odinsblog:

“I realized that I am super annoyed, and have been for a long time, with this idea that Bill Gates is some kind of ‘decent human being’ for so-called, ‘giving away’ his fortune. Because that is not what this man does, and a good human being is not what this man is. Bill Gates is a fucking monster. And so I just want to kind of explain why I have so many negative feelings towards Bill Gates.

With everything that’s going on right now with the vaccines, and the fact that most of the world can’t get them, can be traced directly back to that one man. Because back in 2020 when this all started, the world was cooperating. And I think we all remember this. The world was cooperating to study the virus. And scientists all over the world were sharing their findings to discover how the virus works, and they were developing methods for treatment and they were also developing these vaccines at an incredible speed. And they were doing this together in the spring of 2020.

And so by the end of the spring of 2020, the World Health Organization had created a global knowledge base, so that the vaccination effort could be a team effort instead of a competitive race. And their global knowledge base was called C-TAP (COVID-19 Technology Access Pool). And that’s when Bill Gates stepped in, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. What they did is, they created a separate process for managing the world’s COVID response. They called it the ACT-Accelerator (Access to COVID-19 Tools), which is a public-private partnership that included patent protections, so that the companies that figured out the tasks, treatments and vaccines, would be able to keep their discoveries to themselves, prevent other companies from copying them, and profit on vaccines as they sell them around the world. That was the goal of the ACT-Accelerator. It was a competition to the team building approach. So instead of cooperation, Gates sets up this separate thing for corporate competition, with the winners being rewarded with monopoly powers over our vaccines.

And so instead of the technology being figured out and distributed around the world, Gates’ brainchild organization instead created something called COVAX, which buys vaccines from the companies with the monopoly powers over the vaccines. And then they pass out some vaccines to poor countries around the world like a fucking cherry. But even the stated goal of COVAX has always been a weak one. They never intended to distribute more than enough vaccines to vaccinate any more than 20 percent of the populations of low and middle income countries. And they have totally failed to do even that. The vast majority of the vaccines would have to be fought for in the private market by the governments. And at the beginning of April 2021, 130 countries, home to over 2.5 billion people, hadn’t given out a single dose of a vaccine to anyone in their countries.

So, as a human race, I know that here in the United States all of us are able to get the vaccine. Like, great for us, right? But we are not the only humans here that are dealing with the virus. And as humans, we don’t have enough supply because only a handful of companies can [afford to] make the damn things. And Bill Gates is personally responsible for stopping other companies from having access to vaccine instruction manuals. Because that’s what they need. In fact, when the director at Oxford—which is where the science behind the AstraZeneca vaccine was figured out—when Oxford wanted to publish the instruction manual for their vaccine to the public domain for the world to use, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation used their power to pressure Oxford to instead sign an exclusive contract with AstraZeneca, which now has monopoly rights to that vaccine.

Bill Gates and those who are like him are designing global policy on vaccines, so that the private market decides who gets them. And that’s even when the institutions like the World Health Organization, that are generally on board as the administrators of the global economic system based on privatization of everything—even when those institutions are saying, “This is a global pandemic, and this is a time when we as humans should be making an exception to these rules, we should be sharing the technology to end this pandemic instead of putting patents and profits first.”—even when those institutions are saying that, Bill Gates has enough power as one man, to stop the world from doing it. This economic system has created oligarchs that are so rich and so powerful they can shape the fate of the entire world. And the way that that’s possible? Well, Bill Gates, as the founder of Microsoft, he fought politically to protect monopoly patents. This is something he has been a zealot about for the entire time he’s been in the public eye. He used his own patent protections over computer knowledge to become super rich when Microsoft had monopoly powers over their technologies. And then Bill Gates used his wealth to legally bribe politicians with campaign contributions, who then passed laws that created and continually expanded an economic system that funnels the world’s wealth to the richest people on earth. An economic system that funnels the world’s wealth TO HIM. He had so much damn money, thanks to this system, he got to like $150 billion dollars or so. He started a foundation that would spend his money on the things that HE wanted to spend it on. Billions of dollars. And people think that the sun shines out of his ass for this. Like, he’s some kind of noble human being, giving away his savings. But that’s not what this is. When you’re giving out money by the tens of billions, that’s government—just privatized. That’s society altering money. And the way Gates does it? He’s not funding food banks around the world. He’s chosen to use his billions to shape global health policy in a way that protects PATENTS. This insane economic system lets one dude control $150 billion dollars, and has created a situation where so much of our global health research is funded through him, that any organization or individual in the field that dares to challenge the Gates Foundation on drug monopolies will find themselves iced out of funding. And so everybody’s falling in line.

