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To highlight the importance of scientific principles and knowledge ignored or contradicted by the authorities setting the COVID-19 policies of the last several years, John Campbell, Ph.D., presented Russell Brand with a physiology textbook on a recent episode of “Stay Free with Russell Brand” on Rumble.

Brand asked Campbell, a retired nurse teacher in England who hosts a popular YouTube show that explains evolving science on COVID-19, to provide key examples of how public health officials and Big Pharma compromised or distorted the COVID-19 science to serve financial interests.

The U.K., U.S., Australian and Canadian governments have all ordered hundreds of millions more doses of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, Campbell said, providing one example. They did so despite their knowledge that the vaccine lipid nanoparticles, which can cause severe inflammation, don’t stay in the arm.

Instead, they circulate throughout the entire body and can cause dangerous inflammatory conditions like myocarditis and pericarditis, among other problems.

“And yet,” Campbell said, “people are plowing ahead with this massive cooperation between Moderna in this case and our governments to produce huge amounts of vaccines for which there may be a potentially fundamental problem that means they can’t be used.”

That produces a conflict of interest, he added, “where science is saying one thing and a potential vested interest, who knows who, is saying something else. And the two don’t quite marry up.”

Vitamin D, Campbell told Brand, is another example. Substantial evidence shows vitamin D supplements reduce the risk for a number of conditions, including diabetes, yet its value is ignored in favor of other more expensive drugs.

He also pointed to the mRNA treatments themselves, which he said should probably not have been called vaccines.

Because the pharmaceutical companies called these treatments “vaccines,” healthcare professionals, like himself, who had seen successful vaccination campaigns for things like smallpox, tetanus and polio, had a certain fundamental faith in the treatments. And, he added, the initial data released claimed they were efficacious.

“I get the feeling that because this technology was there, people were kind of chomping at the bit to use it,” he said, without sufficiently investigating the implications and side effects of the new technology.

He and many others didn’t consider how different this technology functioned from previous vaccines, he said. Speaking about the lipid nanoparticles and the potentially deadly inflammatory response Campbell said, “I just wish I’d realized that earlier on, Russell.”

Brand responded:

“One of the things that has defined this pandemic was … an absolute reluctance to report the information accurately … It seems like there was an incredible appetite, a serious set of convergent interests that wanted this medication to be understood in a particular way, and that wanted this pandemic to be interpreted and regulated in a very particular way.”

He asked whether Campbell thought ongoing conversations about excess deaths were another example of policy missteps related to distorted data.

Campbell said that excess death numbers continue to be high, over 65,000 in the U.K., and that the explanations put forward by health officials — for instance, that people lacked access to statins during the pandemic — have all proven false.

Yet, he said rather than investigating the issue, health officials and the media are ignoring them.

Campbell emphasized the scale of the crisis: “If 65,000 people died in a terrorist attack in the U.K., I think that might make the news. Don’t, don’t you think that would make the news?”

Brand said this underscored that “during the pandemic period, there has been an extraordinary amount of censorship. There has been a lot of exerted control over public discourse and a concomitant loss of trust in public institutions, Big Pharma.”

Big Pharma funds regulatory agencies

Brand asked Campbell, who had initially supported the mainstream COVID-19 narrative, what made him start to question it.

Campbell said when he saw the official narrative didn’t change, while the virus and the data did, it raised flags for him.

He explained:

“Then as time went on, some of the stuff they were saying just … stopped really making sense.

“They had a particular narrative. They had this particular idea, but times changed.

“So they had … the vaccine idea … But then as time changed, especially when we came onto Omicron, the risks went down dramatically.”

Brand said this raised questions about “how finance and economics affects research and the distribution of medicine.”

Campbell used his famous overhead projector to share an article published in The BMJ analyzing the pharmaceutical companies’ financing of regulatory agencies in the U.S. and the U.K.

Eighty-six percent of funding for the U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency comes from the pharmaceutical industry. Thirty-two percent of the COVID-19 vaccine committee members in that agency declared they had financial conflicts of interest.

Sixty-five percent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration funding comes from the pharmaceutical industry. Campbell commented, “that sounds like a lot less. But their budget is so massive. We’re still talking about enough, enough money to organize huge, huge research efforts. Huge amounts.”

“There’s a clear conflict of interest,” he added.

Brand added, “The institutional machinery is organized to create certain results that you might as well call systemic at this point.”

He continued:

“And it seems that this unique global event, the pandemic, brought together so many convergent interests — a desire for the increased ability to surveil, the desire for more control in populations that are increasingly harder to control when there are counter-narratives, the ability to censor more, the ability for Big Pharma to make profits. …

“So many things came together simultaneously that the facts were being lost, massaged, manipulated, negated.”

Excluding dissent is ‘intellectual fascism’

Brand asked Campbell if he thought the narrative about the pandemic was shifting and whether there might be a reckoning of some sort.

Campbell said the links between Big Pharma and regulators had to be investigated. People expect the pharmaceutical industry to be profit-driven, he said, but not the regulatory agencies.

“We used to trust these regulatory authorities,” he said. “We thought they had our best interests at heart. But it appears that they have these conflicts of interest that just are, to my mind, not acceptable.”

Brand pointed out that this “economic ideology” guiding the regulators now also extends to the media.

He said to Campell, “What you are doing is reporting essentially, from a firm platform and basis of medical understanding and with a demeanor that I imagine many people find appealing.”

But, Brand said, people like Campbell and himself “have been called conspiracy theorists and crackpots,” and legitimate scientists like Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone or the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have been systematically and intentionally excluded from the conversation.

Campbell responded:

“For potential scientific data to be rejected out of hand before it’s been analyzed, before it’s been critiqued, because it doesn’t fit with a particular narrative, is a form of intellectual fascism …

“Anyone putting forward a legitimate scientific argument should be able to publish that, should be able to debate it and should be able to do so freely …

“If we’re going to deny the nature of scientific reality, then why do we bother having scientists? If we’re not gonna listen to them, we might as well go back to the Stone Age, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Watch here: