Western media’s pre-existing condition? Gaza atrocity denialism
By Rebecca Ruth Gold | The New Arab | September 10, 2025
In August 2025, for the first time in its 20 year history, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) classified Gaza as having reached phase 5, the most acute phase in its system. This classification meant that Gaza was deep into a famine, and many of the starving have already suffered irreversible damage.
The IPC locates Gaza City as being fully within phase 5. The same level of food scarcity is expected to reach Deir al Balah and Khan Younis by late September.
Never before has the IPC made a full phase 5 famine classification outside Africa. It had certainly never reached this classification for a location that was just a few kilometres from world class restaurants. As UN Under-Secretary General Tom Fetcher put it in a memorable speech, the Gaza famine is taking place “within a few hundred meters of food, within a fertile land.”
The Gaza famine has been engineered in a manner that is without precedent in world history. People have described Israel’s siege as medieval, but the famine is backed by the full force of modern technology. Rather than looking to early history for analogies, what is happening in Gaza is best understood as a grotesquely futuristic iteration of modern biopolitics.
“Pre-existing conditions”
Within days of report’s release, Israel immediately called for its retraction. There is nothing unusual about a state that has created a famine pulling all the levers at its disposal to deny it. What makes Israel different from the average perpetrator is the eagerness of US and European media outlets to spread the perpetrator’s denialist narrative.
Already in July, the groundwork had been laid in mainstream outlets like the New York Times, which ran a “correction” to the caption it provided on an image of Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child dying of starvation in Gaza. When the cover image of his emaciated body was used for the story on Gazans dying of starvation, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which controls the entry of food and medicine into Gaza, informed the Times that al-Mutawaq was born with cerebral palsy.
Israeli media, including I24 and The Jerusalem Post set to work spreading this misinformation and suggesting that vulnerable individuals dying of starvation could not be treated as evidence of a famine.
Soon after, the Times stated that al-Mutawaq had “pre-existing health problems.” But what they failed to disclose is that this “correction” was made in response to Israeli pressure and that all famines target the vulnerable first. While cerebral palsy is a lifelong condition, it is not typically fatal for young children absent conditions of siege and famine. Had the victims of starvation not been Palestinian, common sense would have prevailed. No one would have found it necessary to make the obvious point that death by starvation combined with co-morbidities is still death by starvation.
Other media outlets soon followed, adjusting their captions to reflect, even in the abstract and untethered from specific cases, the possibility that children dying of starvation were suffering from “preexisting conditions.”
The Associated Press captioned the images on a photo essay by Palestinian photojournalist Jehad Alshrafi documenting how starvation is attacking children’s bodies with the following disclaimer: “In Gaza, malnutrition is often worsened by preexisting conditions and compounded by illnesses linked to inadequate health care and poor sanitation, largely the result of the ongoing war.”
Perhaps the Associated Press thought that they were mitigating the harm done by such captions by acknowledging that these so-called “preexisting conditions” that Israel and its defenders are using to deny evidence of famine are in fact “the result of the ongoing war.” But they should not be excused so easily for their complicity in famine denial.
The “pre-existing conditions” discourse has a dark history in the US, where it was introduced during the 1940s to deny healthcare to ailing patients. Even more ominously in Gaza, the “pre-existing conditions” that the media uses to whitewash famine are themselves the direct result of two decades of siege.
Legitimising Israel’s narratives
The right-wing US media company Free Press further disseminated the Israeli narrative when it published a story claiming that the “symbols of Gazan starvation […] suffer from other health problems.” Once again, ableism was used to deny the Gaza famine.
If the sick were made sicker by Israel’s engineered famine, it was implied that it was their own fault, and Israel could not be blamed for Gaza’s starvation. Yet the “preexisting conditions” cited by the Free Press journalists—rickets and cystic fibrosis—are not typically fatal for young children.
The fact that children in Gaza afflicted with these diseases are at a much higher risk of imminent death only confirms the severity of the famine, as well as its wider impact on conditions of life and mortality rates. Yet some media outlets downplayed the famine by focusing on the medical challenges faced by children who are dying of starvation.
On the very day the IPC released its famine report, CNN redacted its own story on starvation in Gaza by “updating” its captions to “reflect new information regarding the condition of some of the subjects.”
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu—himself a war criminal whom the International Criminal Court has indicted with “crimes of starvation,” marking the first time it had ever charged any leader with that crime—endorsed the Free Press story. He did not acknowledge all that his own government had done to undermine accurate reporting and to block data collection on starvation in Gaza.
The Gaza famine is an atrocity, a war crime, and evidence for genocide not just because it leads to deaths from starvation. No less fundamentally, it contributes to the breakdown of a social order. Famine tears communities apart. Mothers are forced to watch their children starve, and children watch their parents risk their lives—sometimes getting shot and killed—while searching for food to keep them alive.
Having normalised famine denialism through a eugenicist discourse in July, Israel was well-prepared to escalate its information warfare when the IPC issued its landmark report in August.
Israel attacked the report on two fronts. First, by falsely claiming that the data was biased. Second, by smearing the report authors due to their alleged political biases. As for the data-related dispute, the official X account for the state of Israel falsely insisted that the IPC had “forged” a famine by lowering the threshold to 15% malnutrition among the general population, as measured by upper-arm circumference. Yet the 15% malnutrition standard, measured according to upper arm circumference, was also relied on for previous IPC reports for other locations that reached a phase 5 famine assessment, including Sudan in 2024 and South Sudan in 2020.
As Jeremy Konyndyk, President of Refugees International concludes, Israel’s misrepresentation “is not a good-faith misread. It is a campaign of concerted disinfo[rmation].” The IPC quickly refuted Israel’s false claims.
Denialism
Food security experts criticise the IPC for being too conservative in its metrics. The general consensus is that the IPC places the bar for phase 5 famine classification too high. By the time famine is assessed by the IPC, mortality rates will have sharply escalated (as happened in Gaza during the second half of July 2025), and for many of those who are starving it will be too late to save them.
Unlike most European countries, the US did not issue any official response to the IPC famine report. On 27 August, during an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council which had been convened to address the famine in Gaza, US Ambassador Dorothy Shea to the UN rejected the report by alleging that one of the authors was biased against Israel. Shea’s critique was based on guilt-by-association and did not engage with the substance of the report’s claims.
The US’s denialist stance was explicitly rejected by all other 14 of the 15 Security Council members, who issued a statement affirming that they “trust the IPC’s work and methodology.” However, this consensus will be meaningless unless further measures are taken in defiance of the US.
Indeed, denialism is a core feature of Israel’s information war and is one reason why the genocide persists. In October 2023, less than three weeks into the Gaza genocide, U.S. President Joe Biden stated that he doubted the veracity of the casualty reports provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. In a classic case of denying Palestinians the right to narrate their own extermination, he said “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”
These same reports that Biden cast doubt on had been deemed reliable by the United Nations, human rights groups, and mainstream—even the Israeli—media, not to mention Biden’s own State Department.
It was the first time a US President cast doubt on the validity of the figures provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Subsequent reporting and scholarship has shown that the Ministry of Health’s numbers are likely to be a drastic undercount; importantly, they don’t include indirect deaths from Palestinians who died due to lack of food, water, medicine, and medical care. Yet, mainstream US media started to refer to Gaza’s Ministry of Health as “Hamas-run” in order to undermine the source.
