The 8000 expeditionary force, support of the White movement, and the most serious intentions, on August 15th, 1918, the US State Department officially declared the severance of diplomatic relations with Russia, after which the Americans disembarked in Vladivostok. This marked the beginning of the full-scale intervention of the Entente countries in a country that was already submerged in civil war. The material of RIA covers what memory the overseas military personnel in the Far East left behind.
“The nation doesn’t exist”
Immediately after the October revolution Soviet Russia concluded a truce with Germany on the Eastern front and actually withdrew from the war. The Entente countries perceived it literally with hostility. Under the pretext of the inadmissibility of power in the former empire being captured by the “pro-German party”, the western powers were preparing themselves to intervene in a Russia that was already gripped by civil war.
In December of 1917 the US, Great Britain, France, and their allies held a conference, during which a decision was made concerning the differentiation of zones of interests on the territory of the former Russian Empire and the establishment of contacts with national and democratic governments. In other words, “western partners” planned to divide up the largest state on the planet among themselves, and it is the representatives of the White movement that were supposed to help them with this. Interventionists came into contacts with them even before the intervention.
Ukraine, Bessarabia, and Crimea were in the French sphere of influence. England reserved the right for “Cossack and Caucasian regions”, Armenia, Georgia, and Kurdistan. The US, which kept neutrality during the first years of Soviet power, as a result agreed to help Great Britain and France “explore” the Russian Primorye. The Americans wanted to kill two rabbits with one stone — to get access to the rich resources of the Far East and to prevent Japan – which also had its sights on “dividing the skin of the not yet killed bear” – from entrenching itself there.
The possible resistance of Russians wasn’t taken into account. The Republican senator from the State of Washington Miles Poindexter, calling for intervention, directly said: “Russia became simply a geographical concept, and it will never be anything else. Its force of unity, organisation, and restoration left forever. The nation doesn’t exist …” The ambassador of the US in Russia David Francis also called for intervention: “I insist on the need to take Vladivostok under control, and give Murmansk and Arkhangelsk to Great Britain and France”.
Occupation
Already on August 3rd, 1918 the US Department of Defense gives the order to General William Graves about sending the 27th and 31st infantry regiments to Vladivostok, and also volunteers from the 13th and 62nd regiments. In total in the middle of the month the Americans disembarked about 8,000 military personnel in the Far East. Canadians, Italians, and Brits were also included in the expeditionary force. Formally the contingent had to provide safe passage for the Czechoslovak corps from the depths of Russia. In reality more mercantile aspirations prevailed.
“Interventionists on the territory of Russia defended the interests of their capital [finance],” said the military historian Boris Yulin. “Gold mines, wood, and coal — they had plans for all of this. I am sure that civil war in the country was so long and bloody only because of the intervention of foreign powers.
If it wasn’t for the Czechoslovak Legion and interventionists, it would’ve ended without big blood already in 1918. The leaders of the White movement provided the American, English, French, Japanese with concessions, and promised to pay imperial debts. In fact, they provided foreigners with control over Russian territory”.
The American interventionists used the “invitation” in full. They took away wood, furs, and gold from the Far East. American firms received permission from Kolchak’s government to carry out trade operations in exchange for “City Bank” and “Guaranty Trust” credits. One company alone sent from Vladivostok to the US 15,700 poods of wool, 20,500 sheep skins, and 10,200 large dry skins. Everything that represented at least some value was taken away.
They did not stand on ceremony with the local population who supported the Red partisans. In the Russian state historical archive of the Far East “Acts concerning the tortured and shot peasants were preserved in the Olginsky district in 1918-1920”. Here is an excerpt from this document:
“Having captured the peasants I. Gonevchuk, S. Gorshkov, P. Oparin, and Z. Murashko, the Americans buried them alive for having ties to local partisans.
And they finished off the wife of the partisan E. Boychuk as follows: they pricked her body with bayonets and drowned her body in a rubbish pit. They mutilated the peasant Bochkarev with bayonets and knives to the point where he became unrecognisable: his nose, lips, and ears had been cut off, his jaw had been unhinged, his face and eyes had been pricked by bayonets, his entire body had been cut up. Near Sviyagino station the partisan N. Myasnikov was tortured in the same brutal way – according to the testimony of an eyewitness, at first they chopped off his ears, then his nose, hands, legs, and then chopped him into pieces alive”.
Nineteen months
The historian Fedor Nesterov in the book “Link of times” wrote: “The adherents of the Soviet power were pricked, cut up, shot in groups, hung, sank in the Amur, taken away in torturous ‘death trains’, and starved in concentration camps everywhere where where the bayonet of the overseas ‘liberators of Russia’ could reach”. According to him, many peasants who in the beginning didn’t support the Soviet power eventually rose up against the “guests” and came over to the side of the partisans.
Resistance to the occupiers spread. The battle at the village of Romanovka near Vladivostok in 1919 on June 25th history made history: Bolshevist units under Yakov Tryapitsyn’s command attacked the positions of the US army and destroyed more than 20 soldiers of the enemy.
After Kolchak’s troops had been defeated, foreign intervention in Russia lost its meaning. In 19 months of staying in the country, the American contingent in the Far East lost [were killed – ed] nearly 200 soldiers and officers. The last overseas serviceman went home on April 1st, 1920.
It should be noted that even when the civil war ended and the Americans and the majority of European powers recognised the USSR, no western politician condemned the bloody campaign in Russia. The double-faced attitude towards the occupation of the territories of a sovereign state was characterised more exhaustively by Winston Churchill in the four-volume work “The World Crisis”.
“Were they [the Allies] at war with Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded the ports and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall. But war – shocking! Interference – shame! It was, they repeated, a matter of indifference to them how Russians settled their own affairs. They were impartial – bang!”.
Of the many myths that have taken hold during the pandemic, perhaps none is more central than that the Government was caught out by Covid with no idea about how it ought to respond. Thus the extreme and unprecedented response of lockdown appears to many to be justified by this notion that ministers had little choice but to ‘play it safe’, and the subsequent experiments in social restrictions as we awaited and delivered a rushed vaccine and beyond are imagined as a heroic voyage into the unknown of how a government ought to respond to an ‘unprecedented’ disease.
In fact, though, the Government had a plan for what it should do, the U.K. Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011, and COVID-19 was well within the bounds of what the plan anticipated. As Dr. Noah Carl has noted, this was the plan the Government was following until mid-March 2020, with SAGE re-affirming at a meeting on February 4th 2020 that officials “should continue to plan using current influenza pandemic assumptions”.
While the strategy was focused on influenza, it expressly anticipated the possibility of a new SARS virus:
A pandemic is most likely to be caused by a new subtype of the Influenza A virus but the plans could be adapted and deployed for scenarios such as an outbreak of another infectious disease, e.g. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in health care settings, with an altogether different pattern of infectivity.
The Covid death toll has also been well within what was anticipated, the 193,000 deaths over more than two years being below what the plan suggested should be anticipated as a minimum within four months:
When planning for excess deaths, local planners should prepare to extend capacity on a precautionary but reasonably practicable basis, and aim to cope with up to 210,000 – 315,000 additional deaths across the U.K. over a 15 week period (or a higher level where possible).
Even Neil Ferguson’s infamous prediction of 500,000 deaths is not a long way above this level, and that was always an absurdly high number to anticipate for Covid, as many pointed out at the time.
The pandemic plan could not be clearer that no attempt should be made to prevent the virus spreading. In a way this was the fundamental error from which all else flowed. Why was the Government even listening to advisers modelling the impact of restrictions on spread when its plan was clear that it should not attempt to ‘control’ the virus in this way? In no fewer than three places the plan states that it will not be possible to prevent the virus spreading and no attempt should be made to do so, as this would be a huge waste of resources.
It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.
It almost certainly will not be possible to contain or eradicate a new virus in its country of origin or on arrival in the U.K. The expectation must be that the virus will inevitably spread and that any local measures taken to disrupt or reduce the spread are likely to have very limited or partial success at a national level and cannot be relied on as a way to ‘buy time’.
It will not be possible to stop the spread of, or to eradicate, the pandemic influenza virus, either in the country of origin or in the U.K., as it will spread too rapidly and too widely.
