If only the US President Joe Biden had a time machine as in the post-apocalyptic science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, he should have used that vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively backward through time all the way to 1999 when it was that the US lost the plot on European security and Russia’s perennial quest for mutual security with Europe.
At that defining moment of the post-cold war era 24 years ago, George Kennan was prophetic to warn the Bill Clinton administration that US-Russia relations would be irreparably damaged if the western alliance expanded to include the former Warsaw Pact countries. His advice was ignored. It is generally accepted today that the war in Ukraine is the culmination of the NATO’s relentless advance to the borders of Russia.
A second draft addressed to Washington was titled Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees. Taken together, the two drafts represented an opening bid by Moscow for serious negotiations but it led to no engagement since the Biden administration simply stonewalled that the US and Russia cannot cut a deal over the heads of Europeans and Ukrainians!
As the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan famously said, “nothing about you [Ukraine] without you.” It was a lame excuse, for the Kiev regime installed in power through the US-backed unconstitutional, armed and bloody coup in Ukraine in 2014, was a mere tool of Washington.
The Biden administration thought it was cornering Moscow and setting a bear trap as Russia was damned either way — whether it passively accepted the reality of NATO presence right at its doorstep, or chose to resist through coercive means. When Russia’s special military operation began in February 2022, Strobe Talbott who was the mastermind in the Bill Clinton administration pushing through the doctrine of NATO’s eastward expansion into the former Warsaw Pact territories, tweeted congratulating the Biden Team for cornering the Russians!
Several US analysts triumphantly wrote that Russia was going to be bogged down in a quagmire with dire consequences to the country’s regime and its very existence. The western narrative gained ascendancy for a while. The rest is history.
However, in one of the great turnarounds of history in modern times, Moscow eventually prevailed in the battlefields decisively and irreversibly.
Against such a historical backdrop, Biden’s remark on Saturday that the US is “not going to make it easy” for Ukraine to join the NATO can only be seen as a retrogressive journey into the past. Biden underscored that Ukraine will be required to meet the “same standards” as any other member of the bloc, implying that Ukraine must conform to the so-called Membership Action Plan or MAP, which requires a candidate nation to make military and democratic reforms, with NATO’s advice and assistance, before a determination of membership can be made.
The MAP process can take years. Macedonia took 21 years. Biden’s remark is not only a signal to Kiev but comes at a time when there is a groundswell of opinion within the alliance that Europe and the US must provide Ukraine clear-cut NATO security guarantees, which is important for the future of European security.
In fact, Biden spoke only 4 days after meeting with Jens Stoltenberg, NATO secretary-general, at the White House last Tuesday, where, reportedly, the latter sought to simplify the accession process for Ukraine on the plea that Kiev had already made significant progress toward membership.
What prompted Biden to take a hard line? Poland’s President Andrzej Duda declared, in the run-up to his talks in Paris on June 12 with France’s President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the Weimar Triangle format, that Ukraine would like to have “a very concrete perspective … of joining the North Atlantic Alliance.” Duda hoped that the NATO summit in Vilnius will “send a positive message to Kiev, … that Ukraine’s future membership in NATO is clearly visible.”
Apparently, there was consensus amongst the Weimar Triangle members also that Ukraine should receive security guarantees. Scholz declared: “It is evident that we need something like this, and we need it in a very concrete form.” Macron endorsed, calling for a rapid agreement on “tangible and credible security guarantees.”
Indeed, there have been threatening noises too that if there is no concretisation on Ukraine’s membership in Vilnius, some of the “hardcore” allies may take things into their own hands, and the renegade undertaking – at the national level –- could also include stationing of troops from NATO members in Ukraine.
Now, Biden has ignored these demands from Old and New Europeans. He is confident he can shift the goal post. Maybe, Macron and Scholz are only playing to the gallery? We may never know.
