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Pharma Controlled FDA Approves Inadequately Tested Alzheimer’s Drug

By Stephen Lendman | June 9, 2021

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, around 6 million Americans suffer from the degenerative disease.

The number is projected to more than double by 2050.

One in three US seniors dies from Alzheimer’s disease or dementia — more than breast and prostate cancer combined.

In 2021, treating Alzheimer’s and dementia patients cost an estimated $355 billion.

By 2050, the cost is expected to be about $1.1 trillion.

Over 11 million American families have one or more members afflicted by these diseases.

From 2000 – 2019, US deaths from heart disease declined by 7.3% while individuals in the country dying from Alzheimer’s disease rose by 145%.

Professor of Medicine, medical ethics and neurology Dr. Jason Karlawish is board certified to practice geriatric medicine.

Among his extensive credentials, he heads the University of Pennsylvania’s Neurodegenerative Disease Ethics and Policy Program, is associate director of the Clinical Core and co-associate director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Core Center, as well as co-director of the Penn Memory Center.

He’s involved with the Healthy Brain Research Network.

It’s dedicated to surveillance, education, awareness, empowerment and promotion of brain health. 

He heads  makingsenseofalzheimers.org at the University of Pennsylvania’s Neurodegenerative Disease Ethics and Policy Program.

As part of his research on neuroethics and policy, he investigated issues in dementia drug development, informed consent, quality of life, and treatment decision-making.

On May 30 — days before the FDA’s premature approval of Biogen’s experimental, inadequately tested aducanumab Alzheimer’s drug — Karlawish minced no words saying the following:

If approved, “I won’t prescribe it,” adding:

When asked if any new safe and effective drugs exist to treat Alzheimer’s disease, he unequivocally said, “No.”

He’s been saying the same thing “for the past 18 years,” he explained.

Drugs he prescribes to ease cognitive problems “are only moderately effective.”

No magic bullet otherwise exists.

No drugs slow cognitive impairment to let affected individuals maintain control over their lives.

He and colleagues involved in treating Alzheimer’s patients won’t prescribe aducanumab because “Biogen hasn’t made a convincing case for it,” he explained, adding:

“The consequences of FDA approval are as disturbing as they are vast.” 

Millions of “Americans could be prescribed aducanumab, at an estimated cost that ranges from $20,000 to $50,000 per person per year.” 

“Biogen claims the benefits of slowing declines in cognition and day-to-day function are worth this price.” 

Karlawish disagrees, saying Biogen data are “murky.”

“(T)he drug’s benefits are ambiguous at best and not worth this cost.” 

“Putting it on the market will stress Medicare’s resources.”

Dubious benefits will force families of Alzheimer’s patients to decide if the high cost is worth the risks posed by the drug.

One risk “is small bleeds in the brain, a risk that is heightened in those with the APOE4 gene, a gene associated with late-onset Alzheimer’s disease,” Karlawish explained.

“Aducanumab is not the drug to launch a new era of Alzheimer’s treatment.” 

“It hasn’t been properly studied…so the FDA has incomplete data to form a judgment.”

What’s going on is “good for business but bad for science and patient care.”

According to investors.com, after aducanumab failed two final-phase studies in March 2019, Biogen’s stock lost a third of its value.

After a phase-three test suggested promise — despite 10 members of an FDA advisory committee recommending against its approval — Biogen’s stock rose over 30%.

According to biotech company Cassava Sciences’ CEO Remi Barbier, the anti-amyloid approach used by Biogen “failed repeatedly…for the past 25 – 30 years, adding:

“Normally, when an approach fails, sometimes you try again.” 

“Certainly, three strikes and you’re out.” 

“It’s been 20 strikes and they’re still batting.”

Biogen is a troubled company. 

According to investors.com, generics are eating into sales of its biggest moneymaker, the multiple sclerosis treatment Tecfidera.” 

“In the first quarter, Tecfidera sales plunged 56%.”

In partnership with Ionis Pharmaceuticals, sales of Biogen’s  spinal muscular atrophy drug Spinraza fell about 8%.

Is FDA approval of aducanumab more about preventing Biogen’s bankruptcy than treating Alzheimer’s patients safely and effectively?

Before the drug’s approval, macreoaxis rated possible Biogen bankruptcy at 28.56% because of its troubled financial situation.

In Phase 2 clinical trials, the FDA let Biogen “skip a crucial step in drug development…to assure that the final phase of testing (Phase 3) will make a convincing case that the drug should be marketed to providers and patients,” Karlawish explained, adding:

“Biogen’s application for approval divided the FDA.”

Its advisory committee sided with the yeas over the neas even though the latter case was much more convincing.

Company data on aducanumab are “incomplete and contradictory,” said Karlawis.

“Skipping a key phase of research” was a business, not a science-based, decision.

Families with an Alzheimer’s disease member are grasping at whatever may offer hope.

The verdict on aducanumab won’t be known unless “Biogen invests the time and money needed to run well-designed trials and complete them,” Karlawis stressed.

Given premature FDA approval, they’re highly unlikely to be conducted.

Aducanumab users will be playing Russian roulette with their health by volunteering as virtual guinea pigs with an inadequately developed drug that may make a bad situation worse.

June 9, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Why Is There Such Reluctance to Discuss Natural Immunity?

By Jon Sanders | AIER | June 4, 2021

If you’re among those of us who aren’t tribally invested in Covid politics but would like good information about when life will resume as normal, chances are you’re interested in herd immunity. You’re likely not interested in having to rely on the Internet Archive for good information on herd immunity. Alas, it’s become a go-to place for retrieving, as it were, previously published information on herd immunity that became inconvenient post-vaccine and then virtually Memory-Holed.

Over the past 15 months, the litany of Experts’ True Facts and Science regarding various aspects of SARS-CoV-2 has changed more often than the starting lineup of a bad minor league ball club. Covid-19 is spread by droplets, especially from asymptomatic people, until one day it was airborne all along and people who weren’t sick in all likelihood weren’t even sick. Stay at home, you’re safer indoors, even stay away from parks and beaches; well, actually, outdoors is the place to be. Masks don’t work against viruses and are actually unhealthy to wear if you’re not sick, then suddenly they did work and without one you might as well be shooting people. Everyone knows and PolitiFact verified that the virus couldn’t have been created in the prominent infectious disease lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in bats coincidentally at Covid Ground Zero until, one day, PolitiFact had to retract the entire “Pants on Fire!” article. And so forth.

Unfortunately, information about herd immunity has also not been immune to this kind of meddling. Until recent months, people readily understood that active immunity came about either by natural immunity or vaccine-induced immunity. Natural immunity comes from battling and defeating an actual infection, then having your immune system primed for the rest of your life to fight it off if it ever shows up again. This immunity is achieved at a sometimes very high personal price.

Vaccine-induced immunity is to prime your immune system with a weaker, non-threatening form of the invading infection, so that it’s ready to fight off the real thing should you ever encounter it, and without your having first to risk severe illness or death.

Those interested in herd immunity in itself likely don’t have a moral or political preference for one form of immunity to the exclusion of the other. Immunity is immunity, regardless of whether a particular person has it naturally or by a vaccine. All immunity contributes to herd immunity.

Others, however, are much less circumspect. They seem to have forgotten the ultimate goal of the public campaign for people to receive vaccination against Covid-19. It’s not to be vaccinated; it’s to have immunity. People with natural immunity — i.e., people whose immune systems have faced Covid-19 and won — don’t need a vaccine.

