Dr. Cockle, Witness Testimony at National Citizens Inquiry

A Discussion of Ethical Responsibility: the Corporate Capture of Public Institutions as a Driver of Harm Throughout the Declared Pandemic

 

The other day, a friend and I were discussing the talk that I would give here at the National Citizen’s Inquiry, and with her talent for powerfully concise formulations she provided what I think is a perfect introduction to my topic. When we turned to discuss universities, she said something along these lines:

When I think about our universities, I can’t help thinking about their sad and harmful failure over the past three years. Since March 2020, they have failed to provide public access to much needed information. And they’ve failed to foster and host balanced debate about the decisions being taken and the policy measures being implemented in response to COVID-19. It’s not like these decisions and policies were of no public significance and therefore somehow beneath academic discussion. On the contrary, these decisions and policies threatened all aspects of society–economic and political, social and cultural, education and health. These decisions and policies suspended and sometimes extinguished rights, they forced mass submission to medical experimentation, they destroyed small businesses, they mandated loss of employment and dis-entitlement to employment Insurance, they denied timely access to medical diagnosis, they denied access to medical treatment, including access to early or effective COVID treatment, they criminalized non-compliance and lawful opposition, and they denied access to effective remedies and to due process. In relation both to COVID-19, and our national and provincial policy response to COVID, our universities could have provided public access to much needed, balanced, evidence-based information. Our universities could have provided forums for balanced, interdisciplinary, public debate. Instead, our universities bullied, suspended, and fired faculty who questioned or criticized.

To this, I would add, that after three long years, a great many Canadians are tired of being continuously ashamed of our universities. We want to see representatives of the university community taking the steps necessary to restore ethical integrity in their institutions. We want to see our universities make amends for the terrible harm they have done–harm they have done not only by implementing coercive, harmful policies, but by championing compliant obedience over critical thinking and informed debate, and thereby failing to serve the public good.

The Influence of Global Funding Coalitions on Canada’s National Research Priorities

Dr. Shelley Deeks is the current chair of Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization. Very early on in the pandemic, Dr. Deeks received a 3.5 million-dollar grant as part of the Canadian Immunization Research Network’s “COVID-19 Vaccine Readiness Program.” The CIRN grant was issued several months before there was any randomized control data available, yet it seems to have presupposed that mRNA vaccines were the only viable answer to COVID-19. This was a precipitous conclusion aligned with the interests of global organizations involved in setting Canada’s national research priorities.

One such organization is GloPID-R the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness. In a promotional video, they refer to themselves as GloPID-R, “the global coalition of research funders.”[1] On the GloPID-R website we read that “[m]embers of our global coalition are funding organizations investing in research related to new or re-emerging infectious diseases that share the goal, objectives and commitments of GloPID-R.”[2] Now, clearly the primary investors in research related to new or re-emerging infectious diseases are likely to be pharmaceutical corporations. And, indeed, as one of its developmental milestones, GloPID-R created its “industry stakeholder group” in October 2017.[3] In their own words, “GloPID-R Members agreed on the importance to reach out to industrial pharmaceutical corporations to increase the efficiency of the global response to outbreaks. In order to achieve this objective, they discussed the best way forward and decided to set up a specific industry stakeholder group”.[4]

So, this organization, GloPID-R, played a key role in coordinating the pandemic response and research efforts internationally. It coordinates research funding that advances research and development of pharmaceutical products with a major focus on vaccine development. In addition to its industry stakeholder group, the membership of GloPID-R includes both the World Health Organization, Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, alongside 30 other private organizations and public institutions, among which many national research councils and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.⁶  I think most Canadians would find it somewhat startling that the research priorities adopted for Canada’s COVID-19 response were largely set in the “Global COVID-19 Research Roadmap” developed and published (in March 2020) as a collaboration between this global pharma-backed research organization that prioritizes vaccine research and the WHO R&D Blueprint Team.[5]

Fortunately, noone has to take my word for it. We can read the words of Charu Kaushic, the Scientific Director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Institute of Infection and Immunity. She has written a letter, published on the CIHR website, entitled, “Message from the Scientific Director: The CIHR response to the COVID-19 pandemic”. In this letter, we read:

Since the beginning of this pandemic, Canadian science and scientists have

shown tremendous leadership nationally and internationally. In February, CIHR, Canadian III researchers and leading health experts from around the world participated in a World Health Organization (WHO)-Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness (GloPID-R) joint meeting in Geneva to assess knowledge, identify gaps and work together to accelerate priority research to stop the outbreak. Shortly thereafter, CIHR and other federal agency partners launched a Government of Canada rapid research response, and the response from the Infection and Immunity community was remarkable. This resulted in a total investment of $52.6M to support 96 research projects across the country to rapidly detect, manage and reduce the transmission of COVID-19. … As a result of working closely with GloPID-R and the ongoing coordination from WHO, we have seen unprecedented levels of international cooperation between funding agencies and international researchers in the response to COVID-19.[6]

So, in this letter, Charu Kaushic, this Scientific Director within the CIHR Institute of Infection and Immunity, refers to CIHR Canadian III researchers. Again, reading from CIHR’s own website, these initiatives “offer funding opportunities related to identified priority areas. Each of these initiatives involves collaboration between the Institutes and a wide range of partner organizations, including: other federal and provincial government departments and agencies; international, national and provincial funding organizations and relevant territorial departments; health charities; non-governmental organizations [such as the WHO]; and industry [such as Pfizer]. The purpose of these initiatives is to offer funding opportunities focusing on a specific research agenda…”[7]

