Dr. Robert Malone sues The Washington Post who accused him of spreading “misinformation” online
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 22, 2022
Dr. Robert Malone, an expert in mRNA technology and a vocal Covid vaccines critic who has been consistently censored by Big Tech, is suing the Washington Post for defamation. The lawsuit alleges that the news outlet made defamatory statements against him in an article published on January 24.
The article claimed that Dr. Malone spread “misinformation” in a speech where he said the vaccines “are not working” against the Omicron variant. As evidence the statement was false, the Post cited a paper by the CDC that found that booster shots were protecting people against severe disease.
The Post omitted the part where Dr. Malone said that vaccines, “do not prevent Omicron infection, viral replication, or spread to others.”
Speaking to The Epoch Times, Dr. Malone said: “I said nothing about disease and death at that point in time.” He went on to accuse the Post of selective misquoting and using the CDC study to counter a claim he never made.
The Epoch Times obtained an interview between the article’s writer, Timothy Bella and Dr. Malone, before the article was written. Bella told Dr. Malone, “I have respect for you and your body of work,” and that he was hoping to shadow the doctor during his stay in DC where he gave a speech at a protest against Covid mandates.
Malone initially sent a notice to the Post threatening legal action if the article was not removed or the defamatory statements retracted. When the outlet refused, he filed a lawsuit at a federal court in Virginia.
According to the lawsuit, the article made 10 defamatory statements against Dr. Malone, including that he has been “discredited,” his claims are “not only wrong, but also dangerous,” and that he “repeated falsehoods that have garnered him legions of followers.”
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
“The qualities WaPo disparaged—Dr. Malone’s honesty, veracity, integrity, competence, judgment, morals, and ethics as a licensed medical doctor and scientist—are peculiarly valuable to Dr. Malone and are absolutely necessary in the practice and profession of any medical doctor and scientist. WaPo ascribes to Dr. Malone conduct, characteristics, and conditions, including fraud, disinformation, misinformation, deception, and dishonesty, that would adversely affect his fitness to be a medical professional and to conduct the business of a medical doctor,” the suit states.
“Dr. Malone’s statements concerning COVID-19 and the purported ‘vaccines’ were 100% factually accurate. He has never committed fraud on [sic] engaged in any medical disinformation or misinformation. Further, the so-called ‘vaccines’ do not work, as is abundantly clear from both the scientific and anecdotal evidence to date,” it also says.
Dr. Malone is also currently involved in a lawsuit against Twitter over its censorship.
Western University mandates vaccine booster dose
By Keean Bexte – The Counter Signal – August 22, 2022
Western University has joined University of Toronto in mandating the vaccine booster for nearly all of its students.
“As of October 1, 2022, all members of our community (Western, Brescia, Huron and King’s) are required to provide proof of vaccination of the primary series plus a booster shot (generally, three doses total) of any combination of COVID-19 vaccines recognized by Health Canada,” a COVID policy update published on August 22 reads.
According to Western University’s vaccine FAQ page, the policy applies to all students, faculty, staff, and some visitors.
Moreover, even if most of a student’s classes are online, the student must still comply with the vaccine booster mandate if any aspect of their course has an in-person component.
“Only those students and employees granted a medical or Ontario Human Rights Code accommodation will be exempted from the vaccination requirement, and those with exemptions are required to participate in regular, rapid antigen testing in order to be physically on campus this fall,” writes Western University.
The university has not stated the consequence for not complying with its policy, but de-enrollment for non-compliance is likely on the table.
Additionally, as of September 1, Western University is bringing back its mask mandate for classes, labs, and seminar rooms. However, masks will not be required when students present, perform, facilitate, or speak to a group. The university will also not require masks for those living in residence or those in offices, cubicles, libraries, or dining areas.
Why the university only wants to make students suffer in classrooms is unclear.
With only two weeks before classes start, many unvaccinated students are undoubtedly scrambling to figure out what they will do. Moreover, speaking with True North, several students say that despite the change on the website, they received no formal notice of the change in vaccination policy.
The university says that those who’ve received two doses will still be able to attend university so long as they receive a booster dose within 14 days of being eligible.
However, given the fact that recipients need to wait for a recommended eight weeks between the first and second dose, it’s impossible for students who haven’t received a single dose to reach the level of vaccination required for attendance, regardless if they’ve already paid their tuition.
Canada announces millions in funding for COVID isolation site
By Thomas Lambert | The Counter Signal | August 22, 2022
The Trudeau government has announced $4.2 million in additional funding to keep a Windsor-Essex ‘voluntary’ isolation site afloat until March 2023.
In a new release, the Government of Canada said that isolation remains one of the best ways to slow the spread of COVID despite it being over two years since COVID began and there being little to no evidence to support such a position.
The government continues, saying that the isolation site will be used to accommodate foreign agri-workers who can’t find a place to isolate when they enter Canada. “These workers tend to live in close accommodations and work in congregate settings, which makes it difficult to isolate, if required,” reads the news release.
“As Essex continues to welcome thousands of incoming agricultural workers in the coming weeks and months, this critical federal funding will provide spaces for those who are unable to isolate safely in the community,” said Windsor-Tecumseh MP Irek Kusmierczyk.
“Thank you to Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos and the federal government for recognizing the unique challenges our community faces and always standing up for Windsor-Essex.”
According to the news release, the $4.2 million given to the County of Essex will allow the site to operate 50 rooms for foreign agri-workers until March 31, 2023. ($84,000/room)
The site, formerly operated by the City of Windsor, was previously allotted $4.8 million for the same purpose, with funding lasting until June 30, 2022.
While unvaccinated foreign nationals are still prohibited from entering Canada thanks to the country’s vaccine mandate, an exemption exists for agricultural and food processing workers, marine crew workers, those making medical deliveries, and those that work with medical equipment.
However, despite the exemption, agri-workers still have to follow testing and quarantine requirements upon arrival, including a mandatory (not voluntary) quarantine requirement.
Thus, with flu season on the horizon, it looks like foreign-born agri-workers will be the first to feel the squeeze of the government’s renewed effort to bring back COVID measures.
What it would take to convince the government to end such measures permanently, rather than merely suspend them in certain areas, is anyone’s guess, and the government has made no indication they will ever admit the pandemic is over despite criticism internally and abroad.
Another First Amendment lawsuit against Facebook censorship fails
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 20, 2022
The US judicial system has dismissed yet another lawsuit filed by censored users of Big Tech’s social media platforms, who allege First Amendment free speech violations.
This time it was the US District Court for the Northern District of California that granted a motion to dismiss filed by the defendant, Facebook (Meta). The plaintiff in this case, Richard Rogalinski, sued on First Amendment grounds after a number of his posts about Covid got censored on Facebook.
We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.
One of the posts expressed Rogalinski’s skepticism about the efficacy of masks, saying that he has not seen scientific evidence of their usefulness, but instead, “just talking heads who want to spread fear and control you.”
To this, Facebook’s “fact-checkers” reacted by adding a warning label claiming the post was “missing context.” The same warning was slapped on a post that saw the plaintiff criticize the Covid vaccine rollout.
Finally, a screenshot of a tweet posted by a doctor who promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine got labeled as “false information” by Facebook and removed.
Originally, the Florida resident filed a class action lawsuit in that state, but Facebook moved to either dismiss or transfer it, after which the judge transferred it to California.
In an attempt to fight against the usual defense that massive tech corporations have when censoring content and users – that they are private operations that have the right to do that, while the First Amendment applies only to state actors – Rogalinski mentioned statements made by former White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
In July 2021 – and the California judge noted in the ruling that this happened “after Meta took action against Rogalinski’s posts” – Psaki told a press conference that the Biden administration is “in regular touch” with major social media platforms, and actively flagging content posted on Facebook that the government thinks are “problematic” on misinformation grounds.
Rogalinski argued that the state “chose the targets and content of the statements that it deemed worthy of the defendant’s censorship” which then resulted in censorship by Facebook.
The plaintiff further accused the government and Meta of communicating directly and specifically about the censorship actions and engaging in the act together by sharing responsibility for the two-step process of censorship.
However, the court disagreed, citing several similar cases, including O’Handley v. Padilla, where the ruling reads that the government “can work with a private entity without converting that entity’s later decisions into state action.”
NYT Smears Dr. Mercola Again With Classic Orwellian Doublespeak
Video link
By Dr. Mercola | August 18, 2022
In July 2021, The New York Times (NYT) published the hit piece,1 “The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online,” in which they made several blatantly false claims about me. Now, the NYT is upping the ante with an entire documentary dedicated to yours truly, titled “Superspreader.”
Ever since my book “The Truth About COVID-19” came out, the global cabal seems to have lost their collective minds. The New York Times has printed demonstrably false information about me on multiple occasions, CNN reporters have invaded my office and pursued me on my bicycle with unmarked vehicles, the president of the United States has utilized his federal agencies to target me — and my personal and business bank accounts were closed.
Twitter has banned anyone from sharing any link to my website, YouTube banned my account with over 15 years of content, while Facebook and Google have done everything possible to make me disappear. It certainly would be much easier to cave under the pressure, but if we don’t stand up for our rights and freedom now — when will it be too late? I will continue ‘superspreading’ truth and health until my last days.
NYT Hit Parade Continues With ‘Superspreader’
In an August 5, 2022, TV review, Alex Reif writes:2
“News can spread like a virus. In our fast-paced world, it doesn’t take long for either to spread around, which is why it’s so important to get your information from a good source.
In the latest installment of the FX series The New York Times Presents, viewers will get a perfect example of this with ‘Superspreader,’ which takes a look at one doctor with a massive following, who is credited as being the top spreader of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 and vaccine in the wellness industry …
One of the pre-credit notes at the end of the documentary states that FDA Commissioner Robert Califf considers misinformation to be the leading cause of death in the country and because of this …
[A]nother highlight of the film is an interview with Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Encountering Digital Hate who ranked Mercola at the top of ‘The Disinformation Dozen,’ a numbers-based list of the twelve most influential people leading the COVID-19 anti-vaccination effort.
We also see how Mercola was de-platformed by several social media companies and how that hasn’t done all that much to stop the spread of misinformation.
At face value, The New York Times Presents ‘Superspreader’ is about Dr. Joseph Mercola, the empire he built, and the people who believe everything he says without question. But what viewers ultimately walk away with is a reminder that if something seems too good to be true, it most surely is.”
The NYT documentary premieres Friday, August 19, 2022, at 10 p.m. Eastern and 10 p.m. Pacific time, on FX and Hulu.
Truth Tellers Are Being Vindicated Every Day
In the NYT’s July 2021 hit piece, the author, Sheera Frenkel, cited an article I’d published in which she says I questioned “the legal definition of vaccines” and declared the COVID shots were “a medical fraud,” for the simple reason that they don’t prevent infections, they don’t provide immunity and don’t stop transmission of the infection.
According to Frenkel, that was misinformation. According to the U.S. government and its “experts,” the COVID jabs worked like any other vaccine. Check out the short video for a sampling of what Bill Gates, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mainstream media, Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Biden were saying about the shots in early 2021.
The clear message — the promise — was that if you got the shots, you would not get COVID and you would not transmit it to others. Getting the population “vaccinated” would end the pandemic, for sure. Fast-forward to today, and the reality of the situation is beyond self-evident.
Biden, fully vaxxed and boosted has had COVID twice. Ditto for Fauci and a long list of government officials around the world. Outbreaks have repeatedly occurred at events where every single person present was fully vaxxed. So, the reality is that, back in February 2021, I warned that a medical fraud was being committed, and today, evidence from around the world show I was correct.
The shots do not prevent you from being infected, and they don’t prevent you from spreading it to others. As such, the COVID shots do not function as a vaccine at all, and mass vaccination cannot end the pandemic because you’re just as infectious if you get the shot and contract COVID as you would be if you were unjabbed.
Yet, despite the fact that time has vindicated me, the NYT has decided to double down and put out an entire documentary to cement the “superspreader of misinformation” label to my name when it really should be permanently attached to their own. It probably is important to note that they started their efforts on this video last year, in 2021.
‘Easily Disprovable’ Assertions Are in Fact True
In her 2021 hit piece, Frenkel also highlighted my comments about the COVID shots’ ability to “alter your genetic coding, essentially turning you into a bioweapon spike protein factory that has no off-switch.” According to Frenkel, these assertions “were easily disprovable.”
But did she disprove them? No. Here’s the reality: mRNA vaccines are by definition a genetic instruction set. That’s what messenger RNA (mRNA) is. And the mRNA created by Pfizer or Moderna are synthetic instructions that have never before existed in humans.
This is true for a variety of reasons, but the primary one is the substitution of pseudouridine for uridine to prevent the mRNA from being degraded. Natural mRNA is normally rapidly destroyed and this is by design as your body is very precise about producing proteins and does not produce them willy-nilly.
So is there an off switch? Absolutely not. There’s no off-switch programmed into these jabs. They are relying on your body’s normal degradation systems. The biotech industry has even referred to this reprogramming of your body as turning you into a “human bioreactor.”3
If an off-switch existed, the manufacturers would have assured us of that fact by now. In fact, they probably would have used the existence of a timed off-switch as the justification for boosters, but that has never come up. We know for sure that the mRNA jabs last at least 60 days and that is all we have for hard data. They more than likely last for six months and in some cases could last for years.
Asking Pointed, Nuanced Questions Is Bad?
Next, Frenkel went on to state that:4
“When the coronavirus hit last year, Dr. Mercola jumped on the news, with posts questioning the origins of the disease. In December, he used a study that examined mask-wearing by doctors to argue that masks did not stop the spread of the virus …
[R]ather than directly stating online that vaccines don’t work, Dr. Mercola’s posts often ask pointed questions about their safety and discuss studies that other doctors have refuted. Facebook and Twitter have allowed some of his posts to remain up with caution labels, and the companies have struggled to create rules to pull down posts that have nuance …”
So, I not only committed the “sin” of correctly warning people about the vaccine fraud committed, and had the audacity to follow science and reference published research, but I was also guilty of the “crime” of asking pointed, nuanced questions?
When merely asking questions is deemed a dangerous, if not criminal, act, you know you’re living under an authoritarian regime. It’s certainly far outside the accepted norms of “democracy” and “freedom” that the United States has been a beacon of since its inception.
Ineptitude at Its Finest
Further on in her hit piece, Frenkel makes a truly crucial error that no respectable journalist would ever dare make:
“In an email, Dr. Mercola said it was ‘quite peculiar to me that I am named as the #1 superspreader of misinformation.’ Some of his Facebook posts were only liked by hundreds of people, he said, so he didn’t understand ‘how the relatively small number of shares could possibly cause such calamity to Biden’s multibillion dollar vaccination campaign.’
The efforts against him are political, Dr. Mercola added, and he accused the White House of ‘illegal censorship by colluding with social media companies.’ He did not address whether his coronavirus claims were factual.
‘I am the lead author of a peer reviewed publication regarding vitamin D and the risk of COVID-19 and I have every right to inform the public by sharing my medical research,’ he said. He did not identify the publication, and The Times was unable to verify his claim.”
The problem with Frenkel’s assertion is that I did identify the publication. In fact, I emailed her the direct link. So, she lied. Secondly, my paper is beyond easy to locate. Just put my name into PubMed and you’ll find it. Believe it or not, you can even find it using the most biased search engine on earth, Google.
Daniel Engber, senior editor at the typically highly progressive mainstream media outlet, The Atlantic, commented on Frenkel’s clear ineptitude or malicious prevarication in a tweet:5
“A truly bizarre moment in the NYT piece on Joseph Mercola … you can literally verify the existence of this peer-reviewed publication in one second via googling. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33142828/“
Legal Notice Sent to NYT
July 26, 2021, my attorneys sent the following legal notice to Frenkel at the NYT, demanding a retraction of her false statements:6
“Dear Ms. Frenkel,
The undersigned law firm represents Dr. Joseph Mercola in connection with the attached article that was widely published on July 24, 2021. We are providing notice that you have made several false and defamatory statements in this article:
1.You identified that you could not validate that Dr. Mercola published a peer reviewed study on Vitamin D in the severity of COVID-19. Dr. Mercola provided the direct link in response to you (attached) and any journalist or fact checker would simply find the study by searching “Mercola” in PubMed.
2.Your article falsely states Dr. Mercola has been fined “millions” by the FDA. This is completely fabricated, Dr. Mercola has never been fined by the FDA.
… On behalf of Dr. Mercola, we hereby demand you immediately retract the article. We also request that you preserve all communications and documents that relate to Dr. Mercola.”
Where’s the Proof That I Am the ‘No. 1’ Misinformant?
To this day, the NYT insists I’m the No.1 spreader of misinformation online, based on the fabrications of a group called Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a “foreign dark money group,” to quote Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley,7 which sprang out of nowhere to create lists of people to be censored into oblivion.
The CCDH’s data gathering is so questionable, even ultra-biased Facebook ended up publicly criticizing it. In an August 18, 2021, Facebook report, Monika Bickert, vice president of Facebook content policy, set the record straight:8
“In recent weeks, there has been a debate about whether the global problem of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation can be solved simply by removing 12 people from social media platforms. People who have advanced this narrative contend that these 12 people are responsible for 73% of online vaccine misinformation on Facebook. There isn’t any evidence to support this claim …
In fact, these 12 people are responsible for about just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on Facebook. This includes all vaccine-related posts they’ve shared, whether true or false, as well as URLs associated with these people.”
At the time that Frenkel made her accusations, a Crowdtangle search for Facebook posts about the COVID jabs, from mid-June to mid-July 2021, also confirmed that my online reach was negligible. Topping the list of top performing Facebook posts expressing negative views about the COVID jabs was Candace Owens, followed by the mainstream news outlet ABC World News Tonight.9
The befuddling reality here is that most of the people identified as “top spreaders of misinformation” actually have negligible reach — at least compared to the people on this Crowdtangle list. None of the CCDH’s “top vaccine misinformants” are on the list above, and our reach certainly has not improved or expanded since then.
If You’re Targeted, You’re On-Target
This naturally raises the question, why were we targeted in the first place? Is it because we have high credibility from being one of the first natural health sites on the web with the most followers? Is it because we’ve spent a quarter of a century gaining people’s trust by mostly being correct about the health care system and criminal Big Pharma behavior?
Is it because we, more than others, have well-established credibility and are directly over the target? Is it because we have the experience and know-how to make accurate predictions? Is it because we see and explain the bigger picture?
Or is it some other reason entirely? It’s a mystery, really, but what is clear is that we’ve been deemed a threat to the official propaganda narrative, and I, for whatever reason, am at the very top of that threat identification list. Well, I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: I’m beyond truly honored to have been widely disparaged by one of the arms of the U.S. military and intelligence operations.
Being targeted in this fashion — tedious as it may be — is in fact a badge of honor. It tells me I’m doing the right thing, and that I’ve not misinterpreted the intentions behind the COVID machinations. More so than any intuition, it tells me I’m on target.
In the bright light of undeniable reality — as it is, a year later — it’s clear that Frenkel’s hit piece has not aged well. I doubt the NYT’s “Superspreader” documentary will fare much better. In the final analysis, if you want any hope of controlling your health, and that of your family, you’d be wise to understand legacy media speaks in Orwellian Doublespeak and reality is the opposite of virtually everything they are telling you.
Sources and References
How We Have Been Misled About Antidepressants
By Joanna Moncrieff | Brownstone Institute | August 18, 2022
Our umbrella review that revealed no links between serotonin and depression has caused shock waves among the general public, but has been dismissed as old news by psychiatric opinion leaders. This disjunction begs the questions of why the public has been fed this narrative for so long, and what antidepressants are actually doing if they are not reversing a chemical imbalance.
Before I go on, I should stress that I am not against the use of drugs for mental health problems per se. I believe some psychiatric drugs can be useful in some situations, but the way these drugs are presented both to the public and among the psychiatric community is, in my view, fundamentally misleading. This means we have not been using them carefully enough, and crucially, that people have not been able to make properly informed decisions about them.
Much public information still claims that depression, or mental disorders in general, are caused by a chemical imbalance and that drugs work by putting this right. The American Psychiatric Association currently tells people that: “differences in certain chemicals in the brain may contribute to symptoms of depression.” The Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Psychiatrists tells people: “Medications work by rebalancing the chemicals in the brain. Different types of medication act on different chemical pathways.”
In response to our paper finding that such statements are not supported by evidence, psychiatric experts have desperately tried to put the genie back in the bottle. There are other possible biological mechanisms that could explain how antidepressants exert their effects, they say, but what really matters is that antidepressants ‘work.’
This claim is based on randomised trials that show that antidepressants are marginally better than a placebo at reducing depression scores over a few weeks. However, the difference is so small that it is not clear it is even noticeable, and there is evidence that it may be explained by artefacts of the design of the studies rather than the effects of the drugs.
The experts go on to suggest that it does not matter how antidepressants work. After all, we do not understand exactly how every medical drug works, so this should not worry us.
This position reveals a deep-seated assumption about the nature of depression and the action of antidepressants, which helps to explain why the myth of the chemical imbalance has been allowed to survive for so long. These psychiatrists assume that depression must be the result of some specific biological processes that we will eventually be able to identify, and that antidepressants must work by targeting these.
These assumptions are neither supported nor helpful. They are not supported because, although there are numerous hypotheses (or speculations) other than the low serotonin theory, no consistent body of research demonstrates any specific biological mechanism underpinning depression that might explain antidepressant action; they are unhelpful because they lead to overly optimistic views about the actions of antidepressants that cause their benefits to be overstated and their adverse effects to be dismissed.
Depression is not the same as pain or other bodily symptoms. While biology is involved in all human activity and experience, it is not self-evident that manipulating the brain with drugs is the most useful level at which to deal with emotions. This may be something akin to soldering the hard drive to fix a problem with the software.
We normally think of moods and emotions as being personal reactions to the things going on in our lives, which are shaped by our individual history and predispositions (including our genes), and are intimately related to our personal values and inclinations.
Therefore we explain emotions in terms of the circumstances that provoke them and the personality of the individual. To override this common-sense understanding and claim that diagnosed depression is something different requires an established body of evidence, not an assortment of possible theories.
Models of drug action
The idea that psychiatric drugs might work by reversing an underlying brain abnormality is what I have called the ‘disease-centred’ model of drug action. It was first proposed in the 1960s when the serotonin theory of depression and other similar theories were advanced. Before this, drugs were implicitly understood to work differently, in what I have called a ‘drug-centred’ model of drug action.
In the early 20th century, it was recognised that drugs prescribed to people with mental disorders produce alterations to normal mental processes and states of consciousness, which are superimposed onto the individual’s preexisting thoughts and feelings.
This is much the same as we understand the effects of alcohol and other recreational drugs. We recognise that these can temporarily override unpleasant feelings. Although many psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, are not enjoyable to take like alcohol, they do produce more or less subtle mental alterations that are relevant to their use.
This is different from how drugs work in the rest of medicine. Although only a minority of medical drugs target the ultimate underlying cause of a disease, they work by targeting the physiological processes that produce the symptoms of a condition in a disease-centred way.
Painkillers, for example, work by targeting the underlying biological mechanisms that produce pain. But opiate painkillers may work in a drug-centred way too, because, unlike other painkillers, they have mind-altering properties. One of their effects is to numb emotions, and people who have taken opiates for pain often say they still have some pain, but they do not care about it anymore.
In contrast, paracetamol (so often cited by those defending the idea that it does not matter how antidepressants work) does not have mind-altering properties, and therefore although we may not fully understand its mechanism of action, we can safely presume it works on pain mechanisms, because there is no other way for it to work.
Like alcohol and recreational drugs, psychiatric drugs produce general mental alterations that occur in everyone regardless of whether they have mental health problems or not. The alterations produced by antidepressants vary according to the nature of the drug (antidepressants come from many different chemical classes – another indication that they are unlikely to be acting on an underlying mechanism), but include lethargy, restlessness, mental clouding, sexual dysfunction, including loss of libido, and numbing of emotions.
This suggests they produce a generalised state of reduced sensitivity and feeling. These alterations will obviously influence how people feel and may explain the slight difference between antidepressants and placebo observed in randomised trials.
Influences
In my book, The Myth of the Chemical Cure, I show how this ‘drug-centred’ view of psychiatric drugs was gradually replaced by the disease-centred view during the 1960s and 70s. The older view was erased so completely that it seemed people simply forgot that psychiatric drugs have mind-changing properties.
This switch did not occur because of scientific evidence. It occurred because psychiatry wanted to present itself as a modern medical enterprise, whose treatments were the same as other medical treatments. From the 1990s, the pharmaceutical industry also started to promote this view, and the two forces combined to insert this idea into the minds of the general public in what has to go down as one of the most successful marketing campaigns in history.
As well as wanting to align with the rest of medicine, in the 1960s the psychiatric profession needed to distance its treatments from the recreational drug scene. Best-selling prescription drugs of the period, amphetamines and barbiturates, were being widely diverted onto the street (the popular ‘purple hearts’ were a mixture of the two). So it was important to emphasise that psychiatric drugs were targeting an underlying disease, and to gloss over how they might be changing people’s ordinary state of mind.
The pharmaceutical industry took up the baton following the benzodiazepine scandal in the late 1980s. At this time it became apparent that benzodiazepines (drugs like Valium- ‘mother’s little helper’) caused physical dependence just like the barbiturates they had replaced. It was also clear they were being doled out by the bucket load to people (mostly women) to medicate away the stresses of life.
So when the pharmaceutical industry developed its next set of misery pills, it needed to present them not as new ways of ‘drowning one’s sorrows,’ but as proper medical treatments that worked by rectifying an underlying physical abnormality. So Pharma launched a massive campaign to persuade people that depression was caused by a lack of serotonin that could be corrected by the new SSRI antidepressants.
Psychiatric and medical associations helped out, including the message in their information for patients on official websites. Although marketing has died down with most antidepressants no longer on patent, the idea that depression is caused by low serotonin is still widely disseminated on pharmaceutical websites and doctors are still telling people that it is the case (two doctors have said this on national TV and radio in the UK in the last few months).
Neither Pharma nor the psychiatric profession has had any interest in bursting the chemical imbalance bubble. It is quite clear from psychiatrists’ responses to our serotonin paper that the profession wishes people to continue under the misapprehension that mental disorders such as depression have been shown to be biological conditions that can be treated with drugs that target the underlying mechanisms.
We haven’t worked out what those mechanisms are yet, they admit, but we have plenty of research that suggests this or that possibility. They do not want to contemplate that there might be other explanations for what drugs like antidepressants are actually doing, and they do not want the public to do so either.
And there is good reason for this. Millions of people are now taking antidepressants, and the implications of discarding the disease-centred view of their action are profound. If antidepressants are not reversing an underlying imbalance, but we know that they are modifying the serotonin system in some way (though we are not sure how), we have to conclude they are changing our normal brain chemistry – just like recreational drugs do.
Some of the mental alterations that result, such as emotional numbing, may bring short-term relief. But when we look at antidepressants in this light we immediately understand that taking them for a long time is probably not a good idea. Although there is little research on the consequences of long-term use, increasing evidence points to the occurrence of withdrawal effects which can be severe and prolonged, and cases of persistent sexual dysfunction.
Replacing the serotonin theory with vague assurances that more complex biological mechanisms can explain drug action only continues the obfuscation, and enables the marketing of other psychiatric drugs on equally spurious grounds.
Johns Hopkins, for example, is telling people that ‘untreated depression causes long-term brain damage’ and that ‘esketamine may counteract the harmful effects of depression.’ Quite apart from the damage to people’s mental health by being told they have, or will soon get brain damage, this message encourages the use of a drug with a flimsy evidence base and a worrying adverse effect profile.
The serotonin hypothesis was inspired by the desire of the psychiatric profession to regard its treatments as proper medical treatments and the need of the pharmaceutical industry to distinguish its new drugs from the benzodiazepines that, by the late 1980s, had brought the medicating of misery into disrepute.
It exemplifies the way that psychiatric drugs have been misunderstood and misrepresented in the interests of profit and professional status. It is time to let people know not only that the serotonin story is a myth, but that antidepressants change the normal state of the body, brain and mind in ways that may occasionally be experienced as useful, but may be harmful too.
Joanna Moncrieff is a Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at University College London, and works as a consultant psychiatrist in the NHS. She researchers and writes about the over-use and misrepresentation of psychiatric drugs and about the history, politics and philosophy of psychiatry more generally. She is currently leading UK government-funded research on reducing and discontinuing antipsychotic drug treatment (the RADAR study), and collaborating on a study to support antidepressant discontinuation. In the 1990s she co-founded the Critical Psychiatry Network to link up with other, like-minded psychiatrists. She is author of numerous papers and her books include A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs Second edition (PCCS Books), published in September 2020, as well as The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs (2013) and The Myth of the Chemical Cure (2009) (Palgrave Macmillan). Her website is https://joannamoncrieff.com/.
Climate change is not making children obese
BY MARY HARRINGTON | UNHERD | AUGUST 15, 2022
If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if you’re a media ecosystem with a fixation on hammers, you will do your best to make anything look like a nail.
This is the inescapable conclusion from the reporting around a recent study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Temperature, which looked at the relationship between climate change and children’s fitness — and reported the findings entirely backwards to fit a pre-existing political narrative.
The study pointed out that children’s aerobic physical fitness is 30% lower than that of their parents at the same age, arguing that this is a problem because aerobic physical fitness is vital for tolerating higher temperatures. This in turn means that where climate change is causing temperatures to increase, obese individuals will find it harder to cope.
This is sensible stuff — but the study was reported as stating that climate change had caused reduced fitness in children. The study itself pointed to Covid lockdown measures, among many other factors, as having exacerbated an already-existing issue of poor fitness in children. But headlines suggested children are staying indoors because it’s too hot and that this is why they’re less fit than their parents.
You don’t have to be a scientist to know that reduced aerobic fitness in this generation of children long precedes measurably rising outdoor temperatures of the kind that could be attributed to climate change. Here’s a report from 2013 on the topic, for example, that describes aerobic fitness in children decreasing every decade from 1975 onward.
Nor do you have to be a scientist to come up with multiple factors that are plausibly contributing to this unhappy situation. Anyone with young children, or just rudimentary powers of observation, needs only a moment’s reflection to think of multiple ways in which 21st-century life militates against physically active childhood, compared to the world just a few decades ago. But we mustn’t let minor considerations like the patent absurdity of a claim, or its rampant misreading of an actual scientific paper, get in the way of a clickbait mass-media narrative on a much-hyped topic.
A sensible paper discussing the importance of physical fitness in ensuring resilience in the face of changing climate has been reported entirely backwards. Obesity, discussed as a cause of difficulty in adapting to climate change, is reported as the effect of climate change itself, while ignoring politically inconvenient factors cited in the paper itself as contributing to poor fitness.
But this is only an especially egregious example of how even supposedly respectable media can’t be relied on to read even the abstract of a research paper, before editorialising on it in terms that align with established political narratives. And arguably whether or not such specious editorialising qualifies as “misinformation” mostly depends on your political priors.
Given this, the now-widespread cynicism that increasingly greets “expert” opinion in the press is perhaps understandable. It’s all very well saying “follow the science” – but the average Joe may be forgiven for concluding that “the science” is not so much a reliable source of truth as a pick n’mix array of talking-points for a pre-determined political agenda.
