Advertising agencies wield great power
over public opinion, and prosecutors are increasingly starting to look
at PR firms’ role in cases where corporations are accused of serious
malfeasance or fraud. For example, CampaignAsia.com recently reported
that:1
“Hundreds of new greenwashing-related court cases
have increased the pressure on PR and advertising agencies, as
prosecutors begin to widen their net in terms of who should bear
responsibility for the controversial practice ...
Since May 2021, 369 climate-related lawsuits against
agencies have been concluded, with 218 of those (58%) ruling against the
PR and advertising firms ... Over the past five years the number of
lawsuits relating to the role of PR and advertising in climate change
has doubled. The cases are mainly US-based, but span 39 countries in
total.”
Smoke and Mirrors
The data reported by CampaignAsia come from the report,2
“Smoke and Mirrors: The Legal Risks of Fossil Fuel Advertising,”
published in May 2022 by a climate-change activist organization called
Clean Creatives.
The report names WPP, IPG, Dentsu, Publicis and Omnicom — four
holding companies that in turn run dozens of individual PR agencies — as
being particularly vulnerable to greenwashing lawsuits, as they all
work to improve the public image of fossil fuel clients “while they
continue to pollute the earth.”
According to Clean Creatives director Duncan Meisel, PR companies
take “significant reputational, business and legal risks when they work
with fossil fuel companies to spread climate disinformation,” as their
work not only hurts the planet but could also land them in court. Meisel
also warns that ad agencies may be duped themselves by clients who
withhold damaging information, and that such naiveté could end up being
costly.
The ESG Scam
Investing in “green” companies has
skyrocketed in recent years, but many of these companies aren’t what
they claim to be. According to climate change think tank InfluenceMap, a
majority of “green” equity funds fall short.
Of the 723 funds marketed using Environmental, Social and Governance
(ESG) claims, more than half failed to meet the Paris Accord rules on
carbon emissions and clean energy, and “more than 70% of the funds with
broader ESG goals are also misaligned with global climate targets,” Time
magazine reported.3
InfluenceMap noted that BlackRock Inc. — the world’s largest
investment firm, which has vowed to make sustainability a core
investment strategy — still invests in fossil fuels. The same goes for
other major investment companies.
State Street Corporation, for example, which is the third largest,
owns a portion of Marathon Petroleum and Philips 66 which, according to
InfluenceMap, are “two of the world’s most egregious fossil fuel
lobbying companies preventing policy-based climate action.”4
Similarly, a May 2021 report5
by the Economist concluded some of the largest ESG funds in the world
are “stuffed full of polluters and sin stocks.” According to a 2019
report by the Wall Street Journal,6
“Eight of the 10 biggest U.S. sustainable funds are invested in
oil-and-gas companies, which are regularly slammed by environmental
activists.”
Aside from oil and gas, other top ESG investments include tobacco companies and casino operators,7
neither of which is particularly well-known for high ethical standards.
In a March 2021 USA Today op-ed, former chief information officer of
sustainable investing for BlackRock, Tariq Fancy, said the quiet part
out loud:8
“In truth, sustainable investing boils down to little
more than marketing hype, PR spin and disingenuous promises from the
investment community.”
McKinsey & Company Fined for Consulting That Led to Deaths
We’re also seeing a similar trend happening in the drug industry,
where ad agencies are starting to be held to account for the “legal
lies”9 they spin on behalf of their clients.
For example, in February 2021, McKinsey & Company, a management
consultancy firm, paid $573 million to settle a case in which they were
accused of complicity by giving marketing advice to manufacturers of
opiates — including the maker of Oxycontin, Purdue Pharma — which have
killed more than half a million people.10 CampaignAsia writes:11
“Lauren Papenhausen, a partner at White & Case,
said the McKinsey settlement is ‘particularly noteworthy in that it
signals a willingness on the part of the government to pursue not only
manufacturers, but also those who provide them professional services.
While one might view the settlement as unique to the
particular context of opioids, it raises the question of whether
governmental concern over particular marketing strategies is a sign of
enforcement efforts to come.’”
A late June 2022 article by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health also highlighted obtained litigation documents12 showing McKinsey’s role in the opioid epidemic:13
“They show how McKinsey advised opioid makers Purdue
Pharma, Endo Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson and Mallinckrodt to
help them increase sales, despite the growing public outcry over the
opioid epidemic ...