Instead, the strategy states, the aim should be to minimise the impact on wider society, by ensuring the sick can be treated and not closing down society. Normality should be maintained as far as possible and restored as quickly as possible.
Minimise the potential health impact of a future influenza pandemic by… Ensuring the health and social care systems are ready to provide treatment and support for the large numbers likely to suffer from influenza or its complications whilst maintaining other essential care.
Minimise the potential impact of a pandemic on society and the economy by… Promoting a return to normality and the restoration of disrupted services at the earliest opportunity.
Whole of society response: Business as usual. During a pandemic, the Government will encourage those who are well to carry on with their normal daily lives for as long and as far as that is possible, whilst taking basic precautions to protect themselves from infection and lessen the risk of spreading influenza to others. The U.K. Government does not plan to close borders, stop mass gatherings or impose controls on public transport during any pandemic.
Given this was the pre-prepared strategy, based on sound science and wide experience, it should be the standard against which Government policy during the pandemic is assessed, as in, for example, the independent public inquiry. Anything else is to let ministers off the hook, and to buy into the lie that Covid was something that we were not and could not have been prepared for. In fact, we had planned for exactly the kind of outbreak that occurred, so ministers had no excuse at all for winging it, copying China, or thinking we should try out something radically authoritarian. The legacy of 2020 must not be the dawn of a new era of extreme, ineffective and destructive public health policy, but a clear-eyed resolve that it will never happen again.
The Iraqi parliament on Wednesday set a date for the first reading of a proposed law “prohibiting normalization and establishing relations with the Zionist entity.”
Well-informed parliamentary sources in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, revealed to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that the committee tasked with preparing a draft law on “criminalizing normalization with the Zionist entity” had finished writing the law.
An official in the legal department of the Iraqi parliament told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that “the law was completed by a legal committee affiliated with the Sadrist bloc in the Parliament, and it includes 10 main articles.” He explained that “the head of the Sadrist bloc in the House of Representatives, Hassan Al-Adhari, is scheduled to hand the law over to the parliament’s presidency, to start the procedures for the first and second readings, before putting it to a vote for approval, after Parliament’s decision to extend the current legislative term for another month.”
The official pointed out that “the most important paragraphs of the law about the criminalization of any kind of political, security, economic, artistic, cultural, sports and scientific cooperation or dealings, and under any activity or title whatsoever, with the Zionist entity.” He added that the law affirms “that Iraq is in a state of war with the occupying power, and all that is issued by individuals, institutions, groups, movements, or parties, that violates this concept, in a way that supports the existence of the occupation, materially or morally, falls within the crimes of high treason that There are sentences between death and life imprisonment, according to the amended Penal Code No. 111 of 1969.
And he indicated that the law also deals with “the prohibition of dealing with companies and institutions that deal with, support or are associated with this entity,” noting that the law “contains important paragraphs about the penalties imposed in case of violation, and there is political consensus to pass it easily.”
Ivermectin is a widely used antiparasitic drug that’s listed on the World Health Organization’s essential medicines list1 and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In low- and middle-income countries, ivermectin is commonly used to treat parasitic diseases including onchocerciasis (river blindness), strongyloidiasis and other diseases caused by soil-transmitted helminthiasis, or parasitic worms.2
The drug is also used to treat scabies and lice. It’s estimated that the total number of ivermectin doses distributed is equal to one-third of the world’s population and, as such, “ivermectin at the usual doses (0.2–0.4 mg/kg) is considered extremely safe for use in humans.”3
Ivermectin also has demonstrated antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties and made headlines for its potential role in treating COVID-194 — although much of the positive press has been censored and falsely labeled misinformation.5 Now researchers are highlighting another potential use for ivermectin, which is equally as exciting as its potential role in COVID-19 — as an anticancer agent.
Ivermectin’s Powerful Antitumor Effects
Ivermectin has notable antitumor effects, which include inhibiting proliferation, metastasis and angiogenic activity in cancer cells.6 It appears to inhibit tumor cells by regulating multiple signaling pathways, which researchers explained in the Pharmacological Research journal, “suggests that ivermectin may be an anticancer drug with great potential.”7
Their graphic, below, shows the multiple ways that ivermectin may target cancer, including inducing apoptosis and autophagy while also inhibiting tumor stem cells and reversing multidrug resistance. They stated that ivermectin “exerts the optimal effect when used in combination with other chemotherapy drugs.”8
Many may not be aware that scientists Satoshi ōmura and William C. Campbell won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015 for their discovery of ivermectin.9 The medicine is used to treat not only parasitic diseases like malaria but also shows promise for treating asthma and neurological diseases, in addition to cancer.
Along with direct cytotoxic effects, it’s believed that ivermectin regulates the tumor microenvironment, mediating immunogenic cell death — another reason for its promise as an anticancer agent.10 Research suggests the drug may be useful for the following cancers:11
Breast cancer — The proliferation of multiple breast cancer cell lines was significantly reduced following treatment with ivermectin.
Digestive system cancer — Ivermectin significantly inhibited the proliferation of gastric cancer cells in vivo and in vitro. The drug also inhibited colorectal cancer cell lines and inhibited the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer).
Urinary system cancer — Ivermectin significantly inhibited the proliferation of five renal (kidney) cell carcinoma lines without affecting normal kidney cells. It also had an inhibitory effect on prostate cancer cells.
Hematological cancer — In one study, ivermectin killed leukemia cells at low concentrations while leaving normal hematopoietic cells unharmed.
Reproductive system cancer — Ivermectin inhibited the proliferation of ovarian cancer cell lines and enhanced the efficacy of the conventional chemotherapy drug cisplatin, improving the treatment of epithelial ovarian cancer.
Brain glioma — Ivermectin inhibited the proliferation of human glioblastoma cells in a dose-dependent manner.
Respiratory system cancer — Ivermectin inhibited the development of nasopharyngeal carcinoma in mice, using doses that were not toxic to immune cells known as thymocytes. Ivermectin also significantly inhibited the proliferation of lung cancer cells and may reduce the metastasis of lung cancer cells.
Melanoma — When melanoma cells were treated with ivermectin, their activity was effectively inhibited.
Ivermectin Shows Promise Against Colorectal Cancer
A study published in Frontiers in Pharmacology specifically highlighted ivermectin’s potential to fight colorectal cancer, which is the third most common cancer worldwide.12 The drug was found to inhibit colorectal cancer cell growth in a dose-dependent manner as well as promote cell apoptosis.
Further, even at low doses of 2.5 and 5 µM, ivermectin inducted cell arrest in colorectal cancer, leading researchers to state, “[I]vermectin might be a new potential anticancer drug therapy for human colorectal cancer and other cancers.”13 Considering that the “war against cancer” has been ongoing for decades, with little to show in terms of lives saved, repurposing existing drugs with favorable safety profiles and notable anticancer effects — like ivermectin — makes sense.
The Pharmacological Research scientists similarly noted, “Drug repositioning is a shortcut to accelerate the development of anticancer drugs.”14 Not only has ivermectin been shown to permeate tumor tissues effectively, but it has a long history of successful use in humans. They explained that even when doses were increased, no serious adverse effects were found:15
“[T]he broad-spectrum antiparasitic drug IVM (ivermectin), which is widely used in the field of parasitic control, has many advantages that suggest that it is worth developing as a potential new anticancer drug. IVM selectively inhibits the proliferation of tumors at a dose that is not toxic to normal cells and can reverse the MDR [multidrug resistance] of tumors.
Importantly, IVM is an established drug used for the treatment of parasitic diseases such as river blindness and elephantiasis. It has been widely used in humans for many years, and its various pharmacological properties, including long- and short-term toxicological effects and drug metabolism characteristics are very clear. In healthy volunteers, the dose was increased to 2 mg/Kg, and no serious adverse reactions were found …”
Is Liposomal Delivery a Game Changer?
The development of an injectable form of ivermectin, or liposomal ivermectin, could help overcome some of its limitations regarding solubility and open its use to a broader range of cancers. The cancer immunotherapy treatment pembrolizumab, for instance, is approved to treat PD-L1-positive, triple-negative breast cancer, which accounts for only about 20% of cases.
As an immune checkpoint inhibitor, it works best in so-called “hot” tumors, which are already infiltrated by T cells. If ivermectin could be injected into the tumor, inducing T-cell infiltration into the area and inducing immunogenic cancer cell death, it’s possible that it could turn a “cold” tumor into a “hot” one, thereby making it more effectively treated.16
Biotech company Mountain Valley MD has developed a liposomal delivery system for ivermectin that they believe could dramatically widen its treatment potential. In an interview with Medical Update Online, Dennis Hancock, Mountain Valley MD president and CEO, explained:17
“So the business value proposition really simply is, we take the best-selling and best-acting drugs and expand their ability to be used on … more types of cancer on a broader spectrum. So you still need the cancer drug and what our Ivectosol does is it enables it to be used in a broader universe …
What’s really exciting about the work that Mountain Valley MD is doing is we’re enabling drugs that have already been proven in their efficacy and safety to do better and do more faster — so we’re not asking people to ‘wait five years and see’…”
Most of the research involving ivermectin for cancer to date involves oral or in-vitro administration. Mountain Valley MD is conducting preclinical trials using liposomal ivermectin for metastatic melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer, triple-negative breast cancer and possibly bladder cancers. They also have plans to produce liposomal ivermectin for use in human trials.18 In a news release, Mike Farber, director of life sciences at Mountain Valley MD, stated:19
“The extensive research supporting the drug ivermectin as effective in the inhibition of proliferation, metastasis, and angiogenic activity in a variety of cancers, and as an initiator of immunogenic cell death, is overwhelming. Imagine what is possible when you have the world’s only human injectable form of ivermectin that can be directly injected into a tumor or provided through more bio-available forms such as intravenously.
We believe this will be groundbreaking research with near-immediate application to be able to proceed directly to human trials based on the safety and efficacy of ivermectin.”
I take issue with the conclusions of a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Science of the Total Environment under the title “Managing an evolving pandemic: Cryptic circulation of the Delta variant during the Omicron rise.”
These authors tend to believe that wastewater-based epidemiology combined with mathematical modeling allows for making predictions in regard of the evolutionary dynamics of this pandemic:
“According to the developed model, it can be expected that the Omicron levels will decrease until eliminated, while Delta variant will maintain its cryptic circulation. If this comes to pass, the mentioned cryptic circulation may result in the reemergence of a Delta morbidity wave or in the possible generation of a new threatening variant.”
One should – per definition – always be careful and skeptical about conclusions and predictions proposed by scientists who don’t seem to have an in-depth understanding of the immunology involved!
Variants can only replace previous variants provided they have a higher level of INTRINSIC infectiousness! It’s not because Omicron is highly infectious in vaccinees (i.e., in the vast majority of highly vaccinated population such as the population of Israel) that Omicron will replace Delta in wastewater! It has been published that diminished neutralizing capacity of anti-spike (S) antibodies (Abs)results in disproportionally high binding of non-neutralizing Abs to S-NTD (N-terminal domain of S protein), which explains enhanced susceptibility of vaccinees to breakthrough infection with Omicron but inhibits viral shedding and trans infection of Omicron at distant organs, including the lower respiratory and gastrointestinal tract, thereby reducing the incidence of severe disease in vaccinees (…). So, in other words, Ab-mediated enhancement of infection with Omicron in vaccinees does not translate into enhanced viral shedding from the gastrointestinal tract, which is the primary source of wastewater contamination. On the other hand, diminished shedding in vaccinees is likely compensated by its prolonged duration due to a delay in viral clearance (…). Selective shedding of highly infectious Omicron in vaccinees causes Omicron detection levels in wastewater to rapidly increase to then level off at wastewater detection levels that are higher than those observed for Delta. However, as the amount of Omicron virus shed from the gastrointestinal tract of vaccinees is not determined by the level of Omicron infectiousness in these vaccinated individuals but by the percentage of the population that got vaccinated and because Omicron’s intrinsic infectiousness is similar to that of Delta and, therefore, shed in comparable amounts by the non-vaccinated fraction of the population, it is not surprising to find that – although shed at a somewhat higher concentration in a highly vaccinated population – the Omicron variant is not replacing the Delta variant unless the population were to become vaccinated across all age groups (i.e., including children). Consequently, wastewater-based epidemiology does not supply a real-time image of viral infectivity / transmissibility in highly vaccinated populations as viral infectious behavior in such populations is not primarily determined by the intrinsic infectiousness of the viral variant but by Ab-mediated enhancement of viral infection in vaccinees.
In conclusion, monitoring of Delta and Omicron detection levels in wastewater restricts surveillance of prevalent variants to virus shed from the gastrointestinal tract and thereby ignores antibody-mediated mitigation of shedding. It, therefore, misrepresents differences in viral infectiousness, which is known to be very high for Omicron in a highly vaccinated population due to Ab-dependent enhancement of infection at the level of the upper respiratory tract.
Once again, mathematical modeling may be a challenging and fascinating exercise but is to be considered totally worthless when the immunological assumptions are wrong. It inevitably implies that the essence of the model predictions will also be wrong. There can be no doubt that population-level immune pressure on trans infection-inhibiting Abs is now paving the way for breeding variants that are not only highly infectious but also highly virulent in vaccinees. However, in contrast to what the authors of this publication believe, these new variants will not emerge from previous Delta variants. Delta does not enable highly vaccinated populations (e.g., the Israeli population) to exert immune pressure on viral virulence, simply because it is not fully resistant to potentially neutralizing anti-RBD Abs. So, please forget about any predictions derived from mathematical modeling that – despite lots of complexity – totally ignores the impact of population-level immune pressure on the infectious behavior of the virus. Such predictions are, of course, completely useless when it comes to understanding the evolutionary dynamics and management of a pandemic that has fully changed its natural course as a direct consequence of mass vaccination.
STAT News has a new article titled, “The ‘five pandemics’ driving 1 million U.S. Covid deaths.” Like almost everything they publish, the article is clever, well-written, and almost entirely wrong. The author, J. Emory Parker, claims that the pandemic is primarily a story of older, unvaccinated, rural, poor people with a deadly initial wave that has faded into a lower infection fatality rate today. I’m not going to refute it point-by-point other than to say that he is missing the forest for the trees.
Democrats now interpret all data through the lens of The Narrative(TM) that makes Dems look like heroes, Pharma look like Gods, and Republicans look like unwashed barbarians who deserve death for their failure to obey their betters. It’s not so much science as bougie-supremacy. Self-reflection, paradox, and admitting mistakes are of course banned from the bougie lexicon.
In this short article, I’ve stolen his title (in hopes of messing with the search engines) and I set the record straight. Any honest assessment of the last two years leads to the inexorable conclusion that every facet of the pandemic is a direct result of the intellectual and moral failures of the “expert class” itself.
1. Tony Fauci created the pandemic by funding risky gain-of-function research at a bioweapons lab in Wuhan China. Somehow a chimera virus, engineered to be more lethal to humans, escaped. No Tony Fauci, no pandemic. All else flows from this.
2. Fauci, the FDA, and CDC blocked access to prophylaxis and early treatment. The CDC’s own research showed that chloroquine is safe and effective for prophylaxis and early treatment of SARS coronaviruses (hydroxychloroquine is even safer than chloroquine). The U.S. had a massive stockpile for this very purpose that was never used. About 90% of Covid-19 fatalities in the U.S. could have been prevented if public health officials had followed proper protocols and used about twenty off-the-shelf treatments that are safe and effective. Instead the FDA and CDC ridiculed the best treatments, stopped doctors from prescribing them, and prohibited pharmacies from filling these prescriptions.
3. Hospitals used the wrong protocols and continue to use the wrong protocols. Failing to provide early treatment (turning people away from hospitals to preserve capacity), ventilators, and Remdesivir are all death sentences. Large hospitals have such abysmal outcomes because they used the wrong protocols and they seem to have no ability to course-correct based on actual data.
4. Blue states that followed the CDC’s advice to return Covid+ patients to nursing homes committed senicide — the systematic murder of the elderly. The death toll in the elderly was and is so high because they were never provided prophylaxis, immune support, nor any early treatment and their residences were intentionally seeded with the sick — once again in the misguided attempt to preserve hospital capacity(TM).