White House “Climate Adviser” Banned from the National Academy of Science for Science Fraud
… while White House Officials Beg Social Media to Silence Opponents
By Igor Chudov | August 18, 2022
Climate change is a very important topic! According to Bill Gates-sponsored scientist Kari Nadeau, climate change is responsible for the recent rise in heart attacks, stillbirths, and cardiovascular disease, especially in children. So, knowing how important climate change is, I am paying attention to news about it, though with lesser intensity than I devote to Covid news.
Finally, we have a great climate change story! White House “climate official” Jane Lubchenco was just banned by the National Academy of Science (archive link) for science fraud. She was an editor of a paper written by her brother-in-law. Jane did not disclose this family relationship and promoted her brother-in-law’s article. The article itself contained false data that was known to be out of date at the time the article was written, and thus the paper was fraudulent.
Jane is now not allowed to participate in many scientific activities due to violating ethics rules meant to prevent fraud in science.
What is the White House’s biggest priority right now, when it comes to climate change? Perhaps it is cleaning up the place and making sure that we have honest science? Not really. The priority is demanding that major social networks silence climate change skeptics. Watch this video at 11:10:
The White House adviser says in the interview:
And frankly, the tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation.
I am not a big climate change skeptic — I do not care about climate change all that much right now — but coincidentally, Twitter recently suspended my dog’s account for 7 days.
So, I am not allowed to spread misinformation. The White House, on the other hand, has climate change advisors who perpetrate scientific fraud.
On a more serious note, my dog’s Twitter account was not alone and was suspended among hundreds of others last week, ostensibly for antivax misinformation. Why is this happening now? Why the urgency? It certainly is NOT about helping to vaccinate the public, as COVID vaccine uptake is at historic lows and everyone made up their mind already. Censorship would not help much with vaccination! Why, then, is it intensifying?
My own guess is that these suspensions are not so much related to Covid, but are happening due to the fact that the White House and the woke social networks are preparing for the November elections and want to silence dissent in advance. Why?
- to influence the election, and
- to prevent people from questioning election conduct and fairness afterward
They — the White House, Twitter, Facebook and Google — know that they will have to face very uncomfortable questions about their role in forcing the so-called “Covid vaccine” onto young people, as they “own” the outcome of this. They want to postpone that moment of reckoning and thus are deleting as many dissenting voices as they can.
The CDC Failed, So Spin It Off and Make It More Powerful?
BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | AUGUST 17, 2022
The failure of the CDC to manage Covid-19 was baked in from the first moments of its response. A government agency was never going to mitigate much less get rid of this sort of pathogen. This is because the virus never cared a whit about prestige degrees, job descriptions, big budgets, high-end connections, media agitprop, or polls. It went on its merry way, hit everyone, and immune systems adapted as they always have done.
The great experiment was an enormous flop.
The costs of the experiment we know: it is the catastrophe that Donald Henderson predicted it would be in 2006.
Thus does it make sense that the present overlords of the agency have admitted at least partially to have made some errors. The question is what were these errors. From the latest news concerning some impending shakeup, I see no evidence of any serious rethinking of the crazed and cockamamie lockdown orders it issued from March 2020 onward. Not even preposterous mandates like plexiglass at retail counters, two years of school closures, “six feet of distance,” one-way grocery aisles, band members in bubbles, mask mandates, and limits on how many people you can have in your home have prompted remorse.
Instead, every indication is that the CDC believes the real problem was that it did not have a high-enough budget and enough power. Plenty of lawmakers are willing to go along – not that anyone is asking them. Therefore, its tremendous pandemic powers need to be tweaked and invested mainly in a division known as the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, or ASPR.
Says The Washington Post :
The Biden administration is reorganizing the federal health department [HHS] to create an independent division that would lead the nation’s pandemic response, amid frustrations with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Joy!
The new head of this high-level division (same level as FDA/CDC) is Dawn O’Connell who has a background in literature (Vanderbilt) and law (Tulane), not science or medicine. She is a political appointee who took the reins as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response, as confirmed by the Senate in 2021. She is now elated to report that her division will be elevated to become just as important as the CDC and the FDA.
Here is her memo to the staff:
ASPR Team:
As you know firsthand, ASPR is at the forefront of many of HHS’s and the Biden-Harris Administration’s top priorities. Whether your work involves strengthening our core preparedness and response capabilities, tackling new and emerging challenges, or providing essential support services to the team, please know that the work that you do matters and that it is making a big difference.
In recognition of the tremendous value this team brings to the Department and the American people – and due to the increasing size and scope of what we do – I asked Secretary Becerra to consider making us an Operating Division and I am pleased to report that Secretary Becerra has made the critically important decision to elevate our team from a Staff Division to an Operating Division (OpDiv)!
This change allows ASPR to mobilize a coordinated national response more quickly and stably during future disasters and emergencies while equipping us with greater hiring and contracting capabilities. As an OpDiv, we are now in the same category as other large HHS teams with core operational responsibilities such as CDC, NIH, FDA, CMS, and ACF. This change is an important next step for our organization which has continued to grow and evolve since its creation in 2006 – the pace of which has quickened over the past year. This change is also a recognition of the good work you all have been and continue to do on behalf of the American People…
Along with this reclassification, moving forward we will be known as the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR). The adjustment to our name signals our elevation to an OpDiv, while maintaining the equity and brand recognition we have built with key internal and external stakeholders, particularly over the course of the pandemic.
Thus must we ask: what the heck is going on here? The Biden administration has no idea. Indeed the Washington Post reports that “some senior Biden administration officials said they were unaware of the plan to reorganize the department, which was approved by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and has been held close by his deputies.”