Materials include scopes of work, proposals, and
invoices; presentations prepared for internal discussion and for clients
(including Purdue Pharma and Endo Pharmaceuticals); spreadsheets
outlining project staffing; and emails responding to news about
increased restrictions on opioids.
The collection also houses letters from regulatory
agencies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in response
to new drug applications from opioid manufacturers; preparation
materials for regulatory advisory committee meetings; opioid-related
transition documents for state and federal agencies; and other internal
files.
‘These documents now form a unique and invaluable
public resource to help us comprehend the magnitude of harm done to the
millions of Americans affected by the opioid crisis,’ said Jeremy
Greene, MD, PhD, MA, William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and the
History of Medicine in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
‘More generally, they shine a bright light on the
murkier intersections of science, industry, and financial interest that
continue to characterize the U.S. health care system’ ...
‘Researchers can leverage these litigation documents
to see patterns of industry behavior that could be regulated to protect
public health,’ said Dorie Apollonio, PhD, MPP, a professor of clinical
pharmacy in the UCSF School of Pharmacy. ‘This will be critical to
identifying reforms that can protect against future epidemics like
this.’”
McKinsey Played Both Cop and Robber
We recently discovered that the situation is even more corrupt than previously thought. A U.S. House investigation14,15,16
into McKinsey, based on materials obtained through the discovery
process of various lawsuits, also revealed McKinsey was advising the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration on the safety of opioids, while at the
same time advising drug companies on how to maximize sales.
In one instance, McKinsey wrote scripts for Purdue to use in its
meeting with the FDA to discuss the safety of OxyContin in pediatric
populations. In another, Jeff Smith, a senior McKinsey consultant,
worked on a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS) for OxyContin
while simultaneously advising the FDA about the drug’s safety.17
As noted by investigative journalist Paul Thacker,18
“Just think about that for a moment — for years McKinsey played both
cop and robber.” As reported by The New York Times, April 13, 2022:19
“Since 2010, at least 22 McKinsey consultants have
worked for both Purdue and the FDA, some at the same time, according to
the committee’s 53-page report ...
The firm provided no evidence to the committee that
it had disclosed the potential conflicts of interest as required under
federal contracting rules — an ‘apparent violation,’ the report said.
McKinsey also allowed employees advising Purdue to help shape materials
that were intended for government officials and agencies ...
‘Today’s report shows that at the same time the FDA.
was relying on McKinsey’s advice to ensure drug safety and protect
American lives, the firm was also being paid by the very companies
fueling the deadly opioid epidemic to help them avoid tougher regulation
of these dangerous drugs,’ Representative Carolyn Maloney, the New York
Democrat who chairs the committee, said in a statement ...
A bipartisan group of lawmakers last month introduced legislation20 aimed at preventing conflicts of interest in federal contracting, citing McKinsey’s experience with Purdue and the FDA.”
McKinsey Engaged in Direct Sales
Now, we’ve also come to find that McKinsey21
did direct sales for its Big Pharma clients, using in-house sales reps.
They actually employed entire sales teams that sold clients’ drugs
directly to doctors. This revelation came out of the repository22 of opioid litigation documents set up by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Emails23
show Publicis offers a similar service where Publicis sales staff sell
clients’ products to pharmacies. As reported by The New York Times:24
“The Times found that the firm played a far deeper
and broader role in advising clients involved in the opioid crisis than
was publicly disclosed ... While the firm held remarkable sway at
Purdue, it also advised the largest manufacturer of generic opioids,
Mallinckrodt. It worked with Endo on marketing Opana and helped it grow
into a leading generics manufacturer.
It advised Johnson & Johnson, whose subsidiary
Tasmanian Alkaloids was the largest supplier of the raw materials
extracted from poppies used to make many top-selling opioids. Then, as
the full brunt of the epidemic became apparent, it counseled government
agencies on how to address the fallout ...
Drawing on reams of data and proprietary tools,
McKinsey vetted deals and advised on corporate strategy. It developed
tactics for dealing with regulators and helped secure approval for new
products.
The firm helped clients adopt more aggressive sales
strategies, which, on at least two occasions, led companies to shift
resources to more potent products.