So how does this relate to the problem of great strides being taken in advancing human science without similar attention being taken to advance humane governance and to limit destructive excess? Well, the CIHR is deeply entrenched in a program of global public-private partnerships that allow extremely powerful private interests to play a major role in setting Canada’s research agenda. The 3.5 million-dollar grant received by NACI chair, Dr. Shelley Deeks to encourage “COVID-19 Vaccine Readiness” fits neatly into this larger framework of a research agenda set by global interests. Again and again and again throughout the documents to which I’ve been referring, one sees the assumption that by quite simply continuing–full speed ahead–according to the research priorities identified and funded by global coalitions of research funders, one will be making significant contributions to the public good and that one’s industry in advancing these select research priorities is deserving of “heartfelt thanks.”[8]

As an example of such bizarrely naive assumptions of altruism, we can read the title of an article published on the CIHR website. The article appears to be written as an introduction to Dr. Scott Halperin, Nominated Principal Investigator, with the Canadian Immunization Research Network and Director of the Canadian Center for Vaccinology. The title reads, “Heralded as one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of modern times, why are proven-effective vaccines suddenly getting such a bad rap?” The title hyphenates the words “proven” and “effective” to create a compound word. The compound word then represents the conclusion that vaccines have, indeed, been proven effective. On the face of it, this seems absurd. How have all vaccines been proven effective? But then too, if one wanted to argue that not all vaccines are effective, the author might counter by saying, “yes,” but here we’re only referring to the ones that are proven effective–hence the hyphen.

So, as we read the published material on these official government of Canada websites, we might get the impression that there is considerable effort being made to obscure matters of importance and to present information in an intentionally misleading manner. By way of illustration, another bit of tricky phrasing can be found at the end of the first paragraph on the same page to which I’ve just referred: “Dr. Scott Halperin”, we read, “has dedicated his career to inspiring confidence amongst Canadians that the most effective way to prevent the spread of infectious diseases continues to be through vaccination. By demonstrating the judicious testing that each vaccine undergoes before [being] introduced into publicly funded immunization programs, Dr. Halperin is combating misinformation with fact, reassuring us that the decision to vaccinate ourselves, and our children, is a wise one.”[9] In these two sentences, we are confronted with a barrage of assumptions. First that vaccination is the most effective way to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Second, that, as this continues to be the case, it has been so for a good long time and therefore is a settled matter of scientific fact not open to dispute. Third, that each and every vaccine introduced into publicly funded immunization programs is subject to judicious testing. Fourth, that the decision to vaccinate ourselves and our children is wise, and because there is no context given the suggestion is that it is always wise, presumably because of the judicious testing upon which we can always rely. Fifth, that anything which might shake one’s assurance in the wisdom of vaccinating oneself and one’s children is misinformation.

All across the board, we see that Canadian researchers are being encouraged to simply assume that whatever work they do, so long as they are advancing the research priorities set within the established global research agenda, they are doing the right thing. Earlier, we were reflecting on whether or not it’s advisable to separate the pursuit of specialized knowledge from service to the public good. Well, here we see that our researchers are NOT doing this. At least they don’t think they are. In fact, they are encouraged, at every possible turn, to believe that they are altruistic agents whose industry is unquestionably being directed towards the general health and well-being of Canadians.

There’s a powerful and familiar idea at work here. When we say that we want our children to go to a “good school”, we mean that we want them to flourish. We want them, eventually, to to be esteemed by their fellows, and to be valued in their professions and in the roles they go on to play in their careers. And when we say “good school”, we tend to assume that the school in and of itself, is already fulfilling such an important, socially beneficial role, that the mere fact of entering into that school is already a social good. We tend to assume that if you go to a good school, you are already contributing, you are already doing good for your fellows. I think this is a very common assumption, and I think we see a very similar assumption being promoted in relation to all those participating in Canadian Institutes of Health Research initiatives on these official government website pages.

Now, I also think this is a wonderful assumption to be able to make–if it is true. So long as it is true, it’s wonderful to be able to make that assumption, to have such confidence in universities, to have that type of confidence in any public institution, or publicly funded, publicly approved research initiative. That ‘s a wonderful thing to be able to enjoy, that confidence. That said, there’s a considerable amount of blind trust here. We’re taking it on faith that in and of themselves, these “good schools”, these premiere universities are good. We’re taking it on faith that they are so genuinely and assuredly good, that my participation in them–even my rather selfish, career-motivated participation–is itself an ethical good, something to be lauded, entirely un-problematic, perfectly worthwhile, that the fact of my being enrolled in a good school is, in and of itself, worthy of respect. “Good for you” someone might say, “worthy endeavours.” And that’s all great, so long as they really are worthy, and so long as the good school isn’t actually doing anything unlawful, or unethical, or contrary to the public good.