The heart of the matter is that Biden realises that the ongoing Ukrainian offensive is heading for a train crash and the decimation of Kiev’s remaining army. It is uncertain how long Kiev will be able to recruit enough soldiers. The two figures whom Washington had groomed for precisely the sort of Plan B in Kiev that it needs now — commander of the armed forces Gen. Valeri Zaluzhny and spy chief Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov — are out of reckoning, having been put out of action summarily by recent Russian missile strikes.
Don’t rule out an insurrection in Ukraine if war deaths become unsustainable for the society. Biden also sees that there is continuously shrinking approval in America for his war policy, which could possibly endanger his re-election. Biden pointed out to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky during his last visit to Kiev that the funds that Washington could provide were limited. And CIA chief William Burns separately left a message with Zelensky that continued American military assistance beyond July is problematic.
Suffice to say, if Putin’s harsh remarks last week (on Tuesday and Friday) are anything to go by, the Kremlin leadership has zero trust or confidence in Biden or his European allies. Meanwhile, the plain truth is, 90 percent of Ukraine’s resource base lies in regions under Russian control. Which means that the rump state is going to be a huge drain on US resources, while Russia is showing no signs of exhaustion.
Biden has not said anything new. Biden senses that the US lost the proxy war but he must not and cannot admit it. So, in the absence of a time machine, which could have taken him all the way back to 1999 when the NATO’s expansion began unfolding, Biden simply walked back to the default position of the 2008 NATO Summit at Bucharest welcoming Ukraine into the alliance via the MAP route — as if that moment fifteen years ago is now the past and cannot be pulled back to the present. Russia is not going to accept it.
Over 10,000 categories of nearly 1.6 million adverse events – many of them serious and debilitating – brought to you by Pfizer!
You might not have heard it in the news, but in recent months, Pfizer’s pharmacovigilance documents requested by the European Union’s drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency, have been released. They show that Pfizer knew about a sickening level of injury early on. An August 2022 document shows that the company already had observed the following scope of vaccine injury:
508,351 individual case reports of adverse events containing 1,597,673 events;
One-third of the AEs were classified as serious, well above the standard for safety signals usually pegged at 15%;
Women reported AEs at three times the rate of men;
60% of cases were reported with either “outcome unknown” or “not recovered,” so many of the injuries were not transient;
Highest number of cases occurred in the 31-50 year age group, and 92% did not have any comorbidities, which makes it very likely it was the vaccine causing such widespread, sudden injury.
These numbers alone suggest that all COVID shots should be defunded and Congress must immediately remove liability protections from the manufacturers. But a more recent document released by the Europeans is even more devastating, because it breaks down the 1.6 million adverse events observed by Pfizer by category and subcategory of ailment and injury.
The 393-page confidential Pfizer document, dated Aug. 19, 2022, shows that Pfizer observed over 10,000 categories of diagnosis, many of them very severe and very rare. For example:
Pfizer was aware of 73,542 cases of 264 categories of vascular disorders from the shots. Many of them are rare conditions.
There were hundreds of categories of nervous system disorders, totaling 696,508 cases.
There were 61,518 AEs from well over 100 categories of eye disorders, which is unusual for a vaccine injury.
Likewise, there were over 47,000 ear disorders, including almost 16,000 cases of tinnitus, which even Mayo Clinic researchers observed as a common but often devastating side effect early on.
There were roughly 225,000 cases of skin and tissue disorders.
There were roughly 190,000 cases of respiratory disorders.
Disturbingly, there were over 178,000 cases of reproductive or breast disorders, including disorders you wouldn’t expect, such as 506 cases of erectile dysfunction in men.
Very disturbingly, there were over 77,000 psychiatric disorders observed following the shots, lending credence to Dr. Peter McCullough’s research observing case studies showing psychosis correlating with vaccination.
3,711 cases of tumors – benign and malignant
Of course, there were almost 127,000 cardiac disorders, running the gamut of about 270 categories of heart damage, including many rare disorders, in addition to myocarditis.
There were over 100,000 blood and lymphatic disorders, for both of which there’s a wealth of literature linking them to the spike protein.
