https://twitter.com/MidwesternDoc/status/1854781830693581049
Trump names RFK Jr. to cabinet position
RT | November 14, 2024
US President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), declaring that the former Democrat will ensure that “everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals [and] pollutants.”
Trump announced his choice in a social media post on Thursday evening. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to public health,” he wrote.
“HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming health crisis in this country,” he continued. “Mr. Kennedy will restore these agencies to the traditions of gold standard scientific research… to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
The New York Post claimed the previous day that some of Trump’s closest advisers were pushing for Kennedy to be given an advisory position, but that the former Democrat was “stubborn” in demanding control of HHS.
If confirmed, Kennedy would oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other sub-agencies. Kennedy has been vocally critical of all of these agencies, and vowed to enact sweeping reforms if placed in charge of them.
A long-time vaccine skeptic and proponent of organic agriculture, Kennedy has promised to “get processed food out of school lunch immediately,” to recommend that fluoride be removed from the water supply, and to crack down on the use of chemical pesticides and herbicides in farming.
Kennedy announced last October that he would run for the presidency as an independent candidate, ending his bid to challenge President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party’s primary elections. He suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump in August, citing Trump’s support for free speech, his promise to end the Ukraine conflict, and his willingness to tackle what Kennedy called “the chronic disease epidemic” afflicting American children.
Fluoride in Water Poses ‘Unreasonable Risk’ to Children, Federal Judge Rules
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 25, 2024
In a decision that could end the practice of water fluoridation in the U.S., a federal judge late Tuesday ruled that water fluoridation at current U.S. levels poses an “unreasonable risk” of reduced IQ in children.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can no longer ignore that risk, and must take regulatory action, Judge Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California wrote in the long-awaited landmark decision.
More than 200 million Americans drink water treated with fluoride at the “optimal” level of 0.7 milligrams per liter (mg/L). However, Chen ruled that a preponderance of scientific evidence shows this level of fluoride exposure may damage human health, particularly that of pregnant mothers and young children.
The verdict delivers a major blow to the EPA, public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and professional lobbying groups like the American Dental Association (ADA), which have staked their reputations on the claim that water fluoridation is one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century and an unqualified public good.
Fluoride proponents refused to reexamine that stance despite mounting scientific evidence from top researchers and government agencies of fluoride’s neurotoxic risks, particularly for infants’ developing brains.
Instead, they attempted to weaken and suppress the research and discredit the scientists carrying it out.
Rick North, board member of Fluoride Action Network, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told The Defender, “What’s false is the CDC claiming that fluoridation is one of the 10 greatest health achievements of the 20th century. What’s true is that ending fluoridation will be one of the 10 greatest health achievements of the 21st century.”
“The judge did what EPA has long refused to do, and that is to apply the EPA standard risk assessment framework to fluoride,” said Michael Connett, attorney for the plaintiffs. “In so doing, the court has shown that the widespread exposure to fluoride that we now have in the United States is unreasonably and precariously close to the levels that we know cause harm.”
The EPA can appeal Tuesday’s decision. The agency told The Defender it is reviewing the decision and has no comment at this time. The U.S. Department of Justice, which represents the EPA in the lawsuit, also said it has no comment.
EPA’s argument ‘not persuasive’
The ruling concludes a historic lawsuit — one that has dragged on for seven years — brought against the EPA by environmental and consumer advocacy organizations like the Fluoride Action Network, Moms Against Fluoridation and Food & Water Watch, along with individual parents and children.
It is the first lawsuit to go to a federal trial under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), as amended by Congress in 2016. The TSCA allows U.S. citizens to petition the EPA to evaluate whether a chemical presents an unreasonable risk to public health and should be regulated.
If the EPA denies a TSCA citizen petition — which the agency did when the plaintiffs asked it to reexamine water fluoridation in 2016 — the petitioners are entitled to a “de novo” judicial review of the science without the deference to the agency typically afforded it in legal cases.
Chen’s 80-page ruling, issued six months after closing arguments in February, offers a careful and detailed articulation of the EPA’s review process for chemicals that pose a hazard to human health and evaluates and summarizes the extensive scientific data presented at trial.
Chen wrote, “EPA’s own expert agrees that fluoride is hazardous at some level.” He cited a key report issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) National Toxicology Program (NTP), which undertook a systematic review of all available scientific research at the time of publication.
The report “concluded that fluoride is indeed associated with reduced IQ in children, at least at exposure levels at or above 1.5 mg/L,” Chen wrote.
The NTP also reported that although there are technical challenges to measuring fluoride’s toxic effects at low levels, “scientists have observed a statistically significant association between fluoride and adverse effects in children even at such ‘lower’ exposure levels,” Chen wrote.
He said that despite recognizing that fluoride is hazardous, the EPA’s defense rested largely on the fact that the exact level at which it is hazardous is too unclear for the agency to determine whether the chemical presents an unreasonable risk.
This argument is “not persuasive,” Chen wrote.
Pregnant women exposed to fluoride in water at levels exceeding the hazard level
The EPA requires a margin of error by a factor of at least 10 to exist between the hazard level for a toxin and the acceptable human exposure level. “Put differently, only an exposure that is below 1/10th of the hazard level would be deemed safe under Amended TSCA, given the margin of error required,” Chen wrote.
That means that even if the hazard level were 4 mg/L — well above the 1.5 mg/L identified by the NTP — the safe level of fluoride exposure would be 0.4 mg/L, well below the current “optimal” fluoride level in the U.S., Chen wrote.