This point is crucial. This is how the administrative state works. It cares nothing for the elected officials who come and go. It moves on its own, fueled by money baked into the budgets and with power hardly anyone dares to challenge. There is never any accountability. There is only one path forward: more power. Elections be damned.
The most important part of the memo here is the idea of mobilizing a “coordinated national response.” It drove these people utterly bonkers that during the pandemic, several states went their own way. South Dakota never shut down. Georgia opened a month after the shutdowns. Florida and Texas were next. Finally all the states with Republican governors opened while most states with Democratic governors remained closed to some degree.
The empirical results are incredibly obvious. The open states performed as well and often better on disease demographics. Meanwhile their economies did not suffer nearly as much. The kids stayed in school. The churches functioned. There were live musical performances. The museums, libraries, and playgrounds opened. People are less traumatized.
The migration of people from blue to red tells the whole story. Masses of people fled the lockdown states for the open states.
A “coordinated national response” would make such federalist solutions impossible. Forget the 9th and 10th Amendments. These agencies and these people care nothing for them, nor actual science which would encourage a plethora of experiments in the management of a pathogen. These bureaucrats in Washington think they have all the answers, and they demand complete compliance.
Meanwhile, the CDC itself is being reorganized. But don’t be fooled by any appearance of contrition. They still have a legal appeal in process that would put a mask back on your face when traveling. The new agency to which some of its pandemic responsibilities will be transferred will have a 1,000-person staff to start, people paid the big bucks to sit around coming up with new ways to whip up disease panic and start another crackdown.
A better solution would be to abolish the CDC. States can handle all its responsibilities. It did not even exist until 1947. Its purpose was mosquito control, spraying a now-banned chemical (DDT) everywhere. These days we handle that by going to Home Depot.
The CDC as an agency grew out of the 1944 Public Health Services Act that permitted nationally ordered quarantines for the first time. The legislative history of that thing remains a mystery to me. Regardless, it is nowhere justified in the US Constitution. This act needs to go too. So too all the federal agencies to which it gave rise. This is the only real solution.
Certainly creating a new agency is not the answer. And note that ASPR has its roots in 2006 as an outgrowth of the Bush administration’s obsessive panic over bioterrorism. It was also the first year that anyone imagined that lockdowns could be an appropriate path for any free society. It was the year that “social distancing” was invented by a cabal of computer scientists with zero experience in infectious disease.
These fanatics need to be out of power completely, and the regulations, laws, and agencies that enabled them to ruin the country and its freedoms must be ended. This is what any responsive government in a modern society would do. It would see failure and call it and then do something about it. It certainly would not go in this new direction and reward the disease planners with more power and money!
We must learn real lessons and act on them.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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NATO Sanctions and the Coming Global Diesel Fuel Disaster
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 11.04.2022
Amid the ongoing global inflation crisis, NATO heads of state and mainstream media repeat a mantra that high energy prices are a direct result of Putin’s actions in Ukraine since end of February. The reality is that it is the western sanctions that are responsible. Those sanctions including cutting SWIFT interbank access for key Russian banks and some of the most severe sanctions ever imposed, are hardly having an impact on the military actions in Ukraine. What many overlook is the fact that they are increasingly impacting the economies of the West, especially the EU and USA. A closer look at the state of the global supply of diesel fuel is alarming. But Western sanctions planners at the US Treasury and the EU know fully well what they are doing. And it bodes ill for the world economy.
While most of us rarely think about diesel fuel as anything other than a pollutant, in fact it is essential to the entire world economy in a way few energy sources are. The director general of Fuels Europe, part of the European Petroleum Refiners Association, stated recently, “… there is a clear link between diesel and GDP, because almost everything that goes into and out of a factory goes using diesel.” … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Trita Parsi: Middle East Unraveling — Are We on the Path to World War?
- Iran FM meets with US envoy on UN meeting’s sidelines at American side’s insistence: Report
- Qatar PM calls for Gulf security framework with Iran, says war must be ‘wake-up call’
- China condemns US extortion of Iranian airlines, rejects Washington’s ‘illegal’ sanctions threats
- Italy to move military personnel from Taif base after missile strike
- Finland’s Stubb tells European leaders to calm down
- Defeating Russia on battlefield impossible – Fico
- Finland’s Gender Clinic Reversal
- Massachusetts Wants Mental Health Visits, Why Does Government Use ‘Health’ to Enter Our Homes & Families?
- US lawmaker admits American people footing bill for Trump’s failed aggression against Iran
- If Americans Knew
- Sanctions are collective punishment: immoral and self-defeating
- Phosphorus Munitions Fired by Israel Burn Groves, Orchards in Southern Lebanon
- Israel Carries Out New Ceasefire Violations Across Gaza
- AI – Emphasis on the ‘I’: Israel Is Funding AI Chatbot Propaganda
- Israel Blocking Hundreds of Wheelchairs for Injured Children From Entering Gaza
- Israel Is Expanding and Upgrading Compounds for Palestinian Militias in Gaza
- The Palestinian-American Residents of This West Bank Town Are Wondering: Where Is Trump?
- Gaza desperately needs tents, wheelchairs, fuel… and everything else (Israel blocks it all) – Daily Update
- Israeli Attacks in Gaza Kill at Least Seven Palestinians Over Three Days, including Woman and Child
- Trump’s militarization of Washington DC as he pursues Israel’s war against Iran
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
