For those wishing to support this work financially

 

 

In Vested Interests

 

Volume One and Two

 

 

The two volumes of In Vested Interests publish Martin Walker’s essays and articles that have appeared independent of his books in the period between 1993 and 2003. These two volumes will be published in the Spring of 2008, both priced at £5.00.

 

Both volumes have Preface’s written by people who have been supportive to my work over the last decade. The preface in volume one, is written by Joan Shenton, a tireless film maker and campaigner for the truth in a number of areas of allopathic medicine and illness. The preface to volume two is written by the notable campaigner and leading academic in the field of the distortion by industrial interests in research into environmental causes of cancer.

 

I look forward to publishing these two volumes and it will be a considerable relief to finally get the majority of my bits and pieces up on the web site and out into the public domain.

PREFACE:  Vol. One:

 

Joan Shenton

 

 

 

The pharmaceutical industry and Big Science are more powerful than government. This is why Martin Walker’s well-documented writings about individual challenges to the excesses of industrial science and its vested interests are important.

 

Filming in a London teaching hospital recently, I sat next to a young research medic in the doctors’ dining room. He sighed deeply so I ventured to ask what was the matter. He had just finished a lengthy research project fully funded by a pharmaceutical company. The results had shown unequivocally that the product the company was testing, did not work.  ‘But they changed my results’, he said, woefully.

 

 

Had he not heard of the special clauses in trial centre agreements that Dr Andrew Herxheimer had fought for when editor of the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin? Clauses that forbade the changing of research results by a project funder? It appeared not.

So here we are, well into this new century, appearing to be going backwards in our quest for medical and scientific integrity. In a conversation with Dr Valendar Turner of the Perth group of AIDS dissidents, not long ago, I was reminded of the quote - progress in science advances by funeral to funeral.

 

 Today, this is probably because it is almost impossible to shift a prevailing paradigm; there is too much to lose. The vested interests are so great, involving patents, testing kits, complex drug regimes and vaccines, that the dissenting voice of an independent scientist or, indeed, investigative journalist is no longer heard, or if it is can be easily discredited.

 

Multi-centre drug trials are one of the main culprits. They tie up all scientists of standing in the field, rendering critics incapable of getting an article accepted in a major peer review scientific journal. The net result is that the medical orthodoxy continues to reproduce itself upon a series of questionable premises that often go unchallenged.

 

Martin Walker ably chronicles some disparate but determined attempts at challenging current medical and scientific orthodoxies. This book of his last ten years’ articles, papers and essays tackles amongst other subjects, the vicissitudes of totalitarian science, the use of the power of the media to defend current scientific orthodoxies and describes the policing of individuals and families by a state propelled by plague terror.

 

Walker cocks a snook at some of society’s most firmly held taboo subjects like cancer charities and the belief that cigarette smoke is the major cause of cancer. He calls for the decorporatisation of medicine and his work will be seen as profoundly destabilising to a medical orthodoxy which has become increasingly enmeshed with corporate industrial science.

 

 In his essay ‘HIV, AZT, Big Science and Clinical Failure’ Walker focuses on the story of the AIDS drug AZT. This shocking episode highlights the collusion between government, state-funded medical institutions and the media in constructing and supporting a consensus view on AIDS treatment that allowed a dangerously toxic drug to be given to severely immune-suppressed individuals.

 

 He describes how AZT (zidovudine), which interferes with the reproduction of DNA, was originally developed to destroy cancer cells. It was dropped, then taken over by Burroughs Wellcome and considered suitable for re-use at high doses in young men with (for whatever reason) severely compromised immune systems.  They all died. Today there is not one survivor from that deadly high dose AZT regime. I remember meeting a young man, Alan Roundtree when we were filming ‘AZT-Cause for Concern in New York’ in 1992, he told our interviewer Michael Verney-Elliott,

The headaches came. The dizziness, the nauseousness. I had fingernails so black it looked like I had nail polish on. The upset stomach. Nothing tasted right. You couldn’t listen to people because you didn’t want to hear them because you were hurting so bad. It left me impotent. It destroyed my hopes for living.

