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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I have to eventually accept that large vaccine trials are done authentically and with sufficient power to detect higher rates of adverse events, or that the knowledge of mercury in the body is sufficiently progressed to give some assurance of safety

There's a long history of studies showing that tobacco products are perfectly safe. Those studies had a critical flaw however, they were funded by the same industry that stood to profit from the sale of tobacco.

If you apply this logic to the modern pharmaceutical complex, including the lobbying and legal apparatus, as well as the research and publication apparatus, I think some concern is at least warranted. Why exactly do we trust the pharma companies not to corrupt the science in the name of their own profit?

Oh I agree the pharmaceutical industry is corrupt in many ways and increasingly suspect but there's a lot of good stuff written on this already. I don't think RKJ adds to this scholarship because he makes unsupported claims.