It's Not Been A Good Month For Our "Impartial" Celebrity TV Doctors...

Details of our underreported conflict of interest crisis.

Last week, the levee broke.

Following AstraZeneca’s (AZ) official announcement that they’d be withdrawing their Covid vaccine from the market, various dissident investigative journalists, doctors, and commentators claimed vindication.

The reason being, the withdrawal followed the company’s first admission in court that their product can cause fatal blood clots, specifically in the brain. A confession that emerged against a backdrop of severe vaccine injuries and fatalities.

In response, people littered clips of various “doctor celebrities” previously spewing some particularly grievous, genuine misinformation about the vaccine’s “100% efficacy and safety” on social media.

Naturally, it got the metropolitans’ backs up. So they responded.

On 7th May, BBC Morning Live invited a doctor by the name of Ranj Singh to explain AZ’s legal troubles and the resulting worry. Within 10 seconds of being asked about the news, he referenced “abject conspiracies” and blamed anti-vaxxers for stirring up panic.

Then he resorted to scapegoating. Apparently, we cannot blame Singh for his misleading representation of AZ’s “safe and effective” vaccine because it was based on the best evidence “at the time”. Of course, if he did his due diligence, he might have realised that the company muddied their short-term trial data and thus obscured risk (maybe he did and thought screw it).

You can watch his response here:

Note the change in tone from one of his multiple appearances on ITV’s This Morning in March 2021. His rejection of blood clot risks seemed rather absolute:

An advertisement from the same year echoed similar sentiments:

So, here we had a celebrity doctor who’d voiced complete support for a novel product, dismissed concerns about it as conspiracies, portrayed himself as a victim of online abuse when criticised and routinely ignored manufacturer culpability over injuries and deaths. The question begged, why was Singh so partisan?

Then the pin dropped. After some digging, I discovered AZ paid Singh £22,500.00 for “contracted services” in 2022, according to The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) records.

The BBC disclosed none of this, presenting him as an impartial expert.

For context, £22,500.00 is just shy of a newly qualified UK nurse’s annual wage.

In the days preceding this revelation, Singh had already deleted his X account. Some speculated this occurred due to his alleged involvement in the #ITVGate scandal - a ploy involving two ITV-associated doctors conspiring with a member of the British General Medical Council (GMC) to strike off a vaccine-sceptic doctor.

When a follower questioned Singh about the deletion of his X account on Instagram, he said:

“(X) is full of misinformation and conspiracy theorists who make things difficult for everyone. I don’t have to be a part of that thanks”

News of Singh’s conflict of interest became so widespread, he reactivated his account and posted the following statement:

“You may have seen some on social media claiming that I was paid by AstraZeneca to promote their Covid vaccine. This is upsetting and completely untrue.

The AZ Oxford vaccine was launched in 2020/2021. I worked with AstraZeneca (via a PR company) on an entirely separate childhood flu education campaign in 2022, which was declared to the ABPI. And I have not worked with them since.

I have never been paid to promote Covid vaccines, so I hope that helps clarify things”

There are several flaws with this statement.

First, the original accusation involved a straightforward payment with no specific allegations of product promotion. So this appeared to be an insincere effort on Singh’s part to downplay the news. Second, the critical issue isn't whether AstraZeneca paid him to endorse the vaccine; rather, that he received payments from the company undermines his ability to provide unbiased commentary. You’re unlikely to want to bite the £22,500.00 hand that feeds you. Third, both he and the BBC neglected their ethical obligation to disclose important context to the viewers. If you’ve got some “climate expert” on your TV blabbing about the next life-saving green technology, you might want to know if they could profit from its adoption.

According to ABPI’s Code of Practice, doctors are encouraged to declare involvement with a pharmaceutical company when a contract is signed, not when payment is made. In theory, Singh might have cosied up with AZ back in 2021 and kept quiet about it until the calendar flipped to 2022.

For reasons that further defy common sense, healthcare professionals in the UK are free to refuse consent for a payment to be attributed to them in the ABPI database. Additionally, any payments made to journalists are not required. The ABPI lumps them into one aggregated annual sum. So we can’t figure out who got what.

From what we can see, however, it is painfully clear that Singh isn’t an outlier…

Other Celebrity Doctor Plants:

Dr Peter Openshaw, a respiratory physician and mucosal immunologist, has appeared frequently on mainstream media in recent years. He serves as a member of the UK Vaccine Network and sits on several committees and boards that oversee research into the immunology of respiratory infections.

In January 2022, The Guardian quoted Openshaw criticising Dr Aseem Malhotra for publicly warning of links between the Covid vaccines and excess heart disease deaths on the BBC. Specifically, he emphasised the “rarity” of side effects and said BBC producers were “embarrassed” to have had Malhotra on.

In 2020 and 2021, Openshaw would routinely praise the vaccines, even once remarking that they had been “tested to the max” on the BBC.

According to ABPI disclosures, Pfizer paid Openshaw £3,930 in 2022 with Moderna paying him an additional £6,012.78 during the same year - the two major producers of mRNA vaccines Malhotra voiced concerns about.

The Guardian failed to disclose this to readers. As they did for other payments involving the company Seqirus, which has recently secured a lucrative deal with the UK government to produce “rapid” vaccines in case the World Health Organisation (WHO) declares another pandemic.

Dr. Philippa Kaye is a GP, author, and journalist. She writes a weekly column in Woman magazine and is regularly seen on ITV's This Morning.

