(Natural News)—Pharmaceutical companies have engaged in so many questionable activities over the years that those of us who have been paying attention often wonder why so many doctors continue to willingly peddle their products. From recalled drugs that they knew were dangerous all along to their untested COVID-19 vaccines that destroyed numerous people’s health, it all feels very much like an open secret that they don’t have people’s best interests at heart.
However, those who get their news from the mainstream media are blissfully unaware of all this, and that includes many medical professionals as well. As the pandemic demonstrated, the mainstream media has to keep its advertisers happy, and that includes pharmaceutical companies, and they’re also influenced by the government. As a result, many doctors are surprisingly naïve to what has been going on with Big Pharma and its numerous deceptions and illegal actions.
Most doctors enter the field out of a genuine desire to help people. Although there have been cases of doctors knowingly risking their patients’ health in pursuit of profits, many of them want to keep people healthy and truly believe that pharmaceuticals are the answer – often based on what they are taught in medical school. And while there is no doubt that some drugs and other interventions save lives every day, failing to research these solutions and stay on top of independent news reports about pharmaceutical companies means some doctors are unwittingly doing more harm than good.
Study shows 85% of pharmaceutical companies engaged in illegal activities
For example, not many doctors are aware of a peer-reviewed article published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2020 looking at illegal activities by pharmaceutical companies from 2003 to 2016.
That study revealed that 85 percent of the companies studied had been hit with financial penalties for their illegal activities, adding up to a total combined value of $33 billion. The illegal activities that these companies engaged in ranged from misleading marketing and failing to disclose negative information about their products such as serious side effects, to manufacturing and distributing adulterated drugs. They also found cases of companies providing kickbacks to medical professionals, pricing violations and bribing foreign officials.
There were a lot of familiar names on the list, with GlaxoSmithKline paying overall fines of nearly $10 billion, Pfizer on the hook for $2.9 billion and Johnson & Johnson paying $2.6 billion in penalties. Eli Lilly, Merck, AstraZeneca, Novartis and Sanofi Aventis were also among the names identified in the study as being fined for illegal activities.
In many of these situations, court cases drag out for years, with pharmaceutical companies appealing to higher courts when they are hit with unfavorable findings. This can make it very difficult for patients and other victims to hold them accountable. It’s also important to note that although you may hear about some of these convictions if you are willing to seek out the information yourself, there are also numerous settlements that never come to light, with companies paying money to their victims without admitting any guilt.
Covering up unfavorable studies and ghostwriting journal articles
One of the more blatant examples of pharmaceutical company wrongdoing was seen with Merck’s anti-arthritis drug Vioxx, which was used by as many as 80 million people around the world at its peak popularity. Although it was marketed as being a safer alternative to other anti-inflammatory drugs, it was later revealed – after patients suffered from heart attacks – that a study funded by Merck found a sevenfold increase in heart attacks, but they went on to gain approval by the FDA anyway. Another study funded by the company found a fivefold increase in heart attacks, but the company failed to include some of them in the data they submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine, leaning to a “misleading conclusion” about the risk of the drug.
There have also been cases involving journals that were sponsored by pharmaceutical companies and made to look like independent scientific journals containing articles that were ghostwritten by Merck employees and attributed to doctors.
The evidence is out there, and if we assume that what we’re aware of represents only a fraction of their wrongdoings and that they have likely done even more but haven’t been caught, it’s horrifying to think of the damage that could be done. Many doctors who pushed COVID-19 vaccines said that they believed they were safe because they thought that pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t do anything to hurt people, but apparently, they just weren’t paying enough attention.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