They do, however, need to be considered in any good-faith discussion of herd immunity. There are two prongs to herd immunity, as we used to all know, and those with natural immunity are the prong that’s being ignored. It’s not just mere oversight, however. Fostering such ignorance can lead to several bad outcomes:

  • People with natural immunity could be kept from employment, education, travel, normal commerce, and who knows what other things if they don’t submit to a vaccine they don’t need in order to fulfill a head count that confuses a means with the end
  • The nation could already be at herd immunity while governors and health bureaucrats continue to exert extreme emergency powers, harming people’s liberties and livelihoods
  • People already terrified of Covid — including especially those who’ve already had it — would continue to live in fear, avoiding human interaction and worrying beyond all reason
  • People could come to distrust even sound advice from experts about important matters, as they witness and grow to expect how what “the experts” counsel diverges from what they know to be wise counsel while it conforms to and amplifies the temporary needs of the political class

Those of us wanting good information certainly don’t want any of those outcomes. But others seem perfectly fine to risk them. They include not only elected officials, members of the media, political talking heads, self-important bureaucrats, and their wide-eyed acolytes harassing shoppers, but strangely also highly prominent health organizations.

For example, late last year Jeffrey Tucker showed that the World Health Organization (WHO) suddenly, and “for reasons unknown,” changed its definition of “herd immunity.” Using screenshots from a cached version on the Internet Archive, Tucker showed how the WHO altered its definition in such a way as to erase completely the role of natural immunity. Before, the WHO rightly said it “happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.” The WHO’s change stated that it happens “if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” Not long after Tucker’s piece appeared, the WHO restored natural immunity to its definition.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), seemingly apropos of nothing, on May 19 issued a “safety communication” to warn that FDA-authorized SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests “should not be used to evaluate immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time.” The FDA’s concern appears to be that taking an antibody test too soon after receiving a vaccination may fail to show vaccine-induced antibodies, but why preclude its use for “identifying people with an adaptive immune response to SARS-CoV-2 from a recent or prior infection?” Especially after stating outright that “Antibody tests can play an important role in identifying individuals who may have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and may have developed an adaptive immune response.”

Then there is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, that ubiquitous font of fatuous guidance. He had told people that herd immunity would be at 60 to 70 percent immunity, and then he started publicly cinching those numbers up: 75 percent, 80 percent, 85 percent, even 90 percent (as if Covid-19 were as infectious as measles). He is quoted in the New York Times admitting to doing so deliberately to affect people’s behavior:

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.

Now — or better put, as of this writing — Fauci has taken to arguing herd immunity is a “mystical elusive number,” a distracting “endgame,” and therefore not worth considering. Only vaccinations are worth counting. As he put it recently, “We don’t want to get too hung up on reaching this endgame of herd immunity because every day that you put 2 million to 3 million vaccinations into people [it] makes society be more and more protected.”

While composing an article about natural immunity and herd immunity for my home state of North Carolina, I happened to notice that the Mayo Clinic had removed a compelling factoid about natural immunity. It’s something I had quoted in an earlier discussion of the matter and wanted to revisit it.

Here’s what the Mayo Clinic once wanted people to know in its page on “Herd Immunity and COVID-19” with respect to natural immunity: “[T]hose who survived the 1918 flu (influenza) pandemic were later immune to infection with the H1N1 flu, a subtype of influenza A.” The Mayo Clinic pointed out that H1N1 was during the 2009-10 flu season, which would be 92 years later. That finding attested to just how powerful and long-lived natural immunity could be.

natural infection definition

As can be seen from the Internet Archive, however, sometime after April 14 the Mayo Clinic removed that compelling historical aside:

updated natural infection definition

The Mayo Clinic also reoriented its page to feature vaccination over “the natural infection method” (method? ) and added a section on “the outlook for achieving herd immunity in the U.S.” This new section stated that “it’s not clear if or when the U.S. will achieve herd immunity” but encouraged people nonetheless that “the FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at protecting against severe illness requiring hospitalization and death … allowing people to better be able to live with the virus.”

Why, from people who know better, is there so much interest in downplaying or erasing natural immunity?

Is it because it’s hard to quantify how many people have natural immunity? Is it out of a mix of good intentions and worry, that discussing natural immunity would somehow discourage (“nudge,” in Fauci’s term) people from getting vaccines who otherwise would? Is it simple oversight, being so focused on vaccinations that they just plain forgot about natural immunity? Or is something else at work?

Whatever the reason, it’s keeping Americans in the dark about how many people have active immunity from Covid-19. It’s keeping people needlessly fearful and suspicious of each other. It’s empowering executive overreach. Worst of all, it’s tempting people to consider government and business restrictions on the unvaccinated, regardless of their actual immunity.

Jon Sanders is an economist and the senior fellow of regulatory studies and research editor at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina.

June 4, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Illegitimate rules remove parental consent for Covid vaccines

The Rule of Law is being dismantled and our children are the prey

By Meryl Nass, MD | May 31, 2021

Continuing from the last post: the US had very high rates of Covid compared to many countries, and right now that seems to have been a good thing… since places like Australia and New Zealand seem to want to be able to impose lockdowns for the forseeable future as they pursue the impossible goal of zero Covid. Impossible because you are not going to get everyone on the planet to accept a shot, and then vaccinate the wild animals and pets who are also susceptible. We have basically reached herd immunity with a combination of vaccine and natural immunity. Since only 40% of the US population is fully vaccinated, according to the NYT, there has undoubtedly been a considerable amount of natural immunity that has accrued.

Why aren’t the media celebrating? Apparently the powers that be who have made so many disastrous decisions regarding pandemic management don’t want us to know this. Yet. Thus their huge hurry to vaccinate despite the law, despite the still experimental nature of the vaccine products:

* The colleges demanding vaccinations

* The employers firing the unvaccinated

* The authorization for 12-15 year olds

* The million dollar lotteries for vaccinees, and other excesses to coerce vaccinations

But now the ante has been upped even higher. While many laws have been disregarded during the pandemic emergency, under the rubric of an emergency, two things I learned today are the worst.

Children aged 12-15 are being invited to vaccine clinics without parental permission, in the cities of San Francisco and Philadelphia, and others, based on emergency edicts in local jurisdictions, coupled with a Declaration by Alex Azar in March 2020 broadening the liability waiver umbrella for “covered countermeasures” during a pandemic to virtually anyone who has anything to do with a vaccine program. This could be interpreted as covering anyone who chooses to mandate the vaccine, even while experimental. In other words, even though you are not permitted to mandate an experimental product, Alex Azar said he would not allow you to be punished if you did so.

There do exist real laws, which preceded the pandemic, that protect children as a special class from both being used as experimental subjects (which legally under EUA this is) and protect them by requiring parental consent for procedures, unless they are emancipated minors.

Unless these laws were revoked while I blinked, they still exist and as federal laws should supercede anything imposed by a lesser jurisdiction.

Let’s see what happens. This is “hot” news and I don’t have time to put in the links, but this is true.

Finally, the FDA has announced its vaccine advisory committee will meet on June 10 to advise (aka bless) FDA on authorization and/or licensure for pediatric Covid vaccines. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is possible the FDA will authorize Covid vaccines for younger children, or even license them, starting June 11.

Meanwhile, Israeli media have claimed that one in 3 to 6 thousand vaccinees (I think in the 15-30 age group) develops myocarditis. I am trying to get the official report on this.

It is likely the FDA is trying to forestall any more bad news, which is why it is moving so rapidly. Furthermore, the FDA has warned us that it may not be able to provide any background documents prior to the June 10 meeting. That means the public and the advisors may be entirely in the dark as the advisors vote to provide their approval for whatever the FDA has up its sleeve.

Meanwhile, the Indian Bar Association has served legal notice for suppression of ivermectin against the WHO Chief Scientist, who is a famous Indian who headed up the Indian Council of Medical Research before transferring to the WHO.

