This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Dr. Harvey Risch has a distinguished career as a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, with more than 300 original peer-reviewed publications that include advances in cancer research. He’s the editor of the International Journal of Cancer, associate editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and for six years was on the editorial board of the American Journal of Epidemiology.
But over the past two and a half years, establishment media have labeled him a purveyor of “misinformation” for his criticism of the public health response to the pandemic and his advocacy – including in Senate testimony – for treating COVID-19 with drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin that have been shown to be safe and effective. Further, the government and scientific establishment have suppressed and dismissed his scientific contributions to the global crisis with little or no engagement, adopting the media’s “disinformation” narrative.
In a one-hour video interview with WND (embedded below) that includes his reaction to the FDA’s new COVID booster shot, Risch was matter-of-fact about the current state of medical science.
“All of this censorship, all of these claims of misinformation, disinformation, is purely a statement of We cannot fight on the playing field of ideas, of argument. We do not have the ability to fight back against those positions, and so we are using the tool of censorship instead,” he told WND.
Risch, describing the “misinformation” tactic as “totalitarian,” said the pandemic has opened the eyes of Americans to longstanding corruption in the medical establishment that has shattered trust. He discussed the fundamental problem of government serving the big pharmaceutical companies instead of the people, with influential figures in a revolving door between the governmental and private worlds.
The loss of trust goes all the way down to the provider level, with politics, rather than science, governing hospital and outpatient protocols. And it’s there that Risch already is offering a solution. Last month, along with Dr. Peter McCullough and others, he helped launch The Wellness Company, a holistic, prevention-based approach to health care through telemedicine and, eventually, in-person consultation as well.
The new company aims to combat the kind of “bad science” that suppresses effective treatments and that led to the FDA’s emergency use authorization of the new COVID-19 booster – essentially with no data, amid evidence of “negative efficacy” and alarming signals of severe adverse reactions – relying instead on the performance of the mRNA vaccine prior to the omicron variants.
“It’s very unclear why they would do this, except that they had a preordained motive,” he said. “The fix was in, as some people have said.”
Risch was asked to assess what is behind “bad science” and censorship.
“I think that we have a big problem in modern life, and especially among the intellectual class, which is that we believe in theories,” he began.
“I think George Orwell said intellectuals believe things that no common person would ever entertain.”
Risch explained that “science” is not the theories themselves, it’s the testing of those theories with empirical evidence.
“I love theories. I use theories in my scientific research all the time,” he said. “I just don’t believe them.
“So, intellectuals believe these theories, and they don’t have adequate evidence to justify those beliefs,” he said. “And I think that’s happened to a large degree in public health.”
The theories, he said, are “so simplistic,” such as “vaccine good.”
Many vaccines have been very effective over the past 200 years, but every vaccine has to be evaluated for its risks and benefits, he argued. To simply extrapolate that general assessment to the current COVID vaccines is “irrational if you’re a real scientist.”
And it’s why he and others after the vaccines have failed to stop infection and transmission, are still fighting the mandates
“We’re having to do it in court, because the public health administration in this country has a belief system, a religious belief system, rather than evaluating the scientific evidence.”
Meanwhile, White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci has “declared himself to be the science” without backing his claims with scientific evidence, while CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky admits only to “mistakes” in the government’s response to the pandemic.
“The mistake that they did make was thinking they could tailor their scientific studies to the message they wanted to promote, which is the paternalistic message that we know better than people in the population about what you should do,” Risch said.
“That choice might have been a mistake, but all of the bad science they put out was not a mistake. It was intentional.”