Around the same time, Israel launched a campaign questioning the casualty figures provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN uncritically absorbed Israel’s messaging and began attaching “Hamas-run” to every reference to casualty figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.
For no other nation does the media find it necessary to preface every reference to a civilian agency with the name of the political faction governing that country. Civilian agencies ought to be respected for the work they do, wherever they happen to be located.
Ending impunity, sanctions now
The crime of famine often converges in practice with the crime of genocide. For this reason, both kind of denialist narratives often flourish together. Just as complicity in genocide is a crime under international law, so should complicity in famine bring criminal sanctions.
In the first days of September 2025, as the famine and mass murder of civilians in Gaza continued to spiral out of control, Belgium announced that it would formally sanction Israel. The following day, Scotland announced similar measures. The majority of European states have maintained full complicity in this genocide, but the impunity that has been granted to Israel for decades is finally beginning to fray.
Famine expert Alex de Waal has compared famine to torture at the societal level. Systematic forced starvation creates a system in which “the biological imperative of survival turns against every impulse that makes us humans—compassion, solidarity, and love.”
The people of Gaza have pooled all their resources to resist this stage of social breakdown. That they have been able to withstand the pressures of famine for so long attests to the strong social and familial bonds that pre-existed the genocide.
However, no community can survive intact when their starvation becomes so acute that their bodies begin to consume themselves. Mass death by starvation awaits the people of Gaza unless we take action to stop the blockade and force Israel to open its borders and let aid flood Gaza.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
BBC Ignored Internal Request to Correct Claim Anas Al-Sharif Worked With Hamas
The BBC report remains uncorrected – evidence of a culture of intimidation, fear and political control

By Harriett Williamson | Novara Media | September 10, 2025
The BBC ignored an internal request to correct reporting that smeared a high-profile Palestinian journalist killed by Israel as a Hamas operative, in what a whistleblower has described as a “grave editorial breach”.
According to a leaked email seen by Novara Media, Global Journalism – part of the BBC Global News team, which is run by BBC deputy director Jonathan Munro – sent an “essential amendment and correction” request regarding BBC News reporting which claimed that Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif “did some work with a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current war”.
Al-Sharif was killed on 10 August in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a tent marked “PRESS” outside the entrance of the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. Five other media workers were also assassinated in the strike: Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and photographers Ibrahim Thaher and Mohamed Nofal, freelance photojournalist Mohammed al-Khalidi and cameraman Momen Aliwa.
In a statement posted on X/Twitter, Israel said: “Al-Sharif was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell and advanced rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and IDF troops. Intelligence and documents from Gaza, including rosters, terrorist training lists and salary records, prove he was a Hamas operative integrated into Al Jazeera.” Accompanying the post were unverified screenshots from spreadsheets. The IDF provided no justification for the killing of al-Sharif’s five colleagues in the same airstrike.
Al Jazeera has categorically denied that al-Sharif was in any way Hamas affiliated.
The leaked email, dated 18 August, was sent by Global Journalism to hundreds of BBC journalists via two distribution addresses. It singled out a line in a BBC News article for correction: “The BBC understands Sharif did some work with a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current war”.
Screenshots seen by Novara Media show the email was sent to a significant number of senior journalists, including World Service Languages controller Fiona Crack, senior news editors Kate Forbes and Abigail Mobbs, director of audience growth Jamie Wakefield, and head of digital content for World Service, Claire Williams.
The email said the sentence “should be amended” to: “A source has told the BBC that Sharif had worked for a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current conflict, but Al Jazeera has denied this and the BBC News Arabic correspondent also says that he has seen no evidence.”
The email is signed by Global Journalism, part of BBC Global News which is led by Munro, who currently serves as BBC News’ senior controller of news content and the deputy CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs.
One BBC employee told Novara Media that the email went out to at least 1,200 journalists. The BBC disputed this and says the number is closer to 400. However, a screenshot seen by Novara Media confirms that just one of the two distribution email addresses goes to over 1,200 accounts.
At the time of reporting, the line in question remains uncorrected on the BBC News article, last updated 13 August. The same claim was also presented as fact on the BBC News liveblog on 11 August in reporting by Jon Donnison from Jerusalem, as well as cropping up in BBC Verify reporting on TikTok.
A BBC employee told Novara Media: “This leaked email […] exposes from the inside the culture of intimidation, fear and political control that journalists are subjected to within the corporation.
“The email admits a reported line that should never have made it onto the BBC’s front page was published without evidence, yet the error remains uncorrected and no one has been held accountable.
“In any other newsroom, such a grave editorial breach on a matter of major public interest, the targeted killing of a fellow journalist, would have led to senior resignations.”
A BBC spokesperson said: “We stand by our reporting in the BBC News article you reference from 13 August and liveblog from 11 August, and can assure audiences that we scrupulously fact check and verify all information we obtain. This internal email was sent to a specific team about a different article and contained a suggested amendment that was incorrect. We are updating our copy to remove the amendment where it has been applied.”
Munro became global director of BBC News in September 2024. The role includes leading the BBC World Service, overseeing BBC Monitoring, and continuing as deputy CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs
In the months leading up to al-Sharif’s death, Israeli officials repeatedly claimed the reporter was a Hamas operative, including in a ‘kill list’ graphic with the names and pictures of six Al Jazeera journalists.
Two weeks before al-Sharif was killed, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CJP) called on the international community to protect him due to “repeated threats” from IDF spokesperson Avichay Adraee. The CJP said accusations of al-Sharif being a Hamas operative “represent an effort to manufacture consent to kill al-Sharif”.
In August, it was revealed that Israel has a secret military unit specifically tasked with linking Palestinian journalists to Hamas and Islamic Jihad as part of a drive to tamp down on global condemnation for the murder of journalists in Gaza.
This isn’t the first time the BBC has been criticised for biased reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A blistering report from the Centre for Media Monitoring in June showed that Israeli deaths were given 33 times more coverage per fatality by the corporation, that both broadcast segments and articles included clear double standards, and that content consistently shut down allegations of genocide.
Last week, Novara Media revealed that BBC reps for the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) discouraged colleagues from attending a vigil in London – organised by the NUJ – for their murdered colleagues in Gaza.
Gaza is currently the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. Since October 2023, Israel has killed more media workers in Gaza than in both world wars, the US civil war, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the wars in former Yugoslavia and the war in Afghanistan combined.
Harriet Williamson is a commissioning editor and reporter for Novara Media.
‘A Form of Bribery’: FDA, HHS Crack Down on Misleading Drug Ads
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 10, 2025
Pharmaceutical companies will be required to provide full safety disclosures in direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertisements of their products, according to a new policy HHS and the FDA announced Tuesday.
DTC advertisements “can mislead the public about the risks and benefits” and “encourage medications over lifestyle changes,” according to a memorandum by President Donald Trump outlining the policy.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will send nearly 100 “enforcement action letters” and thousands of warning letters to pharmaceutical companies and drug retailers who have “increasingly been promoting drugs with no mention of side effects at all,” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said in a post on X.
The policy also addresses online pharmacies that promote drugs with “no mention of side effects, and paid social media influencers advertising drugs,” Makary wrote.
Administration officials told ABC News that drugmakers often market their products on social media using influencers who are not clearly identified as paid spokespeople.
Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense, called the new policy “a major victory” that will “dramatically increase the price of pharma advertising, discourage uptake because of side effects and make Big Pharma‘s lawyers stay up at night worrying that they may not have adequately disclosed risks.”
