Health sciences today all too often function as a sophisticated propaganda system for pharmaceutical products, as the Covid‑19 vaccine rollout showed on an unprecedented scale. Since at least the 1980s, scientific institutions, journals, regulators, and mainstream news media have been gradually restructured to align knowledge production, communication, and censorship with corporate interests. This is an argument not against biomedical science but for a science of integrity, honesty, and humanity.
The Blind Spot of Science Studies
Science was once idealized as a norm-governed route to truth, corrected by peer review and open debate – though those norms were always aspirational., The “critical turn” in science studies, from Thomas Kuhn’s account of how proponents of dominant paradigms decide what counts as legitimate evidence and dismiss anomalies to Thomas Gieryn’s examination of how scientists marginalize unwelcome challengers, recast science as a social practice shaped by institutions, interests, and power.,
Yet the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that emerged from this turn has largely ignored the most consequential force on science today: commercial interests. The field has said remarkably little about how actors with concentrated material stakes gain leverage over chokepoints in the research pipeline – funding, design, data, publication, dissemination, retraction – and steer what gets studied, which “knowledge” reaches the public, and what becomes scientific fact and consensus. The field has preferred deconstructing scientific truth to studying its hijacking and destruction by corporate and financial interests.
Epistemic Corruption, Propaganda and Institutional Capture
One prominent exception is STS scholar Sergio Sismondo, who has written widely about how pharmaceutical companies built a vast, industry-controlled pipeline of knowledge production that underpins medical practice. He calls the result “epistemic corruption:” a knowledge system that “loses integrity, ceasing to provide the kinds of trusted knowledge expected of it,” because it has been co‑opted by interests at odds with its central goals.
Unlike bribery or vote-rigging, epistemic corruption arises from dense financial, organizational, and reputational dependencies linking universities, journals, regulators, clinicians, and industry – all of it legal. Science thus becomes less an impartial arbiter of truth than part of a propaganda apparatus through which dominant actors frame problems, filter evidence, and orchestrate consent.
One lynchpin is “ghost management,” in which companies shape every step of the research-to-publication pipeline, with nominally independent academics serving as front‑stage “authors.” This misrepresentation of source is a tacit admission by the real source of its own limited credibility.
Epistemic corruption also shapes which scientific “advances” the news media publicize and which they ignore. Most remarkable is not the corporate influence itself but how thoroughly generations of highly intelligent scientists and physicians have accepted and normalized it. The rare scientists who protest risk career suicide, are branded heretics, and publicly character-assassinated, so the problem seldom penetrates mainstream news coverage.
Regulators have come to serve industry rather than the public, bound to manufacturers through user fees, public–private partnerships, and revolving‑door employment., The same revolving door spins between journalism, public relations, media regulators, politics, and lobbying, helping explain how a hegemonic coalition forms and holds power. When industry fees fund most of a regulator’s budget, fast approvals please paying customers while rigorous scrutiny invites backlash. Regulators let companies test drugs against subtherapeutic comparators, switch primary outcomes after the fact, and report results selectively – practices that would be flagged as manipulative in non-commercial research.
Peer-reviewers, the supposed guardians of scientific quality, are themselves deeply entangled with industry. A recent JAMA study found almost sixty percent of peer-reviewers for leading medical journals received payments from drug and device manufacturers, totaling US$1.06 billion between 2020 and 2022. Journals scrutinize authors’ conflicts of interest but rarely reviewers’, opening an opaque channel for industry influence over what gets published and how rigorously it is vetted.
Industry ties shape findings too: in research on mercury and autism, 86 percent of industry-affiliated studies found no association, compared with 21 percent of unaffiliated studies. Medical journals depend on advertising revenue and the prestige of industry-sponsored research; the Lancet’s editor Richard Horton conceded they had “devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” When conflicts of interest pervade gatekeeping institutions, the appearance of neutral science becomes the very medium through which propaganda operates.
The results are well documented: routinely concealed harms; repeated convictions meeting official definitions of organized crime; and whole narratives – from the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression to the benefits of Tamiflu – that proved false or radically overstated.,,, Selective publication does much of the work: of 36 antidepressant trials the FDA judged negative, only 8 percent were published as negative and 31 percent were spun as positive, so 94 percent of published trials appeared positive, against 51 percent in the FDA’s full data. More broadly, diseases are redefined to expand markets, mild symptoms pathologized, and drugs of minimal efficacy marketed as breakthroughs.
