Dr Peter Gøtzsche is one of the world's most highly cited Danish doctors and researchers, with publications in the most prestigious medical journals. Way before co-founding the renowned Cochrane Institute and presiding over its Nordic branch, this leading expert in clinical trials and regulatory affairs within the pharmaceutical industry worked for a number of laboratories. Drawing on this experience and his renowned scientific work, Peter Gøtzsche is the author of a book on Big Pharma's methods of corrupting the healthcare system.
At what point did you realize that something was wrong in the way we handled the Covid crisis?
I would say immediately. I have a background in infectious diseases. So, I realized very quickly that this was the wrong way of dealing with a respiratory virus.
You can't prevent it from spreading. We already knew that, based on what we know about other respiratory viruses like influenza and other coronaviruses, which spread the common cold. So, the whole attitude where you closed borders very quickly, and all sorts of quarantines, and only allowing few people together, that made sense perhaps, to some people, but it was a wrong approach. In Sweden, they kept the society open in contrast to the rest of the world, and they have had one of the lowest excess mortalities in the world.
It was foolish to think that we could contain the virus by closing down our societies, and I also realized early on that this would have huge collateral damages. Of course I was aware of that, so I was very critical towards what the governments did in the whole world.
Already in March 2020, when the pandemic was just a couple of months old, I published a letter in the British Medical Journal with the title, “Covid-19: Are we the victims of mass panic?”
What proof is there that the Covid escaped from a Wuhan lab?
In science, we work with probabilities. We rarely have absolute certainty of anything. And if you look at all the evidence we have, then it is extremely likely that the virus escaped from a lab. And not only escaped, but that it was manufactured in the lab, because this was the type of dangerous viruses they were already making at this lab. They had done that for several years, so how come it was possible to fool the whole world and to tell people like me that we were conspiracy theorists?
This is not being a conspiracy theorist, this is just being an honest scientist. Of course, they made the virus and it escaped.
This interview was conducted before the publication of the US Congressional report, which reaches the same conclusions.
But the virus was mainly dangerous for old people and people with co-morbidities right? It wasn't that dangerous for young people?
It was not dangerous for children. And the idea of vaccinating children is a very bad one. I believe this creates more harm than good, because it's a mild virus in these people and you actually kill some of them, for example, because of myocarditis. This is not reasonable.
What is WHO’s role in all this? What responsibility do they have in this panic?
I don't recall all the official advice from the WHO, what I recall very clearly was the director general who said “test, test, test”. And this testing mania was obviously wrong. Even the PCR test, which is supposed to be very accurate, when you use this test in a sample of people, most of whom are not infected, then the false positives become important.
There was one researcher I have collaborated with who argued in an article that maybe the virus came from the United States and not from China. They had analyzed a lot of blood samples in a US state and they found a certain occurrence of the virus before the outbreak in Wuhan. I showed to her that this little occurrence in the United States was exactly what you would expect in terms of false positives in a population that was not infected at all, because the test is not perfect. Then, I lost contact to her!
This testing mania, for instance in Denmark where I live, with long queues before schools and in other places where people could get tested cost a lot of money and it didn't help.
Who is funding the Cochrane Collaboration, which you co-founded? And what happened with their reviews on masks mandates that were ineffective?
Because of my work, Denmark was and still is the biggest contributor to Cochrane internationally after the UK National Institute of Health Research stopped funding the UK Cochrane groups by the end of March 2023 because Cochrane had become highly ineffective. But the Cochrane website about funders still claim Denmark is the second biggest funder, which is not correct.
“The war on scientific misinformation is one of the stupidest initiatives I've ever seen in my life”
My colleague Tom Jefferson, who worked for me for a while part-time, is the primary author of the Cochrane review of the effect of physical measures to prevent respiratory infections. He has updated the review many times, but when he showed that face masks don’t work, with additional data, early in 2020, in the middle of the Covid pandemic, Cochrane held it back for seven months before publishing it. And when it was criticised by some unknown social influencer in New York Times, the Cochrane Editor-in-Chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, apologised for the review and threw Tom under the bus. There was nothing to apologise for and it was a huge scandal that she did not support her own people whose research was top quality. I have written about this affair: False propaganda about face masks and Cochrane editorial misconduct.
Medias and authorities now are at war against disinformation. In your last book, you said “if we censor, we lose trust”. So what is your point of view on this war against disinformation?
It is one of the most foolish initiatives I have experienced in my whole life, and I've just turned 75 now. To think that you can introduce censorship is a very bad idea, because science changes all the time, and people disagree. Who are those who should be judges and say that something is misinformation and something is not?
Joe Biden, and many other governmental leaders, said that the Covid vaccines were 100% effective. This is awful misinformation. But all these fact checkers, they didn't react at all.
Just to give you one example that I mention in my Chinese virus book: When Paul Thacker published an article in the BMJ about serious problems with data integrity in Pfizer’s pivotal COVID-19 vaccine trial, some stupid fact checker, the managing editor of Lead Stories, Dean Miller, said that what was written in the BMJ was wrong, and published a “hoax-alert.”
The BMJ editors contacted Lead Stories, which refused to change anything about their article or actions that led Facebook to flag Thacker’s article. They also contacted Facebook, requesting immediate removal of the “fact checking” label and any link to the Lead Stories article, thereby allowing the readers to freely share the article on the platform. Nothing happened. The BMJ also complained, in an open letter, to the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, but he did not respond and did not do anything.
So, this idea that we can have censorship is a very, very bad one. We would all loose by it. We have to accept that there are idiots that propagate their wrong ideas on social media, but it's far worse to have censorship.
It seems indeed that we don’t accept different views anymore. There’s this need of control on what everybody thinks.
I have published a lecture on YouTube, that was removed by YouTube. Even though the lecture was factually correct and was held by one of the best vaccine researchers in the world, Professor Peter Aaby. We protested and it didn't matter. He disagrees with the WHO about, for example, the DPT vaccine but I have studied this issue in depth, and his research is far more reliable than the sources the WHO uses. So, I believe he is right. But he was not allowed to say what his research had shown on YouTube. It’s crazy!
“Most of these fact checkers have no training that justifies the role they play”
It's young people behind a screen who decide what’s true or not. They don't have a medical education and they are not scientists. Most of those fact checkers don't have much education that justifies the role they have. They are not qualified for the job they are supposed to master. To speculate that someone knows the truth in scientific matters, that’s like the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984.
About the Covid vaccines, you found evidence of serious neurological harms, including Bell’s palsy, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myasthenic disorder and stroke, which are likely due to an autoimmune reaction. Why are we still recommending this vaccination? Why isn’t there more scientists and doctors talking about that?
Unfortunately, it has become taboo just to ask questions about vaccines. You are very quickly labeled an anti-vaxxer, even if you just ask questions. Even if you only want to know what the truth is. About my work with Maryanne Demasi, it was a huge undertaking to do this systematic review, and we tried several medical journals, but our paper was rejected every time, so that's why I put it on my website.
“It has become taboo to ask questions about vaccines”
People don't like papers that alert people to the fact that there are also harms of vaccines and if they're used in the wrong people, they might harm more than they benefit the population, which we also noted in our article. It's very sad that it is so difficult to discuss vaccines in the same way as we discuss drugs, for example.
The worst harms of the Covid vaccines seem to be myocarditis and thrombosis. And severe harms, i.e. those that prevent daily activities, were underreported in the randomised trials.
In one of your books, you also say that peer reviewing is biased. But how do we do it without it?
Peer reviewing is very often abused. And it is definitely unfair that the peer reviewers know who you are but you don't know who they are. They're anonymous. This is a very unfair system.
Isn’t there a system of double-blind peer reviewing?
That is very, very rare. The standard model is that they know who you are, but you don't know who are reading your paper. This creates an enormous opportunity for abuse. Of course, many journal editors send a manuscript to people who are knowledgeable in the area, and when you talk about drugs and vaccines, a lot of doctors have been corrupted by industry money, so they want to protect the vaccine or the drug that you may be questioning in your article.
Editors are busy and many times they don't even read the manuscript, they just read the peer reviews and then they reject the article based on people who are conflicted. This is not a good system.
Okay, so what would be a good system then?
First of all, peer reviewers should not be anonymous hangmen. Some good journals publish the peer reviews and also say who these people are. Your temptation of abusing your status as a peer reviewer will be less when you know that your peer reviews will be up for public scrutiny, and people can see if you are conflicted. There are many ways you can improve the system. It should be balanced.