The much lower probable hazard level established by high-quality studies indicates that many pregnant women in the U.S. are already exposed to fluoride in water at levels exceeding the hazard level.
“Under even the most conservative estimates of this level, there is not enough of a margin between the accepted hazard level and the actual human exposure levels to find that fluoride is safe,” Chen concluded.
“Simply put, the risk to health at exposure levels in United States drinking water is sufficiently high to trigger regulatory response by the EPA under Amended TSCA.”
The law dictates that the EPA must take regulatory action, but it does not specify what that action has to be. EPA regulatory actions can range from notifying the public of risks to banning chemicals.
Philippe Grandjean, M.D., Ph.D., adjunct professor in environmental health at Harvard and chair of environmental medicine at the University of Southern Denmark, top researcher on fluoride’s neurotoxicity and expert witness for plaintiffs in the case told The Defender he thought the court’s decision was “well-justified.”
He said the ruling made it incumbent on the EPA to go beyond simply ending water fluoridation.
“EPA will have to consider what to do in the southwestern parts of the country where the fluoride content of groundwater is too high due to minerals in the soil containing fluoride,” he said. “And then there is the question about ingestion of toothpaste.”
The CDC and the ADA did not immediately respond to The Defender’s request for comment.
More than 70 years of controversy
For more than seven decades, U.S. public health officials have steadfastly supported water fluoridation, claiming the practice is a key strategy for maintaining and improving dental health.
Proponents of water fluoridation, with help from the mainstream press, often attempted to cast those questioning fluoride’s benefits and raising concerns about its safety as conspiracy theorists.
The EPA in 1975 recommended adding fluoride to water at an optimal level of 1.2 mg/L for its dental benefits, but recommended a maximum level of 4 mg/L, the ruling said.
As more evidence has emerged about fluoride’s adverse health effects, including skeletal fluorosis, recommended levels were revised.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, officially lowered the recommended dosage for water fluoridation in 2015 from 0.7-1.2 mg/L to 0.7 mg/L after considering “adverse health effects” along with alleged benefits.
However, evidence that fluoride poses a neurotoxic risk has existed for decades.
In 2017, after the EPA rejected their citizen petition to end fluoridation of drinking water in the U.S. based on evidence of health risks, namely neurotoxicity, the plaintiffs filed the lawsuit.
A seven-day trial took place in federal court in San Francisco in June 2020, but Chen put the proceedings on hold pending the release of the NTP’s systematic review of research available on the neurotoxic effects of fluoride.
The NTP sought to publish its report — which consisted of a “state of the science” monograph and a meta-analysis — in May 2022, but dental officials at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research pressured HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine to prevent the review from being published.
The ADA also sought to suppress the report.
Levine told the NTP to not publish the report but to put it on hold and allow for further review.
Plaintiffs submitted documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act exposing this intervention to the court. The revelation prompted Chen to rule that the trial should go forward using the draft report from the NTP.
The trial resumed in January in San Francisco, with arguments presented over the course of two weeks.
The NTP’s monograph was finalized and published last month on its website. The meta-analysis is forthcoming in a peer-reviewed journal.
Connett said that Congress created the citizen petition provision in TSCA as a counterweight to bureaucratic lethargy and as a check on the EPA.
The statute, he said, is a powerful tool for overcoming politicized science.
“When science becomes fossilized in political inertia, the citizen petition provision of TSCA is a very powerful tool for citizens,” Connett said. “Through this case, we have been able to effectuate what Congress had envisioned with this part of the statute.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Measles “Outbreak” In Maine Was Vaccine-Induced All Along
Informed Consent Action Network | September 24, 2024
ICAN’s attorneys obtained documents related to the widely reported May 2023 “outbreak” of measles in Maine. As it turns out, test results from the CDC confirmed that the measles case was “consistent with vaccine strain,” meaning there was no “outbreak” and, instead, it was the vaccine that caused the child’s rash.
On May 5, 2023, the Maine CDC reported that a child had “tested positive” for measles. News outlets immediately began fearmongering, hinting that the “outbreak” was due to low vaccination rates:
- “Measles can be serious for anyone…” (Maine CDC Facebook Page)
- “In severe cases, measles can cause pneumonia, brain swelling and death.” (Bangor Daily News )
- “The CDC says roughly one to three of every 1,000 children infected with measles die.” (USA Today ) Note: the death rate is actually more like 1 in 500,000.
- “Measles was declared eliminated from the US in 2000… But vaccination rates in the US have dropped in recent years, sparking new outbreaks.” (CNN)
- “Anyone who is not immunized or does not know their measles immunization status should get vaccinated.” (Maine CDC Press Release)
The Maine CDC reported that even though the child had received a dose of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, it was “considering the child to be infectious out of an abundance of caution.” In the meantime, the Maine CDC indicated it had sent a specimen to CDC headquarters to determine the specific strain of measles; however, it did not mention how the child would have been exposed to the wild strain of measles, such as international travel, nor did it share how recently the child may have received the vaccine.
According to a WHO report, about 2% of those who receive the measles vaccine develop a rash, called VARI (vaccine-associated rash illness). In fact, one study recommends assuming the rash is vaccine-caused and that “testing should only be considered if exposure to the wild-type (not vaccine-strain) virus is strongly suspected.”
So, it is unclear why the Maine CDC raised the alarm and then took so long to confirm the specific strain. The child was diagnosed on May 3, but it took the Maine CDC five days to ship the sample to the CDC. It then took the CDC seven days to report the results and for the Maine CDC to announce the child was not infectious.
ICAN, through its attorneys, requested relevant records and received them. Incredibly, they reveal that the positive measles test was “[c]onsistent with vaccine strain,” which is apparently an “acceptable” form of measles because, as the Maine CDC announced, the strain that the child tested positive for was not considered “an infectious strain of the virus,” despite causing traditional symptoms of the disease. Decidedly absent from Maine’s announcement was the fact that the child got measles as a result of the vaccine. Maine and the CDC simply hid this fact from the public.
Maine’s actions make sense, however, when considering that it may have just been following a CDC marketing presentation which states that the perfect “recipe” for creating demand for vaccines “requires creating concern, anxiety, and worry” by, for example, having medical experts and public health authorities “state concern and alarm (and predict dire outcomes)” and show “[v]isible/tangible examples of the seriousness of the illness (e.g., pictures of children, families of those affected coming forward) and people getting vaccinated (the first to motivate, the latter to reinforce)” — all things we saw implemented during this “outbreak.”
Lead Counsel, Aaron Siri, Esq. lays out the details here.
ICAN will continue to follow-up on reported outbreaks across the country. In the meantime, catch up on some of ICAN’s additional work on vaccine policy:
Proud to Be Suing Hospitals and Doctors That Inject Hep B Vaccines Into Newborns Without Parental Consent
Injecting Freedom by Aaron Siri | September 21, 2024
Informed Consent Action Network is supporting an initiative that is long overdue: suing doctors and hospitals that inject newborns with a hepatitis B vaccine without parental consent.
The hepatitis B vaccine is a case study in agency capture. The target for this product was sex workers and intravenous drug users, and the rare pregnant mother who was hepatitis B positive. The problem was that CDC could not get the sex workers and intravenous drug users to take this product. The story would have ended there if pharma didn’t stand to earn billions through a wider mandate of this product.
With those billions at stake, an argument was made that if all newborns were vaccinated (not just the tiny number whose mothers were hepatitis B positive) then we could catch these babies before they became prostitutes or heroin addicts. CDC’s advisory committee, stacked with individuals receiving funding from pharma, added it to the routine childhood schedule in 1995.
Parents who decide not to inject their babies with this product have varying reasons. Some simply conclude that their baby won’t be having sex or sharing dirty needles with drug addicts—usually a safe assumption. Others are horrified that the two hepatitis B vaccines available for babies were licensed based on clinical trials with only 5 days of safety monitoring.
Let me repeat: 5 days. If that sounds incredible and shocking, it is because it is incredible and shocking. But that is the simple, cold hard truth. See for yourself in Section 6.1 of the package insert for Engerix-B and Recombivax HB, the only hep B vaccines licensed in the U.S. for use in newborns. ICAN has even formally petitioned FDA to withdraw license of this vaccine until a proper clinical trial is conducted.
(In that petition you can read about all the related legal work our firm has done on behalf of ICAN, including confirming that this ridiculously inadequate safety review period is, in fact, true.)
There are also other reasons parents choose not to inject this product into their babies, including the anemic post-licensure safety studies, harms suffered by an older sibling from this product, or religious beliefs.
All that said, we are proud to be bringing lawsuits against doctors and hospitals across the country that vaccinate newborns with this product without parental consent. You can read more about this on ICAN’s page, our firm’s page, or stay tuned for a segment about this on The HighWire.
Their vaccine injury reports disappeared from VAERS — So they developed a tool for anyone to track their own reports
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 11, 2024
A team of researchers is developing a tool to track reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), so vaccine-injured people can follow what happens to the reports they submit.
As part of a broader effort to hold public health agencies accountable, the tool will also make it possible to audit the VAERS system by identifying what types of reports are deleted, insufficiently updated or contain errors.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which jointly oversee VAERS, have refused to do this work despite multiple appeals by advocates for the vaccine-injured, according to React19, the group leading the initiative.
React19, founded by a small group of medical professionals injured by COVID-19 vaccines, works with institutions and providers to increase understanding and awareness of patients experiencing lasting effects following COVID-19 and/or COVID-19 vaccines.
The group is teaming up with computer programmer Liz Wilner, founder of OpenVAERS — a website that provides tools for more easily accessing and searching VAERS data — and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) to develop the tool.
The idea for developing the automatic VAERS report tracking tool came out of a VAERS audit the group conducted in 2022 to assess how the FDA and CDC were following up on COVID-19 vaccine injury reports.
React19 worked with outside experts to review a sample of 126 VAERS reports filed by some of its members who wanted to know what happened to their reports.
After tracking down each person’s reports and following them through the VAERS system, they “were kind of shocked at how bad it is,” members of React19 told The Defender.
They found that only 61% of the reports filed were correctly logged and published in VAERS. Twenty-two percent of the reports were never issued a permanent ID and are therefore not publicly visible, 12% were deleted and in 5% of the cases, a report couldn’t be filed or their report number remains unknown due to system errors.
That means more than 1 in 3 reports searched couldn’t be found in a database that is meant to be publicly accessible and transparent. It also suggests that problems of “omission of data and underreporting may be even greater than estimated,” according to the audit report.
The group also found that the medical status of the deleted reports, “by and large, had a worse outcome than the ones that were still in the system,” they said. For example, they said, in the public-facing VAERS system, 23% of reports were for permanent disabilities — but in the deleted reports, 53% were for permanent disability.
“One of the more alarming things we found out was that not all death reports are investigated,” Brianne Dressen, React19 founder, told The Defender.