May 31, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , | Leave a comment

The FDA cover-up that led to the approval of the Pfizer vaccine

By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | May 25, 2021

As I’ve been documenting for the past year, the COVID experts have been contradicting themselves six ways from Sunday. As charlatans, they’re abject failures. They can’t keep their own story straight.

Thanks to an alert reader, I’ve come across a new blockbuster.

BY THEIR OWN STANDARDS, the FDA should never have allowed the Pfizer COVID vaccine to be shot into a single arm. The Agency’s Emergency Use Authorization was a crime—according to their own data.

Here we go.

The document, posted on the FDA website, is titled, “Vaccines and Related Biological Products; Advisory Committee Meeting; FDA Briefing Document Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.” [1]

It is dated December 10, 2020. The date tells us that all the information in the document is taken from the Pfizer clinical trial, based on which the FDA authorized the vaccine for public use.

A key quote is buried on page 42: “Among 3410 total cases of suspected but unconfirmed COVID-19 in the overall study population, 1594 occurred in the vaccine group vs. 1816 in the placebo group [who received a saltwater shot].”

Those shocking numbers have never seen the light of day in news media.

The comparative numbers reveal that the vaccine was not effective at preventing COVID-19. It was certainly not 50% more effective than no vaccine at all—the standard for FDA Emergency Use Authorization.

To make all this clear, I need to back up and explain the theory of the vaccine clinical trial.

The researchers assumed the SARS-CoV-2 virus was spreading everywhere in the world, and during the clinical trial, it would descend on some volunteers.

The billion-dollar question was: how many people receiving the vaccine would become infected, vs. how many people in the placebo group?

If it turned out that FAR FEWER people getting the vaccine became infected with SARS-CoV-2, the vaccine would be hailed as a success. It protected people against the virus.

But as you can see from the numbers above, that wasn’t the case at all.

So now we come to the vital weasel-phrase in the FDA document I just quoted: “suspected but unconfirmed COVID-19 [cases].”

“Well, you see, we can’t say these were ACTUAL COVID-19 cases. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. They’re in limbo. We want to keep them in limbo. Otherwise, our clinical trial is dead in the water, and we’ll never get approval for the vaccine.”

What does “suspected cases” mean? It can only mean these people all displayed symptoms consistent with the definition of COVID-19, but they’re unconfirmed cases because…their PCR tests were negative, not positive.

However, if their tests were negative, why would they be called “suspected cases” instead of “NOT CASES”?

Something is wrong here. The FDA is hedging its bets, muddying the waters, obscuring facts.

By FDA/CDC rules, a case of COVID-19 means: a person has tested positive, period.

That’s the way cases are counted.

These several thousand volunteers in the Pfizer clinical trial were either COVID-19 cases or they weren’t. Which is it?

The official response to that question is obvious: the FDA decided to throw the data from all those suspected cases in the garbage and ignore them. Poof. Gone.

Why do I say that?

Because if the FDA had paid serious attention to the several thousand “suspected cases,” they never would have authorized the vaccine for public use. They would have stopped the clinical trial and undertaken a very deep and extensive investigation.

Which they didn’t.

This is called a crime.

“But…but it’s not that simple. This is a complex situation. It’s a gray area.”

“No. It isn’t. If you were running a clinical trial of a new drug, and a few thousand people in the trial, who were given the drug, nevertheless came down with the disease symptoms the drug was supposed to cure, wouldn’t you cancel the trial and go back to the drawing board?”

“You mean if we were being honest? That’s a joke, right? We’re not honest. Don’t you get it?”

Yes. I get it. You’re criminals. Killers.

But wait. There’s more. The FDA document also states: “Suspected COVID-19 cases that occurred within 7 days after any vaccination were 409 in the vaccine group vs. 287 in the placebo group.”

That’s explosive. Right after vaccination, 409 people who received the shots became “suspected COVID cases.” This alone should have been enough to stop the clinical trial altogether. But it wasn’t.

In fact, the FDA document tries to excuse those 409 cases with a slippery comment: “It is possible that the imbalance in suspected COVID-19 cases occurring in the 7 days post vaccination represents vaccine reactogenicity with symptoms that overlap with those of COVID-19.”

Translation: You see, a number of clinical symptoms of COVID-19 and adverse effects from the vaccine are the same. Therefore, we have no idea whether the vaccinated people developed COVID or were just reacting to the vaccine. So we’re going to ignore this whole mess and pretend it’s of no importance.

Back in April of 2020, I predicted the vaccine manufacturers would use this strategy to explain away COVID cases occurring in the vaccine groups of their clinical trials.

It’s called cooking the data. It’s a way of writing off and ignoring COVID symptoms in the vaccine group—and instead saying, “The vaccine is safe and effective.”

And the FDA document, as I stated above, just puts an impenetrable cloud over all the volunteers in the Pfizer clinical trial by inventing a category called “suspected but unconfirmed COVID-19 cases,” and throwing those crucial data away, never to be spoken of again.

I’m speaking about them now. Any sensible person, looking at them, would conclude that the vaccine should never have been authorized.

Unless fraud, deception, profits, and destruction of human life via the vaccine were and are the true goals.

Finally: When you have “suspected cases,” and their ultimate status depends on doing a test, you do the test. You do it as many times as you need to, until it registers positive or negative. Then each “suspected case” becomes an actual case or no case at all.

Perhaps these “suspected cases” in the clinical trial were tested, and many of them came up positive, revealing they were actual COVID cases—but the researchers lied and covered up the fact that they were tested.

Or if you really don’t want to know whether “suspected cases” are actual cases, you don’t test them. You leave them in a convenient limbo and park them, never to be seen again.

Either way, the situation is patently absurd. By official standards, the PCR test decides whether a person is a case or not a case. Just do the test. Saying “we don’t know” is nothing more than a con and a hustle.

I’d love to hear the researchers try to talk their way out of this one. Here is how the conversation might go:

“So you’re saying these several thousand suspected COVID cases couldn’t be adjudicated one way or another?”

“That’s right. Their PCR tests were ‘indeterminate’.”

“That says something devastating about the test itself.”

“Well, sometimes you just can’t tell whether it’s positive or negative.”

“I see. And this ‘indeterminate’ result occurred in SEVERAL THOUSAND suspected cases.”

“I guess so, yes.”

“You know, you could have done something else with these suspected cases. A different test. You could have taken tissue samples and looked for the virus itself in a more direct way.”

“No. That wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Because…the actual virus…”

“Because no one has been able to come up with a specimen of the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

“Right.”

“So tell me—what does that indicate? I’ll tell you what it indicates. You can’t prove the SARS-CoV-2 virus exists.

“I have to go. I’m late for a meeting.”

“You’re late for more than just a meeting. Is it true a person becomes a virologist by cutting out a coupon from the back of a comic book and mailing it to a PO Box in Maryland?’

“Absolutely not. That’s outrageous.”

“What then?”

“The PO Box is in Virginia.”


SOURCES:

[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download

Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALEDEXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX.

May 25, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

America’s Public Health System Is Utterly Corrupt

By Paul Craig Roberts • Institute for Political Economy • May 24, 2021

A sure sign of a country’s collapse is the open corruption of its public and private institutions. When corruption no longer has to be hidden but can be openly flouted, the values and standards that comprised the country’s soul have eroded away.

Try to find an American institution that is not corrupt. Even when presented with the Covid threat the US public health system could not rise above the greed for profit. Effective cures, such as HCQ and Ivermectin were demonized and in many states prohibited. Most Covid deaths are the result of non-treatment.

Throughout the alleged “Covid Pandemic” regulatory agencies, health bureaucracies, medical associations, state governors, media, and Big Pharma have acted to prevent any alternative to a vaccine.