So, when I read Charu Kaushic, the Scientific Director within the CIHR Institute of Infection and Immunity, I might be inclined to take her at her word. When she says, “I know each one of us is trying our hardest to contribute in every way we can, whether it is being a source of authentic information to counteract all the misinformation that is out there, providing sound advice on infection prevention and control, or discussing the scientific evidence on social distancing, latest therapeutics, testing and vaccines.” When I read her saying these words, I am tempted to believe that she believes what he is saying. I am tempted to believe she is in earnest, even though social distancing and masking recommendations were never anywhere near constituting sound, evidence-based advice on infection prevention and control; even though there was no scientific evidence that social distancing was effective; even though relatively little and poorly designed research was done looking into therapeutic treatments for COVID-19, particularly those involving readily and cheaply available generics like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine; even though it was manifestly clear from the beginning that the mRNA COVID-19 genetic vaccines hadn’t even come close to meeting reasonable testing criteria. Why am I inclined to believe that Charu Kaushic believes what she is writing in spite of what might strike one as its manifest absurdity? Well, I think it’s entirely possible she believes that the system as a whole, because it is so wonderfully powerful and productive, because the sky is the limit when it comes to all that we can accomplish, that she believes the system is necessarily and assuredly good. When Charu Kaushic writes to the collective community of the CIHR, when she writes “to everyone of you, my heartfelt thanks!”, she is giving clear expression–whether she really believes it or not–to the idea that their participation in any and all CIHR projects is itself an entirely un-problematic ethical good, something to be lauded, something worthy of spontaneous yet profound respect.

What we are dealing with then, is a rather sophisticated version of what we described earlier as a “biology for biology’s sake” “get-out-of-responsibility-free-card”. If I am a Canadian researcher engaged in top-level research for initiatives funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research or if I am engaged in research within one of the network organizations under the umbrella of the Canadian Immunization Research Network, then I know in my heart that the work I am doing is good. It has to be good because the CIHR and the CIRN are public institutions of the highest caliber, they aren’t predatory corporations, they exist merely to serve the public good and advance the cutting edge of scientific research on behalf of all Canadians. Damn, it feels good!

It feels good, but is it real? Well, what I do know is that Charu Kaushic can’t quite use this line of reasoning to absolve herself of responsibility. The reason for this is that, “In her role as the Scientific Director for CIHR-III, Dr Kaushic is responsible for making [investment] decisions… nationally and internationally… [and] represent[ing] CIHR and [the] Government of Canada at various national and international forums related to infectious diseases. [And, at the same time,] In this [same] capacity she serves as the Chair of GloPID-R, [the] global consortium of funders in pandemic preparedness and emergency response research.”[10] Now what I just read there was taken from the online digital publication “Open Access Government” where we also read that Charu Kaushic “has been closely involved in shaping CIHR’s research response to the pandemic and is [additionally] serving on [the] COVID-19 National Immunity Task Force.”

As I suggested above, it’s possible that a great many well-meaning Canadian researchers are operating under the impression that the work they are doing must be good because the CIHR and CIRN are public institutions that function altruistically. It might be possible for many such well-meaning Canadian researchers to imagine that the CIHR and CIRN are so constituted that they will not and perhaps even cannot function in the manner of predatory, profit-driven corporations. If this is the case, if it is true that many Canadian researchers possess such a view of these powerful public institutions, Charu Kaushic is very unlikely to share their candy-coated illusions.

As Scientific Director within the CIHR Institute of Infection and Immunity, Kaushic is involved with the CIHR’s Global Governance Research on Infectious Disease initiative: From the CIHR’s own website: “[the] CIHR Institute of Population & Public Health (CIHR-IPPH) and Institute of Infection and Immunity (CIHR-III) have been leading efforts to build an international network for social science research on infectious diseases that will be supported by a central coordinating hub funded by the European Commission (EC) through its Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2018-2020. The intention of the international network is for participating funders to establish support centres, initiatives, or networks within their own jurisdictions, which will then be networked internationally through the EC-funded central coordinating hub. This international network of networks will facilitate bigger and more robust social scientific inquiries that respond to the needs of global policymakers. The international network is intended to facilitate policy-relevant opportunities, networking, cross-country learning, bigger science, and knowledge translation opportunities. The CIHR Network for Global Governance Research on Infectious Diseases grant represents the Canadian contribution to the broader international network for social science research on infectious diseases.(my bolding).[11]

The point that needs to be driven home here, is that given the state of our current National research bodies, it is very unlikely that they are representing anything like what the average Canadian imagines as the public good. Not only are our Canadian national research bodies correlating their research with the priorities set out in the WHO and GloPID-R’s “Coordinated Global Research Roadmap”, but our public CIHR is actively contributing to Global Governance programs that will facilitate the transfer of its national decision-making agency as a Canadian public institution into the hands of global public-private-partnership organizations. Rather heroically, the CIHR website refers to its “leading efforts to build” an “international network of networks”… Nowhere does the CIHR mention the goal of securing bigger profits for the corporate stakeholders who stand to gain from these publicly funded webworks… no, according to the CIHR the “international network of networks” just promises “bigger science”. There is similarly no mention of profits on the GloPID-R site: “The overriding aim of our work”, they say, “is to impact global health by saving lives. To coordinate the work of funders, we are active on several fronts.”[12]

