Daily Caller columnist Mary Rooke discussed the importance of the outlet’s new documentary “SICK,” the effects that big medicine has on Americans, Friday on Real American’s Voice.
Rooke appeared on “The War Room” to discuss the release of Daily Caller’s “SICK: Unmasking Big Medicine” and its importance for viewers. Show host Natalie Winters asked Rooke about the origins of the film. (RELATED: Daily Caller’s ‘SICK’ Reveals Just How Much Money Big Medicine Made From COVID)
“We really felt like after Covid, like you said, a lot of people woke up to that realities of what big medicine was doing in America and what that really meant for American patients. So we started doing a little bit of a deep dive and realized, obviously, this went way beyond Covid and had started well before that,” Rooke said. “One of the women that was featured in the trailer, that everybody just watched it, it was such a sad tale. She said that her husband had just started his own company and he was just having trouble sleeping and went to the doctor and got put on Zoloft within 10 minutes. Then shortly after that, like three months later, he was hanging dead in their garage and she has spent a lifetime now of trying to figure out how that happened.”
“Several of the doctors inside the documentary just talk about the financial incentive behind this and why these doctors are kind of going this way,” she continued. “When you look at that money and you follow the money trail, you see that it’s billions and billions of dollars these pharmaceutical companies are pumping into doctors and hospitals. And direct payments too in order to ensure that either shots get in arms or drugs get inside bodies.”
Rooke went on to discuss the story of a doctor featured in the film, who “snowballed” into prescription drugs after being given a bottle of Vicodin.
“When we made this – I guess our big hope for this is that patients no longer go into their doctors’ offices uninformed that they realize that there is an incentive there to ensure that they walk out with a prescription in hand and to really figure out whether or not that prescription is going to have these nasty side effects that some of the people in the documentary highlighted,” Rooke stated.
Winters then questioned Rooke on the “incentives” behind the choices that medical companies have taken towards the American people over the last few years, pressing if it could be something “bigger” or if it was solely financial.
“Well, I think that it’s definitely both. I mean when you look at it – the profits have to be speaking very loudly to them. You had Pfizer, which was doing about 56 billion before Covid, and then by 2023 it was doing 100 billion dollars,” Rooke continued. “Then you look at the payments that these big medicine companies made to doctors alone. It was like 2.46 billion in 2022 – straight to doctors’ offices. So when you look at that, it’s hard not to see that financial incentive behind it. But, you know, like I have talked to other people before, there’s definitely an avenue in which power corrupts people, and when you are giving these people this amount of power over other people’s lives, they are of course going to take it.”
From 2020 to 2021 Pfizer, one of the leading medical companies during the COVID-19 pandemic, doubled its revenue by hitting over $81 billion. As the company gained a massive foothold in the U.S. regulatory process, the company planned to profit off of the pandemic for years through annual vaccinations and sales of Paxlovid, an antiviral pill, even though some patients had reported negative side effects from both treatments.
“SICK” breaks down the incentives of behind the medical industry’s grip on the pandemic and even before that. Through detailed stories of how everyday Americans have been affected, the Daily Caller’s new documentary the spider web that the industry has created within the United States.