Woody Harrelson Draws Fire for Likening Pharma to Drug Cartels
On Feb. 25, 2023, Oscar-nominated and Emmy-award winning actor Woody Harrelson hosted Saturday Night Live (SNL). It was his fifth time hosting the show, long known for its cutting edge satire. During his opening monologue, Harrelson told a joke about the “craziest script” he had ever read. He recounted…
Okay, so the movie goes like this. The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes. And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over. I threw the script away. I mean, who was going to believe that crazy idea? Being forced to do drugs? I do that voluntarily all day.1 2 3 4 5 6
The joke was plainly aimed at Big Pharma, the corporate media, government lockdown policies and the
COVID-19 shots people were repeatedly pressured to get over the past three years of the pandemic. By any standard in today’s crude and violent entertainment culture, Harrelson’s dig was extremely tame, even gentle. What’s more, it was based largely on the truth of what America and so many other countries has been forced to endure during COVID.The authoritarian-like vaccine mandates. The mostly one-sided reporting by the media and the censorship of dissenting scientific views and public opinions. The destruction of countless small businesses and jobs. The incalculable setbacks to the education of children. The psychological harm to millions of people brought on by the constant drumbeat of fear.
All of these things (and more) would have been hard to fathom at the start of 2020. Indeed, it would’ve all seemed like a crazy idea at the time―a bad script for any movie other than one based on a futuristic apocalyptic scenario.
Instead of playfully jabbing as he did, Harrelson could have gone on to contemptuously mock the misguided, harmful decisions made by government, the drug industry and the media. He didn’t. Yet somehow (not surprisingly) he still managed to draw the ire of numerous mainstream media outlets for daring to criticize the powerful institutions that dictated COVID policies and creatively convey how surreal some of those policies were.
The Ole “Spreading Conspiracy Theories” Line of Attack
Magazines like Forbes and People attacked Harrelson for spreading “conspiracy theories” and “parroting false, anti-scientific claims” about COVID. Similarly, The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone accused him of “spewing anti-vax conspiracies.” The Los Angeles Times characterized it as “anti-vax nonsense.”1 2 3 5 6
An article in New Zealand’s Stuff magazine summed up the essence of the referenced conspiracy theories like this:
[T]hat pharmaceutical companies control the government and the media, and that they’re forcing the public to take unnecessary vaccines.4
Imagine how unhinged someone must be to suggest that the U.S. pharmaceutical and health products industry—which spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year lobbying U.S. federal government agencies researching, regulating, making national policy for and promoting vaccines; hundreds of millions of dollars per year in contributions to presidential and congressional electoral candidates, national party committees, and outside spending groups, and hundreds of millions of dollars per year in contributions to state electoral candidates and committees—may have a controlling influence on government?7
Imagine how looney someone must be to insinuate that pharma—which spends billions annually to fund direct to consumer advertising in the media—may wield a significant amount of financial leverage over news content in the media?8 9
Imagine how just plain nuts someone must be to imply that COVID shot manufacturers like Pfizer and Moderna—which earned nearly $38 billion and more than $18 billion respectively from the sales of their experimental Comirnaty and Spikevax messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID shots in 2022—may have played a role in getting the federal government to pass COVID lockdown measures and vaccine mandates and get the media to help promote these laws and disparage and censor public opposition to them?10 11
In his humorous monologue on SNL that should not have generated any controversy at all, Woody described precisely what happened in America during the past three years and was punished for simply telling the truth.
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