As a reminder of the mode of operations one might expect from GloPID-R’s “industry stakeholder group,” we could take a quick peak at the United States Department of Justice website, under the heading, “Justice Department Announces Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement in Its History: Pfizer to Pay $2.3 Billion for Fraudulent Marketing.” In this press release, dated Wednesday, September 2, 2009, we read: American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and its subsidiary… have agreed to pay $2.3 billion, the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice, to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products… The press release quotes Tony West, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division, as saying that “Illegal conduct and fraud by pharmaceutical companies puts the public health at risk, corrupts medical decisions by health care providers, and costs the government billions of dollars…” It quotes Mike Loucks, then acting U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, as saying, “The size and seriousness of this resolution, including the huge criminal fine… reflect the seriousness and scope of Pfizer’s crimes… Pfizer violated the law over an extensive time period. Furthermore, at the very same time Pfizer was in our office negotiating and resolving the allegations of criminal conduct by its then newly acquired subsidiary… Pfizer was itself in its other operations violating those very same laws. Today’s enormous fine demonstrates that such blatant and continued disregard of the law will not be tolerated.”[13]

Now, why would Canadian public institutions want to get into bed with corporations that demonstrate “blatant and continued disregard of the law”? Does the Canadian public believe it is worthwhile to give up the autonomous governance of our national research programs and to partner with corporations that pay out billions in health care fraud settlements just for the sake of “bigger science”?

Part II: Explaining Public Private Piracy

At this point, I’d like to turn away from considerations of personal involvement and return to a more general line of argument. In this next section, what I want to make clear is that public institutions are not, in themselves, the problem. If public institutions–as a result of pervasive, corrupting, conflict of interest—if public institutions have become woefully inefficient, if they are making a mess of things, if they are failing in their mandates, if they are causing harm, the answer is absolutely not to defund and dismantle them. Instead, we need to determine exactly how they are failing, why they are failing, what or who is causing or helping them to fail, what these parties would gain from their failing, and finally how to restore them, strengthen them, and protect them from further corruption. Public institutions belong to the public and we need to do all we can to wrest our public institutions back from the private interests that have sunk their agile claws into them.

It has been widely assumed–and certainly our private legacy media and our national public broadcaster have worked overtime to create this impression–that the COVID-19 response in Canada has been led by independent scientists and elected representatives whose primary motivation has been to promote public welfare. In reality, however, our COVID-19 response has been largely directed by individuals and corporations with ideological and financial interests independent of, and in some cases contrary to, public welfare. These individuals and corporations have guided pandemic policy in order to ensure outcomes in line with their own private interests, with little regard to the general well-being of Canadians.

Rather than respecting reasonable boundaries between regulatory, political, and corporate interests, public health’s management of the COVID-19 crisis has instead invited the blurring, and in some cases, the erasure of these lines. The normalization of public-private partnerships in the context of emergency response poses a very serious threat to the public health and well-being for which public institutions and agencies, like the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Public Health Agency of Canada, are responsible. When public-private partnership is normalized, the result is not the support, but the capture of public institutions.

In responding to COVID-19, large corporations and their affiliated interests have taken full advantage of the opportunity represented by the declared pandemic to maximize profit and maintain growth, while endorsing public health policies that have crippled the small independent business sector. This has inevitably created conditions of severe hardship and widespread precarity for the working middle class. The massive transfer of wealth that has taken place, enabled and propelled by disastrously ill-advised pandemic mitigation policy, is no crude “conspiracy theory.” It is a hard, cold, and ugly fact. This destructively exploitative profiteering that has occurred throughout the declared pandemic is, of course, shocking. But it is nevertheless entirely consistent with the nature and operation of the marketplace and of the corporate powers striving for dominance within that marketplace.

Those corporations with the financial and political means – organizations that are motivated to guide societal responses to crises – will understandably devote their resources to areas of research, development, and public relations that align with and promote their own pre-existing biases, worldview, and interests. Not only corporate bodies, but individual researchers, academics, students, and others who rely on outside funding, are all most likely to pursue research and lines of argument, and to adopt or endorse public positions, that will increase their opportunities for funding and career advancement. As a result of this natural selection bias – in favour of professionally advantageous perspectives and endeavours – alternative perspectives, ideas, and paths of inquiry will be outcompeted.

Public institutions are rooted in the public sphere. They tend to have laudable goals, mission statements, and mandates clearly aligned with the constant underlying purpose of serving and protecting the public good. Increasingly, however, over the past decades, and most acutely during the declared pandemic, leading figures within our public institutions have chosen to engage in partnerships with private sector entities. As a result of this choice to engage in public-private partnerships, public institutions can become, to greater or lesser degree, dependent upon external and private sources of funding. In so doing, they not only compromise their integrity as organizations whose intended purpose is to promote the public welfare, but by their example they normalize the public-private partnership model.

On the face of it, public-private partnership sounds like a good thing; it suggests the idea that everyone is working together towards a common goal or set of goals. However, when it comes to the interests of powerful corporations capable of exerting influence on a global scale, there is little evidence those interests ever meaningfully intersect in positive, healthy, and peaceful ways with the interests of the average global citizen. It bears constant repeating, and it should be an ever-present consideration for anyone advocating on behalf of the public good: it is absolutely essential that public institutions remain independent from the private sphere. Particularly when one is dealing with public regulatory bodies, it is vital that the regulatory body remain independent of the private sector industries they regulate. But they must also remain independent of any overarching state and federal bodies that might themselves be leveraged by private sector interests.