From day one the emphasis was on the profits from a vaccine. To get people to submit to an experimental and untested vaccine required the absence of cures. To keep the road open only for a vaccine even supplements such as NAC, which has shown effectiveness as both preventative and treatment of Covid, has been challenged by the FDA in its use as a supplement. In response, amazon.com, a major online marketer of dietary supplements removed NAC from its offerings.

The generation of fear was essential to stampeeding people to line up to be vaccinated. The fear was supplemented by threats of inability to travel, to attend sports events, to resume working at one’s job.

A Covid test, known as PCR, was intentionally run at high cycles known to result in a very high percentage of false positives. These false positives guaranteed a high infection rate that scared people silly. Economic incentives were used for hospitals to report all deaths as Covid deaths, thus greatly exaggerating Covid’s mortality.

As you might have noticed, last winter had no reporting of flu cases as flu was added to the Covid statistics.

A number of reports have been published that the Covid vaccine does not prevent some vaccinated people from coming down with Covid. Other reports say that vaccinated people become spreaders of Covid. There are also reports of a large number of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccine.

In order to suppress the facts and keep the Covid vaccine selling, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), which supported running the PCR test at high cycles in order to inflate the number of Covid cases, runs the PCR test at much lower cycles in the case of infected vaccinated people in order to minimize the number of vaccinated people who came down with Covid.

To further create an artificial picture of the vaccine’s effectiveness, asymptomatic and mild infections are excluded from the reporting of vaccinated people who catch Covid. Only vaccinated people who catch Covid who have to be hospitalized or die from Covid are counted among the people who caught Covid despite being vaccinated. However, unvaccinated people with only minor symptoms or false positives from a high cycle PCR test are added to the number of Covid cases.

See also: https://off-guardian.org/2021/05/18/how-the-cdc-is-manipulating-data-to-prop-up-vaccine-effectiveness/

This is obvious and blatant manipulation of statistics in order to scare people about Covid while reassuring them about the vaccine’s effectiveness. Overstating the number of cases among the unvaccinated while simultaneously understating the number of people who caught Covid despite being vaccinated is shameless and protects the contrived picture of the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.

The falsification of statistics in order to produce massive public fear and the prevention of treatment with known safe and effective cures in order to maximize death rates produced billions of dollars in profits for Big Pharma and associated industries, with Moderna’s CEO topping the list of nine new billionaires made rich from the rollout of Covid vaccines. These billionaires rode to their riches on the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who died from an enforced lack of treatment — mandated deaths to protect vaccine profits.

Will anything be done about this extraordinary corruption of the American public health system?

May 24, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Covid-19 vaccines: In the rush for regulatory approval, do we need more data?

By Peter Doshi | BMJ | May 18, 2021

After rollout under emergency authorisation, manufacturers of covid-19 vaccines now have their sights on regulatory approval. But what’s the rush, asks Peter Doshi, and is just six months of data from now unblinded trials acceptable?

In April 2021, Pfizer and Moderna announced efficacy results at the six month mark from the phase III trials of their respective covid-19 vaccines.1 2

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said the company’s data “confirm the favourable efficacy and safety profile of our vaccine and position us to submit a Biologics License Application to the US FDA [Food and Drug Administration].”1 And on 7 May it formally initiated that application which, if successful, will earn the Pfizer-BioNTech product, BNT162b2, the distinction of becoming the first covid-19 vaccine approved by the FDA.

Because lest we forget, all covid-19 vaccines currently in use in the US are available under emergency access only.

(The situation is similar in Europe, where four covid-19 vaccines have been granted “conditional marketing authorisations,” a fast track mechanism that can be used in emergencies. These can be converted into standard “marketing authorisations” pending positive data after authorisation, but this has not yet happened for any covid-19 vaccine being administered.)

As hundreds of millions of people around the world get vaccinated, it may seem like wordsmithing to highlight the fact that none of the covid-19 vaccines in use are actually “approved.” Through an emergency access mechanism known as Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA), the products being rolled out still technically remain “investigational.”3 Factsheets distributed to vaccinees are clear: “There is no FDA approved vaccine to prevent covid-19.”4

The approval-authorisation distinction is often misunderstood by the media,5 even in the scientific press. But it was the focus of much discussion back in September 2020. With large phase III trials by Pfizer and Moderna well under way, and the November US presidential election looming, many worried about political pressure resulting in the rollout of an unsafe or ineffective vaccine.6

The FDA had already come under fire, accused of bending to the White House in granting EUAs for two covid-19 treatments, hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma. But those fears largely dissipated when the FDA published a guidance document in early October outlining its expectations for the EUA. According to the document, at least half of a trial’s participants would need to be followed for at least two months.7 This alone made it all but certain no vaccine could cross the line before the election.

The FDA also said it would want a vaccine at least 50% effective (with a confidence interval reaching no lower than 30%) against a primary endpoint of preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection or covid-19 disease of any severity8—parameters it had previously defined as necessary for approval. Even for non-clinical parameters, like manufacturing quality, the FDA characterised its expectations for the EUA as “very similar” to those for approval.3

Six months: enough?

One key difference between EUA and approval (also called “licensure,” and which for vaccines is known as a BLA (Biologics License Application)) was the expected length of follow-up of trial participants. Unlike its clear articulation of two months for an EUA, the FDA has not committed to a clear minimum for approval.

Cody Meissner, a professor of paediatrics at Tufts University and member of the FDA’s advisory committee, was curious. “Is it possible to predict or estimate when conditions of safety and efficacy might be satisfied for BLA?” Meissner asked at the agency’s 10 December meeting which had been convened to consider the FDA’s first emergency authorisation for the Pfizer vaccine.

The FDA’s Doran Fink responded: “I couldn’t predict, but I will say that we typically ask for at least six months of follow-up in a substantial number of clinical trial participants to constitute a safety database that would support licensure.”

An approval based on six months of data would represent one of the fastest for a novel vaccine in FDA history. Among the six “first in disease” vaccines approved by the FDA since 2006, pre-licensure pivotal trials were a median of 23 months in duration, according to a recent analysis.9

Six months also seems substantially shorter than previously conceptualised expectations. A World Health Organization expert group on covid-19 vaccines (which included FDA regulators) in August 2020 called for follow-up “until at least month 12, or until an effective vaccine is deployed locally.”10 Another group, composed of industry and academic authors, similarly wrote in October 2020: “we recommend longer term follow-up of all participants … for at least a year after randomisation.”11

On paper, the phase III studies by Pfizer, Moderna, and Janssen are all of two years’ duration. But the FDA’s official position on minimum follow-up before licensure is unclear at best.

In its formal guidance last June, the agency said that for licensure applications, it wanted participants followed for covid-19 outcomes for “as long as feasible, ideally at least one to two years”12 after the first injection. But the same document states that safety assessments for “serious and other medically attended adverse events” should be studied “for at least six months after completion of all study vaccinations. Longer safety monitoring may be warranted for certain vaccine platforms.”

Asked to clarify whether its guidance is asking for follow-up of at least six months or one year, a spokesperson told The BMJ: “We do not have any further information beyond what is in the guidance document.”

Unblinded and without a control group—what about safety?

Duration of protection is not the only question that longer, placebo controlled trials can address. They also address vaccine safety.

“Very often, it’s the fact that we have that placebo controlled follow-up over time, that gives us the ability to say that the vaccine didn’t cause something at a longer period of time after vaccination,” the FDA’s Philip Krause explained last December.13

Yet there is a gap—currently of unknown size but growing—between any expectation of blinded placebo controlled data, and the reality that within weeks of the vaccines receiving an EUA the unblinding of trials commenced as placebo recipients were offered the chance to get vaccinated.