In a X post, dated April 7th 2021, Kaye said:

“Benefit vs risk for the AZ vaccine. Risk of dying from a clot with the vaccine is 1 in 2.5million. If 2.5million 40 year old get covid 2000 will die and 1 in 20 (125 000 people) will have long covid. Benefit outweighs risk.”

Long Covid was vastly understudied at the time and subsequent studies found that flawed research exaggerated its perceived risk.

Partnering with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the National Health Service (NHS), Kaye also participated in various promotional advertisements encouraging Covid vaccination. One targeted 12-15 year olds after studies found evidence of an increased risk of myocarditis, which outweighed the benefits of Covid vaccination for boys of that age. Various European countries had also halted use of the AZ vaccine months prior because of blood clots.

Kaye infamously once claimed “having side effects from the Covid-19 vaccine is a good thing” as it is a “way of your body showing you that its immune system is working”.

According to ABPI disclosures, AZ paid Kaye £12,500.00 in 2020. Of course, neither ITV or DHSC notified viewers of her conflict.

Dr Sarah Jarvis is a GP and broadcaster. Sarah has been the resident doctor for the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2 for the last 16 years. She has presented on the BBC’s One Show for the last 10 years, and on Good Morning Britain on ITV, BBC World News, Channel 5 and LBC.

In April 2022, during a segment on ITV News, Jarvis told viewers it is important that “young people are vaccinated because they can pass it on to older and vulnerable people...”. By then, dozens of studies and the government’s own data conclusively proved the vaccine did not prevent transmission. The UK’s former Vaccine Chief had also admitted the vaccines were “not designed” to do so either. Jarvis would routinely talk up the risk Covid posed, especially Coronavirus mutations.

Like Kaye, Jarvis featured in several DHSC and NHS advertisements on social media promoting vaccination for 12-15 year olds.

ABPI’s disclosure records show that Jarvis took home an impressive £39,602.00 in contracted service fees and expenses from pharmaceutical companies in 2022. AZ paid her £4,440.83. ITV did not disclose Jarvis’s conflicts.

Additionally, Merck & Dohme, the co-producer of antiviral Covid drug Molnupiravir, paid her a further £1,400.00 in 2020, £1,662.50 in 2021, and £1,680.00 in 2022. Curiously, Jarvis peer reviewed a paper attesting to Molnupiravir’s effectiveness in 2022 for Patient but omitted any reference to her financial ties to Merck & Dohme.

Dr Hilary Jones is a GP, TV presenter, medical broadcaster, and author. He currently works as the Health Editor of ITV’s Breakfast show.

In October 2020, Jones featured on ITV’s This Morning stressing that Covid was so serious it constituted “the biggest threat to public health for so many decades”. In December 2021, he supplemented the latter with a grossly inaccurate statement about hospitalisation rates in the unvaccinated.

With nearly every opportunity, he talked up the dangers of Covid and the heighten risk people faced if they did not take certain treatments.

According to ABPI’s database, Covid antiviral manufacturer Merck & Dohme paid Jones a whopping £24,380.00 in 2020 and an additional £5,000.00 in 2021.

Similar to Jarvis, Jones amplified the risk of Covid while being paid by a company that stood to financially benefit from its amplification. Naturally, ITV failed to notify viewers.

Dr Amir Khan, a full-time GP and best-selling author working in inner city Bradford, is a resident doctor for ITV’s Lorraine and Good Morning Britain.

In March 2021, Khan, like Kaye and Jarvis, partnered directly with the DHSC and NHS. This involved the presentation of a series of instructional videos in which he warned of Covid’s dangers and promoted the use of Covid test kits. He appeared in a similar video for ITV when the government reopened schools. In July 2021, he stated that people should conduct these tests “twice a week”.

ABPI’s database shows that Teva, a multinational pharmaceutical company that purveys in contract manufacturing services, paid Khan £3,400.00 in 2021. According to Teva UK’s website, the company worked to “assist the UK’s COVID-19 testing program” with the NHS. Specifically, they worked to “repurpose sodium chloride saline solution… to help with mass testing” - a venture they presumably profited from.

More recently, Khan came under scrutiny for praising the results of a study on a new weight loss drug on ITV without declaring that the maker of the drug, Novo Nordisk, had paid him in 2021.

Existing Laws:

According to the Human Medicines Regulations 2012 set out under statutory authority of the European Communities Act 1972 and the Medicines Act 1968, “a person may not publish an advertisement relating to a medicinal product that refers to recommendation by scientists or healthcare professionals”.

MHRA are responsible for the upkeep of such legislation. But the agency receives 86% of its £159 million annual budget from Big Pharma. So, they too, as these celebrity doctors, harbour a financial incentive to refrain from scrutinising Big Pharma.

Thoughts:

Yesterday, The Daily Mirror published an exclusive on Singh, which quoted a BBC spokeswoman saying, “they hadn’t known about (Singh’s) financial link before yesterday’s show”.

Honestly, it took 20 to 30 minutes to find all of these disclosures. It’s one thing for doctors to shill for Big Pharma in the context of a negligent and compromised medical regulator. It’s entirely another for a supposedly unbiased, investigative news outlet to fail to carry out very, very basic background checks on their guests. But they’re on the payroll too.

Barrel. Rotten.

Follow up report on the government’s Big Pharma-paid advisers coming soon…

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