Regulatory bodies are comprised of individuals with a special mandate to protect the public welfare. Individuals outside of these regulatory bodies – individuals who are not bound by these same mandates, and who may be subject to significant conflicts of interest that might bias them against promoting the public welfare – need to be excluded from the decision-making processes of public regulatory bodies.

Over the course of the declared pandemic, the most obvious and flagrant example of private sector influence upon public regulatory bodies, as well as upon public organizations more generally, is the influence exerted by the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical companies have a clear mandate to pursue financial gain. Their primary goal is to increase shareholder profit and investment. It is not in their mandate, nor a marketplace requirement, nor even a marketplace expectation that they determine the nature of the public good, let alone promote or protect it. The COVID-19 crisis presented global corporations, including pharmaceutical companies, with an unprecedented opportunity to consolidate their wealth and power. Indeed, the transfer of wealth that has taken place, a transfer from the working class to the global billionaire elite, has been measured in the trillions. According to a recent oxfam report: “The richest 1% grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population”[i] .

At the same time, the COVID-19 crisis has presented the global public with an opportunity to see just how much power the corporate sector can wield. We have seen its ability to influence public organizations, including regulatory bodies. We have seen its ability to direct the emergency response, including the legislative processes, of sovereign governments. And through the hold it has upon both legacy media and the new social media platforms, we have seen the influence it is able to exert in shaping the understanding of and the reaction to these policies in populations around the globe. In other words, we have observed that there are corporate power structures ready, willing, and able to shape global government policies and then to shape the global response to the policies they are promoting – policies ostensibly in service of the public welfare but manifestly serving to increase the wealth, power, and finally control of these corporations over an increasingly captured public sphere.

Part III: Are Our Universities Promoting Cultural Barbarism?

 

Now the title of this section sounds like hyperbole. But I think we need to seriously consider, whether or not our university system as it now exists, works for the public good, works to foster and cultivate the general welfare of Canadians, or whether the universities, as they currently exist, contribute to a state of barbarism.

The term barbarism comes from the ancient Greek barbaros. It referred to those who didn’t speak Greek. And like our English terms mumble and murmur, it may involve onomatopoeia—that is, when foreigners speak it just sounds like bar bar bar. Of course, this may have begun as a reference to language, but it then took on further cultural connotations. The barbarians did not share the general culture, the religious rites, the commonly held customs that made up the Greek thing.

The term barbarian then gets adapted in an interesting way when Erasmus writes his important parodic dialogue Against the Barbarians, at the end of the 1400s. Erasmus was referring to the scholastics, that is the scholastic Doctors of Divinity who dominated the theological schools. These scholastics, or schoolmen, studied the bible exclusively in its Latin translation. They also developed a powerful analytic approach to interpreting the bible that employed a specialized Latin vocabulary. Scholastic interpretation tended to consider the meaning of biblical passages in a rather abstract manner, with relatively little regard to their context within the biblical stories from which they were taken.

When Erasmus accused the scholastics of being Barbarians, he was playing around… But Erasmus’s jesting is always heavily freighted with meaning. So, first, he was saying that the Scholastics speak a foreign tongue, they do not speak Greek. This was true, the scholastics worked almost exclusively in Latin. It’s important that they did not speak Greek because the New Testament, was written in Koine, meaning common or marketplace Greek, just as the Old Testament or Tanak was written in Hebrew. But the linguistic resonance of the term barbarian didn’t stop there. The schoolmen could not read the Greek that was the original language of the sacred text they were interpreting. Additionally, they had developed a Latin that had a high concentration of new terms, crafted to better perform the logical operations of their Scholastic method of argument. Erasmus was one of the humanists. The humanists were steeped in what was called “good letters,” “the best things that have been written or spoken” by the most authoritative writers and thinkers of the classical cultures of ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Humanists like Erasmus, who were well versed in the greatest Roman authors, considered the Latin of the Scholastics to be a kind of tortured and foreign amalgam.

So, the term barbarian might also refer, in this way, to the paradoxical observation that the Scholastics, who worked in Latin, did not speak Latin. This argument could be made because the Scholastics worked in a specialized Latin that bore little resemblance to anything that had ever circulated among Latin speaking people, and little resemblance to anything that had ever been recorded within the general body of good Latin letters.

But what then do we mean when we say barbarism. Well, we mean something very different. But the two ideas are related, and the relationship is instructive. When we refer to a culture of barbarism, one of the primary characteristics we are referring to, is the readiness to abuse others. Barbarism refers to the readiness to rely upon violent or coercive means to persuade others to do as one wishes. If a culture is given over to barbarism, this might also imply a preference for relations of domination over relations of empathy.

Clearly there’s some distance between the original language-based definition and our current shared cultural understanding of the term barbarism. The feature of barbarism that connects the meanings of the term is easy to overlook—it’s specialization. The specialization of all areas of human activity is a major contributor, a gateway to what we think of when we say a culture of barbarism. This brings us back again, into the vicinity of Erasmus’s criticism of the scholastics. The Scholastics had developed a specialized way of interpreting the bible, and they used a specialized language to perform this interpretation.