When reading what Pfizer knew early on juxtaposed to independent studies, it’s clear that nobody could have mistaken most of these AEs for mere incidental ailments. Here is a list of 3,129 case studies chronicling vaccine injury in every organ system observed in this Pfizer document.
What is so jarring is that there are hundreds of very rare neurological disorders that reflect something so systemically wrong with the shots, a reality that was clearly of no concern to the manufacturers and regulators alike. One of the infamous cases of vaccine injury was Maddie de Garay, an Ohio teen who became disabled for life immediately after participating in the Pfizer clinical trial. Her story is chronicled in chapter 16 of my book. I checked this confidential document and found that they knew of 68 cases of her rare diagnosis, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy.
The broad scope of injuries affecting every single organ system is simply extraordinary. Yet to this day, the FDA continues to criminally label the Pfizer shot as safe and effective. To this day, the label indicates the shot is a fully protective vaccine and also fails to mention all of these side effects, as required by law.
Recently, Peter Doshi, editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote a letter to the FDA requesting that the agency update its labeling to reflect the reality of what we’ve learned about the shots. Specifically, he asked that they include the following side effects on the label: multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, pulmonary embolism, sudden cardiac death, neuropathic and autonomic disorders, decreased sperm concentration, heavy menstrual bleeding, and detection of vaccine mRNA in breast milk. The causal relationship of all these AEs to the vaccine is backed by substantial research, surveys, and adverse event reporting systems.
Unfortunately, the FDA denied the causal relationship between any of these side effects and the COVID shots. Even with regard to the request that officials clarify on the label that the shots don’t stop transmission, the FDA replied, “We are not convinced that there is any widespread misconception about this.”
“Product labeling should be informative and accurate, not promotional. The law requires it, and following the law shouldn’t be optional,” bemoaned Doshi and the other authors in a piece at TheHill.
The question is whether Republicans in the House will force the FDA to comply with the law by using the leverage of the appropriations bills for the FDA and HHS. So far, there has been no reckoning for their false marketing and the devastating human toll it has cost. Oh, and that is just the short-term human toll.
Although we have all come to expect that the science of medicine might occasionally reach a blind alley or take a wrong turn on the road to truth, we trust in the integrity of the medical establishment to make the appropriate corrections and proceed on investigative and therapeutic journeys determined primarily by objective scientific evidence.
That was certainly the belief I held as a medical student in the ‘80s and throughout my career as a physician, despite the free lunches sponsored by cheerful and ebullient pharmaceutical representatives who pitched the drug du jour. We students and interns and residents and attendings may have eaten their pizza and hoagies, but we were secure that our clinical judgments would remain unbiased when it came to treating our patients.
But then again, as we all know, there really is no free lunch—or free pens or flashlights or god knows what else you may find at most medical conventions where drug companies pitch tent. Eventually something starts eating away at your firm and unbiased principles and the drug samples become a bit too easy to hand out gratis, and the prescribing hand a bit too familiar with the proprietary rather than generic names. This is why from the outset of my career I refused to see drug reps: I knew enough about myself to know that influences like these can’t be easily rebuffed.
However, I hardly imagined that vested pecuniary interests could ever have affected so many millions of patients by misdirecting the management of the coronary heart disease (CHD) over the past six decades. Believe it or not, such appears to be the case, as the recent publication in JAMA on the sugar industry shows. This fascinating and critical article demonstrates convincingly that the industry not only attempted but actually succeeded in shifting the medical approach to CHD away from sugar to fats.
In 1972, John Yudkin published Pure, White and Deadly, arguing that sugar was the real culprit in the obesity epidemic and the major factor in associated coronary disease. His findings were marginalised, thanks in large part to the sugar lobby. Instead, the position advocated by physiologist Ancel Keys, which advocated the role of fats and dietary cholesterol won the day and became the mainstay for treatment strategies—not because of intrinsic scientific merit, however.
The Sugar Research Foundation, today known as the Sugar Association, went so far as to pay three Harvard researchers to conduct a literature review, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, which refuted the link between sugar consumption and CHD.
Thanks in part to the advocacy of physicians like Dr. Robert Lustig, whose 2009 YouTube lecture “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” has been viewed by more than six and a half million people, and to researchers like him who have persevered in their pursuits to understand the physiology of CHD, the tide has begun to turn.
As someone once said somewhere, the truth will set us free; but he failed to mention that the road to the truth may be a long and hazardous one and that the power of special interests and money may create profound detours and, in some cases, lead us to points of no return. Medicine, like every other human activity, is not immune to the blandishments of lucre.
Fortunately Yudkin—and medical science—have been vindicated, as we are now finding out. Although I mourn the passage of so many decades spent in unnecessary error, and so many lives that might otherwise have benefited from an actually objective approach, I also take heart that these findings will keep us ever more vigilant about science, that ostensibly most ‘objective’ of human endeavours, and the non-scientific factors that may influence its course.
It’s time to be on red alert. Substandard medical publications were used to push and promote narratives and squash other narratives. AND NOW those publications are being silently deleted.
Hundreds of medical journals are disappearing, and no one is talking about it! I’ve never seen this in my 40 years of practicing medicine.
We wrote about gender dysphoria, a growing problem in Europe and the stages of “treatment” proposed by international guidelines:
And then proceeded to do what we do for a living: look at the evidence from systematic reviews, focussing on the most up-to-date and most of all, we looked at the quality of the 16 studies in the reviews.
We listed the presumed benefits and possible harms of interventions for stages 1 and 2, with stage 3 (surgery) being irreversible.
We concluded that the evidence for interventions for both stages was very low quality. Still, the range of psychological and physical harms induced by the hormones was likely to be high.
All this would matter less if these were offered to individuals who could make up their minds, but they were offered to people as young as 12.
In any case, we concluded that none of these hormone interventions should be offered outside clinical trials, of which there were none in the reviews we identified.
We wrote: ‘The development of these interventions should, therefore, occur in the context of research, and treatment.’ Our conclusions were reported in the Times. The work was also worthy of a BBC Panorama programme.
However, our work drew a complaint to the Editor in Chief of the BMJ, enough to close down our work in that outlet.
Well, four years after all this, NHS England has come to the same conclusions:
“Puberty suppressing hormones will not be prescribed to under 18s for gender dysphoria, except in exceptional circumstances, because of a lack of evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness. Puberty blockers will only be accessible to children as part of research, interim guidance states. As such, a study into the impact of puberty suppressing hormones on gender dysphoria in children and young people with early onset gender dysphoria is being developed by NHS England’s new national children and young people’s gender dysphoria research oversight board.”
The tale shows that we found poor-quality evidence wherever we looked, which appears to be a problem swept under the table.
EBM applied correctly will eventually come up with the right answer, especially in the matter of harms that most people are uncomfortable with. What matters now is how many children have been harmed in the intervening four years it took NHS England to review the evidence and come to the same conclusion.
World-renowned Critical Care Pioneer, Dr. Paul Marik, is back in the news as the CHEST Journal, which published his benchmark life-saving Vitamin C Protocol for sepsis, reaffirmed the study after it came under attack. Dr. Marik joins Del to detail the pharma-driven war on repurposed drugs, and cheap early, non-pharmaceutical interventions for weight loss, overall health, cancer, and more. These are the treatments that pharma doesn’t want you to know about.
Russia’s economy is performing strongly, according to recent forecasts from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The outcome defies earlier predictions by the United States and its European allies which held that Western sanctions would bring the Russian economy to its knees and force it to submissively “Cry Uncle”.
When the conflict in Ukraine escalated 16 months ago (after eight years of NATO-sponsored aggression using the Kiev Neo-Nazi regime), various Western politicians and pundits were relishing the prospect of the Russian economy collapsing from “Total War” launched against its international banking and trade.
Well, it didn’t turn out like that. Far from it. As the World Bank noted above, the Western sanctions have simply helped Russia boost alternative markets in China, India, and elsewhere around the globe. A principal earner for Russia is energy exports of oil and gas. Increased sales to Asia have maintained revenues despite the loss of European markets due to Western sanctions.
