As of late, meaning since the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people have expressed confusion about the progressive viewpoint toward the pharmaceutical industry, also known fondly around here as Big Pharma.
For decades and decades, Democrats railed against Big Pharma and their bloated profits and bluntly called them an evil among us. Before the pandemic, as Marc Thiessen has pointed out, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) referred to the pharmaceutical industry as “the biggest bunch of crooks in this country,” then went on to accuse the industry of “literally killing Americans.”
Kamala Harris, somehow a senator prior to the pandemic, called pharmaceutical executives “nothing more than some high-level dope dealers” who didn’t care one wit about public health. Joe Biden bashed the “greed of drug companies” for years.
So why is it that, since the pandemic, Democrats have been among that industry’s most vocal supporters. They live—and maybe die—by the Covid vaccine, they supported mandated vaccination, they line up behind massive vaccination schedules for youth, they are horrified by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign to discover the real causes of autism and to stop the overmedication of America’s youth in general.
Oh yeah, don’t try and touch Big Pharma’s liability immunity. In 2024, when conservative Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced a bill to remove all federal liability protections for the Covid-19 vaccine and to preserve the ability of injured Americans to access pre-existing compensation programs, not one Democrat signed on in support of the legislation or co-sponsored it. Nineteen Republicans jumped at the chance of co-sponsorship.
Sure, the uni-party killed the bill, but that tells us all we need to know about how progressives feel these days about Big Pharma. They’re an item, as they say.
So what the heck happened? How did the Democratic party go from essentially being RFK, Jr., in its anti-Big Pharma fervor to being poster children for Pfizer?
Well, as is usual in politics, a lot of the answer has to do with money. I know, surprise, surprise.
Once upon a time, Big Pharma mostly lined the pockets of Republicans with campaign cash and very little went to the Democrats. And then a funny thing happened on the way to Donald Trump’s presidency and RFK, Jr.’s, ascendency: The Republicans went all populist and turned on big business (with good reason, mind you), and the Democratic Party became, rhetoric aside, the real party of millionaires and billionaires.
In particular, corporations became globalist when they discovered that meant they could turn high-paying American jobs into low-paying ones in the developing world. As for Big Pharma, when Bill Gates declared it was his mission to vaccinate the world, no matter what it did to the peasants—causing vaccine-induced polio outbreaks and other miseries for their own good—drug makers really liked that. And so did Democrats, who were giddy over all that abuse-induced dependence.
And so the Big Pharma money began to flow to Democrats. More of their dollars went to Democrats than to Republicans for the first time in 2020. In 2024, Open Secrets data showed Harris raking in more than $7.5 million from the pharmaceutical industry compared to only $1.3 million for Trump.
This reflects the entire movement of corporate money to Democrats and it partly explains why Democrats have a new found love for the industry and its elites.
But it’s not the whole story.
Indeed, progressives—and by that I mean the New Left that defeated twentieth century old-school liberalism—don’t care if Big Pharma drugs our kids, don’t care about the harms vaccines might cause, don’t care if over-medication turns children into dysfunctional zombies or uncontrollable hyperactives.
And they never have.
Look closely at all those years that Democrats fought against Big Pharma and you will notice a repetitive line of attack: It was all about lower drug costs and better access. Progressives didn’t care that Big Pharma was over-drugging and over-vaccinating our children. Just the opposite: They were loudly calling for lower drug prices so more people, especially in poorer communities, could access them.
Their complaint wasn’t that Big Pharma was poisoning our kids—the current conservative grievance—their complaint was that the industry’s huge profits prevented even more poisoning of the masses.
So why would progressives want that?
It’s all the rage …
Well, because overmedication, in particular the psychiatric drugging of children, are a means of control, and of controlling the population from an early age. That’s why this week’s government MAHA report points out that overmedicalizaton has continued despite evidence that it doesn’t work:
Stimulant prescriptions for ADHD in the U.S. increased 250 percent from 2006 to 2016, despite evidence they did not improve outcomes long-term. Antidepressant prescription rates in teens increased by 1,400 percent between 1987 and 2014, even though a systematic overview shows that psychotherapy is just as effective as drugs in the short term, and potentially more effective in the long term.
There was more:
Antipsychotic prescriptions for children increased by 800 percent between 1993 and 2009, with most of these medications prescribed for conditions not approved by the FDA for use in children. Studies find that more than 35 percent (equivalent to more than 15 million prescriptions) of childhood antibiotics are unnecessary and that infants exposed to antibiotics in the first two years of life are more likely to develop asthma, allergic rhinitis, atopic dermatitis, celiac disease, obesity, and ADHD.
Writing in 2017, Dr. Bonnie Burstow put it this way in Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry:
As shown by Baughman and Hovey (2006), these drugs are given frequently for controlling children, however much that control is seen as help. Schools are deeply implicated, ordering attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) testing and actively encouraging stimulant use with children seen as disruptive or having too short an attention span—in other words, children acting like children and not acting in the way which adults would prefer.
Over the course of time, Burstow wrote, behavior that was once viewed as normal is redefined as a medical problem that needs to be controlled. I would add that this control of normal behavior becomes a culturally pervasive norm, and when normal behavior is controlled on a mass scale, that means the people are controlled.
It’s pretty simple. The progressive left is all about control. The Democrats’ paradox—their sudden support for Big Pharma—is no paradox at all. They never railed against what Big Pharma was doing; they just wanted them to profit less so more people could be controlled.
That line of thinking still exists—I still see Democrats go off against excessive Pharma profits—but it is obscured by the progressive push to spread the Big Pharma poisonous product line far and wide.
A long time ago, the democratic left was a different breed, a completely different species. The left believed in a welfare state, but it was devoted to the Bill of Rights, to free speech and to the U.S. Constitution, which they believed ratified the best instincts of left-wing libertarianism.
Democratic socialists such as Michael Harrington, the founder of Democratic Socialists of America, to which AOC belongs, were free-speech and constitutional absolutists. They believed the right posed a threat to the realization of fundamental individual rights that the constitution guaranteed for poor and rich alike.
Not so today’s left. It believes the constitution and the freedoms it enshrines are the enemy. That’s why progressives today have turned their backs on the working and middle classes and hitched their wagon to the lodestar of power and control—the shining globalist complex of bureaucratic institutions and massive corporate institutions beckoning them.
The only time you’ll see them attacking Big Pharma is when they think the industry isn’t doing enough to advance the population’s ultimate submission to globalist control.
This piece first appeared as an Our View with Gregg Walker in The Lakeland Times.