as egregious as the "Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine (AJBJM)" that was created by Merck and Elsevier.

Elsevier Had A Whole Division Publishing Fake Medical Journals

Remember a week ago when we wrote about pharma giant Merck and publishing giant Elsevier working together to publish a fake journal that talked up various Merck drugs and was used by doctors to show that the drugs were safe and useful?

This ought to teach all of us to be critical of everything we read. ⬆

"Seek simplicity, and distrust it."

--Alfred North Whitehead