“This will greatly contribute to making America healthy again because it will start to dismantle Pharma’s grip on Big Media,” Holland said.
‘Pharmaceutical ads hooked this country on prescription drugs’
In announcing the new policy, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said the ads have “distorted physician prescribing habits and patient decisions.”
The advertisements use positive emotional appeals to encourage people to get those medications, HHS said.
The new policy stops short of an outright ban on the advertising. Instead, the policy will require DTC advertisements to “report full contraindications, boxed warnings, and common precautions” — a return to regulations in effect until 1997.
HHS said the loosened regulations in place since that year created an “explosion of DTC pharmaceutical advertising,” which led to “public deception from patient confusion” and “patient harm via inappropriate demand for medications and misalignment of therapeutic choices with actual patient needs.”
Administration officials told ABC News the new policy “is the strongest, boldest action we can take to make sure that patients have adequate safety information on pharmaceutical ads.”
They said no additional steps are planned to regulate such ads.
“Pharmaceutical ads hooked this country on prescription drugs,” U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement. He added:
“We will shut down that pipeline of deception and require drug companies to disclose all critical safety facts in their advertising.
“Only radical transparency will break the cycle of overmedicalization that drives America’s chronic disease epidemic.”
The new policy was announced on the same day the White House released its Make Our Children Healthy Again strategy report, which states that the federal government “will increase oversight and enforcement under current authorities for violations” of DTC drug advertising laws.
Time reported that the U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries that permit DTC drug ads. According to Digiday, Big Pharma spent $30 billion on advertising in 2024. According to HHS, drugmakers spent $369.8 million in social media advertising in 2020.
Relaxed advertising rules had ‘clear negative impact on public health’
According to the White House memo, the U.S. Congress granted the FDA authority to regulate prescription drug advertising in 1962. DTC drug advertising in the U.S. began in 1981, but regulations were loosened in 1997, resulting in a 330% increase in drug advertising by 2005.
According to HHS, the relaxed regulations permitted drugmakers to direct the public to websites, toll-free phone numbers and package inserts for details on contraindications and common precautions.
An HHS fact sheet states that this “loophole … had a clear negative impact on public health,” contributing to about 31% of the rise in U.S. drug spending since 1997.
According to HHS:
- Patients who consulted with their physician about a DTC-advertised drug were about 17 times more likely to receive a prescription than those who didn’t — the result of persuasive marketing techniques.
- 91% of direct-to-consumer drug ad claims featured social approval as a result of product use and 94% employed positive emotional appeals.
- Prescription drug use among Americans increased from 39% (1988-1994) to 49.9% (2017-2020) in the last 30 years.
Following the FDA’s loosening of its regulations in 1997, the agency’s enforcement actions also decreased. “Enforcement letters plummeted from over 130 annually in the late 1990s to just three in 2023,” according to the fact sheet.
HHS said enforcement actions will intensify, with the issuing of “dozens of enforcement letters related to false and misleading advertising, which makes the drug at issue misbranded.”
The FDA will also “send a letter to every single sponsor of an approved drug or biologic … warning them that the Agency is no longer asleep at the wheel, putting them on notice that FDA will be actively enforcing violations of the law, and directing them to remove all non-compliant promotional materials from the market.”
Drug advertising ‘a form of bribery’
Attempts by the federal government to enact a full ban on DTC drug advertisements are likely to face legal challenges, some legal experts say.
A report by The Lever in January states that it is “relatively unlikely” the federal government will be able to ban DTC pharmaceutical ads, partly because courts have previously rejected such attempts on First Amendment grounds.
Attorney Rick Jaffe wrote last year that while legal precedent exists through the 1970 ban on cigarette advertising in broadcast media in the U.S., “An advertising ban on the entire Pharma industry would be a much heavier lift.”
Despite such obstacles, the End Prescription Drugs Now Act, introduced in June and pending before Congress, would ban DTC prescription drug advertising entirely if passed.
Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, said the Trump administration’s new policy is “entirely consistent with the First Amendment but will very likely make vast amounts of existing DTC advertising too arduous for it to continue as is.” He said:
“An outright ban would be easily overturned by the courts on First Amendment grounds. On the other hand, in a free society, every seller of products and services has an obligation to warn of risks. This normal practice has been neglected for a long time. This is what has allowed Pharma to spread its wings without accountability and without ensuring informed consent.
“This is an excellent step, not only to protect the public but to curb Pharma capture of the major media.”
According to CNN, the healthcare and drug industry is fourth among all industries in television advertising expenditure, accounting for 11.1% of the market. Prescription drugs accounted for 30.7% of ad minutes across evening news programs on ABC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC last year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
According to a 2019 Forbes report, Pfizer spent twice as much on marketing its products as it did on research.
Last year, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a 10% increase in DTC advertising results in a 1% to 2.3% increase in consumer drug spending.
Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D., a professor of media studies at New York University whose research and teaching focus on propaganda, said such expenditures have enabled Big Pharma to exercise significant editorial control over the legacy news media.
Miller said:
“Drug advertising, like all commercial advertising, is a form of bribery that corrupts all media that carry it. This development has been the most destructive of them all. Nothing on TV, radio and/or the Internet should be ‘brought to you by Pfizer’ or any other corporate poisoner.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
The Only Medical Specialty That Survives on Lies
By Peter C. Gøtzsche | Brownstone Institute | September 8, 2025
I am a specialist in internal medicine and have a keen interest in statistics and research methodology.1 My general approach to science has led to publications in many different areas because people came to me when they suspected something fishy in their specialty.1
In 2007, midwife Margrethe Nielsen from the Danish Consumer Council wanted to find out if history was repeating itself. I offered her a PhD student scholarship and we found out that the withdrawal symptoms are very similar for depression drugs and benzodiazepines, but they were described as dependence only for the latter.2
This started my interest in psychiatry and I quickly realised that a lot else was also misrepresented in this specialty. The lies psychiatrists convey to the public are so common and so harmful for their patients that I published my own textbook of psychiatry where I document what is wrong in the official textbooks used by medical students and psychiatrists in training.3 Much of what is claimed in the textbooks is scientifically dishonest, and frequently cited research is often totally unreliable because the data were tortured till they confessed.4
Psychiatry is the only specialty I know of that causes more harm than good; in fact, vastly more harm than good.5 This disaster can only survive because psychiatrists constantly lie to the public about what they can achieve with their drugs. Psychiatrists also routinely violate elementary human rights about informed consent and use forced treatment even though it is harmful.5,6
The title of my most recent psychiatry book summarises the issues: “Is psychiatry a crime against humanity?”5 As you shall see, I am not exaggerating.
In January 2014, I published the article, “Psychiatry gone astray,” in a major Danish newspaper, which also came out in English.7 I described ten myths in psychiatry that are harmful for the patients:
Myth 1: Your disease is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.
Myth 2: It’s no problem to stop treatment with antidepressants.
Myth 3: Psychotropic drugs for mental illness are like insulin for diabetes.
Myth 4: Psychotropic drugs reduce the number of chronically ill patients.
Myth 5: Happy pills do not cause suicide in children and adolescents.
Myth 6: Happy pills have no side effects.
Myth 7: Happy pills are not addictive.
Myth 8: The prevalence of depression has increased a lot.
Myth 9: The main problem is not overtreatment, but undertreatment.