The group brought this to the attention of public health officials in their meetings, sharing examples of reports that had been updated by people’s families when they died, but didn’t show up on the public system.
They also found that many follow-up reports containing updates on worsening symptoms were gone from the system.
At the time, the group was meeting regularly with top officials, including Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, to discuss vaccine injuries and why the agencies were doing nothing to address them.
In those meetings, according to Dressen and React19 member Dr. Joel Wallskog, when they raised the issue that the agencies weren’t following up on VAERS reports, the FDA told them VAERS wasn’t a reliable indicator for vaccine injuries, because anyone could file an injury complaint, including “Mickey Mouse or Michael Jackson.”
“We told them we know thousands of people that have not had any follow-up on their VAERS reports that are not Mickey Mouse, and they’re suffering it every single day waiting for you guys to get back to them to investigate what happened to them,” Dressen said.
“And of course then they never did anything. So we were like, OK, fine. If they’re not going to generate the evidence, then we will ourselves.”
The group submitted their findings to Marks during a meeting with him and his team. Based on their findings they also requested an external audit of the entire VAERS system and posed a series of questions listed on their audit report webpage.
They never heard from the agencies again.
“We were like, really?” Dressen said. “We were having these regular meetings with them every one month or every two months, and then after that, they wouldn’t meet with us anymore.”
Dressen, who was injured in the AstraZeneca clinical trials and whose diagnosis of post-vaccine neuropathy and other vaccine-related disorders was confirmed by the National Institutes of Health, said her own VAERS report is not visible to the public. The agencies haven’t told her why.
More recently, still hoping for accountability from the public health agencies, React19 submitted its audit and complaint to the Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The only response they received was an autoresponse confirming receipt of the complaint.
Attempt to ‘bring power back to the people’
In its small pilot audit, React19 found the VAERS system is “obviously broken from top to bottom.” According to Dressen, “One thing we can easily conclude is that the FDA and CDC have no interest in addressing these issues.”
Now, the group is scaling up the project to do a larger audit with more data.
With help from OpenVAERS and CHD, the team built a backend, automated administrative tracking system that eliminates the need to manually search for each report and its journey through VAERS — something the analysts had to do for the first iteration of their audit.
Participants will register on the React19 website and will be invited — if they are interested — to share their stories as part of the organization’s project to collect and publish vaccine injury testimonials.
Users can share any information they have about their VAERS report — their ID number if they have one, or if not, details about their case. Then they will receive a monthly email with the status of their report.
For example, someone who has a user ID and a public-facing report will be informed if their report disappears. In the case of those people who filed a VAERS complaint but never got an ID number, the system will search each month for the record and try to find the ID.
“We’ll be able to track these reports through the system and figure out what happens to them,” Wilner said. “Do they disappear? Do they appear and the person doesn’t get notified? Do they appear incorrectly?”
“So people will be able to track their own reports with less effort and React19 will be able to audit a much larger user base than they initially did.”
Wilner said auditing VAERS in this way also reveals details about how the agencies are “either lying or deliberately obfuscating the process.” In the first audit, it was clear there was no systematic or automated way that, for example, reports were deleted.
The tracker and the audit will provide valuable data that no one else has. Rather than having only the stories, Wilner said, they will have the data backing up those stories. “Now we have a group of injured people that are all talking with one voice.”
“Without more pressure and more discovery,” Wallskog said, “I don’t think we’re ever going to get the truth out. Ultimately, we want to get this information to the masses of people that just don’t know what’s happening, particularly with this data, and that we’ve all been duped.”
Dressen said the project is an attempt to “bring the power back to the people.”
The COVID-19 vaccine produced a large swath of vaccine injuries all at the same time, she said. Auditing the COVID-19 entries in VAERS will provide an opportunity “to show through massive numbers where those problems are, not just with the systems that are supposed to be monitoring vaccine safety, but also the actual harms themselves and what those are, but the government’s not doing their job on that.”
The two faces of VAERS and the problem of accountability
Wilner said Dressen’s injury report, sitting in VAERS limbo, spoke to one of the major issues around claims of transparency in the database — that there are two versions of VAERS, a public-facing database and a private one.
The BMJ reported last year that it investigated the VAERS database and found that the public facing database contains only initial reports. And “a private, back end system containing all updates and corrections — such as a formal diagnosis, recovery, or death.”
The CDC told The BMJ that this was part of patient confidentiality, but the publication found that in the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System, they do update the database — “raising the question of why VAERS can’t do the same.”
And during the React19 audit, the group found that VAERS was sometimes deleting people’s legitimate reports or the more detailed updated reports that some people were submitting.
Another problem, Wilner noted, is that a lot of key information — such as race, pregnancy and report provider — is unnecessarily withheld from public VAERS reports. She also said the agencies sometimes leave reports on there that are clearly false or jokes, which then discredits the database in the public’s eyes.
On the CDC website, Wilner said, “you’re basically looking at a doctored set of books.”
Wallskog said the agencies “try to live on both sides of the fence” with VAERS, presenting it as a key tool for monitoring vaccine injuries. But when it shows a safety signal or an issue with vaccines, they discredit it as a problematic surveillance system with a lot of limitations that can’t be trusted.
“It’s incredibly frustrating for injured people,” he said.
The team working on the new VAERS tracking system and audit said they hope it will raise public awareness and force the public health agencies to take responsibility for the vaccine injuries.