It profiled and targeted physicians, in some
instances trying to influence prescribing habits in ways that federal
officials later warned heightened the risk of overdose. And when opioid
prescriptions began to decrease during a government crackdown, the
records show, McKinsey devised new approaches to drive sales.”
Publicis to Face Charges Over Role in Opioid Crisis
Another advertising company that is in hot water over its role in the
opioid crisis is Publicis Health, which crafted many of Purdue’s
Oxycontin marketing materials.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey sued Publicis Health
May 6, 2021, accusing the company of “collecting more than $50 million
in exchange for marketing schemes to get doctors to prescribe Purdue’s
opioids to more patients, in higher doses, for longer periods of time.”25 Publicis tried to have the case dismissed, but failed.26
The Truth About Fact Checkers
Aside from hiring big advertising companies to push their dangerous
wares, how else are drug companies keeping the truth from coming out?
Enter fact checkers. Over the past two years, it’s become quite clear
that so-called “fact checkers” are anything but. While they claim to
combat misinformation, they’re the ones spreading most of it, and they
do it on behalf of the drug industry and the advertising companies that
run cover for them.
There are countless examples of conflicts of interest running amuck in fact checking organizations. To list just a few examples:
• Publicis funded the creation of and is partnered with NewsGuard,27 an online “credibility rater”28
to “provide its clients with more responsible, trustworthy advertising
platforms.” It’s not far-fetched to assume Publicis might influence
NewsGuard’s ratings of drug industry competitors, such as alternative
health sites.
NewsGuard’s health-related service, HealthGuard, is also partnered
with the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a dark money-funded
progressive cancel-culture leader29
with extensive ties to government and global think tanks that has
labeled people questioning the COVID-19 injection as “threats to
national security.”
• As a Google partner,30,31 Publicis also has the ability to bury undesirable views that might hurt its clientele.
• Pfizer (a Publicis client32) also funds Facebook’s fact checking operation,33 which is why you can’t say anything negative about the COVID jabs on Facebook.
• Pfizer also has significant conflicts of interest with Reuters, which has joined in the fact checking enterprise.34 Reuters chairman (and former CEO) James Smith is both a top investor and board member of Pfizer,35 raising suspicions he might have a vested interest in keeping Pfizer’s media record clear of incriminating details.
• Another fact checking organization called FactCheck.org
is funded, in part, by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which holds
nearly $2 billion in Johnson & Johnson stock. What’s more, its CEO,
Richard Besser, is a former (2009) director of the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, which appears to view the protecting of
Big Pharma interests as a full-time job.
The Ultimate Goal of This Network
This network of players is also intricately tied to the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is using pandemic fears to usher the world into a “Great Reset.” Publicis is a WEF partner,36 as is Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Google, BlackRock, State Street and a slew of other investment firms — and oil companies.37
Many fact checking organizations belong to the International Fact-Checking Network,38
which is financed by George Soros (through his Open Society Foundation
and the National Endowment for Democracy), Google and the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation39 — all of whom are part of the WEF’s technocratic cabal that is pushing for a Great Reset.
This sort of brings us back to where we started, with the
greenwashing of polluters. The entire “green” agenda serves that larger
“Reset” goal, and the fact that we’re now seeing so much greenwashing
going on in the “green” investment sphere is just more proof that the
whole thing is a scam. The claim that we must quit using fossil fuels
and “go green” to save the planet is a ruse to get people to accept a
radically lowered quality of life and greater restrictions on freedom.
Big Pharma fits into this larger scheme because the WEF needs a
justification for the introduction of biomonitoring and biosecurity in
the form of a digital vaccine passport. The COVID pandemic was a
manufactured crisis that “necessitated” global vaccination, and a way to
confirm vaccination.
Vaccination tracking was the chosen foundation for what will become a
much larger and more invasive monitor and control system involving your
finances as well. With vaccine passports being largely rejected, plan B
is to introduce digital identity, which is more or less the same thing,
just more complete from the start.
So, the reason these players — from fund managers to PR companies,
drug companies, legacy media, social media platforms, search engines and
fact checking organizations — are all protecting each other is because
they’re all cogs in the same machine. They work together to achieve an
ultimate goal, which is to put the world population under a system of
global technocratic control.