Myth 10: Antipsychotics prevent brain damage.
I explained why “Our citizens would be far better off if we removed all the psychotropic drugs from the market, as doctors are unable to handle them. It is inescapable that their availability creates more harm than good. Psychiatrists should therefore do everything they can to treat as little as possible, in as short a time as possible, or not at all, with psychotropic drugs.”
I hit some sore toes. There was an outcry, spearheaded by the drug industry and their paid allies among doctors and the media, but also the biggest debate in Denmark ever about psychiatric drugs.1,6 For more than a month, there wasn’t a single day without discussion of these issues on radio, TV, in newspapers, and at psychiatric departments. But sadly, the harmful business continued as usual.
The Facts
Psychiatric drugs do not have any specific effects, directed against a specific disease.8 Psychiatric disorders are merely a constellation of symptoms and psychiatric drugs have mainly two effects: They either sedate and numb people, or they stimulate them.
Brain-active drugs have such effects, e.g., also alcohol, opioids, cannabis, other psychedelics, and cocaine, but we don’t call such drugs antidepressants or antipsychotics. And the effect of antidepressants and antipsychotics is far below the minimally relevant effect, as established by the psychiatrists themselves in their research.3,6 It is therefore reasonable to say that they don’t work.
The most important effects of psychiatric drugs are not what you hear about. Because of the colossal overuse of the drugs, they are the major reason that our prescription drugs are the leading cause of death, ahead of heart disease and cancer.9 One in five citizens is on an antidepressant, which can cause falls, and when elderly people break their hip, one-fifth will die within the next year.
Many of those who don’t die will fare badly anyhow. In all countries where the relationship has been examined, the rates of disability pensions go up in tandem with increased usage of psychiatric drugs.10
You don’t hear much about sexual disturbances either. The so-called happy pills harm the sex life in half the patients, and in half of those patients, the harm is unacceptable.11 In some patients, the harms are irreversible and continue after the patients come off their drugs, which has led to suicide.12
The Lies
Psychiatrists, particularly those in high positions, routinely lie to the public with the intent to protect their guild interests and their financial interests, which are huge. In the US, there are more psychiatrists collecting payments from the pharma industry than any other type of specialist.13
The American Psychiatric Association (AMA) is corrupt. Many of the psychiatrists who invented the most foolish diagnoses in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) for psychiatric disorders, which expanded hugely the market for psychiatric drugs, were on industry payroll. But they are not open about it. The DSM-5-TR panel members received $14 million in undisclosed industry funding.14 To a European, this is an obscene level of corruption.
The worst lie is this one: Psychiatrists routinely tell their patients that they are ill because they have a chemical imbalance in the brain and that they will receive a drug that fixes this.
An associated lie is that withdrawal effects, when the patients try to come off their drugs, are trivial, and not withdrawal effects at all, but signs that their disease has relapsed and that they still need the drugs.15
In 2018, leaders in the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists wrote in the Times that, “in the vast majority of patients, any unpleasant symptoms experienced on discontinuing antidepressants have resolved within two weeks of stopping treatment.”5 A group of clinicians and academics, including me, wrote to the authors that their statement was incorrect and that the College’s own survey of over 800 patients had found that withdrawal symptoms were experienced by 63% of the patients and that a quarter reported anxiety lasting more than 12 weeks.
The College immediately removed its survey from its website and when they refused to correct the error, we made our complaint public, which was covered by the BBC. Later, psychiatrist Sir Simon Wessely, previous president of the College, rejected any link between the pills and suicide and stated categorically in a podcast that they are “not addictive.”
We then published a most damning letter in the BMJ.16 Since guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) stated that withdrawal symptoms were “usually mild and self-limiting over about 1 week,” we asked for the evidence. NICE provided two short review articles, neither of which supported the one-week claim, and both articles cited numerous sources that contradicted it!
The embarrassment was now so big that the College needed to change its stance and NICE updated its guidelines.
This is one of the very rare instances where protests about psychiatry’s lies have led to any change. But the organised denial just continued. In 2025, a highly flawed systematic review in JAMA Psychiatry claimed that antidepressant withdrawal is not a problem.17,18 As usual, the authors postulated that depression after discontinuation is indicative of depression relapse.
To spread a little candlelight in the psychiatric darkness, I invented the term abstinence depression, which is not a true depression.3,18 The fact is that about half of the patients experience withdrawal effects; in half of the cases they are severe; and when patients try to stop, they often become worse than they were before they started on the drug.19 Moreover, the longer one is on the drugs, the higher the risk of withdrawal.19,20
The lies about a chemical imbalance and that abstinence symptoms are signs of relapse keep patients on their drugs for many years. Why would they ever stop when it is so clear that they need the drugs? But we don’t argue this way in relation to abuse of alcohol or narcotics. The patients never had a chemical imbalance causing their problems; but the drugs created one21,22 and caused harm.
Another big selling point is that you only need to treat a couple of patients to benefit one of them. This is also a huge lie. Psychiatric drugs cannot cure anyone. And the illusion of huge benefits is obtained by statistical manipulation.23 The trick is to dichotomise disappointing outcome data on a ranking scale and talk about response rates instead.24
This statistical hocus-pocus can convert a non-existing benefit into an almost doubling of the response rate,24 which looks very impressive. But as psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff wrote, it is spinning straw into gold transforming ineffectiveness into the much-trumpeted idea that antidepressants work.25
The number needed to treat to benefit one patient (NNT) doesn’t exist because more patients are harmed than those who benefit. There can therefore only be a number needed to harm (NNH), which is two for sexual harms caused by antidepressants.11
Harms and benefits are rarely measured on the same scale, but when patients in a placebo-controlled trial decide whether it is worthwhile to continue in the trial, they make a judgment about if the benefits they perceive exceed the harms. My research group found that 12% more patients dropped out on a depression pill than on placebo (P < 0.00001).26 Thus, the patients will benefit by NOT being treated with antidepressants. They prefer a placebo.
More Examples of Institutional Betrayal
The US National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) is the most prestigious psychiatric institution in the world. In 2022, Thomas Insel, its director from 2002 to 2015, called “America’s psychiatrist,” published the book, “Healing: Our Path From Mental Illness to Mental Health.”
Insel takes on the role of a drug rep, selling the wonders of psychiatric drugs to the public, but his book is misleading and dishonest.5 It starts already with the title. Psychiatric drugs cannot heal mental disorders, and the path the psychiatrists have taken is not from mental illness to mental health, but from bad to worse. Clearly, Insel makes an unintended case for abolishing psychiatry even though he tries to support it.27
The book reflects the thinking of psychiatric leaders everywhere and encapsulates how psychiatry has consistently betrayed public trust and misinformed the public, and that it will never tell the public the truth about psychiatric drugs.
Being a former NIMH director, Insel had an ethical obligation to tell his readers about the negative long-term outcomes of treatment with psychiatric drugs, as documented in expensive and prestigious research funded by the NIMH, e.g. the STAR*D trial in depression – a $35 million fraud – the MTA trial in ADHD, and the CATIE trial in schizophrenia.5 He didn’t, even though the NIMH is the only institution in the world that funds the big, long-term drug trials. As psychiatric leaders always do, Insel sacrificed the patients and protected the psychiatric guild by keeping the long-term studies financed by his own institute hidden.