“Rochelle Walensky said the CDC is charged with finding legitimate vaccine injuries and reporting them,” Wilner said. She added:
“If that’s the case, where is that? We don’t have access to the actual database to figure it out so we want to know where is the report from the CDC on the people that were actually injured by the COVID vaccine that the government accepts were legitimately injured? That report doesn’t exist.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
‘Follow the Science’: Have the Bad Guys Finally Gone Too Far?
By Sharyl Attkisson | The Defender | September 9, 2024
In this exclusive excerpt from her new bestseller, “Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails,” journalist Sharyl Attkisson details how public health agencies and some public universities are so captured by commercial interests that they function as little more than an advertising arm of Big Pharma.
In the case of vaccine makers, success comes with inventing shots that can be added to the list of what’s required for schoolchildren. Better yet, invent shots that the public can be convinced to get, repeatedly, for the rest of their lives. Instant billion-dollar blockbuster!
This has led to a questionable dynamic where the one-time standard that vaccines were required to meet — that they must be vital, safe, and effective — fell by the wayside. Instead the government aggressively serves as promoter of dubious versions that may not be necessary, may not work very well, and come with the risk of serious side effects.
In 1975, the cost of vaccinating a child from birth to age six was $10 (in 2001 terms, adjusted for inflation). As more vaccines were added to the list, the cost ballooned to $385 in 2001. Today it’s thousands of dollars. The costs are largely hidden to us since we get inoculated for free or with minimal out-of-pocket payments. But make no mistake, we’re paying the bills in the form of insurance premiums, and tax dollars to state and federal programs that provide vaccines at little to no direct cost to the patient. Vaccine companies are reaping enormous profits.
Sometimes getting and keeping a vaccine on the market requires sleight of hand. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), our premier infectious disease federal health agency, is happy to give a little help to its vaccine industry partners or, as the CDC calls them, “stakeholders.” The agency’s best and brightest can even adjust the veritable meaning of the word “vaccine.”
The CDC used to define “vaccines” quite simply as agents that “prevent disease.” But in 2021, that had to be changed. It became undeniable that Covid vaccines didn’t prevent the disease (or transmission, or even illness). Logic might suggest that the Covid vaccines would have to be withdrawn from the market. After all, they didn’t even meet the definition of a vaccine. Instead the CDC quietly redefined the word “vaccine” to make the Covid shots seem successful after all.
On the CDC’s vaccine web page, sometime between September 1 and 2, 2021, somebody removed a key phrase from the definition. On September 1, the CDC defined a vaccine as “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.” But on September 2, the phrase “protecting the person from that disease” was removed, like it never even happened. Now, the CDC says, vaccines merely “stimulate the body’s immune response.”
Think of it. The CDC unilaterally redefined two hundred years’ of the world’s understanding of what constitutes a vaccine, without so much as an explanation, public discussion, hearing, or vote. Once you understand that our top, trusted medical authorities are willing to sneakily move goalposts and change meanings of words to protect a market, you’re a long way to beginning to understand how deep the corruption goes.
It’s one thing to be barraged by marketing to convince you to buy a shiny new car. But it’s quite another to get sold a bill of goods by our trusted health experts when it comes to our most precious possession. Our increasingly elusive quest for good health has become a commodity to be bought and sold by today’s snake oil salesmen and their coconspirators, but on a far grander scale …
In their defense, pharmaceutical companies are doing exactly what they were built to do: make money. The thought that they’re somehow different from other multinational corporations, that they are motivated by altruism and can be trusted to be honest about the failings of their own products, is a fallacy. There’s no law that requires them to put patient health ahead of profits. There’s nothing that forces them to stop promoting a pill even if they secretly know it doesn’t work or has dire side effects. It could be argued they have a fiduciary duty to try to downplay or even cover up negative information about their products if it could hurt their bottom line.
Our sick and broken system is the fault of politicians, federal agencies, the medical establishment, and the media. They have a far different responsibility than private drug companies. But they’ve allowed themselves to be so captured by commercial interests that they function as little more than an advertising arm of the pharmaceutical industry …
It’s grown exceedingly common that when patients get sick during a study, instead of the drug company considering the illness to be a possible side effect — which is what should be the response — they seek to explain it away. They blame anything other than the experimental medicine.
Another blatant example of this twisting of science can be found in a May 2023 study to look at whether serious neurological, or brain and nerve, disorders were connected to Covid-19 vaccines. The study was entitled, “Observational Study of Patients Hospitalized With Neurologic Events After SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination.” It was published in Neurology Clinical Practice.
The first problem I see when reviewing the study is that, although some side effects don’t surface until months or years after a medicine is taken, the study scientists drew their conclusions based on a mere six-week period. They looked at only 138 people hospitalized after a Covid vaccination, and a limited number of neurological conditions, including stroke or blood clots, encephalopathy or brain damage, seizure, and intracranial bleeding.
But what really captures my attention is the study’s nonsensical conclusion. It states that since all 138 vaccinated, hospitalized patients had “risk factors” or “established causes” for their neurologic illnesses, such as high blood pressure for stroke victims, this proves the Covid vaccines are safe. “All cases in this study were determined to have at least 1 risk factor and/or known etiology accounting for their neurologic syndromes. Our comprehensive clinical review of these cases supports the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines,” reads the study discussion.
You don’t have to be a scientist to detect a serious flaw in their reasoning. It’s like claiming that an old person who falls down the stairs and breaks a hip — was injured by being old, and it had nothing to do with the fall down the stairs. Having high blood pressure to begin with doesn’t mean if you have a stroke after Covid vaccine, you can automatically rule out the vaccine as having an impact. In fact, you should immediately ask whether the vaccine might prove riskier to people with preexisting vulnerabilities.