5. Promoting mass injections with negative efficacy, keeps the pandemic going indefinitely. These useless shots also seem to be driving the evolution of variants. The pandemic will never end as long as the government continues to promote these mRNA shots that lack sterilizing immunity.
The entire pandemic, from the origins, through the early days, until now, is a self-inflicted, man-made crisis. This is iatrogenic pandemicide — created, spread, and made more deadly by the people who claim that they are “experts”. Everything that public health has done for two years has made things significantly worse. As long as the people who are wrong about everything remain in power, the crisis will continue.
The Russian military began reporting on the extent of US military biological activities in Ukraine in March, citing seized documents and other materials on the study of a range of potentially deadly bioweapon agents, including diseases which can be spread naturally using local geography, flora and fauna, and target certain ethnic groups.
Senior Democratic Party politicians are the chief “ideologists” of America’s illegal operations in biolabs operating throughout Ukraine, and have involved major multinational biotech companies in their activities, Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defence Troops, has indicated.
Speaking at a briefing in Moscow on Wednesday and citing an MoD analysis of documentary evidence, the RCB Troops chief said the profits US politicians earn for the private biotech sector helps to pay for their re-election via campaign donations.
According to Kirillov, the US executive branch has also worked to create a “legislative framework to finance military biological research directly from the federal budget”, and with funds of non-government organisations underwritten by the state and controlled by the leadership of the Democratic Party, including charitable foundations affiliated with the Clinton family, the Rockerfellers, George Soros, and Hunter Biden.
Major global pharmaceutical companies have become involved in these shady “public-private” partnership schemes, including Pfizer, Moderna, Merck, and Pentagon-affiliated biotech firm Gilead, Kirillov said.
“US specialists are working [in Ukraine] on the testing of new medicines, bypassing international safety standards. As a result, Western companies seriously reduce the costs of research programmes and gain significant competitive advantages”, the officer said.
State Structures’ Involvement
Ukrainian state structures are also involved in the US-funded and organised military biological activities in their country, Kirillov said, with Kiev’s main job being “to conceal illegal activities, conduct field and clinical trials and provide the necessary biomaterial”.
In 2020, Kirillov said, an attempt was made to infect the residents of the settlement of Stepovoye in the Lugansk People’s Republic with a multi-drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis using counterfeit banknotes contaminated with the disease’s causative agent and spread among local youth.
Additionally, the RCB Troops chief said that his agency has received information detailing the Pentagon’s experiments on Ukrainian nationals at Psychiatric Hospital No. 1 in the village of Strelechie, Kharkov region, with the research targeting male patients aged 40-60 with a high stage of physical exhaustion, and overseen by a US national.
The Russian military operation in Ukraine has stopped the spread of US military activities in Ukraine, and halted these “criminal experiments” on its civilian population, Kirillov stressed.
In the case of the research taking place at the Kharkov mental hospital, Western specialists were evacuated in January 2022, and the equipment and pharmaceutical preparations involved relocated to western Ukraine, he said.
Polish specialists have also been working with Ukraine’s biolabs, Kirillov said, citing documents detailing the work of the Polish Institute of Veterinary Medicine and the US’ Battelle Memorial Institute – a Pentagon contractor – on research assessing epidemiological threats and the spread of the rabies virus in Ukraine.
“In addition, documentary evidence has been obtained about Poland’s funding of Lvov Medical University, which includes a participant in US military biological projects – the Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene. Since 2002, this organisation has been implementing a retraining programme for specialists with experience working with dual-use materials and technologies”, the officer said.
The German military has also been involved in research in Ukraine, Kirillov said, citing documents indicating that the Bundeswehr’s Institute of Microbiology had taken some 3,500 blood serum samples from 25 Ukrainian regions back to Germany between 2016 and 2019. The officer said the Institute’s as yet unidentified interest in these biomaterials “raises questions about the goals [being] pursued” by the German Armed Forces. The complete, Ukrainian-language document can be found in RTF format here.
According to the MoD’s information, along with the Munich-based Institute of Microbiology, the Berlin-based Robert Koch Institute, the Loffler Institute in Greifswald, and the Nocht Institute of Tropical Medicine in Hamburg are also participating in biological research activities in Ukraine. The complete presentation can be downloaded here.
Mariupol Samples Partially Recovered
An RCB Troops investigation of samples from a veterinary laboratory in Mariupol has concluded that it also may have been involved in the broader US-led biological research activities, Kirillov said, pointing to the presence of pathogens uncharacteristic of veterinary diseases, such as typhoid fever, paratyphoid fever, and gas gangrene at the lab. Part of the lab’s collection of samples was destroyed on 25 February, but due to the rush, some of it has been preserved intact, and is now being analysed by Russia. To ensure safety and safe storage, Russian specialists exported 124 strains and have organised their study”, Kirillov said. The complete batch of documents can be found here.
The officer also revealed that Russian specialists have carried out work “directly in two biological laboratories in Mariupol”, and that “evidence has been obtained of the emergency destruction of documents confirming their work with the US military. A preliminary analysis of the surviving documentation indicates that Mariupol was used as a regional centre for the collection and certification of the cholera pathogen”, with the samples sent to the Centre for Public Health in Kiev, which transferred the materials on to the United States.
Kirillov stressed that the information that continues to be gathered and analysed by the Russian MoD casts doubt on assurances by US specialists that Ukraine does not have the capability to develop and produce bioweapons, and that the US itself has not “found” any evidence of biological weapons in Ukraine.
WMD Provocations Possible
The RCB Troops chief also indicated that Moscow has intelligence related to the preparation of possible provocations involving weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine to accuse the Russian military of using such arms along a “Syrian-style” scenario, in which the necessary evidence is fabricated and the “perpetrators” are appointed ahead of time.
One piece of evidence suggesting the high likelihood of such provocations taking place is Kiev’s request in a letter to European Union officials for personal protective equipment that provides protection against toxic chemicals and biological agents, Kirillov said.
The supply of organophosphate toxicity medications to Ukraine is also a concern for the Russian military, the officer noted, pointing out that in the first months of 2022, over 220,000 ampoules of atropine, as well as medicines for treatment and disinfection following a chemical attack, have been delivered to Ukraine by the United States.
Letter from Mayor of Kiev Vitaliy Klitschko to “International Charity Organizations” dated 20 March 2022 requesting a range of equipment to protect against WMD attack.
Additionally, Kirillov said, 10 more drones equipped with 30-litre containers and spraying equipment were found in the town of Kakhovka, Kherson region in late April, on top of three others with similar equipment found in the Kherson region in March.
Kirillov’s RCB Troops have spent over two months investigating and reporting on the US-sponsored military biological activities taking place at 30 separate facilities across Ukraine going back to at least 2005.
Western officials and media have largely dismissed the information provided as a “conspiracy theory”, notwithstanding Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s admission at a Senate hearing in March that “biological research facilities” do in fact exist in the Eastern European country and that the US was “working with” the Ukrainians to ensure that these materials “do not fall into the hands of Russian forces”. Investigations by the few Western outlets that have conducted their own research have confirmed individual details of the Russian MoD’s allegations – such as Hunter Biden’s role in securing millions of dollars in funding for a US contractor working in Ukraine.
This is the second instalment of Paula Jardine’s five-part investigation into the planning behind ensuring vaccine acceptance and countering vaccine ‘hesitancy’. You can read Part 1, published yesterday, here.
IN 2010, as GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations (now called The Vaccine Alliance) was setting out on its ambitious ten-year strategic plan called the Decade of the Vaccine, Dr Heidi Larson, a professor of anthropology, risk and decision science, set up the ‘Vaccine Confidence Project’ at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It was funded by vaccine manufacturers and their European lobby group in conjunction with the European Commission, UNICEF and University College London. The ubiquitous Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is unusually absent from this list. The project’s purpose was to challenge vaccine scepticism.