“Medical journals are so beholden to the pharmaceutical industry that it's increasingly difficult to publish critical articles”
I have argued about that in one of my articles where I also argue that sometimes, it should be possible for you, as a whistleblower, to publish a paper where your identity is unknown in order to avoid serious harassment. So, there are various other ways of doing things much better than we do today. But the medical journals are so beholden to the drug industry that it's becoming more and more difficult to publish critical articles about drugs or vaccines.
I have published more than one hundred papers in BMJ, The Lancet and the three other “big five”. I'm the only Dane who has ever done that, so I know what it is like to be a top researcher. And yet, I have come to the conclusion that I am fed up with medical journals. I prefer to write books and publish articles on my own website or on websites, where there is no censorship, butreasonable editors who work for the common good.
Isn’t it dangerous to have no contradiction in science?
I would prefer to have good avenues for scientific debates. That's better than anything else. If I were allowed to publish what we want to say in a journal and that journal asked people who disagree with us to publish something else, then we could have a debate about things. That would be the best solution. But since the system we have is so corrupt – many journals are dependent on drug ads and selling reprints to the industry - , I do prefer to publish on websites. On some of them, there are quite many comments. Mad in America, for instance is a fantastic website for mental health issues.
About the Covid vaccines, you tweeted recently that “Plasmid DNA from mRNA vaccines, e.g. COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, can integrate into the genome of normal human cells. This involves a potential cancer risk that can no longer be ignored and ridiculed by paid industry trolls, but must be studied further”. Can you tell us more about that?
It is not my research area and it is my deputy director, Maryanne Demasi, who wrote several articles about this. This is definitely worrying and should be investigated much more. We now know that DNA fragments can integrate into the human genome, and we also know that when this happens, there could be an increased cancer risk, so therefore, this must be investigated. For vaccines, where you vaccinate a lot of people who will never benefit from the vaccine, we must have very good safety studies so that we don't harm more than we benefit people.
And that was not the case with the Covid vaccines?
They introduced a new technology and people didn't realize that this could be dangerous.
It was the first time a vaccine has been administrated to so many people. If it were that dangerous, wouldn't we see large scale consequences? More than we can see now at least?
No. If the mRNA vaccines increase the risk of cancer, it could take many years before we can see it in the population, because it takes time for cancers to develop, sometimes decades. Breast cancer has been in the body for about 20 years, on average, before it becomes detectable at breast screening. And what if the cancer risk is not that much increased, then we might never find out if the vaccine causes cancer because people get cancer anyway. So, it's not so easy.
So even in ten years from now, we won't be able to understand if it was the vaccine or not?
It's far too early to study this. We need to wait some more years before we can do epidemiological studies to see if there are any signals that cancers might be increasing. But it is very difficult also because we have vaccinated so much of the world's population, so what would be your control group? If a certain cancer increases in prevalence, then you would need to see what the trend is for this particular cancer over many, many years.
In your book The Chinese virus, you say that the vaccine decreases severe cases and that those who died in intensive care are mostly unvaccinated. John Ioannidis published a study establishing that millions of lives have been saved. So, is this vaccine effective and should people continue to get it?
We know for certain that the vaccine is pretty ineffective because the virus mutates all the time, and some studies show only a 50% efficiency of the vaccine. Which is far from the 100% that Joe Biden talked about. So, the vaccine is not particularly effective, and many of us, including my wife and I, the first time we started seein and hugging people again as usual, that was at a wedding in Sweden in June 2022, and we had both been vaccinated twice, so, what happened? We got Covid, for heaven's sake! And a lot of those who went to the party who had also been vaccinated also got Covid.
“Pharmaceutical companies' business model is organized crime”
So, “effective” is not really the word I would use to describe this vaccine.
How many lives have been saved by this vaccine? That would be very difficult to say something qualified about.
About your book called Deadly medicines and organised crime. What techniques are used to manipulate doctors into buying drugs and were those techniques used with Covid vaccines to manipulate governments?
I usually say there are two little words with five letters that explain what goes on in healthcare: money and power. Those who have the money also have the power, so it's about the same.
How does a regulator work? Do they do their own tests or do they base their decisions on the drug companies’ studies only?