The paradoxical thing is that U.S. and European sanctions against Russia while intended to cripple the Russian economy have actually made the latter stronger.
Michael Hudson, an American global economics analyst, points out: “The sanctions have obliged Russia to become self-sufficient in food production, manufacturing production and consumer goods.”
Hudson also notes that the U.S. geopolitical strategy is to use sanctions in order to make its supposed European allies more dependent and subservient to Washington.
Another respected commentator, Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian geoeconomics professor, likened the use of Western sanctions to the self-destructive behavior of “self-harm”. The United States and European Union, he says, have “handed over a huge market to the rest of the world”.
Diesen also observes that 85 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that do not comply with Western sanctions against Russia. This global majority is more than ever creating new forms of trade and finance that obviate Western control. A major impetus for this positive development is the necessity bequeathed by Washington’s systematic abuse of power and privilege.
The repercussions are more far-reaching and profound than the inadvertent benefits accruing to Russia’s national economy. What the Western sanctions are also doing is accelerating the development of a multipolar world and the demise of the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency. The upshot of those two trends is the historic dwindling of American imperial power – albeit with outbursts of militarism and warmongering along the way down.
A significant illustration of the times a-changing was seen this week at the 25th summit of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). Attending the four-day event were 17,000 delegates from some 130 nations. This year’s convocation witnessed large representations from Asia, Latin America and Africa.
The bustling event not only reflected Russia’s own economic strength but the fact that – far from being “isolated” and downtrodden – Russia is viewed by the rest of the world as an engine for growth and more prosperous multipolar relations.
Indeed, from the perspective of most nations, it looks like the United States and its Western allies are the ones who are isolated and anachronistic.
One of the attendees at SPIEF was American industrial analyst Douglas Andrew Littleton who commented: “Western sanctions against Russia have backfired.” And he added: “I’m happy that Russia has been able to bypass and skirt the sanctions in so many ways with their friends and allies.”
What’s going on here is not just merely the emergence of an alternative system, but an epochal political and perhaps moral paradigm shift. The globe wants more peaceful and mutual relations of cooperation and development. Most people on this Earth want endless warmongering, militarism and unilateral bullying by self-ordained powers to be put to an end. The planet is crying out for a world based on justice and peace.
What the world is realizing more than ever is that the unilateral use of economic sanctions by Washington is nothing but warfare and state terrorism by another, more palatable name. For decades, the U.S. has tried to use economic weapons to strangle and kill other nations. North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Iraq and many other countries come to mind where U.S. imperialism has imposed conditions of economic genocide.
The world is well aware of this fiendish legacy and has had enough of American barbarism wielded with the help of its Western lackeys in NATO and the European Union.
We should here make special mention of Syria, the Arab nation struggling to recover from 12 years of war that was inflicted upon it by Washington and its NATO partners for “regime change”. Today, Syria’s recovery is cruelly hampered by economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU. How despicable is that?
There is an unerring historical sense, however, that Washington, has finally met its nemesis. By racking up sanctions against Russia and dragooning its EU lackeys to follow suit, the United States has now unleashed a historic dynamic process of its own imperial collapse.
For decades, U.S. sanctions worked to a nefarious degree on isolated, smaller nations to indeed enforce vengeful hardship.
Not anymore. Russia’s vast natural wealth and economy are too big to contain. Militarily, too, Russia will not be pushed around. Indeed, it has pushed back in Ukraine against the West’s deceptive and pernicious proxy war.
Organically and consciously, the world economy and international relations have been transformed in recent years, especially with the rise of China and Eurasia generally.
Another key development is that the Western imperialist media monopoly has also been broken. Washington and its minions in the European political class are held in contempt as liars and charlatans, even by their own populations.
By unwisely attempting to trap the Russian bear, the West has only created a scenario of revolt by the rest of the world from the West’s exploitative control. Five centuries of European and American Western parasitism have run their course.