In January 2025, I notified the UK drug regulator, the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), that the package inserts for antidepressants — called patient information leaflets (PIL) — contain false statements about depression being caused by a chemical imbalance, and I called for the misleading messages to be removed.28
The MHRA refused and when I sent a letter about this to four major UK newspapers and the Royal College of Psychiatrists with Joanna Moncrieff and others, they didn’t even have the courtesy to respond.
To paraphrase Lenin, editors of leading medical journals also behave like useful idiots for psychiatry and the drug industry. On 10 May 2025, an anonymous editorial in the Lancet, “50 years of SSRIs: weighing benefits and harms,” did little of what its title promised. It praised the drugs based on flawed research and glossed over the harms. When I pointed out how misleading the editorial was in a letter to the editor, it was rejected.28
Many Cochrane reviews of psychiatric drugs also contain misleading praises of the drugs and are garbage in, garbage out exercises that uncritically reproduce the flawed data the drug industry has published.1,5,29-31
The Lie That Drugs Can Prevent Suicide
Despite their pompous designation, “State of the Art” articles in leading medical journals are usually misleading and they are particularly dishonest in relation to suicides.1 A 19-page review in the BMJ claimed that depression drugs, lithium, antiepileptics, clozapine, ketamine, and electroshock can decrease the risk of suicide.32 None of the 159 references were convincing;33 the package inserts for depression drugs warn against the risk of suicide; and the package inserts for antiepileptics state that they double the risk of suicide!
In a 14-page Lancet suicide seminar from 2022, the authors tried to resurrect the lie about the chemical imbalance but the two articles they cited were gobbledygook.34,35 Among risk factors for suicide, they mentioned substance use but not depression pills, antiepileptics, or the psychiatric profession itself.35,36 A Danish register study of 2,429 suicides showed a very marked dose-response relationship:36 The closer the contact with psychiatric staff, the greater the risk of suicide.
Compared to people who had not received any psychiatric treatment in the preceding year, the adjusted rate ratio for suicide was 44 for people who had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital.36 Such patients would of course be expected to be at greatest risk of suicide because they were more ill than the others (confounding by indication), but the findings were robust and most of the potential biases in the study were actually conservative, i.e. favoured the null hypothesis of there being no relationship. An accompanying editorial noted that there is little doubt that suicide is related to both stigma and trauma and that it is entirely plausible that the stigma and trauma inherent in psychiatric treatment—particularly if involuntary— might cause suicide.37
The Lancet authors wrote that there is a possibility of exacerbating suicidal thoughts. Wrong. It is not a possibility; it is a fact. None of the 142 references were to any of the many meta-analyses showing that depression pills increase the suicide risk compared to placebo. The authors even claimed, with no references, that drug treatment can reduce the suicide risk. Which miraculous drugs can do this?
They also noted that some research has found an association with increased risk of suicide-related outcomes in young people. This is also dishonest. When the FDA looked at all the randomised trials, they found a causal relation and not just an association.
In 2023, the “experts” failed us badly again. A 16-page article in BMJ about suicide in young people, with 169 references, mentioned some risk factors, e.g. living in a home with firearms, but not depression drugs, which they recommended with “increased monitoring by the prescribing physician.”38 This is a fake fix, as people may kill themselves suddenly and unexpectedly.39
The authors considered a risk difference of 0.7% for suicidal ideation or suicide attempt between drug and placebo small and even dismissed it: “Data from more recent pediatric antidepressant trials have not shown differences between drug and placebo.” The review they quoted cannot be used to such effect and for rare events, it is unacceptable to lose statistical power by including only “recent” trials. Moreover, the review only included published trial reports, which we know have omitted many suicide attempts and suicides, even in children.6,39 It is irresponsible of the BMJ to publish such dangerous nonsense.
In 2023, I called for retraction of three fraudulent trial reports that had omitted suicidal events in children.40 Even though my letter was co-signed by 10 people who each lost a child or spouse to suicide as a direct consequence of being prescribed an antidepressant drug for a non-psychiatric condition, my request was turned down by both involved journals.41
Annette Flanagin, Executive Managing Editor, Vice President, Editorial Operations JAMA and JAMA Network, replied: “We shared your letter with the author of the study published in Archives of General Psychiatry and he does not identify any new concerns. Similarly, we do not find new evidence in support of your request to retract this article.”
So, JAMA and Graham Emslie, who omitted two suicide attempts on fluoxetine, do not think this is something to bother about. When I contacted the journal’s owner, Elsevier, they did not engage with our concerns but directed me back to the journal.
Douglas K. Novins, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (JCAAP), wrote to me that, “Following guidelines developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE),” they had thoroughly reviewed my “critique, as well as the responses provided by the papers’ authors. We are satisfied that the critiques of the papers as outlined do not merit retraction.”
It is hard to see how Novins could have followed the COPE guidelines, as the two trial reports, by Emslie and Martin Keller, are clearly fraudulent.
In 2023, I did a Google search on suicide and antidepressants, which confirmed that the public is being massively and systematically misinformed.42,43 One of the top 10 posts was from the Danish Centre for Suicide Research that reported that depression drugs increase the risk of repeated suicide attempts by 50%.44 The research was supported by Lundbeck, and after the researchers had adjusted their analyses for many factors including psychiatric contact and use of various psychiatric drugs, they concluded that the pills do not increase the risk of suicide. It is plain wrong to adjust for something that is part of the causal chain, as it may remove a true association, but the authors surely pleased their funder.
Another post was a comment I made on the Danish Board of Health’s website.45 Poul Videbech, a national icon in depression, had claimed in the Board’s journal, Rational Pharmacotherapy, that undertreatment with depression drugs is dangerous because of the suicide risk. This cannot be correct because the drugs increase the risk of suicide.
When I searched the Internet to find out what the “experts” opine currently, I found a systematic review in the psychiatrists’ flagship journal, American Journal of Psychiatry.46 It was about “evidence-based strategies,” but already the abstract was blatantly false. It claimed that “Meta-analyses find that antidepressants prevent suicide attempts.”
I don’t know of any other medical specialty whose practitioners lie systematically to the public in matters of life and death and claim the opposite of what is true.
In June 2025, I gave a talk in Capitol about suicides caused by antidepressants, invited by US war veterans who are routinely given these drugs for their war traumas.47 As expected, the effect of the veterans’ suicide prevention programme has been a notable increase in suicides corresponding to a similar increase in antidepressant usage.48,49
In the surreal upside-down world of psychiatry, all suicide prevention initiatives I have come across have included drugs that increase suicides!50
There was a press conference outside the Capitol,47 but the media are not keen to write stories about antidepressants killing people. I only saw an article in the Wall Street Journal, which I tweeted about:
Combat cocktails: US war veterans are destroyed and kill themselves because of psychiatric polypharmacy. Wall Street Journal https://bit.ly/4fjkz5P.
Antidepressants Harm the Unborn Child
New winds are blowing in the US, which could profoundly change healthcare for the better.51 On 21 July 2025, the FDA held a two-hour seminar about the possible harms to the foetus of treating pregnant women with antidepressants.52 For the first time, this crucial issue was honestly debated at the FDA, by good scientists, but this could not be tolerated by the professional liars.
There was a howl of outrage from psychiatric organisations and mainstream media that accused the FDA’s panel of being alarmingly unbalanced and of spreading misinformation,53-55 which was not at all the case.