Of course the drug regulators can't do all the testing in patients themselves, but we could require that testing of drugs and vaccines become a public enterprise. The drug industry should have absolutely nothing to do with it, because we already know that the business model of drug companies is organised crime. They routinely commit fraud in their clinical trials and in what they publish. Even deaths are missing in what they publish. So, we don't know how dangerous drugs and vaccines are, because the drug industry, which has a tremendous conflict of interest, they are the ones who do the trials. This is simply very, very wrong.
“America has always been dysfunctional”
I have an allegory: Imagine if I told the car inspectors that they don't need to look at my car my car the next time it needs a car inspection. I have tested it very carefully and I bring a stack of five meters of paper with my results. You just need to read my five meters of paper and you'll be convinced that this is a safe car. That's what the drug industry does
How can we fail to apply the same precautions to our health that we take for granted when it comes to our cars, our homes or even our pets?
That's what I have written about in one of my books. Now, if I went to the car inspection with all my papers and I cheated because my brakes were not really working, then maybe I could kill myself and one or two others. But when drug companies cheat with their drugs, they can kill more than one hundred thousand people, which was what Merck did with Vioxx, its arthritis drug.
When a regulator approves a drug that ends up being withdrawn from the market, are there no consequences for the regulators?
Oh no! Only positives ones. They might get a highly paid job in a drug company afterwards.
In a way, the Covid crisis has underlined all that was not working for years in the medical industry?
Yes, and the Covid pandemic particularly showed us what is wrong with the United States. It was a total disaster over there. They had a poorly functioning healthcare system already, but then came the pandemic and so many people died there compared to other countries, which showed us once again how poor healthcare is in the United States.
It shouldn’t be too hard to make America healthy again, right? Whatever they do, it can’t be worse.
(Peter laughs). It never was healthy! The same goes for making American great again… Was it ever great? As far as I can see, America has always been dysfunctional.
There are cases of regulators going to work for the companies whose products they just have approved. Does that happen a lot?
It is called “the revolving door phenomenon”. They go back and forth between the drug industry and drug agencies, and there's no law against that. There are some laws, for example in Europe, that that if you leave EMA (European Medicines Agency) you are not allowed to work for the drug industry for a while, for a couple of years I think. But what you have seen is that when bosses leave FDA or EMA, sometimes they already started working for the drug industry before they left the drug agency, although this is illegal.
Why aren't they sued?
That’s how the world is.
Is it safe to say that the FDA is the most corrupted organization in the world? And that the same goes for EMA and other agencies, like Swissmedic in Switzerland?
We shouldn’t use superlatives, because you can always find an organization that’s worse. It’s enough to say corruption is part of the problem in drug agencies. Andit’s a problem all over the world. Corruption can come at many levels, but it has been best documented in the FDA.
You wrote that abuse of medicine, illegal and prescribed medicine, is the main cause of death in America. Even more than cancer and cardiovascular disease?
This is not about illicit drugs or abuse. This is how we use drugs in ordinary practice.-Drugs are the number one cause of death. I’ve published an article about this earlier this year. It’s pretty much the same all around the Western world. I mainly focused on drug groups I'm very familiar with: anti-arthritis drugs and psychiatric drugs and then I also added opioids.
“Drug regulation doesn't work”
Nothing proves better that drug regulation doesn't work. It doesn't protect the public against harmful drugs, when our prescription drugs are the main cause of death.
Have you ever been scared for your life? Did you receive death threats or have you been pressured by pharmaceutical companies?
People have tried to put pressure on me many times, but I have not received death threats.
Are all drugs made to create reactions that would require more drugs to stabilize?
In psychiatry, this often happensYou start with one drug and then you go on and quickly come on two drugs and three drugs and four drugs. This is also because the drugs are poor and have very little effect. And then, in desperation, the psychiatrist, just prescribe one drug after another for you.
But sometimes, it's correct that they use another drug for the side effects, for example, you can develop Parkinson because of antipsychotics, and then you need an anti-parkinson drug.
You also wrote that drug companies make no distinction between marketing and research and that the worst company was Pfizer, whose marketing is “aggressive” and “ruthless”.
When I was young, Pfizer was considered the worst drug company. But now there are many competitors. There are many other drug companies that behave very, very badly. I can mention Merck and Eli Lilly, for example, two very big US companies, Janssen and Janssen, Roche, and Lundbeck and Novo Nordisk from my own country. They all know that organized crime pays well.