Russia’s economic strength is galvanizing the rest of the world to shake off the chains of Western domination and subjugation. The process of dumping the dollar is gathering momentum which self-harming sanctions are precipitating. Pillars and facades are crumbling in real time.
The theme for the SPIEF event this year was “Sovereign Development – the Basis for a Just World”.
As with many other empires in the annals of history that have collapsed, arrogance and hubris often precede the fall. The American and Western elite thought they had an eternal license to wreak havoc for their own selfish gain. Their economic plunder and weaponry are now turning on their own heads. And it’s long overdue.
London and Washington run the show in the “rules-based world order,” trying to dictate policy to their own allies as well as countries outside the West, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told RT on Friday.
Russia fully understands that building relations with other countries needs to be based on mutual benefits and equal partnerships, Lavrov said in an interview with RT at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
“This is not what we see in the West these days. The Anglo-Saxons are basically running the show, controlling the rest of the collective West. They are using the current situation, which they created through Ukraine – this war against Russia – to remove competition,” Lavrov elaborated.
“They see us as a competitor, they see China as a competitor. Their doctrinal documents clearly state that. But they are also removing their competition in continental Europe. It’s obvious. The economic and social processes in Germany are grim. Other countries are not much better off,” the Russian foreign minister added.
The only Western state benefiting from the current situation is the US, Lavrov said, “and the UK is always somewhere around, helping America reach its selfish goals.”
According to Lavrov, the “Anglo-Saxons and their allies” are currently trying to pressure countries around the world to side with them against Russia, including the Arab world, using methods he can only describe as “rude.”
“You see, when they talk about these ‘rules’ on which the international order must be based, what they really mean is their diktat,” Lavrov told RT. “Colonial instincts – live at the expense of others. Nothing else.”
Lavrov took particular exception to Western proclamations that their support for Kiev is “defending democracy” and that Ukraine is fighting for “Western values” in the conflict with Russia.
“First of all, if they really see it that way, I cannot but be convinced that they are holding on to Nazi views. Because saying that Western values are being protected in Ukraine is the same as saying that Nazism is your mode of existence,” the diplomat told RT. As for democracy, he added, “they only speak about democracy when they teach others how to live,” but not when it comes to respecting the sovereign equality of other states, per the UN Charter.
Correction: IFR for 0-18, according to Nature, was 2 in 1 million which is 0.000002 but when converted to a percentage is 0.0002%, not 0.000002%. While each # is effectively 0%, and this is obviously a comedy video, I still strive to be accurate and am sorry for the error.
So-called combined oral contraceptives (commonly referred to as “The Pill”) were pioneered in the Sixties and were regarded as one of the catalysts of the sexual revolution.
A connection between oral contraceptives and depression has been established in a study which examined a vast number of subjects – 250,000 women were tracked from birth until menopause – performed by Uppsala University in Sweden.
Those who start birth control pills in their teens were found to have a nearly 130 percent higher rate of depressive symptoms. A similar pattern has emerged among adult birth control pill users with a solid rate of 92 percent.
Seen for all women in the study, the risk of receiving a regular depression diagnosis increased by 73 percent during the first two years of contraceptive pill use.
The particularly strong impact of birth control pills on teenagers can be attributed to the hormonal changes caused by puberty, according to the study’s author, Therese Johansson, a PhD student of Uppsala University’s Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Genomics and Neurobiology. Because women in that age group have already undergone significant hormonal change, they are more susceptible not only to hormonal changes but also to other life experiences.
Teenage pill users were found to have an increased rate of depression even after they stopped using the pill. A similar effect was not observed in adult users.
“Although contraceptives have many benefits for women, both medical professionals and patients should be informed of the side effects identified in both this and previous research,” Johansson said in a statement, admitting that because the study is observational, there are limits to what may be concluded regarding causation.
How the Research Was Carried Out
The study focused on the use of so-called combined oral contraceptives (in everyday life often referred to as “The Pill”) launched in the Sixties and commonly regarded as one of the driving forces of the sexual revolution. The contraceptives contain progestin, a compound that mimics the hormone progesterone, and estrogen. Progestin prevents ovulation and thickens cervical mucus to prevent sperm from passing into the uterus. Estrogen, in turn, thins the lining of the uterus to make implantation of a fertilized egg more difficult.