Right now he’s basically using his fortune to act as a volunteer lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, and he’s been doing this since 1999. He’s using his personal billions—wealth beyond what many governments have—to protect the profits of multinational drug companies, while being branded a hero for donating some drugs to poor countries, to charity wash the entire racket: “Oh he’s giving away all his money! He’s giving away 95 percent of his wealth” … at $150 billion dollars, if he gives away 95 percent of it, he’s still keeping over $7 billion dollars for himself. This guy is a selfish mother fucker. It’s NOT charity. It’s not charity what he’s doing. He’s shaping global policy. He’s governing on his own. His fortune, via the Gates Foundation, stopped the world from sharing information about AIDS treatments two decades ago. And now he’s pulling the same shit with the COVID technologies.

Now this dynamic is being challenged in the World Trade Organization—as it should be—where more than 100 countries, more than half the world is trying to force companies like Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna, to give them the instructions so that they can make their own vaccines and get this pandemic over with. And Moderna is a perfect example of the privatization of government funded science. Because the mRNA technology that is central to the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines? That’s been in development since 2016. It’s not new, even though we’re acting like this was invented in the last year. It’s not. They’ve been working on it for years. But it’s an invention of the National Institute of Health, which is otherwise known as OUR GOVERNMENT. So allowing obscene prices and profits for pharmaceutical companies, that did not lead to the research and development that created that amazing technology. It was our tax money that did it. It was our government that did it. We should all be patting ourselves on the back for that because we are the ones who funded it. It wasn’t Moderna, and it wasn’t Pfizer. It was us. The government scientists were working on a vaccine with Moderna for a different Coronavirus, MERS, when they got the information about the COVID virus. And so they were able to quickly tweak the technology they were already working on for 5 years. They gave the instructions for those tweaks to Moderna, and then Moderna did the work of cooking the recipe. But the mRNA technology? THAT’S OURS.

And on top of that, I’ve read every COVID related law, from start to finish. Every word. And starting in early March, 2020, our congress poured billions and billions of our tax money into vaccines. We paid for the raw materials, the clinical trials, we paid for all the renovations needed at the Moderna facilities to make all this happen. Moderna didn’t take on the risk. We taxpayers did. But when the Trump administration signed the contracts with Moderna to be the chefs of the vaccines, they didn’t require Moderna to share the recipes. And so they aren’t sharing. And the Biden administration so far, has sided with the Trump administration and the drug companies, and is refusing to support the effort to lift the patent protections on the vaccines that WE paid to invent. The Biden administration has all the leverage and legal authority it needs to tell these greedy companies, Moderna in particular, to share what we gave them for the good of the world. But instead, the Biden administration is dancing around the edges, choosing instead to donate doses, like a bunch of AstraZeneca ones that we just had stored in some closet somewhere. “Oh we’re donating those! Aren’t we great?” They want to funnel billions of our tax dollars to COVAX, that Gates inspired organization that buys vaccines from the monopoly drug companies, and passes them out to the poor. It’s all charity. But the problem is the monopolies. The problem is requiring the entire world to get the vaccine from these handful of chosen companies, and the ones that can’t afford it have to depend on … charity.

And that’s bullshit.”

-Jennifer Briney

A damning new report shows that one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine makers appears to have played a role in restricting access to those very vaccines. The report, “Pfizer’s Power,” published this week by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, examines Pfizer’s contracts with the United States, United Kingdom, European Commission, Albania, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic and Peru. They offer a rare glimpse into the power Pfizer has to silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximize profits in the middle of a public health crisis.

Pfizer’s Power

AlterNet, March 30, 2015.

In 2014, a greatdeal of ink was spilled about the need to stop calling women crazy. Though dismissing women as emotional and irrational is hardly a new phenomenon, a Washington Postop-ed by dating coach Harris O’Malley provided the fodder for a thousand blog posts on the subject. As O’Malley writes, “It’s a form of gaslighting—telling women that their feelings are just wrong, that they don’t have the right to feel the way they do.”

According to Julie Holland, a psychiatrist who has had her own Manhattan practice for 20 years, this sort of minimizing attitude does serious damage. Not only does it hurt women’s self-esteem, but it leads to women being diagnosed and medicated for psychiatric disorders at higher rates than men. In her new book Moody Bitches, Holland looks at how pharmaceutical industry ads target women, the hormonal differences between genders and our long, dark history of medicating women’s emotions. She shared her findings with AlterNet in a telephone interview, which has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Allegra Kirkland: Why did you decide to call your book Moody Bitches? Is it a reclamation of language that’s traditionally been used to denigrate women?

Julie Holland: First of all, it was really a joke. I thought it was funny and so did other people I spoke to. Most of my patients are women. I certainly don’t typically call women bitches. Part of it was reclamation for sure. That was important to me. If anyone’s going to call me a bitch I want it to be me.…It is a sort of bigger message that it’s our birthright to be emotionally expressive—to feel deeply and to express what we’re feeling honestly. I really believe that not only would women be better off if they did a little more of this, but the world would be better off if women aren’t squelching a big part of them, and if men weren’t squelching that part of themselves too.