Do they still do science in those companies, or is it just marketing and selling?
They manipulate the science. They are not interested in the truth about drugs but in selling them.
But at the end of the day, we need pharmaceutical companies, don’t we?
No. Absolutely not. I have argued in an article that it is well known that most breakthroughs in drug treatment don't come from the drug industry. They come from publicly financed research. So, what really matters for our health doesn't come from drug companies. It comes from public researchers.
We might as well take the full step and say: Let's make drug development, testing and marketing a public interest enterprise. Let's get rid of capitalistic drug companies because they are so incredibly harmful for our health, so it should be a public enterprise to develop and test drugs. If that were the case, we could also require as citizens that drugs must not be sold at prices so high that we can't afford it.
“Many mainstream media outlets have also been corrupted by Big Pharma”
As it is now, we are being extorted because the drug industry takes tens of thousands of dollars to treat just one patient for one year. Take these weight losing drugs, for instance, Ozempic cost about $12,000 a year. FDA has approved worthless, harmful, and ridiculously expensive drugs against dementia, e.g. at a cost of $32,000 a year, based on poor research and experts with financial conflicts of interest. It is so ridiculous. The whole drug industry should disappear. It should not be a capitalist enterprise.
But don't we need the money to do the research? Aren’t the drug companies needed to do the research because of all the money they have?
No. There are plenty of scientists who know how to do research and clinical trials. If it became a public enterprise, many people who today work in the drug industry and are fed up with all this crime, would prefer to work in a public system. So, it would be a brave new world actually.
There are loads of money that we taxpayers give away to the drug companies. If we didn't do that, we would have more than enough money to develop our own drugs and market them.
When I interviewed the former head of infectious disease from the Swiss public health last month, she said “companies would have no interest whatsoever in falsifying studies or market vaccines that there are neither effective nor safe. They would lose their reputation and a lot of money.” What do you think about this statement?
(Peter laughs loudly). This is a fairy tale! It can't be more wrong than that! It's totally wrong. They cheat all the time and it pays well. I was once asked by a journalist what I think about the ethics in the drug industry, and I said nothing! Because I can’t see they have any ethics.
In Switzerland, during the Covid pandemic, we had the chairman of the board of directors of a pharmaceutical group who was, at the same time, the chairman of the biggest media group in the country. What do you think about that and what do you know about the influence on the pharmaceutical companies upon media?
That's another of their dirty businesses. Many big media corporations have also been corrupted by Big Pharma. It tries to buy anyone who can potentially harm their business. Therefore, it's a good idea to corrupt the media, television, newspapers, medical journals, everyone. When people have been corrupted, they know very well that if they don't do what the drug companies want, they won't get any more money.
How do they do it? Through money transactions?
There are many, many ways in which you can send money to people. For example, through advertising. Prestigious medical journals have been threatened by drug companies that if they don't do what they want, they will stop advertising for their drugs in the medical journal, and since this income can be quite big, it can be important for a journal.
I have given some examples in my crime book of these threats. Annals of Internal Medicine lost advertising revenue of over 1 million dollars after they published an article that was critical of drug advertisements.
How can a medical journal publish an advertisement for a drug? Isn’t there a problem?
Yes, it is totally wrong. My deputy at the Nordic Cochrane Centre and I worked on getting drug ads out of the Danish medical journal. We even did a calculation that showed that it would not cost the subscribers much if they dropped the advertising. We also suggested that the journal needed not come out on paper, it could be published on the Internet, and then it would be cheaper to publish even without ads.
We also did a scientific investigation where we documented that these drug advertisements were directly harmful for the population. And yet the Danish medical journal was resistant. But a couple of years later they dropped the drug ads. We think it was because of us, but of course they didn't want to give us the credit for it.
Are you hopeful with the nomination of Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary in the US institutions? Or do you think that corruption comes with the job?
It is very difficult to avoid becoming corrupted if you have a top job like being commissioner at the FDA. There are many ways to corrupt people and you can do it without leaving any traces. It's difficult to avoid, but I am very glad that Donald Trump has chosen Bhattacharya from Stanford and Makary from Johns Hopkins. I so much hope they will succeed changing America a little for the better.
Is there hope to suppress corruption in healthcare?
You can compare it with the mafia in Italy: Will we ever get rid of it? That's very, very difficult. That's something we must work on for decades.