In the study, medical information from UK Biobank was used. The bank harbors extensive data from questionnaires, interviews, physical health measures, biological samples, and imaging, as well as participants’ health records, including hospital inpatient data, primary care data, cancer, and death registry data.
The researchers focused on collecting data on the women’s use of contraceptives when they were first diagnosed with depression, and when they first experienced depressive symptoms without necessarily receiving a diagnosis.
Though internationally, many women are known to stop using birth control pills because of perceived mood effects, scientific research has so far not provided a clear picture of why birth control pills cause poor mental health and depression and further studies are needed.
So far, educating users of oral contraceptives, screening for depression and informing primary healthcare practitioners of related depression is also necessary, the study concluded.
[RECORDED MAY 20, 2023] via ChildrensHealthDefense.org: Where did the global biosecurity agenda come from? Where is it going, what was it intended to do? Was it hijacked, or was it always nefarious? How then do the IHR Amendments and Pandemic Treaty fit into this, and who were the funders? Dr. Meryl Nass and James Corbett continue their discussion in the 7th installment of their series on the WHO + One Health to answer these questions and more, with former WHO expert Dr. David Bell. Tune in!
Antidepressants can cause severe, sometimes irreversible, sexual dysfunction that persists even after discontinuing the medication.
Sufferers have described it as ‘chemical castration’ – a type of genital mutilation caused by antidepressants, mainly selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
The condition is known as post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD), a condition largely unrecognised, and the true incidence of which is unknown.
David Healy, psychiatrist and founder of RxISK.org said, “I saw my first patient with PSSD in 2000, a 35-year-old lady who told me that three months after stopping treatment, she could rub a hard-bristled brush across her genitals and feel nothing.”
Josef Witt-Doerring, psychiatrist and former FDA medical officer said, “This condition is so devastating that it will cause serious changes to your life and to those around you.”
It happened to Rosie
In 2020, during protracted covid lockdowns in Melbourne, 23-year-old Rosie Tilli felt an increasing sense of anxiety and depression.
Her psychiatrist prescribed a low dose of Lexapro (escitalopram), an SSRI to help Rosie calm down, assuring her that if she experienced side effects, they’d go away once she stopped the medication.
Rosie Tilli
Soon after taking the medication Rosie felt emotionally blunted, but took it as a positive sign.
“At first, I thought it was great because it felt like the medication was working. But then I couldn’t feel my emotions, I couldn’t cry, I had no sexual desire, and my genitals went numb.”
After four months, Rosie decided to slowly wean herself off the medication. Some of her symptoms improved and the fog lifted, but over the next two years her libido faded to nothing.
“It has been two years of hell. Now, I have no sexual function. I’m numb down there. I can’t have an orgasm. It feels like my soul has just been vacuumed out of my body. I feel completely asexual,” said Rosie.
She sought help from various professionals, but none believed it could be the antidepressant because the drug had already left her system. They concluded it was all in her mind.
Rosie went to a local youth centre for help, but they ended up sectioning her under the Mental Health Act with an Involuntary Treatment Order, insisting she take antipsychotic medication.
“I refused to take an antipsychotic because I knew I wasn’t psychotic. Instead, they forced me to take another antidepressant against my will in order to leave the facility,” said Rosie.
“It was the most traumatic thing I’ve ever been through in my life. I felt helpless and my parents just looked on and said, ‘trust the professionals, they know what they are doing’.”
In her clinical notes, the doctors wrote that “Rosie exhibits fixated beliefs of a delusional intensity about ongoing sexual side effects from Lexapro”.
“One psychologist actually asked me if I’d tried seeing a male sex worker to help bring back my libido. I was shocked. They said it would reduce my anxiety and help me get in touch with my body,” said Rosie.
“I’m chemically castrated, and no one believes me. In retrospect, my original anxiety was not even a problem compared to this. This has absolutely ruined my quality of life. I feel trapped inside my own body,” she added.
