The Censorship Industrial Complex | Paul Thacker

Paul Thacker is an American investigative journalist based in Spain and is founder of The DisInformation Chronicle, a newsletter that reports on corruption in science and medicine.

Paul won a 2021 British Journalism Award for a series in The BMJ that investigated the financial interests of medical experts advising US and UK governments during the Covid-19 pandemic. A separate investigation Paul wrote for The BMJ looked at problems in the clinical trial for Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine. That article was the finalist for an investigative journalism award and is the most highly viewed article in all of science in 2021.

Paul has written on conflicts of interests and corruption in science and medicine for multiple outlets over the years, including for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, NEJM, The New Republic, Vice, Slate, JAMA, Environmental Science & Technology, and Mother Jones.

For several years Paul led a series of high profile investigations in the United States Senate looking into corruption in science and medicine. This work led to reforms in medicine, including passage of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act and heightened conflicts of interest policies at the National Institutes of Health. Some of this work was captured in a profile Nature Magazine written about Paul.

Paul is a former Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard and has lectured on journalism and corruption in science at multiple universities including Harvard, Georgetown, MIT, Brown University, the University of Toronto, and the University of West Virginia.

https://www.pauldthacker.com

The Covid event has revealed that it was about more than just public health and the political, economic and societal aspects of the response are of far greater significance than the virus itself. There remains a continued drive toward the transformation of our societies in ways that threaten democracy and our existing ways of life. Open Society Sessions aim to examine the political, societal and economic dimensions of our recent experience and analyse developments in the future.

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