The Scholastics sought to discover principles of the faith, almost as though these principles were buried in the biblical stories. In terms of the Scholastic method of biblical interpretation, it was only through a highly abstract process that the biblical message could be clarified and properly understood by specialists—by the scholastic Doctors of Divinity themselves—before being conveyed, with the sanction of Church authority, to the general public. Erasmus and the other Christian humanists thought differently. For them, it was essential to remain within the original, simple language of the biblical narrative, because in those biblical stories “the doctrine of Christ is more common and accessible than the sun”.[14]

What Erasmus called the philosophy of Christ required no specialized accreditation. Now, you might be wondering, what does biblical interpretation have to do with the public good that universities are supposed to serve? Well, for Erasmus’s late medieval/early modern European culture, the bible was the foundation and well-spring of what was understood as the public good. Consequently, if a given power structure could control biblical interpretation, and if it could control the delivery of the biblical message, then it might be able to control how the public good was being represented—with a clique of specialized interpreters, it could redefine or shape representations of the public good to align them with its own interests. Erasmus, however, didn’t go along with the establishment and its insistence on controlling the narrative. Two quotes from Erasmus will show the direction he was constantly heading: “All can be devout, and—I shall boldly add—all can be theologians” (Olin; 104). And if this wasn’t bad enough, from an establishment perspective, he doesn’t just suggest that everyone should become interpreters of the bible but he suggests that the lower classes, and women too should receive the education necessary to become their own biblical interpreters: “I wish that even the lowliest women read the gospels and the Pauline Epistles. And I would that they were translated into all languages so that they could be read and understood not only by Scots and Irish, but also by Turks and Saracens…[so that], the farmer [might] sing some portion of them at the plow, the weaver hum some parts of them to the movement of his shuttle, the traveler lighten the weariness of the journey with stories from this source” (Olin: 101).

Interpreting the Bible oneself, meant to some extent, autonomy, and ethical self-determination—it meant being self-possessed. When we look at the late Middle Ages, we see that the text of the bible, the biblical stories, the biblical message—originally composed in a very simple marketplace Greek accessible to any Greek speaking person who heard it—was walled off from the regular citizenry. It required intermediary, specialized interpreters.

What happens when domains of study, like biblical interpretation, like theology, what happens when entire domains of learning and activity become specialized? They become cut off from the general population. They become inscrutable. Ordinary people cannot see what they involve. Ordinary people cannot navigate those domains on their own; they can’t make sense of those domains on their own; they can’t, on their own, judge what is happening within those domains. To gain access to a specialized domain, ordinary people must be guided by others. Responsibility for the domain of activity is placed upon others. In specialized domains, responsibility is placed upon specialists, and the rest of us are told to trust the experts.

When all areas of human activity and inquiry are subject to specialization, ordinary people are not encouraged to do their own research, they are not encouraged to labour diligently towards understanding; instead, they are encouraged to trust the experts. This is a transition point where we can begin to bridge the gap between what we commonly understand by barbarism and the original language-based meaning that we find when we consider the ancient Greek term barbaros.

When you have domains of learning and activity that are specialized and you are encouraged to trust the experts rather than coming to your own determinations, then not only are you cut off from the learning and the skill involved in that domain, but you are also cut off from the possibility of taking responsibility in that domain. A specialized domain is not the responsibility of the non-specialist. What happens, however, when the entire network of human activity has become specialized is that, for any given thing, the grand majority of people are not responsible. Not only are they not responsible, but they cannot “take” responsibility. Taking responsibility becomes a question of accreditation. And here we come full circle to the role our universities play in contributing to the cultural state of barbarism.

By creating and legitimizing and normalizing the extraordinary authority of the expert, of the specialist, the universities legitimize the adoption in the general population of a very unhealthy default position—”whatever the matter at hand, it is almost certainly not my responsibility, and this is not a problem.” If I trust in the “good schools”, then I know that, whatever the problem, there are experts whose responsibility it is, there are specialists looking into these things, and the specialists looking into these things are the trustworthy product of our trusted universities.

And our “good schools” are trusted institutions. They are partly trusted because they are public institutions. And even when they are private institutions, they are trusted with public funds, and thus their trustworthiness is not a question, it’s an established fact. This trust that I’m describing is, of course, related to our earlier discussion of the university representing a public good, something of which we can be certain. And besides, everyone knows that our universities are tasked not only with creating and training our specialists, but with ensuring that they adhere to a high academic and ethical standard. As a result–whatever the problem–we can rest assured that there is a corresponding and eminently responsible department at one of our good schools, and there are specialists within that department, and they have been tasked with looking into whatever problem is at hand, and they will generate the best possible solution to that problem.

And so, we have this uncritical acceptance of the idea that universities are a public good and that the specialization in all areas of human inquiry that they cultivate is a public good. As a result of this accepted notion, the default position for individuals is that they are not responsible. And once you have convinced the population that they are justified, precisely when they do NOT take responsibility for important public issues, then you open the door to coercive policies and abuse. You open the door because you have created the conditions for acquiescent acceptance of anything and everything in the general population. They will accept whatever policies are handed down, no matter how oppressive, because they know they have been handed down by individuals accredited within a system they trust. They believe that the system is trustworthy because it goes without saying that it represents a public good.