Doctors don’t get it
“Most doctors are not familiar with enduring side effects following antidepressants and believe side effects end after the drug is discontinued,” said Witt-Doerring.
“There’s a lot of shame wrapped up in sexual functioning, especially in young persons. Even older persons don’t want to talk about it and so they’re not reporting it, or they are minimising the sexual aspects of their symptoms to their doctors,” he added.
Healy says PSSD is often dismissed as the person’s ‘underlying depression’ and patients are gaslighted by their doctors leading to repeated trauma.
“I’ve known many patients who’ve gone on to commit suicide because of the condition. Others have asked for referrals to Dignitas, which is access to assisted dying in Switzerland,” said Healy.
PSSD has been discussed in the medical literature for about 15 years, but very few studies focus on the issue.
In a study from 2001 involving >1000 patients with no previous history of sexual problems, 59% reported sexual dysfunction after commencing an antidepressant. For the five most commonly used drugs, 46% experienced no orgasm or ejaculation.
A 19-year retrospective cohort analysis recently published in the Annals of General Psychiatry, found that 1 in 216 males taking a serotonergic antidepressant (80% took an SSRI) experienced erectile dysfunction long after discontinuing their medication.
Sufferers have gone to extreme lengths to find a treatment, or even an explanation, for their condition.
Some have had biopsies to see if the medication has damaged their sensory nerves – others have had plasmapheresis, to mop up rogue antibodies in their system.
None of it works.
“The truth is, there’s no unifying, readily agreed upon cause for why these people are experiencing these symptoms. It remains unknown,” said Witt-Doerring.
Drug regulators
In 2018, Healy led a group of physicians and researchers who petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “to immediately require the addition of boxed warnings and precautions on the product’s label.”
Healy said the petition sought to highlight the harms of SSRIs by adding warnings about harms such as ‘genital anaesthesia’ and requested that the FDA send ‘Dear Doctor’ letters to all medical professionals about the significant public health concern these drugs pose.
However, to date, the FDA has not responded to the petition. Nor has the agency responded to follow up enquiries. Healy says he had more success with the European regulator.
In June 2019, the European Medicines Agency updated the ‘Special Warnings and Precautions’ section on the label of SSRIs to warn that sexual dysfunction can persist even after treatment stops.
In 2021, Health Canada also did a review of the evidence and “found rare cases of long-lasting sexual symptoms persisting after stopping SSRI or SNRI treatment” and updated the product label for Canadians.
“The problem is that doctors in Europe and Canada might not be checking the drug labels now that the warnings have been updated. And there were no letters sent to medical professionals to alert them of the new warnings,” said Witt-Doerring.
In Australia, the product label of Lexapro (the drug that Rosie was prescribed) does not have any warnings about permanent or long-lasting sexual dysfunction.
A spokesperson for the TGA said that the agency was aware of the actions taken by EMA and Health Canada to update the product labels in those countries. It stated:
The TGA is actively considering appropriate regulatory actions in response to our own review of the evidence, noting that the Australian PIs of some SSRI and SNRI products have already been updated by the relevant sponsors.
Lack of informed consent
“There’s a massive epidemic of a lack of informed consent,” said Witt-Doerring.
“For most people, they would want to know about reports of persistent and enduring sexual dysfunction; it would weigh on the decision for them to take this medication,” he added.
Rosies’s doctor failed to warn her about PSSD, despite EMA’s label update in 2019.
“It has been two years since I stopped the medication, and all the symptoms are progressively getting worse. I am unable to feel myself peeing, I can’t feel a crush or romantic emotions, I can’t feel love, happiness, joy, or euphoria,” said Rosie.
“I would have been OK to have difficulty with orgasm or low libido while I was on the drug, but I never thought that I could lose all sensation in my genitals, and that it would be permanent. I would never have touched the drug if I’d known it was a possibility,” she added.
A website has been dedicated to increasing awareness of PSSD and gives people the opportunity to tell their stories.
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