The American Psychiatric Association (AMA) wrote to the FDA four days after the meeting that it was “alarmed and concerned by the misinterpretations and unbalanced viewpoints shared by several of the panelists… This propagation of biased interpretations at a time when suicide is a leading cause of maternal death within the first postpartum year could seriously hinder maternal mental health care. The inaccurate interpretation of data, and the use of opinion, rather than the years of research on antidepressant medications, will exacerbate stigma and deter pregnant individuals from seeking necessary care.”
The AMA could hardly have been more dishonest. Antidepressants double not only the risk of suicide but even actual suicides.49,56
Without mentioning the pregnancy issue, the AMA circled the wagons again, in a tweet on 28 August:57
“IMPORTANT: Decades of rigorous research, randomized clinical trials, peer-reviewed studies, meta-analyses, national registry studies, and FDA oversight show that psychiatric medications are safe and effective. Medications like SSRIs can be lifesaving if they are taken as directed under the care of an appropriately licensed healthcare professional. Learn more: https://ow.ly/RWEQ50WNJeI.“
In just two sentences, the AMA propagated three lies. No psychiatric drug is safe. They all kill people, to a substantial degree.1,3,5,6,9 And it has never been documented that SSRIs can be life-saving while it has been documented that they take many lives. They cause suicides and homicides6 and lead to falls in the elderly,9 and when they break their hip, one-fifth will die within the next year. Psychiatric medications are not effective either, e.g. the effect of antidepressants and antipsychotics is far below the minimally relevant effect, as established by the psychiatrists themselves in their research.5,6
Not even when there is clear evidence, both from studies in animals and humans,52-55 that our children are being harmed by psychiatric drugs before they are even born, do we see any admission from the AMA that it is wrong to treat pregnant women with antidepressants. They prefer to continue lying.
Antidepressants should be banned for use in pregnant women. Psychotherapy is more effective, as it has enduring effects,5,6 and it won’t harm the unborn child.
Reactions to AMA’s Tweet
Increasingly, the public is waking up to psychiatry’s deceptions. People are not so dumb as the AMA thinks they are, which the retweets to AMA’s tweet57 demonstrate:
“The FDA issues a black box warning for all SSRI’s indicating increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, particularly in children, adolescents, and adults under 25. How could the American Psychiatric Association make such a claim? (sic) Isn’t doing so extremely unethical?!”
“The APA is lying to you. SSRIs are neither safe nor effective. NOT EVEN CLOSE. And they do not magically perform better under the care of a licensed professional. Them’s the facts.”
“Anytime I hear experts so-called say something is safe and effective. I immediately know that that is not the case. Thank you for confirming my suspicion.”
“Merriam-Webster defines ‘safe’ as ‘free from danger, harm, or risk.’ All classes of psych meds include black box warnings about serious or life-threatening adverse effects risks.”
“How safe is sudden death? Some of those meds can cause that.”
“Life-taking. My adult son didn’t make it past 6 weeks after his #PillPusher prescribed SSRIs within 15min of meeting him.”
“What percentage of patients who take SSRIs are cured and can stop taking them?”
“I don’t know a single person who has been cured by psychiatric drugs.”
“The good ‘ol APA, brought to you by Pfizer. Maybe they will make a med for cognitive dissonance soon?”
“Psychiatry is quackery. Read the book Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker!”
“Psychiatry is one of the dumbest religions.”
A retweeter showed this picture of Mr. Bean, which sort of explains it all:

Conclusions
Psychiatry is a totally corrupt specialty, ethically, scientifically, and financially, with devastating consequences for the patients, their relatives and friends, and for our national economies.
Psychiatry is a crime against humanity that must be stopped.5 It should not be a medical specialty, and patients with mental health issues should not be treated by medically trained doctors because the existing approaches, which focus on drugs, are not working.
In the UK, mental health disability has almost tripled in recent decades, and the gap in life expectancy between people with severe mental health issues and the general population has doubled.58 The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations have therefore recently called for systematic mental health reform emphasising psychosocial interventions.58
My advice to patients is: If you have a mental health issue, don’t see a psychiatrist. It is too dangerous and might turn out to be the biggest error you made in your entire life.12,59 Don’t look up a family doctor either, as they are also programmed to make psychiatric diagnoses and hand out psychiatric pills.
References
1 Gøtzsche PC. Whistleblower in healthcare (autobiography). Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom 2025; April 8 (freely available).
2 Nielsen M, Hansen EH, Gøtzsche PC. What is the difference between dependence and withdrawal reactions? A comparison of benzodiazepines and selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors. Addiction 2012;107:900–8.
3 Gøtzsche PC. Critical Psychiatry Textbook: a new psychiatry is needed. Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom 2023; May 17.
4 Mills JL. Data torturing. N Engl J Med 1993;329:1196-9.
5 Gøtzsche PC. Is psychiatry a crime against humanity? Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2024 (freely available).
6 Gøtzsche PC. Deadly pPsychiatry and Organised Denial. Copenhagen: People’s Press; 2015.
7 Gøtzsche PC. Psychiatry gone astray. Mad in America 2014; Jan 28.
8 Moncrieff J. The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; 2007.
9 Gøtzsche PC. Prescription Drugs Are the Leading Cause of Death. Brownstone Journal 2024; April 16.
10 Whitaker R. Anatomy of an Epidemic, 2nd edition. New York: Broadway Paperbacks; 2015.
11 Montejo A, Llorca G, Izquierdo J, et al. Incidence of sexual dysfunction associated with antidepressant agents: a prospective multicenter study of 1022 outpatients. Spanish Working Group for the study of psychotropic-related sexual dysfunction. J Clin Psychiatry 2001;62 (suppl 3):10–21.
12 Gøtzsche PC. Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs. Ann Arbor: L H Press; 2022.
13 Staton T. Psychiatrists dominate doc-payment database. Fierce Pharma 2010; Oct 25.
14 Burton KW. DSM-5-TR Panel Members Received $14M in Undisclosed Industry Funding. Medscape 2024; Jan 10.
15 Gøtzsche PC, Demasi M. Interventions to help patients withdraw from depression drugs: A systematic review. Int J Risk Saf Med 2024;35:103-16.
16 Davies J, Read J, Hengartner MP, et al. Clinical guidelines on antidepressant withdrawal urgently need updating. BMJ 2019;365:l2238.
17 Kalfas M, Tsapekos D, Butler M, et al. Incidence and nature of antidepressant discontinuation symptoms: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Psychiatry 2025;Jul 9:e251362.
18 Gøtzsche PC. Exposing the Lie That Antidepressant Withdrawal Symptoms are Mild and Short-Lived. Brownstone Journal 2025; July 25.
19 Davies J, Read J. A systematic review into the incidence, severity and duration of antidepressant withdrawal effects: Are guidelines evidence-based? Addict Behav 2019;97:111-21.
20 Horowitz MA, Buckman JEJ, Saunders R, et al. Antidepressants withdrawal effects and duration of use: a survey of patients enrolled in primary care psychotherapy services. Psychiatry Res 2025;350:116497.
21 Moncrieff J, Cohen D. Do antidepressants cure or create abnormal brain states? PLoS Med 2006;3:e240.
22 Moncrieff J, Cooper RE, Stockmann T, et al. The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Mol Psychiatry 2023;28:3243-56.
23 Gøtzsche PC. Number needed to treat with a psychiatric drug to benefit one patient is an illusion. Mad in America 2022; Dec 13.