Steven Goodman, associate dean of clinical and translational research at Stanford University, told the FDA in an invited presentation last December, “Once a vaccine is made widely available and encouraged, maintaining a double blinded control group for more than a nominal period is no longer in the investigator’s (or regulator’s) control and undue pressure to do so may undermine the entire vaccine testing enterprise.”14

Goodman’s recommendation was to rapidly convert the trials into crossover studies, enabling those on placebo to get vaccinated (and vice versa), while maintaining the blind. The companies challenged the feasibility, calling it “onerous,” and a crossover never occurred.15

The BMJ asked Moderna, Pfizer, and Janssen (Johnson and Johnson) what proportion of trial participants were now formally unblinded, and how many originally allocated to placebo have now received a vaccine. Pfizer declined to say, but Moderna announced that “as of April 13, all placebo participants have been offered the Moderna covid-19 vaccine and 98% of those have received the vaccine.”2 In other words, the trial is unblinded, and the placebo group no longer exists.

Janssen told The BMJ: “We do not have specific figures on how many of our study participants have received a vaccine at this time.” But the company confirmed it was implementing an amended protocol across all countries to unblind all participants in its two phase III trials, the earlier of which passed the median of two month follow-up mark in January.

How the FDA will weigh the loss of blinding and placebo controlled follow-up is unclear, but just months ago the agency said these trial properties were vital.

“Continuation of placebo controlled follow-up after EUA will be important and may actually be critical to ensure that additional safety and effectiveness data are accrued to support submission of a licensure application as soon as possible following an EUA. … Once a decision is made to unblind an ongoing placebo controlled trial, that decision cannot be walked back. And that controlled follow-up is lost forever,” the FDA said last October.3

At its next advisory committee in December 2020, the FDA reiterated the importance of the placebo group: “Placebo controlled follow-up can be very important in showing that whatever happened in the vaccine group also happened in the placebo group. Because that’s our best way of knowing.”13

What’s the rush?

The US’s “Operation Warp Speed” delivered on its promise to get a novel vaccine into arms in record time (box). Millions of doses of vaccines are being administered daily across the US, making clear that lack of FDA approval is no barrier to access. So just what benefit is there in seeking, and granting, a BLA?

The BMJ asked the manufacturers why they were seeking a BLA. Moderna did not respond and Janssen only confirmed it intended to apply for a BLA “later in 2021.” Pfizer likewise did not answer but instead quoted an FDA webpage on medical devices, which stated: “Sponsors of EUA products are encouraged to follow up the EUA with a pre-market submission so that it can remain on the market once the EUA is no longer in effect.”16 But EUAs have no built-in expiry date—in fact, 14 EUAs for Zika diagnostic tests remain active despite the public health emergency expiring in 2017.17

Cody Meissner told The BMJ he saw some distinct advantages of a BLA over EUA. An approved vaccine, for one, would provide “an element of assurance,” increasing public trust in the vaccines, particularly for those currently sitting on the fence. It would also pave the way for claims of vaccine injury to be routed through a more established compensation programme, and for adding the vaccine to government funded schemes to reach children in financial need.18 Finally, it may affect the potential for vaccine mandates: “It is unlikely these vaccines will be mandated while an EUA is in place. Remember that currently these vaccines are still considered experimental.”

While still under EUA, an increasing number of educational and other institutions have already mandated vaccines, but debates over the legality of these actions has hinged on the distinction between authorisation and approval.19

But approving a vaccine in order to legally support mandates or convince people of its safety arguably puts the cart before the horse. Meissner responded that a BLA would not be issued until the FDA is convinced of the short and long term safety of these vaccines.

No new biodistribution studies for covid-19 vaccines

Officials have consistently emphasised that despite shaving years off traditional timelines for producing vaccines, no compromises in the process were taken.20 However one type of study, tracking the distribution of a vaccine once injected in the body, was not conducted using any of the three vaccines currently authorised in the US.

Such biodistribution studies are a standard element of drug safety testing but “are usually not required for vaccines,” according to European Medicines Agency policy,21 which adds, “However, such studies might be applicable when new delivery systems are employed or when the vaccine contains novel adjuvants or excipients.”

In the case of covid-19 vaccines, regulators accepted biodistribution data from past studies performed with related, mostly unapproved compounds that use the same platform technology.22232425

Janssen told The BMJ its covid-19 vaccine leverages the same technology as its Ebola vaccine, which received licensure last June. “Our confidence in our adenovirus vector Ad26 is based on our experience with this vector.”

Pfizer and Moderna did not respond to The BMJ’s questions regarding why no biodistribution studies were conducted on their novel mRNA products, and none of the companies, nor the FDA, would say whether new biodistribution studies will be required prior to licensure.

Footnotes

  • Competing interests PD gave a public statement at the October and December FDA advisory committee meetings mentioned in this article (transcripts here: https://faculty.rx.umaryland.edu/pdoshi/#publications), and may continue to engage in public input towards regulatory decision making around covid-19 vaccines. PD is also employed by a university that has mandated covid-19 vaccines for all faculty, staff, and students. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect official policy or position of the University of Maryland.

Peter Doshi, senior editor – pdoshi@bmj.com

References

May 19, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

FDA’s last word on the safety of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine was issued last year/ FDA

By Meryl Nass, MD | May 16, 2021

FDA managed to find 385 adverse event reports for either HCQ or CQ in its FDA adverse event reporting system database, as justification for withdrawing its EUA for the chloroquine drugs.

But there wa something strange about these reports. Only 102 of the 385 reports, or 26%, came from the United States. Why would foreigners be submitting reports of adverse events associated with a chloroquine drug to the FDA, instead of to their own pharmacovigilance system?

According to FDA, “FAERS is a database that contains information on adverse event and medication error reports submitted to FDA.” It is not an international database.

Might FDA have requested that foreign entities submit reports? Might some of those foreign entities have been sites where the HCQ overdose trials were conducted? The big three multicenter overdose trials were RecoverySolidarity and REMAP-Covid. Page 8 of the FDA report does indicate that some of those patients, for whom adverse event reports were filed, had received excessive HCQ doses. Of a total of 256 reports for which FDA had dosing data, depending where you place the excessive dose cut-off, between 23 and 95 had received high doses.

FDA did a number of different things to suppress the use of hydroxychloroquine. This just happens to be one thing I had not previously reported on.

What else is interesting is that this report was compiled in May 2020. It is attached to a website dated July 2020, ten months ago.

In the intervening 10 months, well over 100 papers have been published on HCQ’s use in Covid. FDA claims, “The FDA’s job is to carefully evaluate the scientific data on a drug to be sure that it is both safe and effective for a particular use…Yet FDA has ignored this massive amount of accumulating literature on hydroxychloroquine, during which 400,000 Americans died of/with Covid. Why? Willful misconduct?

May 17, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

FDA attempts to stop OTC sales of N-acetyle cysteine, an adjunctive treatment for Covid-19

By Meryl Nass, MD | May 16, 2021

Last July, FDA sent out warning letters to supplement companies, informing them that N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) could no longer be marketed as an ingredient in food supplements, using the justification that it was also a licensed drug.

FDA has concluded that NAC products are excluded from the dietary supplement definition under section 201(ff)(3)(B)(i) of the Act [21 U.S.C. § 321(ff)(3)(B)(i)]. Under this provision, if an article (such as NAC) has been approved as a new drug under section 505 of the Act [21 U.S.C. § 355], then products containing that article are outside the definition of a dietary supplement, unless before such approval that article was marketed as a dietary supplement or as a food. NAC was approved as a new drug under section 505 of the Act [21 U.S.C. § 355] on September 14, 1963. FDA is not aware of any evidence that NAC was marketed as a dietary supplement or as a food prior to that date.