 

It is not too late to weep for these young men neither is it too late to point the finger at those who are to blame.

 

  Drawing on John Lauritsen’s work, Walker also points out that the trials leading to the licensing of AZT were deeply flawed. Reporting information which Lauritsen obtained under the Freedom of Information procedure he recounts how in one trial centre they actually tampered with the records in order to reflect better results for the drug.

 

 My own personal experience of this sorry situation was when, to my great relief, one respected researcher Dr John Hamilton published in the New England Journal of Medicine the results of his US Veterans Administration trial at Duke University. It was then the longest and largest AZT trial looking into whether the drug should be given early or late to patients with AIDS. His results showed that patients who were less ill and took AZT longest died at the same time as those who were more ill. In other words, AZT hastened the death of those who were less ill.

It is not too late to weep for these young men neither is it too late to point the finger at those who are to blame.

 

  Drawing on John Lauritsen’s work, Walker also points out that the trials leading to the licensing of AZT were deeply flawed. Reporting information which Lauritsen obtained under the Freedom of Information procedure he recounts how in one trial centre they actually tampered with the records in order to reflect better results for the drug.

 

 My own personal experience of this sorry situation was when, to my great relief, one respected researcher Dr John Hamilton published in the New England Journal of Medicine the results of his US Veterans Administration trial at Duke University. It was then the longest and largest AZT trial looking into whether the drug should be given early or late to patients with AIDS. His results showed that patients who were less ill and took AZT longest died at the same time as those who were more ill. In other words, AZT hastened the death of those who were less ill.

 In other circumstances this would have provide definitive proof of the toxicity and lack of efficacy of a drug.  Instead Dr Hamilton was humiliated and vilified by his peers - in particular Dr Margaret Fischl who criticised the model of his study. Fischl had played a key role in the two trials that led to the licensing of AZT and believed strongly that patients should be given the drug as early as possible.

 

 When Dr Brian Gazzard, one of the main AZT researchers in the UK, later reflecting on the early AZT regimes at a 1997 Royal College of Physicians lecture, he called his colleagues' enthusiasm for AZT monotherapy  ‘ludicrous’; no one, however, took any notice.

 

 In most of these essays, Walker concludes that we live in a world where science can be manipulated into a consensus that all to often serves financial and political interests. Wellcome not only owned the patent for AZT, it owned the patent for the test kits that decided whether or not you needed the drug. There could be no greater monopoly than that.    

 

Scientific consensus is, however, according to Professor Peter Duesberg a nonsense, because the first scientific rubric is that a matter is either scientifically proven or remains unproven. Despite this, contemporary scientific and medical establishments often support consensual compromise on ideological grounds rather than on evidential proof.  

 

 

With the increasing power of establishment cliques in medicine, there has been a worrying erosion over the past twenty five years of the independence of organisations that should be acting as our watchdogs. For example, the MHRA, the main medicines regulatory agency in Britain (previously called the MCA), which was once state-funded with a brief to protect us from any excesses of the pharmaceutical industry, is now a quango which receives 90% of its considerable funding from the very pharmaceutical companies which it is meant to oversee!

 

In order to protect ourselves from the 'cliques of the powerful' Walker says it is not enough to ‘simply argue the opposing scientific perspective...  People have to empower themselves in every area where industry and capitalist production have taken over the basic functions and interchanges of everyday life.  People have to fight back by finding themselves and a better way of treating themselves.’

 

  Walkers writing over the years has consistently given a voice to the individual scientist and dissenting minorities. A recent edition of the BBC’s ‘Quote Unquote’ provided the following gem of a quote from Kierkegaard, which seems to support Walkers work and perspective:

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of the majority is illusory, formed by gangs who have no opinion.