24 Gøtzsche PC. Response Rates in Psychiatric Drug trials are Statistical Nonsense. Brownstone Journal 2025; July 11.
25 Moncrieff J. Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth. Padstow: Flint; 2025.
26 Sharma T, Guski LS, Freund N, et al. Drop-out rates in placebo-controlled trials of antidepressant drugs: A systematic review and meta-analysis based on clinical study reports. Int J Risk Saf Med 2019;30:217-32.
27 Whitaker R. Thomas Insel makes a case for abolishing psychiatry. Mad in America 2022; Apr 30.
28 Gøtzsche PC. Protecting the false narrative about antidepressants. Mad in America 2025; July 7.
29 Gøtzsche PC. Cochrane recommends antidepressants for anxiety in a garbage in, garbage out review. Mad in America 2025; July 29.
30 Gøtzsche PC. Garbage in, garbage out: the newest Cochrane meta-analysis of depression pills in children. Mad in America 2021; Aug 19.
31 Gøtzsche PC. Cochrane reviews of psychiatric drugs are untrustworthy. Mad in America 2023; Sept 14.
32 Bolton JM, Gunnell D, Turecki G. Suicide risk assessment and intervention in people with mental illness. BMJ 2015;351:h4978.
33 Gøtzsche PC. No psychiatric drugs have been convincingly shown to decrease suicides. BMJ 2015; Dec 10.
34 Knipe D, Padmanathan P, Newton-Howes G, et al. Suicide and self-harm. Lancet 2022;399:1903-16.
35 Gøtzsche PC. A hopelessly flawed seminar in “The Lancet” about suicide. Mad in America 2022; June 1.
36 Hjorthøj CR, Madsen T, Agerbo E, et al. Risk of suicide according to level of psychiatric treatment: a nationwide nested case-control study. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 2014;49:1357–65.
37 Large MM, Ryan CJ. Disturbing findings about the risk of suicide and psychiatric hospitals. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 2014;49:1353–5.
38 Hughes JL, Horowitz LM, Ackerman JP, et al. Suicide in young people: screening, risk assessment, and intervention. BMJ 2023;381:e070630.
39 Gøtzsche PC. Depression drugs have been shown to double the risk of suicide in young people and should not be used. BMJ 2023; April 26.
40 Gøtzsche PC. Call for retraction of three fraudulent trial reports of antidepressants in children and adolescents. Institute for Scientific Freedom 2023; Aug 3.
41 Gøtzsche PC. Medical journals refuse to retract fraudulent trial reports that omitted suicidal events in children. Mad in America 2024; Mar 18.
42 Gøtzsche PC. The lie that antidepressants protect against suicide is deadly. Mad in America 2023; Nov 28.
43 Gøtzsche PC. So-called suicide experts recommend antidepressants, which increase suicides. Mad in America 2024; Oct 24.
44 Jakobsen SG, Christiansen E. Selvmordsforsøg og antidepressiva. Center for Selvmordsforskning 2019; Dec.
45 Gøtzsche PC. Misinformation om antidepressiva og selvmord. http://www.irf.dk 2015; March 5.
46 Mann JJ, Michel CA, Auerbach RP. Improving suicide prevention through evidence-based strategies: a systematic review. Am J Psychiatry 2021;178:611-24.
47 Harris L. Veterans Take Their “War Cry For Change” to Capitol Hill. Mad in America 2025; June 14.
48 Gøtzsche PC. Suicides increase after national suicide prevention introduced. Mad in America 2025; Feb 20.
49 Gøtzsche PC. Observational studies confirm trial results that antidepressants double suicides. Mad in America 2025; Feb 8.
50 Gøtzsche PC. So-called suicide experts recommend antidepressants, which increase suicides. Mad in America 2024; Oct 24.
51 Kennedy: A new time for America? Filmed interview with Peter C. Gøtzsche. Broken Medical Science 2025; Jan 12.
52 FDA Expert Panel on Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) and Pregnancy. YouTube 2025; July 21.
53 Whitaker R. Not even the unborn are safe from psychiatric harm. Mad in America 2025; Aug 23.
54 Moncrieff J, Urato A. Antidepressants in Pregnancy -Turning a Blind Eye, Again. Mad in America 2025; Aug 25.
55 Gøtzsche PC. Psychiatrists Deny the Harm of Antidepressants for the Fetus. Brownstone Journal 2025; Aug 30.
56 Hengartner MP, Plöderl M. Reply to the Letter to the Editor: “Newer-Generation Antidepressants and Suicide Risk: Thoughts on Hengartner and Plöderl’s ReAnalysis.” Psychother Psychosom 2019;88:373-4.
57 American Psychiatric Association tweet. X 2025; Aug 28.
58 Shifting the balance towards social interventions: a call for an overhaul of the mental health system. Beyond Pills All-Party Parliamentary Group 2024; May.
59 Breggin P. The most dangerous thing you will ever do. Mad in America 2020; March 2.
Dr. Peter Gøtzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, once considered the world’s preeminent independent medical research organization. In 2010 Gøtzsche was named Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen. Gøtzsche has published more than 97 over 100 papers in the “big five” medical journals (JAMA, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine). Gøtzsche has also authored books on medical issues including Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime.
Hezbollah denies any links to arrestees in Damascus countryside
Al Mayadeen | September 11, 2025
Hezbollah has denied the Syrian Interior Ministry’s claim that several individuals arrested in the western Damascus countryside are members of the group.
In a statement issued by its Media Relations Office on Thursday, Hezbollah reiterated that it does not have any presence or any activity within Syrian territory, asserting that it is “deeply committed to Syria’s stability and the security of its people.”
This follows remarks by the head of internal security for the Damascus countryside governorate, Brigadier General Ahmad al-Dalati, who alleged that security forces arrested a cell operating in the western Damascus countryside towns of Sa’sa’ and Kanakir, which he claimed was affiliated with Hezbollah.
Al-Dalati further claimed that security forces had seized rocket launch platforms, 19 Grad-type rockets, anti-tank missiles, a number of individual weapons, and large quantities of various types of ammunition.
Not so new accusations
Syria has previously leveled similar accusations against Hezbollah, which consistently denies having any involvement or presence on Syrian soil.
On July 13, Hezbollah categorically denied similar allegations made by Syria’s Interior Ministry that one of the individuals arrested in Homs at the time was affiliated with the Lebanese Resistance group.
In a statement issued Sunday by its Media Relations Office, Hezbollah said it has “no presence or activity in Syria” and rejected any connection to local events or conflicts.
No involvement in Syria events
On March 8, Hezbollah issued a firm denial of media reports that claimed it was involved in the ongoing conflict in Syria, as a war monitor reported that recent violence had killed more than 500 people from the country’s Alawite minority community.
In its statement, Hezbollah’s Media Relations Office urged media outlets to refrain from falling for disinformation campaigns that serve questionable foreign agendas, asserting that “some parties are keen to drag Hezbollah’s name into the events taking place in Syria and accuse it of being a party to the conflict.”
The Lebanese Resistance group further called on media outlets to uphold accuracy in their reporting and to avoid being drawn into politically motivated disinformation campaigns that serve foreign interests.
Lion Electric School Buses Still Catching Fire
StacheD Training | September 9, 2025
On September 9, 2025, another Lion Electric school bus burst into flames in Montreal — this time with five children and their driver on board. Thankfully, everyone escaped safely, but this marks the third Lion Electric bus fire in less than a year (Ascot Corner, Huntsville, and now Montreal).