But other drugs, such as Coenzyme Q10 and Vitamin D, are licensed as drugs but also permitted to be sold as supplements. And the federal government’s PubChem website lists many virtues of NAC.

In the case of NAC, it has been available as a licensed drug for 57 years in the US. It is widely used and very safe. Unlike many supplements, it has been extensively studied. Clinicaltrials.gov lists 541 studies for the search term ‘N-acetyl cysteine.’ Why did FDA suddenly decide its OTC use should be restricted?

This is especially troubling as a number of doctors have said it is useful in the treatment of Covid-19, especially during the late, cytokine storm stage, since it works as an antioxidant and a substrate for the production of glutathione. In fact, there is a growing body of literature on its benefits for Covid. Here is just one review.

Last week, Amazon stopped selling all products containing NAC. While no absolutely final decision has been made by FDA regarding NAC, it might be the third effective Covid treatment that the FDA has attempted to suppress, after the chloroquine drugs and ivermectin. Stay tuned.

May 16, 2021 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

YouTube restrictions on medical information are a public health concern

By PeterYim | TrialSiteNews | May 16, 2021

Recently, the American Journal of Therapeutics reported that there was strong evidence that a treatment for COVID-19 had been found:

“Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.”

The American Journal of Epidemiology also reported on strong evidence of a different treatment for COVID-19:

“Five studies, including 2 controlled clinical trials (of hydroxychloroquine), have demonstrated significant major outpatient treatment efficacy.”

What these reports have in common is that YouTube explicitly forbids these therapies to be discussed on its platform. It’s policy states:

“Don’t post content on YouTube if it includes ….. Claims that Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments for COVID-19”

Furthermore, YouTube characterizes any information that dissents from the view of the “local health authorities” or the World Health Organization as “misinformation”:

“YouTube doesn’t allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19.”

Under YouTube policy, the peer-review medical literature has lost its place as the source of medical information to governmental and para-governmental organizations. In the US, the relevant organizations are the FDA and the NIH. The FDA currently recommends against the use of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 except in clinical trials.

The FDA does not, however, offer any evidence to support this recommendation. In fact, the FDA clarifies:

“The FDA has not reviewed data to support use of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients to treat or to prevent COVID-19 …”

Nor does the FDA claim that any formal procedure was followed. It doesn’t even identify the individual or individuals who developed that recommendation.

The case of the NIH recommendation on Ivermectin is even more troubling. The NIH formally does not recommend for or against the use of Ivermectin but does make it clear that there are “insufficient data” to make that recommendation. The NIH names the medical experts who form the Panel and explains the procedures for developing the COVID-19 recommendations. Then, apparently, the NIH deceptively bypassed both in arriving at its recommendation.

Our reporting on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines has found that the NIH cannot state whether a vote was held to endorse the latest recommendation on Ivermectin. The NIH even decided to fight a complaint in federal court simply to avoid answering that question. This reporting shows that the NIH cannot be trusted.

Aside from the NIH’s deceptive ivermectin recommendation, the American public is generally skeptical of public health authorities. As reported earlier, a survey was recently conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health on the public’s views of the US public health authorities. The top line finding was:

“The public lacks the high level of trust in key public health institutions necessary to address today’s and future challenges.”

Why then is YouTube adhering so uncritically to the views of “local health authorities”? In so doing, it is obstructing patients and health care providers from accessing the best medical information.

May 16, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Memo to medical bloggers living in Mommy’s basement

And to medical reporters living in New York and Georgetown pulling down nice paychecks

By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | May 13, 2021

You see, bloggers and reporters, here is the problem (one among many, actually). You have no background.

You don’t understand that every time you write a medical piece, there is a context which should inform your every move:

The modern medical system kills and maims huge numbers of people.

To put it another way, THE MODERN MEDICAL SYSTEM KILLS AND MAIMS HUGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE.

Let me help you out.

ONE: “The Epidemic of Sickness and Death from Prescription Drugs.” The author is Donald Light, who teaches at Rowan University, and was the 2013 recipient of ASA’s [American Sociological Association’s] Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology. Light is a founding fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2013, he was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. He is a Lokey Visiting Professor at Stanford University.

Donald Light: “Epidemiologically, appropriately prescribed, prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death, tied with stroke at about 2,460 deaths each week in the United States. About 330,000 patients die each year from prescription drugs in the United States and Europe. They [the drugs] cause an epidemic of about 20 times more hospitalizations [6.6 million annually], as well as falls, road accidents, and [annually] about 80 million medically minor problems such as pains, discomforts, and dysfunctions that hobble productivity or the ability to care for others. Deaths and adverse effects from overmedication, errors, and self-medication would increase these figures.” (ASA publication, “Footnotes,” November 2014)

TWO: Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998: “Incidence of Adverse Drug Reactions in Hospitalized Patients.”

The authors, led by Jason Lazarou, culled 39 previous studies on patients in hospitals. These patients, who received drugs in hospitals, or were admitted to hospitals because they were suffering from the drugs doctors had given them, met the following fate:

Every year, in the US, between 76,000 and 137,000 hospitalized patients die as a direct result of the drugs.

Beyond that, every year 2.2 million hospitalized patients experience serious adverse reactions to the drugs.

The authors write: “…Our study on ADRs [Adverse Drug Reactions], which excludes medication errors, had a different objective: to show that there are a large number of ADRs even when the drugs are properly prescribed and administered.”

So this study had nothing to do with doctor errors, nurse errors, or improper combining of drugs. And it only counted people killed or maimed who were admitted to hospitals. It didn’t begin to tally all the people taking pharmaceuticals who died as consequence of the drugs, at home.

THREE: July 26, 2000, Journal of the American Medical Association; author, Dr. Barbara Starfield, revered public health expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health; “Is US health really the best in the world?”

Starfield reported that the US medical system kills 225,000 Americans per year. 106,000 as a result of FDA-approved medical drugs, and 119,000 as a result of mistreatment and errors in hospitals. Extrapolate the numbers to a decade: that’s 2.25 million deaths. You might want to read that last number again.

In 2009, I interviewed Dr. Starfield. Here is an excerpt:

What has been the level and tenor of the response to your findings, since 2000?

The American public appears to have been hoodwinked into believing that more interventions lead to better health, and most people that I meet are completely unaware that the US does not have the ‘best health in the world’.

In the medical research community, have your medically-caused mortality statistics been debated, or have these figures been accepted, albeit with some degree of shame?

The findings have been accepted by those who study them. There has been only one detractor, a former medical school dean, who has received a lot of attention for claiming that the US health system is the best there is and we need more of it. He has a vested interest in medical schools and teaching hospitals (they are his constituency).

Have health agencies of the federal government consulted with you on ways to mitigate the [devastating] effects of the US medical system?

NO.

Since the FDA approves every medical drug given to the American people, and certifies it as safe and effective, how can that agency remain calm about the fact that these medicines are causing 106,000 deaths per year?

Even though there will always be adverse events that cannot be anticipated, the fact is that more and more unsafe drugs are being approved for use. Many people attribute that to the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is (for the past ten years or so) required to pay the FDA for reviews [of its new drugs]—which puts the FDA into an untenable position of working for the industry it is regulating. There is a large literature on this.

Aren’t your 2000 findings a severe indictment of the FDA and its standard practices?

They are an indictment of the US health care industry: insurance companies, specialty and disease-oriented medical academia, the pharmaceutical and device manufacturing industries, all of which contribute heavily to re-election campaigns of members of Congress. The problem is that we do not have a government that is free of influence of vested interests. Alas, [it] is a general problem of our society—which clearly unbalances democracy.