With the number of approved vaccines on national immunisation schedules increasing and with dozens of new vaccines in the pipeline, GAVI’s game plan had become ‘demand generation’, in other words getting people actively to seek out vaccination (the intention being for people to create bottom-up pressure on their governments). Strategic Objective 2 of the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP), the implementation plan for the Decade of the Vaccine, which remains today, is that ‘individuals and communities understand the value of vaccines and demand immunisation as both their right and responsibility.’
The GVAP reframing of vaccination in terms of rights and responsibilities transforms vaccination from an individual (private) medical choice (even in the context of a national public health programme) into a civic rights issue, pitting choice against a (spurious) socio-political ordinance. Writing on her blog, Larson explains, ‘Immunisation, since its beginning, has always walked a tense line between individual rights to choice and societal rights to health. A tense line between rights and responsibilities – the right to choose, with the caveat that it does not injure those around you.’
The principal value of this utilitarian collectivist perspective is that it displaces, for ‘the greater good’ (as defined by certain elites), the well-established medical ethics principle that the benefit of a procedure to each individual recipient must outweigh the risk. The assumption here is that for an act to be morally right it has to be judged only on its consequences for the majority. And since vaccines are supposed to induce immunity and consequently prevent transmission of infectious diseases, mass vaccination in pursuit of disease eradication must be for the greater good. As the utilitarians say, the end justifies the means.
Winning confidence in vaccines, which means winning trust in their safety and efficacy, is therefore imperative. From the health system administering them to the motives of the policy makers, this is the requisite of demand generation. When and where this fails has been dubbed ‘hesitancy’, the reluctance or refusal to be vaccinated despite the availability of vaccines (as though vaccines were, per se and in all circumstances, an unquestionable good regardless of the chequered history of many). According to a World Health Organisation working group report, ‘As hesitancy undermines demand, to achieve the GVAP defined vaccine demand goal, countries will need to address hesitancy. High rates of hesitancy mean low demand.’
Vaccines have been recognised by courts in the US, including its Supreme Court, as unavoidably unsafe products. However, based on the precedent of smallpox eradication, public health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) remain determined to use vaccination to eradicate diseases and therefore argue that the overall value of vaccines to the community outweighs the risk to any single individual.
Diseases are no longer just diseases, we’re told they’re vaccine preventable diseases. Evidence in the medical literature of people who fail to respond to vaccination (primary failure) or of waning protection following vaccination (secondary failure) is simply ignored. The single greater good concept has provided the justification for mandatory vaccination and, in Covid times, for restricting the freedoms of those who exercise their right to bodily autonomy by refusing a medical procedure. Those unlucky enough to be injured or die from vaccine administration are what the American bioethicist Dr Leroy Walters has called ‘injured recruits in the war on infectious disease’.
Despite the rationale that society benefits from universal vaccination, the burden of vaccine injury is largely borne by individuals. It’s now standard practice for vaccine manufacturers to bear no liability for their products. The precedent of indemnification was set by the ill-fated 1976 US swine flu vaccination campaign when the US government stepped in because insurers balked. It paid out almost as much in compensation for vaccine injuries as it spent on the programme, thanks to an active surveillance reporting system for vaccine injuries. Active surveillance has never been repeated. Today only 27 countries have compensation programmes for vaccine injuries, a small improvement on the dozen that had them when GAVI was created in 1999. As for the rest, their injured citizens are collateral damage in the Rockefeller-conceived War on Microbes.
In the U.S., an estimated 21 million American adults experienced at least one major depressive episode in 2020.1 The reported numbers for the past several years2 have consistently been highest among those aged between 18 and 25.3 However, not only is there evidence that depression is vastly overdiagnosed, but there’s also evidence showing it’s routinely mistreated.
With regard to overdiagnosis, it’s been ongoing for a long time, with one 2013 study4 finding only 38.4% of participants with clinician-identified depression actually met the DSM-4 criteria for a major depressive episode, and only 14.3% of seniors 65 and older met the criteria.
As for treatment, the vast majority are prescribed antidepressant drugs, despite the fact there’s little to no evidence to suggest they provide meaningful help, and plenty of evidence showing the harms are greater than patients are being told.
According to a 2017 study,5 1 in 6 Americans between the ages of 18 and 85 were on psychiatric drugs, most of them antidepressants, and 84.3% reported long-term use (three years or more). Out of 242 million U.S. adults, 12% were found to have filled one or more prescriptions for an antidepressant, specifically, in 2013. By 2021 in the midst of the pandemic, 1 in 4 Americans over age 18, or 50 million persons, were on prescription mental health drugs.6
According to data7 presented by a watchdog group in 2014, hundreds of thousands of toddlers are also being medicated with powerful psychiatric drugs, raising serious ethical questions, along with questions about the future mental and physical health of these children.
And, a study published in The BMJ in 20138 found that “In utero exposure to both SSRIs and non-selective monoamine reuptake inhibitors (tricyclic antidepressants) was associated with an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders, particularly without intellectual disability” in the offspring.
Studies are also shedding much needed light on the addictive nature of many antidepressants, and demonstrate that the benefits of these drugs have been overblown while their side effects — including suicidal ideation — and have been downplayed and ignored for decades, placing patients at unnecessary risk.
The Chemical Imbalance Myth
One researcher responsible for raising awareness about these important mental health issues is professor Peter C. Gøtzsche, a Danish physician-researcher and outspoken critic of the drug industry (as his book, “Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare,”9 suggests).
Gøtzsche helped found the Cochrane Collaboration in 1993 and later launched the Nordic Cochrane Centre. In 2018, he was expelled by the Cochrane governing board following the publication of a scathing critique of a Cochrane review of the HPV in which he and his coauthors pointed out several methodological flaws and conflicts of interest.
Over the past several years, Gøtzsche has published a number of scientific papers on antidepressants and media articles and a book discussing the findings. In a June 28, 2019 article,10 Gøtzsche addresses “the harmful myth” about chemical imbalances — a debunked hypothesis that continues to drive the use of antidepressants to this day. He writes, in part:11
“Psychiatrists routinely tell their patients that they are ill because they have a chemical imbalance in the brain and they will receive a drug that fixes this …
Last summer, one of my researchers and I collected information about depression from 39 popular websites in 10 countries, and we found that 29 (74%) websites attributed depression to a chemical imbalance or claimed that antidepressants could fix or correct that imbalance …
It has never been possible to show that common mental disorders start with a chemical imbalance in the brain. The studies that have claimed this are all unreliable.12
A difference in dopamine levels, for example, between patients with schizophrenia and healthy people cannot tell us anything about what started the psychosis … [I]f a lion attacks us, we get terribly frightened and produce stress hormones, but this does not prove that it was the stress hormones that made us scared.
People with psychoses have often suffered traumatic experiences in the past, so we should see these traumas as contributing causal factors and not reduce suffering to some biochemical imbalance that, if it exists at all, is more likely to be the result of the psychosis rather than its cause.13
The myth about chemical imbalance is very harmful. It makes people believe there is something seriously wrong with them, and sometimes they are even told that it is hereditary.
The result of this is that patients continue to take harmful drugs, year after year, perhaps even for the entirety of their lives. They fear what would happen if they stopped, particularly when the psychiatrists have told them that their situation is like patients with diabetes needing insulin.”
Real Cause of Depression Is Typically Ignored
According to Gøtzsche, there is no known mental health issue that is caused by an imbalance of brain chemicals. In many cases, the true cause is unknown, but “very often, it is a response to unhealthy living conditions,” he writes.14
He also cites the book,15 “Anxiety — The Inside Story: How Biological Psychiatry Got It Wrong,” written by Dr. Niall McLaren, in which the author shows that anxiety is a major factor in and trigger of most psychiatric disorders.
“A psychiatrist I respect highly, who only uses psychiatric drugs in rare cases … has said that most people are depressed because they live depressing lives,” Gøtzsche writes.
“No drug can help them live better lives. It has never been shown in placebo-controlled trials that a psychiatric drug can improve people’s lives — e.g., help them return to work, improve their social relationships or performance at school, or prevent crime and delinquency. The drugs worsen people’s lives, at least in the long run.16“
Gøtzsche rightfully points out that antipsychotic drugs create chemical imbalances; they don’t fix them. As a group, they’re also somewhat misnamed, as they do not address psychotic states. Rather, they are tranquilizers, rendering the patient passive. However, calming the patient down does not actually help them heal the underlying trauma that, in many cases, is what triggered the psychosis in the first place.