In this video, I break down what happened, why the fire department’s explanation doesn’t quite line up with the bus’s construction, and why these repeated incidents raise serious questions about safety, accountability, and taxpayer funding. Lion has already taken nearly $160 million in U.S. funding for 435 buses, yet many districts never received vehicles — and the ones that did are stuck with broken, unsafe buses and voided warranties.
Are these buses ready for prime time, or is this a dangerous rush to electrify at any cost?
Training & Consulting: https://www.stachedtraining.com
All messenger apps are ‘transparent’ to spy agencies – Kremlin
RT | September 7, 2025
Messaging apps are “absolutely transparent” to intelligence agencies and security services, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said. People who use them to share sensitive information should be aware of the risks, he added.
“All messengers are absolutely transparent systems, and people who use them should understand that they are transparent… to the security services,” Peskov told journalists on Friday at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia.
He added that it is particularly important to consider the risks when sensitive government or commercial data is shared through these apps, which can be accessed by foreign intelligence services.
Peskov was commenting on Telegram and WhatsApp in Russia, as well as the Russian government’s support for developing a domestic messaging platform.
Russian security services have accused Telegram and WhatsApp of using double standards for refusing to share data with the Russian authorities about fraud and terrorist plots while complying with similar requests from other countries.
In July, a member of the State Duma’s committee on information policy and technology, Anton Nemkin, called WhatsApp’s continued presence in Russia a “legalized breach of national security.”
Russian law enforcement officials have said that Ukrainian intelligence, along with other malicious actors such as swindlers and con artists, often relies on databases containing personal data obtained through WhatsApp and Telegram to recruit agents or identify targets inside Russia.
In December 2024, the US government also warned senior officials to switch to encrypted communications after a security breach in which a group of hackers stole data, including information stored under US government surveillance protocols as part of “legal” wiretapping of American suspects.
Elite UK divers likely behind Nord Stream sabotage – Putin aide
RT | September 8, 2025
The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines could not have been carried out without Western commandos, a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed, singling out Britain as the likely culprit.
German prosecutors have attributed the explosions in international waters in September 2022, which disabled the twin pipelines supplying Russian gas to Germany via the Baltic Sea, to a group of Ukrainian nationals.
In an article published Sunday in Kommersant, the former head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Nikolay Patrushev, argued that Ukrainians lack the expertise to carry out this complex operation independently.
The sabotage was likely “planned, overseen, and executed with the involvement of highly trained NATO special forces,” Patrushev wrote, adding that the perpetrators were experienced in deep-sea operations and familiar with working in the Baltic.
“Few armies or intelligence services have divers capable of executing such an operation correctly and, above all, covertly. One unit with the necessary skills is the British Special Boat Service,” he said. Founded during World War II, the SBS is the Royal Navy’s elite squad specializing in amphibious warfare.
Russia has criticized the German investigation for a lack of transparency and for not including the Russian authorities. In 2024, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service claimed it had “credible information” that the US and UK were directly involved in the sabotage, a claim denied by both London and Washington.
Science-for-hire companies violate scientific norms, degrade public discourse, and facilitate the mass poisoning of society
By Toby Rogers | August 27, 2025
Last week, the New York Times published a bizarre “Guest Essay” on autism by Jessica Steier, a Pharma mercenary who has at least ten financial conflicts of interest and no background in autism research. I submitted a reply to the article to correct her disinformation and the NY Times refused to publish it.
Here are the facts for anyone who wants to read them:
Jessica Steier runs a science-for-hire company, “Unbiased Science.” She uses a number of pass-through organizations to launder contributions from large pharmaceutical and chemical companies. However, one can still figure out a lot of her funders (see article on “Unbiased Science Podcast” in SourceWatch). Steier advises an infant formula company and is an affiliate for a company that makes monosodium glutamate (MSG). Her podcast has taken money from 3M, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Moderna, and CSL Seqirus (a flu vaccine manufacturer).
Steier is cartoonishly evil. From SourceWatch:
Steier’s Unbiased Science Podcast:
• Described the herbicide glyphosate as “safe for use”
• Declared polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) in Teflon to be “non-toxic to humans”
• Called the Environmental Working Group Dirty Dozen list of produce with the most and least pesticide residues “a fear-based marketing ploy”
• Claimed GMOs are “safe,” “nutritious,” and “beneficial to consumers, producers, and the environment” and
• Called hydrogenated oil “a safe dietary fat.”
The Unbiased Science Podcast recorded two episodes on organic food and farming in December 2022 and January 2023 in which they argued that organic pesticides are more harmful than synthetic pesticides used in chemical farming…
Andrea C. Love [Steier’s co-host] defended the artificial sweetener aspartame as “safe,” said in an interview that she has “at least one diet soda a day,” and the Podcast posted on Instagram that “aspartame does not pose a health risk to humans, cancer or otherwise, especially at levels we would consume.”
Love and Steier were critical of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s ranking of the chemicals considered possibly carcinogenic to humans in 2023.
SourceWatch provides even more evidence of Steier’s toxic sophistry here.
For those who are new to these topics, mountains of evidence from The Defender, Beyond Pesticides, and Moms Across America, among others, show why all of Steier’s claims listed above are junk science.
Nearly everything Steier writes in her “Guest Essay” on autism is demonstrably false. For example, Steier:
- Thinks mercury and aluminum in vaccines are fine even though they are known neurotoxicants (see Grandjean and Landrigan, 2014, Supplementary appendix).
- Omits the fact that Mark, Anne, and David Geier sued the Maryland Board of Physicians and won (and then a higher court retroactively granted “absolute immunity” to this private board even though the Maryland legislature never gave it that right).
- Has apparently not read any of the 55 autism prevalence studies in the U.S. since 1970, so she is oblivious to the fact that autism rates have increased 32,158% over that time period.
- Seems unaware that a Danish study she cited favorably recently issued a correction after they discovered, post-publication, 136% more neurodevelopmental events, including autism and ADHD, that changed their research findings.
- Has never read, or just plain ignores, the six vaccinated vs. unvaccinated studies that show that vaccines significantly increase autism risk (see summaries in Rogers, 2025).
Science-for-hire companies will say or do anything for money. Steier’s company, “Unbiased Science,” is relatively new. However, it uses the same playbook developed by other notorious science-for-hire firms, including Gradient, Exponent, and Ramboll. They are often referred to as “rented white coats” (see discussion in Rogers, 2019). Anyone citing Steier as a “public health expert” has no idea what they are talking about.
The NY Times devoted considerable resources, including two graphic designers and prominent placement online and in the Sunday print edition, in the attempt to make this trashy hit piece look presentable to its readers. The NY Times’ failure to disclose Steier’s extensive conflicts of interest and its refusal to publish critical comments in connection with this “Guest Essay” make me wonder if this was a paid advertorial at the behest of a pharmaceutical company.
The autism epidemic is a matter of enormous national importance. Yet everything that the NY Times publishes on autism is an attempt to cover up the causes and protect the powerful industries that are culpable. Unfortunately, in the midst of this crisis, the NY Times has abandoned its role as “the newspaper of record” and is now a criminal syndicate that is endangering the health of all Americans.
Toby Rogers has a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focus is on regulatory capture and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Rogers does grassroots political organizing with medical freedom groups across the country working to stop the epidemic of chronic illness in children. He writes about the political economy of public health on Substack.