Surely even a novice scientist should know this. So why did this ridiculous study get published? It looks suspiciously as if someone is trying to dispel growing safety concerns about the vaccines. I decide to find out who.
I learn that the study was conducted at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and New York–Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. It was funded by taxpayer money through the CDC. I email the primary study author, Dr. Kiran Thakur: “The study seems to imply that because people who suffered certain neurological events shortly after Covid vaccination had risk factors, it exonerates the vaccines from blame. But did the authors consider that people with existing risk factors could be at greater risk for vaccine adverse events?”
Instead of answering the question, Dr. Thakur replies, “Can you clarify the purpose of your questions (to be published, personal inquiry or otherwise).” When I reply that her responses might be published, she goes dark on me. When I persist in asking her to respond, she finally answers: “Declining, thank you.” Why isn’t a legitimate scientist happy to answer a simple question about her work? What’s the big secret?
Reaching a dead end with Dr. Thakur, I query the medical journal’s editorial staff. They loop me back to Dr. Thakur, saying only she can answer my questions. Shouldn’t the journal be asking the same questions?
Next I turn to Columbia University. I ask to see the study materials and related communications. I want to learn Who was behind this study, and did the peer reviewers or anybody else flag the obvious flaws? It’s a reasonable request because we, the public, funded the research and own the information. Besides, a basic tenet of scientific research dictates that there should be transparency in data and all aspects of studies. In fact, a study isn’t considered legitimate unless the data is available so that it can be verified and replicated by others with the same results.
But Columbia University stalls in responding to my emails. So I file a formal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the material. More time passes, and Columbia informs me that it’s a private institution and it doesn’t have to follow Freedom of Information Act law. I appeal on the basis of scientific transparency. Why does Columbia want to keep details of an important, publicly funded study secret? Isn’t that contrary to tenets of sound science? My appeal falls on deaf ears. University officials tell me they’ll only respond to validly issued and served subpoenas or court orders, and that “[s]ubpoenas to the University must be served on the Office of the General Counsel.”
Think of the audacity. A private university can take our tax money for a study, then refuse to answer questions about it because they’re a private university. To me it looks like the CDC can legally launder taxpayer dollars to third parties to produce what amounts to propaganda, then cover their tracks under a shroud of secrecy.
Next, I decide to file a FOIA request directly with the CDC, which is undeniably subject to the Freedom of Information Act. However, I know from experience that federal agencies spin the FOIA process into a tool to obfuscate. They rarely follow the provisions requiring them to turn over materials within twenty working days. And punishment for their violations is virtually nonexistent.
Sure enough, the CDC sits on my FOIA request for forty-two days before emailing to let me know they haven’t yet begun processing my request. They say I need to be much more specific, or they won’t consider responding. This raises one of the newer tricks federal agencies use to make it tougher for us to access information we own. They require FOIA requests to be impossibly precise. In the past, it was enough for a requester to provide a topic and date range. Agencies would search computer records using keywords. But now they claim they can’t do that.
The CDC FOIA officers now demand that I somehow discover and present them with names of each specific, archaic department and subdepartment that should be searched and the title of any documents I’m looking for. They further insist I provide names and titles of each person within those departments whose email accounts should be searched. And I must give them the number of the grant that awarded the taxpayer funds for the study. Problem is, I have no way to know any of that. The grant number was strangely omitted from the published study, and I have no clue how I would find names of the people who might have records, or what departments they work in. That’s a key part of what the FOIA response would reveal. Using these avoidance tactics, a federal agency can heighten their odds of keeping public documents secret …
There may be a silver lining. The bad guys finally went too far.
With Covid: the disinformation, intolerance for dissent, shutdowns, mandates, forced or withheld medical treatment, mass firings, and attacks upon tens of thousands of scientists sparked the formation of a diverse coalition. This coalition includes a mix of liberals, conservatives, and nonpartisans. It’s made up of freethinking parents, students, doctors, nurses, researchers, elected officials, and celebrities.
Many had never before questioned public health narratives or their doctors. Most had blindly supported them. But today, members of this new coalition find themselves probing widely pushed orthodoxy on Covid and beyond, rightly asking what else the media and top public health officials have misled us on.
Now, redemption from the grasp of those who seek to control our health and our lives may come through a collective awakening that’s already begun.
“Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails,” by Sharyl Attkisson, is now available at bookstores everywhere.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Court Finds Kennedy Has Standing in Our Consolidated Case
As I predicted, our new co-plaintiff Kennedy meets even the Supreme Court’s stringent standing requirements, the injunction against the government is back in play.

By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | August 26, 2024
As I explained in a previous post, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s companion lawsuit Kennedy v. Biden has been consolidated by the court into our Missouri v. Biden case. Based upon documents we obtained on discovery, the court recently found that Kennedy meets the Supreme Court’s stringent standing criteria. We only need one co-plaintiff with standing to bring the case and the petition for the injunction. So the injunction is back in play, and we will likely find ourselves at the Supreme Court again in a few months. Unless SCOTUS invents another technicality on which to temporize, they will be forced to rule on the merits of the evidence against the government, which we believe is overwhelming.