As noted in one 2012 meta-analysis17 of studies looking at childhood trauma — including sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional/psychological abuse, neglect, parental death and bullying — and subsequent risk of psychosis:
“There were significant associations between adversity and psychosis across all research designs … Patients with psychosis were 2.72 times more likely to have been exposed to childhood adversity than controls … The estimated population attributable risk was 33% (16%-47%). These findings indicate that childhood adversity is strongly associated with increased risk for psychosis.”
Economy of Influence in Psychiatry
A related article,18 written by investigative journalist Robert Whitaker in 2017, addresses the “economy of influence” driving the use of antidepressant drugs in psychiatric treatment — and the “social injury” that results. As noted by Whitaker, mental disorders were initially categorized according to a disease model in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association.
“We’re all familiar with the second ‘economy of influence’ that has exerted a corrupting influence on psychiatry — pharmaceutical money — but I believe the guild influence is really the bigger problem,” he writes.
Whitaker details the corruption within the APA in his book “Psychiatry Under the Influence,” one facet of which is “the false story told to the public about drugs that fixed chemical imbalances in the brain.” Other forms of corrupt behavior include:
The biased designs of clinical trials to achieve a predetermined result
Spinning results to support preconceived conclusions
Hiding poor long-term outcomes
Expanding diagnostic categories for the purpose of commercial gain
Creating clinical trial guidelines that promote drug use
In his article, Whitaker goes on to dissect a 2017 review19 published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, which Whitaker claims “defends the profession’s current protocols for prescribing antipsychotics, which includes their regular long-term use.”
As Whitaker points out, there’s ample evidence showing antipsychotic drugs worsen outcomes over the long term in those diagnosed with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.
The review in question, led by American psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, was aimed at answering persistent questions raised by the mounting of such evidence. Alas, their conclusions dismissed concerns that the current drug paradigm might be doing more harm than good.
“In a subsequent press release and a video for a Medscape commentary, Lieberman has touted it as proving that antipsychotics provide a great benefit, psychiatry’s protocols are just fine, and that the critics are ‘nefarious’ individuals intent on doing harm,” Whitaker writes.20
The Scientific Bias of Psychiatric Treatment
Five of the eight researchers listed on the review have financial ties to drug companies, three are speakers for multiple drug companies and all eight are psychiatrists, “and thus there is a ‘guild’ interest present in this review, given that they are investigating whether one of their treatments is harmful over the long-term,” Whitaker notes.21
Not surprisingly, the review ignored studies showing negative effects, including studies showing antipsychotics have a detrimental effect on brain volume. What’s more, while withdrawal studies support the use of antipsychotics as maintenance therapy over the long term, these studies do not address how the drugs affect patients’ long-term health.
“They simply reveal that once a person has stabilized on the medication, going abruptly off the drug is likely to lead to relapse,” Whitaker writes.22 “The focus on long-term outcomes, at least as presented by critics, provides evidence that psychiatry should adopt a selective-use protocol.
If first-episode patients are not immediately put on antipsychotics, there is a significant percentage that will recover, and this ‘spontaneous recovery’ puts them onto a good long-term course. As for patients treated with the medications, the goal would be to minimize long-term use, as there is evidence that antipsychotics, on the whole, worsen long-term outcomes.”
Vast Majority of Psychotic Patients Are Harmed, Not Helped
In his deconstruction of Lieberman’s review, Whitaker details how biased thinking influenced the review’s conclusions. It’s a rather long article, but well worth reading through if you want to understand how a scientific review can be skewed to accord with a preconceived view.
Details I want to highlight, however, include findings relating to the number needed to treat (NNT) and the percentage of patients harmed by the routine use of antipsychotic drugs as a first-line treatment.
As noted by Whitaker, while placebo-controlled studies reveal the effectiveness of a drug compared to an inert substance, they do not effectively reveal the ratio of benefit versus harm among the patient population. NNT refers to the number of patients that have to take the drug in order to get one positive response.
A meta-analysis cited in Lieberman’s review had an NNT of 6, meaning that six patients must take the drug in order for one to benefit from the treatment. The remaining five patients — 83% — are potentially harmed by the treatment. As noted by Whitaker:23
“The point … is this: reviewers seeking to promote their drug treatment as effective will look solely at whether it produces a superior response to placebo. This leads to a one-size-fits-all protocol.
Reviewers that want to assess the benefit-harm effect of the treatment on all patients will look at NNT numbers. In this instance, the NNT calculations argue for selective use of the drugs …”
Antidepressants Are Not Beneficial in the Long Term
While typically not as destructive as antipsychotics, antidepressants also leave a trail of destruction in their wake. A systematic review24 by Gøtzsche published in 2019 found studies assessing harm from selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) fail to provide a clear and accurate picture of the harms, and therefore “cannot be used to investigate persistent harms of antidepressants.”
In this review, Gøtzsche and colleagues sought to assess “harms of SSRIs … that persist after end of drug intake.” The primary outcomes included mortality, functional outcomes, quality of life and core psychiatric events. In all, 22 papers on 12 SSRI trials were included. Gøtzsche found several distinct problems with these trials. For starters, only two of the 12 trials had a drop-out rate below 20%.
Gøtzsche and his team also note that “Outcome reporting was less thorough during follow-up than for the intervention period and only two trials maintained the blind during follow-up.” Importantly, though, all of the 22 papers came to the conclusion that “the drugs were not beneficial in the long term.”
Another important finding was that all trials either “reported harms outcomes selectively or did not report any,” and “Only two trials reported on any of our primary outcomes (school attendance and number of heavy drinking days).”
A few years later, in April 2022, a study using data from the United States’ Medical Expenditures Panel Survey for patients who had depression found, “The real-world effect of using antidepressant medications does not continue to improve patients” health-related quality of life (HRQoL) over time.25
Antidepressants Are More Addictive Than Admitted
In a June 4, 2019, article,26 “The Depression Pill Epidemic,” Gøtzsche writes that antidepressant drugs:
“… do not have relevant effects on depression; they increase the risk of suicide and violence; and they make it more difficult for patients to live normal lives.27 They should therefore be avoided.
We have been fooled by the drug industry, corrupt doctors on industry payroll, and by our drug regulators.28 Surely, many patients and doctors believe the pills are helpful, but they cannot know this, because people tend to become much better with time even if they are not treated.29
This is why we need placebo-controlled trials to find out what the drugs do to people. Unfortunately, virtually all trials are flawed, exaggerate the benefits of the drugs, and underestimate their harms.”30
Addictive Nature of Antidepressants Skews Results
In his article,31 Gøtzsche reviews several of the strategies used in antidepressant drug trials to exaggerate benefits and underestimate the harms. One little-known truth that helps skew study results in the drug’s favor is the fact that antidepressants tend to be far more addictive than officially admitted. He explains how this conveniently hides the skewing of results as follows:32
“Virtually all patients in the trials are already on a drug similar to the one being tested against placebo. Therefore, as the drugs are addictive, some of the patients will get abstinence symptoms … when randomized to placebo …
These abstinence symptoms are very similar to those patients experience when they try to stop benzodiazepines. It is no wonder that new drugs outperform the placebo in patients who have experienced harm as a result of cold turkey effects.
To find out how long patients need to continue taking drugs, so-called maintenance (withdrawal) studies have been carried out, but such studies also are compromised by cold turkey effects. Leading psychiatrists don’t understand this, or they pretend they don’t.
Most interpret the maintenance studies of depression pills to mean that these drugs are very effective at preventing new episodes of depression and that patients should therefore continue taking the drugs for years or even for life.”
Scientific Literature Supports Reality of User Complaints
Over the years, several studies on the dependence and withdrawal reactions associated with SSRIs and other psychiatric drugs have been published, including the following:
•In a 2011 paper33 in the journal Addiction, Gøtzsche and his team looked at the difference between dependence and withdrawal reactions by comparing benzodiazepines and SSRIs. Benzodiazepines are known to cause dependence, while SSRIs are said to not be addictive.
Despite such claims, Gøtzsche’s team found that “discontinuation symptoms were described with similar terms for benzodiazepines and SSRIs and were very similar for 37 of 42 identified symptoms described as withdrawal reactions,” which led them to conclude that:
“Withdrawal reactions to selective serotonin re‐uptake inhibitors appear to be similar to those for benzodiazepines; referring to these reactions as part of a dependence syndrome in the case of benzodiazepines, but not selective serotonin re‐uptake inhibitors, does not seem rational.”
•Two years later, in 2013, Gøtzsche’s team published a paper34 in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, in which they analyzed “communications from drug agencies about benzodiazepine and SSRI withdrawal reactions over time.”
By searching the websites of drug agencies in Europe, the U.S., U.K. and Denmark, they found that it took years before drug regulators finally acknowledged the reality of benzodiazepine dependence and SSRI withdrawal reactions and began informing prescribers and patients about these risks.
A significant part of the problem, they found, is that drug agencies rely on spontaneous reporting of adverse effects, which “leads to underestimation and delayed information about the problems.”
In conclusion, they state that “Given the experience with the benzodiazepines, we believe the regulatory bodies should have required studies from the manufacturers that could have elucidated the dependence potential of the SSRIs before marketing authorization was granted.”
•A 2019 paper35 in the Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences journal notes “It took almost two decades after the SSRIs entered the market for the first systematic review to be published.” It also points out that reviews claiming withdrawal effects to be mild, brief in duration and rare “was at odds with the sparse but growing evidence base.”
In reality, “What the scientific literature reveals is in close agreement with the thousands of service user testimonies available online in large forums. It suggests that withdrawal reactions are quite common, that they may last from a few weeks to several months or even longer, and that they are often severe.”
Antidepressants Increase Your Risk of Suicide and Violence
In his June 2019 article,36 Gøtzsche also stresses the fact that antidepressants can be lethal. In one of his studies,37 published in 2016, he found antidepressants “double the occurrence of events that can lead to suicide and violence in healthy adult volunteers.”
Other research38 has shown they “increase aggression in children and adolescents by a factor of 2 to 3 — an important finding considering the many school shootings where the killers were on depression pills,” Gøtzsche writes.
In middle-aged women with stress urinary incontinence, the selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI) duloxetine, which is also used to treat incontinence, has been shown to double the risk of a psychotic episode and increase the risk of violence and suicide four to five times,39 leading the authors to conclude that harms outweighed the benefits.
“I have described the dirty tricks and scientific dishonesty involved when drug companies and leading psychiatrists try convincing us that these drugs protect against suicide and other forms of violence,”40 Gøtzsche writes.41 “Even the FDA was forced to give in when it admitted in 2007, at least indirectly, that depression pills can cause suicide and madness at any age.
There is no doubt that the massive use of depression pills is harmful. In all countries where this relationship has been examined, the sharp rise in disability pensions due to psychiatric disorders has coincided with the rise of psychiatric drug usage, and depression pills are those which are used the most by far. This is not what one would expect if the drugs were helpful.”
Drugmaker Lied About Paxil’s Suicide Risk
In 2017, Wendy Dolin was awarded $3 million by a jury in a lawsuit against GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Paxil. Dolin’s husband committed suicide six days after taking his first dose of a Paxil generic, and evidence brought forth in the case convincingly showed his suicide was the result of the drug, not emotional stress or mental illness.42
The legal team behind that victory, Baum Hedlund Aristei Goldman, also represented other victims of Paxil-induced violence and death. At the time, attorney R. Brent Wisner said:43
“The Dolin verdict sent a clear message to GSK and other drug manufacturers that hiding data and manipulating science will not be tolerated … If you create a drug and know that it poses serious risks, regardless of whether consumers use the brand name or generic version of that drug, you have a duty to warn.”
GSK’s own clinical placebo-controlled trials actually revealed subjects on Paxil had nearly nine times the risk of attempting or committing suicide than the placebo group. To gain drug approval, GSK misrepresented this shocking data, falsely reporting a higher number of suicide attempts in the placebo group and deleting some of the suicide attempts in the drug group.
An internal GSK analysis of its suicide data also showed that “patients taking Paxil were nearly seven times more likely to attempt suicide than those on placebo,” Baum Hedlund Aristei Goldman reports, adding:44
“Jurors in the Dolin trial also heard from psychiatrist David Healy, one of the world’s foremost experts on Paxil and drugs in its class … Healy told the jurors that Paxil and drugs like it can create in some people a state of extreme ’emotional turmoil’ and intense inner restlessness known as akathisia …
‘People have described it like a state worse than death. Death will be a blessed relief. I want to jump out of my skin,’ Dr. Healy said. Healthy volunteer studies have found that akathisia can happen even to people with no psychiatric condition who take the drug …
Another Paxil side effect known to increase the risk of suicide is emotional blunting … apathy or emotional indifference … [E]motional blunting, combined with akathisia, can lead to a mental state in which an individual has thoughts of harming themselves or others, but is ‘numbed’ to the consequences of their actions. Drugs in the Paxil class can also cause someone to ‘go psychotic, become delirious,’ Dr. Healy explained.”
Hundreds of Thousands of Toddlers on Psychiatric Drugs
Considering the many serious psychological and physical risks associated with psychiatric drugs, it’s shocking to learn that hundreds of thousands of American toddlers are on them. In 2014, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a mental health watchdog group, highlighted data showing that in 2013:45
274,000 babies aged 1 and younger were given psychiatric drugs — Of these, 249,699 were on anti-anxiety meds like Xanax; 26,406 were on antidepressants such as Prozac or Paxil, 1,422 were on ADHD drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall, and 654 were on antipsychotics such as Risperdal and Zyprexa
In the toddler category (2- to 3-year-olds), 318,997 were on anti-anxiety drugs, 46,102 were on antidepressants, 10,000 were prescribed ADHD drugs and 3,760 were on antipsychotics
Among children aged 5 and younger, 1,080,168 were on psychiatric drugs
These are shocking figures that challenge logic. How and why are so many children, babies even, on addictive and dangerously mind-altering medications? Considering these statistics are 6 years old, chances are they’re even higher today. Just what will happen to all of these youngsters as they grow up? As mentioned in the article:46
“When it comes to the psychiatric drugs used to treat ADHD, these are referred to as ‘kiddie cocaine’ for a reason. Ritalin (methylphenidate), Adderall (amphetamine) and Concerta are all considered by the federal government as Schedule II drugs — the most addictive.
ADHD drugs also have serious side effects such as agitation, mania, aggressive or hostile behavior, seizures, hallucinations, and even sudden death, according to the National Institutes of Health …
As far as antipsychotics, antianxiety drugs and antidepressants, the FDA and international drug regulatory agencies cite side effects including, but not limited to, psychosis, mania, suicidal ideation, heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and even sudden death.”
Children Increasingly Prescribed Psych Drugs Off-Label
Making matters even worse, recent research shows the number of children being prescribed medication off-label is also on the rise. An example offered by StudyFinds.org,47 which reported the findings, is “a doctor recommending antidepressant medication for ADHD symptoms.”
The study,48 published in the journal Pediatrics, looked at trends in off-label drug prescriptions made for children under the age of 18 by office-based physicians between 2006 and 2015. Findings revealed:
“Physicians ordered ≥1 off-label systemic drug at 18.5% of visits, usually (74.6%) because of unapproved conditions. Off-label ordering was most common proportionally in neonates (83%) and in absolute terms among adolescents (322 orders out of 1000 visits).
Off-label ordering was associated with female sex, subspecialists, polypharmacy, and chronic conditions. Rates and reasons for off-label orders varied considerably by age. Relative and absolute rates of off-label orders rose over time. Among common classes, off-label orders for antihistamines and several psychotropics increased over time …
US office-based physicians have ordered systemic drugs off label for children at increasing rates, most often for unapproved conditions, despite recent efforts to increase evidence and drug approvals for children.”
The researchers were taken aback by the findings, and expressed serious concern over this trend. While legal, many of the drugs prescribed off-label have not been properly tested to ensure safety and efficacy for young children and adolescents.
As noted by senior author Daniel Horton, assistant professor of pediatrics and pediatric rheumatologist at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, “We don’t always understand how off-label medications will affect children, who don’t always respond to medications as adults do. They may not respond as desired to these drugs and could experience harmful effects.”
In 2020 mental health experts and reviewers were still at-odds over prescribing these drugs for children, yet hesitant to call a stop to it:49
“Antidepressants are prescribed for the treatment of a number of psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents, however there is still controversy about whether they should be used in this population …
Treatment decisions should be tailored to patients on an individual basis, so we recommend clinicians, patients and policy makers to refer to the evidence provided in the present meta-review and make decisions about the use of antidepressants in children and adolescents taking into account a number of clinical and personal variables.”
Educate Yourself About the Risks
If you, your child or another family member is on a psychiatric drug, I urge you to educate yourself about the true risks and to consider switching to safer alternatives. When it comes to children, I cannot fathom a situation in which a toddler would need a psychiatric drug and I find it shocking that there are so many doctors out there that, based on a subjective evaluation, would deem a psychiatric drug necessary.
Have you read How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates yet? Well, I have, and let me tell you: it’s every bit as infuriating, nauseating, ridiculous, laughable and risible as you would expect. Here are the details.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) top vaccine official told a congressional committee on Friday that COVID-19 vaccines for kids under 6 will not have to meet the agency’s 50% efficacy threshold required to obtain Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
The FDA is reviewing data from Moderna’s two-shot vaccine for infants and toddlers 6 months to 2 years old, and for children 2 to 6 years old.
The agency is awaiting data on Pfizer and BioNTech’s three-dose regimen for children under age 5 after two doses of its pediatric vaccine failed to trigger an immune response in 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds comparable to the response generated in teens and adults.
According to Endpoints News, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA, told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis the agency would not withhold authorization of a pediatric vaccine if it fails to meet the agency’s 50% efficacy threshold for blocking symptomatic infections.
COVID-19 vaccines for adolescents, teens and adults had to meet the requirement.
“If these vaccines seem to be mirroring efficacy in adults and just seem to be less effective against Omicron like they are for adults, we will probably still authorize,” Marks said.
The FDA on June 30, 2020, issued guidance that in order for an experimental COVID-19 vaccine to obtain EUA, it must “prevent disease or decrease its severity in at least 50 percent of people who are vaccinated.”
The guidelines were issued during a briefing with the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, during which senators sought assurances from former FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top health officials that the expedited speed of development of COVID-19 vaccines wouldn’t compromise the integrity of the final product.
All previously authorized COVID-19 vaccines and boosters for all age groups were required to meet the FDA’s 50% requirement prior to obtaining EUA.
Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and associate professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco posted a video responding to the news the FDA would bypass its own standard to authorize pediatric COVID-19 vaccines for kids.
Prasad said:
“Peter Marks from the FDA — he’s the defacto regulator-in-chief when it comes to vaccines — is saying that kids’ vaccines don’t need to hit the target. They don’t need to hit the 50% vaccine efficacy against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 target. That was the target that the FDA themselves came up with in the original pandemic.
“They came up with this target 50% point estimate above, and the lower bound to the 95% confidence interval has to be above 30%. That was their minimum efficacy standard for vaccination. That was the standard they themselves set and that was the standard initial vaccine trials did clear for adults.
“But the pediatric vaccine trials — both the Pfizer and Moderna — appear not to have cleared that bar, and Peter Marks is talking to congressional officials and he is saying that it’s okay, we’ll probably authorize it anyway.”
Vasad said it was “incredible” that Marks would sign off on a pediatric vaccine if it seems to be mirroring efficacy in adults but is less effective against Omicron.
“We have standards for a reason,” Vasad said. The standard chosen by the FDA was “arbitrary and if anything I’d argue it was on the low side — 50% isn’t as good as what we wanted,” Vasad said.
“Fifty percent is quite low, and if you have a very low vaccine efficacy […] you can have compensatory behavior that actually leads to a lot more viral spread,” he added.
Vasad said when it comes to kids, it’s “kind of a moot point” because estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from a few months ago showed 75% of children had zero prevalence — and it’s “probably higher now.”
“Taking a child under the age of 5 who already had and recovered from COVID and trying to make them better off with a vaccine against the original Wuhan ancestral strain — that’s an uphill battle,” Vasad said.
“The absolute upper bound, absolute risk reduction, has got to be super super low because once kids have it and recover from it they generally do pretty well. If they get it again they do even better than the first time.”
Lowering the regulatory standards for vaccine products is not the direction FDA should go, Vasad said. “They need to be upholding the standards they’ve set and raising the standards.”
Vasad raised concerns over what the standard will be moving forward if the agency doesn’t abide by its own minimum requirement.
“At what point will vaccine efficacy arrive at something the agency doesn’t accept?” He asked.
Vasad said once the FDA does away with EUA, many preschools will immediately mandate COVID-19 vaccines, and they won’t make exceptions for natural immunity or provide any exceptions at all.
“And so what he’s talking about is authorizing a vaccine in a setting where you have 75% minimum zero prevalence and the vaccine efficacy could be less than 50%,” Vasad said. “How much less?”
Pointing to a Moderna press release stating one arm of its trial showed its pediatric vaccines were only 37% and 23% effective, Vasad asked, “How much lower can it go — 10%? How low before Peter Marks says that’s too low?”
Vasad said if the adult vaccine becomes less effective over time, “tell me why that means you should accept the less effective kids’ vaccine?”
Vasad explained:
“If a therapy loses efficacy over time, why does that mean the bar to be a therapy is lower? It should mean that we need new therapies. We need a new mRNA construct.
“You need to kind of aim at the thing that’s actually out there now and not the original thing from two years ago. Maybe you want to rejigger your process. Try something new but it doesn’t mean we keep lowering the bar. This is ridiculous.”
Moderna reports concerning efficacy data for pediatric COVID-19 vaccines
As The Defender reported, Moderna on April 28 asked the FDA to approve its COVID-19 mRNA-1273 vaccine for children 6 months to 6 years old, citing different efficacy numbers than it disclosed in March.
The company conducted separate trials for two versions of the vaccine, one for infants and toddlers aged 6 months to 2 years, and one for children 2 to 6 years, and claimed data showed “a robust neutralizing antibody response” and “a favorable safety profile.”
Yet, Moderna’s KidCOVE study showed the company’s COVID-19 vaccine failed to meet the FDA’s minimum efficacy requirements for EUA in the 2- to under-6 age group, and barely surpassed the agency’s 50% efficacy requirement in the 6-month to 2-year age group — even after the vaccine maker changed its analysis of the study to meet the threshold.
Moderna also did not follow trial participants beyond 28 days, so vaccine effectiveness after that time is unknown. Data from New York state show vaccine effectiveness for the 5-to-11 age group plummets within seven weeks to 12%.
“Here, we’re looking only at the first four weeks,” Dr. Madhava Setty told The Defender. “Although data from New York were in a different age group using a different mRNA vaccine, the effectiveness was remarkably similar after four weeks. Why wouldn’t we expect that the same thing is going to happen?”
The House Select Subcommittee on Coronavirus Crisis on April 26 asked the FDA for a status update on COVID-19 vaccines for children under 5.
The agency said it was considering holding off on reviewing Moderna’s request to authorize its COVID-19 vaccine for children under 5 until it has data from Pfizer and BioNTech on their vaccine for children, pushing the earliest possible authorization of a vaccine from May to June.
When asked on Friday whether the FDA’s vaccine advisors would slow-roll Moderna’s applications and wait to review Pfizer’s and Moderna’s applications together, Marks said the meetings set for next month could move up if necessary.
“Obviously if we get through reviews faster, then we will send them to committees sooner,” Marks said.
According to Rep. Jim Clyburn’s (D-S.C.) account of the meeting, Marks said the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee has reserved earlier dates, enabling the agency to potentially “move dates up even by a week for any of these reviews.”
“At the end of the day, we want people to have confidence in getting vaccinated,” Marks said. “We need to get more kids vaccinated, not just in the younger than 5 age range, but also older than 5.”
Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.
By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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