Would it be correct to say that, when your JAMA study was published in 2000, it caused a momentary stir and was thereafter ignored by the medical community and by pharmaceutical companies?

Are you sure it was a momentary stir? I still get at least one email a day asking for a reprint—ten years later! The problem is that its message is obscured by those that do not want any change in the US health care system.

Are you aware of any systematic efforts, since your 2000 JAMA study was published, to remedy the main categories of medically caused deaths in the US?

No systematic efforts; however, there have been a lot of studies. Most of them indicate higher rates [of death] than I calculated.

Did your 2000 JAMA study sail through peer review, or was there some opposition to publishing it?

It was rejected by the first journal that I sent it to, on the grounds that ‘it would not be interesting to readers’!

Do the 106,000 deaths from medical drugs only involve drugs prescribed to patients in hospitals, or does this statistic also cover people prescribed drugs who are not in-patients in hospitals?

I tried to include everything in my estimates. Since the commentary was written, many more dangerous drugs have been added to the marketplace.

—end of interview excerpt—

FOUR: BMJ June 7, 2012 (BMJ 2012:344:e3989). Author, Jeanne Lenzer. Lenzer refers to a report by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices: “It [the Institute] calculated that in 2011 prescription drugs were associated with two to four million people in the US experiencing ‘serious, disabling, or fatal injuries, including 128,000 deaths.’”

The report called this “one of the most significant perils to humans resulting from human activity.”

The report was compiled by outside researchers who went into the FDA’s own database of “serious adverse [medical-drug] events.”

Therefore, to say the FDA isn’t aware of this finding would be absurd. The FDA knows. The FDA knows and it isn’t saying anything about it, because the FDA certifies, as safe and effective, all the medical drugs that are routinely maiming and killing Americans. Every public health agency knows the truth.

FIVE: None of the above reports factor in death or injury by vaccine.

The US system for reporting severe adverse effects of vaccines is broken.

Barbara Loe Fisher, of the private National Vaccine Information Center, has put together a reasonable analysis:

“But how many children have [adverse] vaccine reactions every year? Is it really only one in 110,000 or one in a million who are left permanently disabled after vaccination? Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler observed in 1993 that less than 1 percent of doctors report adverse events following prescription drug use. [See DA Kessler, ‘Introducing MEDWatch,’ JAMA, June 2, 1993: 2765-2768]”

“There have been estimates that perhaps less than 5 or 10 percent of doctors report hospitalizations, injuries, deaths, or other serious health problems following vaccination. The 1986 Vaccine Injury Act contained no legal sanctions for not reporting; doctors can refuse to report and suffer no consequences.”

“Even so, each year about 12,000 reports are made to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System [VAERS]; parents as well as doctors can make those reports. [See RT Chen, B. Hibbs, ‘Vaccine safety,’ Pediatric Annals, July 1998: 445-458]”

“However, if that number represents only 10 percent of what is actually occurring, then the actual number may be 120,000 vaccine-adverse events [per year]. If doctors report vaccine reactions as infrequently as Dr. Kessler said they report prescription-drug reactions, and the number 12,000 is only 1 percent of the actual total, then the real number may be 1.2 million vaccine-adverse events annually.”

SIX: Here is a stunning quote from a doctor who has quite probably read and analyzed as many medical-drug studies as any other doctor in the world:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)


Compare that quote with one from “the father of COVID science,” Tony Fauci. In an interview with the National Geographic, Fauci stated: “Anybody can claim to be an expert even when they have no idea what they’re talking about… If something is published in places like New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, Cell, or JAMA—you know, generally that is quite well peer-reviewed because the editors and the editorial staff of those journals really take things very seriously.”

They take things so seriously at the New England Journal, they routinely publish glowing studies of medical drugs which, as evidence shows, are killing people in great numbers.

So… you medical bloggers living in mommy’s basement, and you medical reporters who live in New York and Georgetown and pull down nice paychecks, you now have some background. Every time you write a Mockingbird article (aka puff piece), you can fathom how deep your lies really go, and how much crime you’re really involved with.

It’s never too late to tell the truth. I’m offering you a way out.

May 14, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

We Have A COVID Lifeline. The Powers Won’t Allow It.

By Mary Beth Pfeiffer | Trial Site News | April 23, 2021

In a widely reported announcement, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned, “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19.”

Taking the drug “can be very dangerous,” FDA said, though 33 years of human use, billions of doses and a Nobel Prize for annihilating parasitic illness suggest otherwise.

The FDA statement, which is the lynchpin of COVID policies worldwide, purported to protect the public from taking over-the-counter ivermectin meant for animals. But its real purpose was to instill fear.

Indeed, a war on ivermectin — by public health agencies, corporations that stand to cash in on the pandemic, and social and mass media – is being waged to dismiss a drug that could be a lifeline to normalcy.

Why?

Confused By The Facts

Ivermectin is a case study in official decrees that do not align with reality.

Take a close look the World Health Organization’s contortions before declaring on March 31 that ivermectin should be limited to experimental trials. WHO first ignored its own commissioned analysis that found the drug would cut COVID deaths by 75 percent. Then, WHO handed the job to a different team, which also found far fewer deaths with ivermectin – but ruled its cherry-picked evidence unconvincing. That is the analysis WHO chose.

Or read the lone study — one among 52 ivermectin trials — that did not find significant evidence of improvement in COVID patients. Despite contradictions and flaws, including some patients given the wrong drug, the results were accepted by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Scour the list of positive studies, many from countries where this inexpensive drug is reducing illness. Few medical journals will publish them. Though available online, the media ignores them. Major outlets that have not done a single serious story on ivermectin jumped on the told-you-so JAMA story.

Finally, consider that right now, social media is in the midst of a brutal little-reported campaign of censorship to the point that YouTube policy precludes users from saying ivermectin prevents or helps COVID.

Why so rigorously manage the message if the evidence is so weak?

Data Versus The FDA

A website tracker summarizes those 52 ivermectin trials, involving more than 17,500 patients. Collectively, ivermectin:

–Prevented 85 percent of infections (similar to vaccines);

–Resolved 81 percent of early illness;

–Improved 43 percent of late-treated patients;

–Reduced deaths by 76 percent.

As authorities dismiss study after study, it has become clear. The drug’s rejection is not based on science, data or the experience of many doctors. Instead, a disinformation campaign is raging to demonize the drug and belittle studies that support it.

Exhibit #1: The FDA announcement. The agency said in March it had received “multiple reports of patients who have required medical support and been hospitalized” after taking a form of ivermectin used to treat horse parasites.

Among many alarming articles, I could not find any that actually told how many people were “poisoning themselves,” as one report put it. I asked the FDA press office what it meant by “multiple.”

The answer: Four. Three people required hospitalization, though, beyond that, the FDA had no details.

“Some of these cases were lost to follow up, so we can’t be sure of the final outcome,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “Privacy laws” precluded further comment.

For all we know, the patients might have been sick from COVID, not horse paste, which is regrettably used when patients cannot get the real thing. Ivermectin, incidentally, is FDA-approved and permitted for off-label use, with just 19 associated deaths since 1992, compared to 503 for remdesivir since 2020.

The seeds were nonetheless planted: Ivermectin was an “evolving threat” and “fake COVID treatment,” encouraged by “conspiracy sites trying to push this drug in really high doses.” All based on four cases.

So far, there have been more than 2,500 U.S. deaths after vaccination for COVID-19. I see no hysterical reporting on that.

Unsupported Conclusions

Exhibit #2: The WHO recommendation. On March 31, the World Health Organization dealt a gut punch to ivermectin, decreeing it should be limited to clinical trials only. But the WHO’s review was limited, questionable and seemingly hastily done.

