From John D. Rockefeller to Bill Gates & Beyond

The billionaires control the medicine...

On September 29, 1916, John D. Rockefeller became the world’s first-ever confirmed billionaire. By the time he died in 1937, his net worth — adjusted for 2021 — was possibly as high as $400 billion. For context, Elon Musk (allegedly today’s richest human) is worth $278 billion. Rockefeller earned (sic) his fortune by pioneering the concept of a monopoly. The Standard Oil company — of which he was a founder, chairman, and major shareholder — controlled more than 90 percent of the petroleum market. “Competition is a sin,” Rockefeller once said.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Rockefeller also turned his attention to the creation of new compounds from oil. Called “petrochemicals,” they first manifested in a wide range of plastic items. Let’s stop the medical history lesson for a moment to appreciate a small sampling of the legacy of this venture:

• The average human eats 70,000 micro-plastics each year

• 73 percent of beach litter worldwide is plastic

• Plastic kills more than 1.1 million seabirds and animals every year

• Roughly 700 species of marine life are facing extinction due to the increase in plastic pollution

• Every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic

• Scientists have recently discovered microplastics embedded deep in the Arctic ice

But John D. was focused on far more than plastic bags. He closely monitored scientific breakthroughs within the realm of medicine. For example, as vitamins were first being discovered, he saw the opportunity to artificially synthesize them by using (you guessed it) petroleum. Suddenly, organically occurring compounds could be patented and owned. Life itself would have a copyright. This sparked Rockefeller’s interest in amassing even more billions by a) influencing how medical training was carried out in the U.S. and b) expanding and dominating the pharmaceutical industry.

In the early 1900s, holistic treatments were equally as popular as what would later become known as “Western medicine.” Licensed doctors, particularly doctors west of the Mississippi River, were plying their trade by using more than a little natural and herbal medicine. This approach was fused with knowledge gleaned from traditions ranging from European to Native American. The “problem,” as Rockefeller saw it, was that such natural elements were available to anyone. Where’s the profit in that?

Remembering his own credo of competition being a sin, John D.’s first step was to purchase part of the German pharmaceutical company I.G. Farben. (Side note: I.G. Farben was the same German chemical cartel that would soon manufacture Zyklon-B, the poison gas used in the Nazi gas chambers.) With a drug manufacturing company under his control, all Rockefeller had to do next was use his vast wealth and power to drum natural medicine out of business. 

More than 100 years ago, there was a wide range of options available for anyone seeking medical assistance. This included herbal medicine, chiropractic, naturopathy, homeopathy, and other modalities now called “holistic” or “traditional.” At the same time, business interests were beginning to monetize any and all forms of health care. As already mentioned, the most powerful entity involved in this effort was John D. Rockefeller and his oil empire. 

His first step was to hire Abraham Flexner, a respected educator, to compile a book-length report on the state of U.S. medical schools. Like any corporate-funded research, Flexner’s work had an agenda — and he delivered what the richest man in world history wanted. To be clear, some of Flexner’s research was helpful. There were plenty of questionable practitioners and practices that needed to be reined in. And there’s obviously merit to the idea of standardizing medical training. But again, such standards are only as legitimate as the people and interests imposing them. If John D. wanted to eliminate the “sinful” competition, it wouldn’t be so hard for him to do so. This would clear the way to:

• Demonize and, in some cases, criminalize alternative therapies

• Normalize a pharmaceutical-based approach to medicine

• Increase the wealth of Rockefeller and Standard Oil via the use of petrochemicals

Here are just some of the outcomes of the Rockefeller-funded Flexner Report:

• Assigning monopoly power to the American Medical Association (AMA) when it came to granting medical school licensure in the U.S.

• Smear campaigns against any practitioners of traditional healing, jailing some doctors that persisted in such practices

• Reduction of courses on nutrition

• Increased emphasis on drug treatments

• Firing senior faculty at schools that resisted adherence 

• Creating a false division between scientific medicine and public health. Preventive medicine and population health would no longer be considered the responsibility of physicians.

• Restricting attendance at medical schools to male-only

Flexner also recommended and got all but two historically black medical schools closed. His explanation: “The practice of the Negro doctor will be limited to his own race, which in its turn will be cared for better by good Negro physicians than by poor white ones. But the physical well-being of the Negro is not only of moment to the Negro himself. Ten million of them live in close contact with sixty million whites. Not only does the Negro himself suffer from hookworm and tuberculosis; he communicates them to his white neighbors, precisely as the ignorant and unfortunate white contaminates him. Self-protection not less than humanity offers weighty counsel in this matter; self-interest seconds philanthropy. The Negro must be educated not only for his sake but for ours. He is, as far as the human eye can see, a permanent factor in the nation.”

The number of all medical schools in the U.S. dropped from 160 in 1904 to 66 in 1935. With so few institutions — all-male, virtually all-white, and marching in lockstep with the “pill for an ill” mentality — it became simple to maintain full control over what “healing” would mean to the industrialized world. Rockefeller and Flexner ushered in a profit-driven brand of corporate medicine called “allopathic.” To this day — more than a century later — this paradigm is accepted virtually without question by the vast majority of humans, particularly in the West. 

For the record, I’m not saying all “alternative” therapies are good or all pharmaceuticals are bad. I’m pointing out that our collective perception of healing is not an accident. It wasn’t created by preordained theology or an unstoppable force of nature. The way most of us view medicine (and the Covid-19 “vaccines”) is the result of deliberate measures by those who will profit most from it.

This brings us back to the madness of the Covid era. You can believe that the Covid-19 “vaccine” is safe but there is no rational reason to assume so. Yet, after nearly two years of being scared out of their wits, many humans would inject anything into their bodies if they believed it would just reduce the overwhelming presence of fear. The captains of industry — from John D. to today’s Robber Barons — were and are acutely aware of this. In fact, they actively cultivate such an environment in the name of creating a larger pool of compliant consumers. By all indications, this social experiment has been an unmitigated success.

Information is a commodity doled out in minuscule and deceptive portions. It is naive to expect corporate-owned media or corporate-funded politicians to supply you with the ammunition you need to grow independent from them. It has also become self-sabotaging and/or self-serving to expect that any rando on the interwebs has carefully vetted every tweet, meme, or video they share. Therefore, life in a disinformation state requires us to do the grunt work if we wish to fashion an informed, open-minded opinion, e.g.

• Look beyond your news feed and contacts list. 

• Question your own assumptions. 

• Accept the possibility that some (if not most) of what you believe may be founded on untruths. 

This path not only emancipates your mind. It also helps you better understand the viewpoints of those with whom you disagree. It’s time to rediscover the subversive pleasure of intellectual self-defense.