The world's most prestigious medical journals have for centuries been trusted as the gold standard for scientific research. But many doctors who rely on them likely don’t know a shocking truth: much of the information is slanted or untrue.

Dr. Joseph Varon is a critical care specialist and president of the Independent Medical Alliance. The group started in 2020 as the FrontLine COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, FLCCC, medical professionals who developed treatment protocols for the virus that often contradicted mainstream narratives.

“There is no question that [medical] journals have been taken hostage by Big Pharma,” Varon tells "Full Measure." “We recognized that all these journals were being kidnapped. ... I had the idea that we needed an independent journal that would allow independent practitioners, independent key opinion leaders to write papers that were clean – were bias free.”

Varon has now started a new publication, the Journal of Independent Medicine, aiming to tease the bias out of medical publishing.

Insiders such as Dr. Marcia Angell have long sounded alarms about deep conflicts of interest in the journals. She was editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and spoke with me in 2017 about what she learned working at the journal starting in the 1970s.

“Starting about then was when you saw the drug companies assert more and more control until finally they, over the next couple of decades, they began to treat the researchers as hired hands,” Angell told "Full Measure." "They would design the research themselves. You know, you can do a lot of mischief in how you design a trial. Or we'll test this drug, and we'll tell you whether it can be published or not, and so if it's a positive study, it's published, if it's a negative study, it'll never see the light of day.

I became to be extremely distrustful of most of the research that was published. We did our very best, we often rejected things because they were clearly biased, but anything we rejected always ended up in another journal.”

Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet – a leading U.K. medical journal that also has been cited for conflicts of interest, in 2015 wrote: "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue... science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

It’s not just Pharma advertising money. 

Journals also rake it in when drug companies buy reprints of favorable studies to promote their products… often paying hundreds-of -thousands to millions per article. Drugmakers pay journals to publish sponsored supplements, which critics say disguise industry-backed content as science.

And Pharma pays collective billions each year for journals to offer selected articles free to anyone, “open access,” without a subscription, so that more people can see them. It’s estimated that just six major publishers collected $2.5 billion related to open access fees in 2023.

“When you have journals that get more than 50% of their income from big pharma, you know that they're gonna publish things that’s favorable to this particular company. So you lose credibility,” Varon says.

The EXCEL Trial in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2016 was paid for by stent maker Abbott. It concluded stents were better than heart bypass surgery. Critics later alleged data manipulation and withholding of evidence showing there were actually more deaths with stents.

In Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, there was rushed publication of two studies in 2020 claiming the drug hydroxychloriquine harmed Covid patients. Both studies were later retracted amid fraud concerns but only after they’d steered people away from treatment that might have saved lives.

And GlaxoSmithKline published a study on Paxil in 2001 claiming the antidepressant was safe and effective for teenagers. That wasn’t true, and now the medicine carries strong warnings about the risk of suicide in young people.

Varon says it’s not only what the journals publish – it’s also what they refuse to publish that matters. And he’s looking to give ink to some of those articles.

For more on this story, watch "Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” on Sunday. Attkisson's most recent bestseller is "Follow the $cience: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails.”