First, the WHO working group called the evidence that ivermectin reduced deaths of “very low certainty” based on five studies. Why so few?

An independent analysis, also done in March, analyzed 13 studies and found ivermectin decreased the risk of death by 68 percent, an effect that was “consistent across mild to moderate and severe disease subgroups.” The systematic review was led by Dr. Tess Lawrie, a physician and author on 41 Cochrane Reviews, which are routinely used to inform medical guidelines.

In the earlier report that WHO discounted, six mortality studies were examined by the University of Liverpool’s Dr. Andrew Hill — four of which were curiously left out of the second WHO analysis.

Notably, even the studies assessed by the WHO group showed strong reductions in deaths. But the group used unconventional methods to downgrade them, Lawrie said in a YouTube interview. It classified two less-impressive studies as having a low risk of bias, wrongly in Lawrie’s view. That effectively inflated their importance, and helped the review conclude the evidence was lacking.

“You have a risk of death across these studies — in their data — of 70 per thousand, and if you get ivermectin you have a risk of death of 14 per thousand,” Lawrie said in the interview with Dr. John Campbell, a PhD nursing teacher.

That comes to a 72 percent reduction in deaths in patients treated with ivermectin, Lawrie said. But indicative of what Lawrie called a “slapdash” approach, a table of conclusions in the WHO study refers to seven, not five, mortality studies, and to an 81 percent reduction in deaths. “Very strange,” Lawrie said.

Significantly, the review omitted trials analyzed by both Lawrie and Hill that demonstrated significantly fewer deaths: From Egypt (92 percent), Bangladesh (86 percent), Iraq (67 percent) and Turkey (33 percent).

Moreover, the WHO review failed to even look at the strongest evidence in favor of ivermectin: its potential to prevent infection.

Dr. Pierre Kory, president of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, believes that omission was designed to protect the Emergency Use Authorization, which allows administration of unapproved vaccines if no alternative exists. “If ivermectin were to be approved as a standard therapy,” he said in a broadcast to supporters, “…that would kneecap the entire global vaccine policy around the world.”

(Note: I reached out several times to Dr. Bram Rochwerg, co-chair of the WHO analysis. A spokesperson at McMaster University in Canada, where he is an associate professor, said he would have no comment.)

Selection Bias?

Exhibit #3: The JAMA study. Predictably, the WHO report included the only existing negative ivermectin trial in its review, giving the Cali, Colombia study an inexplicable thumbs-up label of  “low risk of bias.”

The flaws, outlined in a critique led by David Scheim and in a letter signed by 120 doctors, call that designation, and JAMA’s publication, into serious question.

–With an average age of 37 and lean body mass, the study population was inclined to do well from the get-go — “nebulous parameters,” Schein said, that made statistical relevance negligible. Testament to the robust nature of the group, just one person died in the untreated group, a rate six times lower than locally. Of note, no treated patient died.

–38 people in the control group were accidentally given ivermectin, a serious error, underscoring the letter’s assertion, “The study’s flaws span subject population, design, execution and controls.”

–Participants reported symptoms by telephone, and without objective examination, 16 days after treatment ended, a highly unusual lag time. “Not credible,” the letter said.

Of crucial importance, both patient groups – one got ivermectin and one did not – had almost identical, though minor, side effects, a “striking anomaly” that suggests something, Scheim said. Perhaps ivermectin, which is widely available in Colombia, did not appear to make a significant difference because both groups were taking it. Ivermectin has a bitter taste and 64 placebo patients were given sugar water, compromising a fundamental of controlled trials — that patients cannot discern what treatment they get.

Why would a premier medical journal accept an article with such glaring flaws?

An Organized Campaign

Exhibit #4: Information Management. Everyday, my inbox grows with messages of people who had items removed from Twitter, LinkIn, Facebook and YouTube. Several people were locked out of Twitter for tweets on the results of a registered trial that found ivermectin prevents COVID. I was also locked out of Twitter for eight days after writing the fateful words: “Ivermectin works.”

Aside from a couple of opinion articles in the Wall Street Journal, the media has barely taken notice. Yet this is a clear assault on free expression by outlets that, though privately owned, are essentially monopolies.

“We must never allow anonymous censors to determine what is medical misinformation,” Associate Professor Seymour M. Cohen of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in a letter to the WSJ, “and cancel scientific inquiry and discussion with which they disagree.”

Held Hostage

Although Kory, Lawrie and others are accused of medical “misinformation,” the real problem, Kory says, is disinformation, akin to historical efforts to cover-up the ills of tobacco and other pharmaceutical and government mistakes.

Among the slew of studies that support ivermectin, you will rarely if ever find listed under authors’ potential conflicts of interest the names of pharmaceutical powerhouses like Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, Merck Sharp & Dohme, and Gilead. Yet, each of those was listed on the JAMA article’s COI disclosures.

Merck itself pioneered ivermectin – its chief scientist sharing the Nobel in the process – and has repeatedly said it is a safe, essential medication. Yet Merck disavowed ivermectin for COVID in February in yet another example of how facts do not align with reality. Reuters and others eagerly reported Merck’s statement, but never mentioned the company’s $356-million deal to supply the U.S. government with an “investigational therapeutic.”

The rejection of ivermectin may not be a grand coordinated conspiracy, says Jay Sanchez, an attorney in New York City. Rather, it grows out of something more mundane and insidious that he studied 35 years ago in a course at Harvard Law School taught by later-Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Bryer: “Regulatory Capture.”

“Regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the industries or interests they are charged with regulating,” says Investipedia. Hence, they act more on behalf of the companies they regulate than on the public they serve. Blame “regulator complacency, cozy relationships,” wrote economist Fred S. Grygiel, “and ultimately, conflicts of interest.”

Those relationships allow PR campaigns to shape messages, news outlets and social media companies to mercilessly reinforce them, and spineless government agencies go along with the shadows of doubt rather than the robust evidence.

That is ivermectin today.


Mary Beth Pfeiffer is an investigative journalist and author of Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change. She was authored 10 articles for Trial Site News.

April 23, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

FDA Approves Gilead’s Remdesivir To Treat COVID-19 Despite Data Showing Drug Doesn’t Work

By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 10/22/2020

Despite reams of data from an international WHO study raising serious questions about its efficacy, the FDA has finally approved the use of Gilead Science’s remdesivir – a powerful antiviral originally developed to treat ebola – for the treatment of COVID-19, making it the first such drug approved to treat the virus in the US.

The FDA first granted the drug emergency authorization in May, allowing hospitals and doctors to use the drug even though by all accounts it wasn’t that widely used.

President Trump received one course of remdesivir along with several other COVID-19 therapies after contracting the virus. Doctors also gave the president dexamethasone, a steroid that has a much better track record for treating the virus, according to the available data. Trump also received an experimental drug from Regeneron, which, along with Eli Lilly, has filed for emergency use approval for its COVID-19 antibody treatment.

Gilead has been waging a PR campaign against the WHO, which recently publicized the results of its global trial of remdesivir, producing data that was widely hailed as definitive by other scientists.

But Gilead had a lock on approval seemingly from the very beginning, as US officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, praised the drug. Dr. Fauci once said the drug would “set a new standard of care” for COVID-19.

Back in August, Gilead said the company planned to produce more than 2 million courses of the drug by the end of the year, with “several million more coming in 2021.”

Initially, Gilead says it will initially focus on meeting “real-time demand” in the US.

Oddly, none of the initial coverage of the FDA’s decision included much discussion of the WHO’s trial data, which pretty clearly branded the drug a flop. Even the evidence that Gilead has managed to marshal in remdesivir’s defense has been pretty unconvincing.

October 23, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment