“Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.” --Winona LaDuke
Rays of sunshine filtered through the stained glass window, the Biblical scene on that window shimmered and came alive. I sat quietly in the pew mesmerized by the play of the light and shadow on the carpeted floor of the Church. I should have been praying, but instead I was watching the dance of light and shadow across the floor. I spent a lot of my Sundays as a child and teenager in Church entertaining my boredom by daydreaming. But in 1968 we had a new, young priest and his sermons were not boring. He took the stories of ancient people in the Bible and made them relevant to current events. For several Sundays, he talked about the war in Vietnam, and related it to the teachings of Jesus: “love thy neighbor as thyself,” “thou shall not kill.” It made sense to me. It seemed like simple commandments to a naïve teenager, but the commandments of love thy neighbor and do not kill are not so simple for adults.
One Sunday the priest began again to preach on Vietnam and the war. Suddenly, men quietly started walking out of the Church. The Church slowly emptied out. My Dad was one of the few men who did not leave. So I became very curious about why most of the men left the Church. Later that day I asked my Dad why the men walked out of Church in the middle of the sermon, my Dad said all the men worked for GE. Well that didn’t make sense to me. What did GE have to do with it? My Dad explained that GE had major contracts with the federal government for the war in Vietnam.
A few weeks later the priest was removed from his position in the Church. A new priest was chosen, and once again I found myself staring at the same stained glass window only this time as I watched the light and shadows dance across the carpet I began to recall one of my favorite songs.
“I’m sitting on the dock of the bay Watching the tide roll away, ooh I’m just sitting on the dock of the bay Wastin’ time” --Otis Redding, Dock of the Bay
My reverie ended abruptly with the sounds of the Church pipe organ playing loud enough to wake the dead. It certainly ended my wasting time!
About a month later I asked my Dad why the Church had sided with the men from GE, and dismissed the priest. I can’t remember exactly what my Dad said. I believe he said something like, “If half the church walked out for good, the Church loses the ability to pay its bills, to keep its doors open.” I found it baffling that the Church chose its economic survival over its values. The men who walked out of the Church that day also chose their economic survival. Their solidarity in protecting their jobs had resulted in the outcome they desired. Of course many decades later I understand the economic underpinnings of that decision, although I believe that the Church made an ethically wrong decision.
Ethical or moral decisions are not easy in real life, even for churches. What I learned from being a witness to this situation is that economics is often the driving force in personal decision-making. The impact for me was a loss of trust in the Church.
Nowadays I look at research papers and wonder where are the researchers employed, and what other funding do they receive? Does their employment or funding influence their choices of what to study, their methods of research, and impact their conclusions? I remember the Church I use to belong to, and understand the real impact of ethical challenges and how trust can be lost.
Does funding influence research?
What does the Lancet 2023 Breastfeeding Series show us in regard to these issues? The funding and employment of researchers can often give you insight into the underlying assumptions of researchers. We know that medical and scientific journals require researchers to declare their conflict of interest.
What is a conflict of interest in research (COI)?
“A basic working definition of COI is a situation in which a secondary interest, such as financial or other personal condition has the potential to unduly influence the primary interest of objectivity in research conduct.” P Knerr and RP D’Amelia, Introduction to the Ethics of Scientific Conflict of Interest (COI), 2020.
Knerr and D’Amelia also state that COI is not considered misconduct because “misconduct is limited to fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism.” They state that “Trust is an essential ethical value of scientific inquiry.” And they state, “Fundamental to this trust is objectivity in the execution, interpretation and dissemination of research.”
How were the researchers of the Lancet 2023 Breastfeeding Series funded?
It appears from the Lancet papers that the Gates Foundation funded a number of researchers, or their places of employment such as: universities, nonprofit organizations, or governmental bodies such as WHO and UNICEF. Two researchers were social marketers, one from a company and one from a university. Some people call social marketing propaganda. I think that is pretty accurate. I don’t care much for being told what to think. One researcher was employed by the Gates Foundation, and another was retired from the Gates Foundation
The Lancet is owned by Elsevier which has an agreement with the Gates Foundation regarding open access policy.
“…requires authors to ensure research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and are supported in whole or in part by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funding, are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CCBY) or an equivalent license, and are deposited immediately in PubMed Central (PMC), or in another openly accessible repository.”
I was surprised when I first started to read the 2023 Breastfeeding Series that I had free access to all of the papers. I have tried to read other papers in the Lancet and encountered the inevitable pay wall. The Gates Foundation pays most of the fees, and we all get to read their research for free. While this appears wonderful, it is also troubling. The Gates Foundation’s funding of so many researchers, universities, organizations, and governmental body’s means that we are reading freely what the Gates Foundation believes is important. Researchers are in all likelihood picked by the Foundation, because their research aligns with the Foundation’s views. Will we be able to read alternative views freely? No, because research not funded by Gates is behind a pay wall. Gates has gained a monopoly on our minds by providing an open door policy to his research, when other research is shuttered by paywalls.
The Cochrane Studies received funding from the Gates Foundation of $1.15 million for 2016-2017. https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants/2016/09/opp1158795
The Cochrane website states that “they do not accept commercial or conflicted funding.” They are supposedly the source for “trusted evidence.” Is the Gates Foundation funding “conflicted?”
The British Global Justice Now organization in a report from 2016 concluded that the Gates Foundation’s:
“…giving is far from a neutral charitable strategy, but instead an ideological commitment to ‘promote neoliberal* economic policies and corporate globalization.’”
* “A policy model that encompasses both politics and economics and seeks to transfer the control of economic factors from the public sector to the private sector.” Definition of neoliberalism by Investopedia
Vandana Shiva has stated,
“Gates has hijacked the WHO and transformed it into an instrument of personal power that he wields for the cynical purpose of increasing pharmaceutical profits. He has single-handedly destroyed the infrastructure of public health globally.”
To be continued on 3/20/23 at https://valeriewmcclain.substack.com “Breastfeeding or Bust: Infant feeding in an Age of Half-Truths & Outright Lies” Subscriptions are free.