At this point, one might wish to object, yes this seems possible but, is it not true that the university accreditation process is no walk in the park? It is a rigorous process. It’s no small feat to earn a graduate degree that indicates the development of specialized expertise. And isn’t it true, that you will not find a university department that does not insist upon ethical standards? Isn’t it true, in fact, that individuals studying, researching, teaching within university departments must always satisfy the ethical requirements of their department? Not only this, look at all the work that universities do to ensure equity and inclusion! These are all obvious signs of a great deal of attention to ethical matters!

I would agree that the equity and inclusion curriculum is explicitly a curriculum aimed at establishing ethical norms. We all agree, ethical considerations are a good thing. But there is still a problem here. This domain, this “ethics and inclusion” domain, is yet another area subject to specialization. And this leads to the question—does even this specialization, the specialization in the domain of “ethics and inclusion”, can even this specialization lead to the brutality we commonly associate with cultural barbarism? How could specialization in ethics possibly be related to abusive power, coercive control of populations, the stripping of rights and freedoms, and the oppression and confinement of formerly and rightfully free individual human beings?

Well, if we look at the university, we can see how this unlikeliest of outcomes is still a possibility. And here I’ll return to the topic of professional and financial conflict of interest which creates conditions likely to introduce bias such that paths of inquiry followed, policies recommended, conclusions reached, tend to favour a predetermined outcome or set of priorities. When we have knowledge and skills developed by specialists, and research initiatives managed by these specialists, and when the outcomes produced by these initiatives are further curated and communicated by specialists, then this small clique of specialists, this group of experts who possess the precious cultural capital of their specialized expertise–these individuals then become targets. These specialists become targets for those parties, those organizations, those corporate power-structures that stand to benefit from predetermined positions, policies, or outcomes in the specialists’ domains. As with public institutions in general, departments of universities, and specialists within these departments, can become subject to corporate capture. That is, they can fall under the sway of programs, organizations, corporations that direct them in their activities, in their research, in their policy recommendations. And one common and highly effective manner in which this is accomplished is by controlling funding.

In this game of influence, an organization that can shape research agendas and influence funding priorities—including ethics priorities–does not need to direct research and other initiatives entirely according to its own priorities. It doesn’t have to say that no research can be done in a direction that might lead to outcomes contrary to its interests. Instead, it will raise less alarm and thereby increase efficiency if it simply floods the board with funding that tends to favour its direction of choice. There will be copious funds available if you investigate this particular avenue–the efficacy, say, of mRNA vaccines in lowering rates of hospitalization. But there will be very little funding available if you want to investigate the efficacy of any off-patent drugs in early COVID treatment. When it comes to games of influence, such an organization will be even more effective, if it can coordinate with other corporate interest groups and begin working on a global level, creating a global framework for advancing research and determining national research priorities. Then, through their cooperative effort, this network of powerful corporations can not only channel their own funds but can begin directing and channeling the funds put forward by public research bodies that don’t want to be left behind, especially when progress is taking place “at the speed of science”.[15]

Ultimately, the goal of such games of influence is likely to be a mixture of financial gain and control over market and regulatory bodies. And when we refer to market and regulatory bodies, we are referring to populations seen as consumers, and to public institutions seen as either impediments to or captured instruments for gaining access and control over that population.

At this point, I can almost hear the dissenting voices of our public broadcaster crying out, I can hear them crying out in unison with the collective voices of legacy media across North America—”This is science fiction! And what’s more, it’s “extremely dangerous to our democracy”.[16] Well, I wish it was science fiction, but I agree that the things I’m describing are extremely dangerous to our democracy. Of course, we know that there is an organization much like the one I’ve just described—an organization with a great deal of relevance to the Canadian COVID-19 moment. And that organization is the GloPID-R organization chaired by Charu Kaushic, the Scientific Director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Institute of Infection and Immunity. And GloPID-R appears to have had a major influence upon the research priorities of developed nations–including Canada–throughout the declared pandemic. Indeed, it helped create the Coordinated Global Research Roadmap which, in Kaushic’s words, “became the roadmap against which most funding has been correlated” throughout the declared pandemic.[17]

The question is who is responsible for determining whether the research priorities set by GloPID-R and accepted by public institutions, among which universities, and other research bodies, who is responsible for determining whether or not these are in the public interest? Well, that responsibility would seem to fall to the specialists who work within these organizations. It’s true that an individual professor might choose to refuse funding from one of these bodies. Might refuse to go along with the research priorities advanced by them. But this would simply mean that that portion of funding was not made available to that particular researcher. The process goes no further. There is no participatory recourse, whereby the individual professor or researcher might attempt to take responsibility for the direction in which research was being propelled by the mostly unseen corporate powers pulling the strings within the global research funding initiatives.

But still, I can hear familiar voices saying things like, ‘oh, come on! Don’t you think you’re exaggerating a little? How bad can it be? Are you really telling me that we can’t trust our universities now? What about our medical journals, eh? Is that next? Are you going to try and tell me that not only our universities, but our public research agencies and the world’s leading medical journals are somehow corrupt? C’mon kid, give your head a shake!” Yes, yes, yes. Unfortunately, that is where we’re at. But it’s above my pay-grade. On this final question, I think it would be best to let Richard Horton, the editor in chief of the Lancet—one of the world’s most highly respected medical journals… I think it would be best to let Richard Horton say a few words. The following is from a short Lancet article that Horton penned himself, which appeared on April 11^th, 2015, and which was entitled, “Offline: What is Medicine’s 5 Sigma”.