On the issue of Kennedy’s standing, U.S. District Court judge Terry Doughty last week ruled: “There is not much dispute that both Kennedy and CHD [Kennedy’s nonprofit Children’s Health Defense] were specifically targeted by the White House, the Office of Surgeon General, and CISA, and the content of Kennedy and CHD were suppressed. Therefore, Kennedy must now show a substantial risk that in the near future, at least one platform will restrict the speech of Kennedy in response to the actions of one Government Defendant.” Citing evidence we uncovered in Missouri v. Biden, Doughty explained: “The Court finds that Kennedy is likely to succeed on his claim that suppression of content posted was caused by actions of Government Defendants, and there is a substantial risk that he will suffer similar injury in the near future.”
As reported in The Kennedy Beacon Substack:
The latest ruling is not only significant for Kennedy but for the future of online speech. In June of this year, the Supreme Court ruled that the state attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana did not have standing to bring their case on government directed mass censorship. Now that Kennedy and the CHD have been found to have standing in the matter, the Supreme Court will likely have an opportunity to judge the issue on its merits rather than on a technicality as it did when making its standing ruling on an injunction in June.
If Kennedy and his co-plaintiffs are able to demonstrate to judges that the Biden administration’s intrusion into the actions of major social media companies resulted in censorship, the country will be one step closer to a major legal ruling guaranteeing freedom to speak online without the censorious interference of the federal government.
In related news, Kennedy announced Friday that he is suspending his presidential campaign. While he has deep disagreements with Trump on several issues, he is endorsing Trump’s candidacy to advance the key issues on which they have substantial agreements—including stopping government censorship and propaganda. His 48-minute speech announcing this decision was an extraordinary moment in American politics and is worth watching. In addition to discussing the issue of government censorship, which seriously hamstrung his ability to campaign, Kennedy’s remarks focus also on the root causes of the current epidemic of chronic disease in the United States.
While there is online buzz that Trump may tap Kennedy as Attorney General, I anticipate if Trump is elected he will appoint Kennedy to his cabinet as Secretary of Health and Human Services, a department which includes the CDC, FDA, and NIH. This could prove a welcome opportunity for the reform of our public health agencies. I am currently working with a team of policy analysts and health freedom advocates on concrete policy proposals for just such reforms, and will keep you posted on our progress with that project.
What Does a Fraudulent Vaccine Safety Study Look Like?
By Dr. William H. Gaunt | The Defender | August 26, 2024
New vaccines should be proven safe before they are accepted onto the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine schedule.
Here is what is actually happening: Vaccine companies are doing studies that claim to demonstrate the safety of new vaccines but are carefully designed and conducted to intentionally hide the toxicity of these vaccines.
To see how this is done, read on.
What does an honest vaccine safety study look like?
An honest safety study must have a test group that gets the vaccine and a control group that gets a harmless placebo. Injuries and deaths are compared in the two groups.
If the test group has many more adverse events than the placebo control group, the vaccine is not safe.
Most people would be shocked to learn that none of the vaccines on the CDC vaccine schedule have been safety tested in this way.
What does a fraudulent vaccine safety study look like?
Rule No. 1 for conducting a fraudulent study: Do not have a placebo control group. Here is where the fraud is happening: The “control group” is deliberately given something that is as toxic as the vaccine being tested. It can be an older vaccine or the vaccine ingredients minus the antigen.
The results will show that the injuries and deaths are similar in both groups. That is because they are both receiving toxic ingredients. The new vaccine is then illogically declared safe.
If there is no placebo control group, the toxicity of the vaccine is hidden. This is both clever and diabolical. Can you see it?
The public is unaware of this subterfuge
“Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth” is the most thorough and brutally honest book ever written about vaccines.
The authors tell us on page 81:
“As we have seen in this chapter, vaccine trials are designed and performed in such a way as to ensure that the true extent of adverse events is hidden from the public. There is not a single vaccine in the US routine childhood vaccination schedule whose true rate of adverse events is known.”
Two examples of how unsafe toxic vaccines got on the CDC vaccine schedule
Prevnar-13 (a pneumococcal vaccine) was given to the test group of children and the “control group” was given the older Prevnar vaccine.
Severe adverse events occurred in 8.2% (one out of every 12 children) in the test group. Severe adverse events also occurred in 7.2% (one out of every 14 children) of the control group.
What percent of a placebo control group would have had severe adverse events? Probably 0% because they would have received something harmless. We can’t know because the authors of this study chose not to have a placebo control group.
The Prevnar-13 vaccine was declared “safe” and was approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). You don’t have to be a doctor or scientist to suspect that both the Prevnar and the Prevnar-13 vaccines are unsafe. “Turtles All The Way Down” covers this fraudulent vaccine safety study on pages 60 and 61.
Here is the second example, which the authors describe on pages 77 and 78:
“In one of the DTaP vaccine trials, 1 in every 22 subjects in the trial group was admitted to the hospital. A similar hospitalization rate was also reported in the ‘control group’ (which received the older-generation DTP vaccine).”
Again, there was no placebo control group. Both vaccines appear to be decidedly unsafe yet the newer DTaP vaccine made it onto the CDC vaccine schedule. DTP and DTaP vaccines contain antigens for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.
Why is this happening?
Ultimately, the answer is greed. It is enormously profitable to get a vaccine on the CDC schedule. Vaccine companies will do whatever it takes to accomplish this. If it takes a little scientific fraud, so be it.
The vaccine companies are cheating on vaccine safety studies by omitting placebo control groups, thereby lying about the safety of vaccines. The FDA and CDC are complicit because they are doing nothing to stop this fraud.
Corporate capture or regulatory capture
The FDA and CDC are regulatory agencies. The original function of these agencies was to protect the public from dangerous drugs and vaccines.
Unfortunately, these agencies have been captured by Big Pharma. They no longer focus on protecting the public. They focus on protecting and promoting the interests of pharma companies.
Can we compare the health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children?
Theoretically, yes but not if we expect our health authorities or pharma companies to do these types of studies. Chapter 6 of the “Turtles” book is titled “The Studies That Will Never Be Done.”
On page 207 the authors tell us:
“No study that compares the health of vaccinated children to that of unvaccinated children has ever been done by the medical establishment.”
If such a study showed that vaccinated children are healthier than unvaccinated children, it would have been published and been headlined in every newspaper and been the lead story on the nightly news. That hasn’t happened. We suspect that such a study has been done internally at the CDC.
The unwanted conclusion that they won’t allow to see the light of day is that unvaccinated children are far healthier than vaccinated children. This study has likely been done and buried instead of published. Such a study is verboten because it would be a disaster for the vaccine companies.
Private studies show that unvaccinated children are healthier
Here are two privately funded studies:
- “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination” by Dr. Paul Thomas and James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D.
- “Analysis of health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children: Developmental delays, asthma, ear infections and gastrointestinal disorders” by Brian S. Hooker, Ph.D., and Neil Z. Miller.
Another great resource is the book “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak,” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Hooker. They report on many studies where unvaccinated children have better health outcomes compared to vaccinated children.
Science is for sale
The book “Science for Sale: How the US Government Uses Powerful Corporations and Leading Universities to Support Government Policies, Silence Top Scientists, Jeopardize Our Health, and Protect Corporate Profits” by David L. Lewis, Ph.D., tells the story of how corporate profits can frequently trump true science.
This happens in many industries, not just in vaccines. It is not unusual for government agencies to take the side of the corporations. The author was fired from the EPA for revealing details of how this happens.
The health of the public is subverted by powerful corporations in these situations. Does that sound familiar? Lewis doesn’t cover vaccines in his book except in Chapter 7 where he describes how Dr. Andrew Wakefield was unjustly crushed for questioning the safety of the measles-mumps-rubella or MMR vaccine.
Are vaccines the main cause of autism?
If the answer is yes, that would be very bad for vaccine companies. The “Turtles” authors point out on page 209 how our health authorities are trying hard not to find the correct answer to this question:
“Over the past 15 years, dozens of epidemiological studies have been conducted examining the association between vaccines and autism, but not a single one compared the rate of autism in fully vaccinated and fully unvaccinated children.”
If they actually wanted to answer this question, they would do vax/unvax studies. Such studies are easy to do but our health authorities refuse to do them.
Why do health authorities favor epidemiological studies?
The “Turtles” authors provide the answer on page 198:
“Epidemiological studies are the tool of choice for health authorities and pharma companies to maintain a facade of vaccine safety science. They are cheap, relatively simple to conduct, and, above all, their results are easily manipulated.”
It is entirely possible to get an epidemiological study to conclude whatever its authors want it to conclude. These types of studies are not the gold standard.
What caused the drastic decline in infectious disease mortality?
We are supposed to believe that vaccines have been our saviors. Not true. The huge decline in infectious disease mortality was largely due to sanitation, hygiene and improved nutrition (the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables year-round).
The “Turtles” authors make this clear on page 293. They reference a report by the American Institute of Medicine, which states:
“The number of infections prevented by immunization is actually quite small compared with the total number of infections prevented by other hygienic interventions such as clean water, food, and living conditions.”
The claim that vaccines alone saved us is false and our health authorities know it is false.
Below is a simple graph that causes cognitive dissonance in those who believe that vaccines saved us from high rates of infectious disease mortality.

We can clearly see that deaths from measles were reduced to near zero by the interventions mentioned above BEFORE the measles vaccine was introduced.
Similar graphs for other infectious diseases are shown in the book “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History” by Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk. The mortality rate for all infectious diseases was dropping rapidly before vaccines were introduced.
Do you smell a rat?
Yes. And it has been dead for quite a while. We have been bamboozled (deceived, cheated, swindled and defrauded).
Vaccines are now doing far more harm than good by causing a huge increase in chronic diseases like autism, asthma, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or ADHD, Type 1 diabetes, learning disabilities, seizures and much more.
It is way past time to use honest unbiased science to sort it out. Imagine what will happen when honest science is applied to vaccine safety studies.
Here is how the ‘Turtles’ authors sum it up
On page 518:
“Science belongs to the people. It belongs to humanity, not to corrupt government agencies and pharmaceutical giants who collude to rewrite the principles of science in order to continue the decades-long cover-up of their crimes against humanity.
“The magnitude of these crimes is enormous — these entities are in way too deep to ever be able to admit any wrongdoing. They will do whatever is necessary to protect the great vaccine hoax. For them, it is a matter of life and death — literally. And so it is for us.”
The lie that vaccines are safe and effective and that serious adverse events are exceedingly rare is still believed by many people — yet trust in pharma and our coopted regulatory agencies is now rapidly eroding. For example, only a tiny percentage of people are continuing to take the COVID-19 vaccine boosters.
Also, the percentage of parents who are choosing to obtain an exemption to vaccines for their children is increasing. This can be done in almost all states.
It is becoming obvious to a growing number of people that we are being intentionally misled regarding vaccines and vaccine safety.
CDC USES ‘COVID SURGE’ TO STOKE FEAR
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | August 22, 2024
The CDC is using new, questionable techniques to declare a ‘COVID surge’ and stoke fears. Coincidentally, a new booster hits the market as students head back to school. Jefferey Jaxen reports.