“A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially remain unquoted, since the forthcoming UK election meant they were living in “purdah”—a chilling state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech are placed on anyone on the government’s payroll. Why the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution? Because this symposium—on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome Trust in London last week—touched on one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.

[Now, in relation to the series of excerpts that follow, please remember that this is the editor in chief of the Lancet speaking about scientific literature—as he makes no exception for the Lancet, we can assume that in writing this he considers his own journal to be among the offending publications]

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”… The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming… Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours… Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as high-impact publication. National assessment procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise bad practices…

Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivised to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivised to be productive and innovative… Instead of changing incentives, perhaps one could remove incentives altogether…The conclusion of the symposium was that something must be done. Indeed, all seemed to agree that it was within our power to do that something. But as to precisely what to do or how to do it, there were no firm answers. Those who have the power to act seem to think somebody else should act first… nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system. [18]

What a terrible realization it is, when we discover that our best and brightest seem constitutionally incapable of taking responsibility to fix what is broken in our precariously democratic system. And then too, how much worse it is, when we discover that our most powerful public institutions are busily preparing the transfer of their powers and their autonomy into the controlling hands of international networks coordinated by global corporate interests. It’s terrible, but here we are. So, what do we do now?

Well, clearly we’ve got to stop waiting for other people to take care of things. But as we confront the enormous pile of wreckage that the last three years have piled up around us, I think it’s essential that we act on the recognition that our public institutions are not rotten in and of themselves—they are being undermined, corrupted, sabotaged by highly sophisticated private interests. Part of this recognition requires us to rethink some of our economic assumptions. After much conditioning, many of us have come to believe that public institutions are necessarily inefficient. We have been conditioned to think that all government and all regulatory institutions are corrupt and that, consequently, survival of the fittest is the best way to govern industry. We are constantly being led to believe that if we allow the market to be as Darwinian as possible, the outcome will always be fine because, when it is unregulated, the market triumphs. This sneaky little idea, is like an unspoken creed informing much of what we have seen happening over the past three years, ever since the eleventh of March, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 constituted a pandemic. To bring home exactly what is at stake, I think we all need to consider that this type of market triumphalism—which favours the use of public-private-partnerships to capture and then assimilate public institutions–that this type of market triumphalism inevitably translates into a culture of barbarism, a society that eclipses empathetic community building while normalizing relations of domination and subordination.

That’s not what we want. What we want is a simple thing. A beautiful world of beautiful people. A world in which we build cooperative, empathetic communities, while taking full responsibility for ourselves and our relationships with one another. Easily said, sure… but the work’s already underway.

[1] Who are we and what do we do? A short introduction to GloPID-R
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+you+say+GloPID-r&rlz=1C1CHBF_enCA1043CA1043&sxsrf=APwXEdctmZNlsf1gc-1e_YCpUcHU7tsvKQ:1682906265441&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjmgZGxgtP-AhWaCjQIHRV0B-4Q_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=1536&bih=746&dpr=1.25#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:4bba78b1,vid:vYBgUyIHCUI

[2] GloPID-R members https://www.glopid-r.org/members/

[3] https://www.glopid-r.org/our-milestones/

[4] https://www.glopid-r.org/articles-newsletter/new-partnerships-stakeholders-working-groups/

[5] https://www.glopid-r.org/our-milestones/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpy3MGNqcM0 (minute 13)

[6]  “Message from the Scientific Director: The CIHR response to the COVID-19 pandemic”

https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/51925.html  (As I go on to explain below—see page 8—Charu Kaushic is simultaneously the Chair of GloPID-R)

[7] III Initiatives

https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/38949.html

[8] “Message from the Scientific Director: The CIHR response to the COVID-19 pandemic” https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/51925.html

[9] Heralded as one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of modern times, why are proven-effective vaccines suddenly getting such a bad rap?

https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/51440.html

[10] Charu Kaushic, Chair, Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness (GloPID-R)

[11] The Environments and Health Signature Initiative
https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/48464.html#a2

[12] https://www.glopid-r.org/about-us/

[13] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-largest-health-care-fraud-settlement-its-history

[14] Language and Method 95

[15] Pfizer Executive Janine Small speaking before the European Parliament (45-50 second mark) https://twitter.com/TrueNorthCentre/status/1579830040858329089?lang=en
Original European Parliament multimedia centre link appears no longer valid
https://multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/en/video/lessons-learned-and-recommendations-for-the-future-extracts-from-the-exchange-of-views-ep-special-committee-on-the-covid-19-pandemic_I231213

[16] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0EF_WxZm1o&t=232s

[17]Cochrane Convenes Keynote from Doctor Charu Kaushic (00:13:10-00:13:25) https://www.google.com/search?q=cochrane+convenes+keynote+from+dr+charu+kaushic&rlz=1C1CHBF_enCA1043CA1043&oq=coch&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j35i39i650j46i512j69i60l4.2517j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:693b34f8,vid:gpy3MGNqcM0

[18] Richard Horton, “Offline: What is Medicine’s 5 Sigma”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext

[i] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-bag-nearly-twice-much-wealth-rest-world-put-together-over-past-two-years