AK: The point of your book and your New York Times  op-ed is that women should feel okay experiencing strong emotions—that it’s perfectly natural and can even be beneficial for us. But that message also applies to men.

JH:It absolutely applies to men. For sure.

AK: And men are bound by such strict definitions of how to behave in an appropriate “masculine” way.

JH:Right. This is totally about the suppression of the feminine, not necessarily the suppression of women. I’m sorry to use this word, but it’s about the yin as opposed to the yang. There’s a receptive energy and there’s a penetrative energy. We’re all trying to be more penetrative and we’re suppressing a lot of our sensitivity and intuition and empathy. I don’t know to what end. It seems to me that it’s not doing women any good and it’s not doing society any good. Our world is imbalanced and there’s a lot of penetrative energy: missiles and guns and rape and corporate greed and malfeasance. We need more feminine energy and we need to own that. I’m not suggesting that people who need psychiatric medications throw them away. That is definitely not my message at all.

First of all, I worked at Bellevue for nine years in the psychiatric emergency room and I saw many very sick patients. And I’ve had a private practice for 20 years in Manhattan where I’ve seen all kinds of people who really can’t get by without medication, be it anti-anxiety meds or sleeping pills. But I’m absolutely also seeing a trend where there’s a lower threshold for getting on medication, there’s a much lower threshold for staying on medicine. People are getting on and staying for decades on medicines that were studied for less then a year. These are medicines that are not approved to be taken for decades. With Prozac, there are people who have been on it since the ‘80s. And we’ve learned how difficult it is for some of these people to get off their meds. There is an absolute withdrawal syndrome…that isn’t always discussed. Keep in mind that 80 percent of psychiatric medications in America are not prescribed by psychiatrists.

AK: Right, you mention in the book that they’re prescribed by general practitioners.

JH: It’s also just the new normal. The more women who are on meds, the more it’s in the mix, it’s common, you have friends who are taking them, your doctor’s talking about them, you see all these ads for all these different meds. Did you see the Apple Watch commercial where at the very beginning of this beautiful, glossy video they show you like 20 different versions of the watch? So right away you’re not thinking, Should I get a watch or not? You’re thinking, Should I get the silver one or the white one? You’re already advancing the conversation….We’re seeing so many ads and people have so many friends on meds and it’s so easy to just get them from a doctor that it’s turning from, Should I be on psychiatric medication, to Which one should I take? So that’s new. I’ve watched it develop over 20 years and it’s really alarming.

AK: There’s a  long history  of women being medicated and even institutionalized for invented illnesses like hysteria and frigidity. Do you see the high rates of psychiatric drug prescriptions for women as part of that historical continuum or is this something new?

JH:What I’m starting to see more and more are these ads. There are great websites for ads from the ‘50s and ‘60s, not just targeting women. Remember at that time Big Pharma could only advertise to doctors. So they’re advertising to doctors basically saying, If this patient is calling you too much and bugging you, here’s a medicine that will get her to stop.

The ads now feature everyday women with everyday problems. First of all, there was 9/11, and there’s no question that led to an increase in money spent on advertising, targeting women who were scared, who are having a normal response to an unnatural event. The ads were completely targeting them. There was one that just read, “Millions can be helped by Paxil.”

AK: Which is an incredibly vague statement.

JH:Right. And there were just words: “worry,” “anxiety,” with a picture of a woman clutching her handbag walking down a city street. It was genius. It was evil genius, but it was genius. And now what they’re doing is killing me. I don’t know if you’ve seen those binge eating disorder ads. Shire makes Adderall, which is generic now, so the only brand amphetamine Shire has left is Vyvanse, which is a medicine for ADHD. It’s an amphetamine just like Adderall but it lasts 12, 13 hours. They paid some doctors and they paid for a full-page ad in the journal that the “study” ran in, and it says in the journal that they also paid the writers and the editors. So they have this Shire-paid, really crappystudy showing that at high dosage every single day for weeks, Vyvanse separates out from placebo. Basically, they show that if you give a woman high-dose amphetamines every day, she will binge less.

They have ads where they show a woman surrounded by pizza and hamburgers and donuts and it says, “If you eat more than you want to and you feel guilty afterwards, you may have this disorder.” Which is sort of like saying, “If you’re a woman, you have this.”

First of all, if you’re not on the pill and you’re not on SSRIs, you’re going to go through a certain day or two when you’re eating more carbs or sweets before your period. They have ads for doctors where they say “binge eating disorder is a shameful disorder and your patient may not volunteer this information so be sure to ask whether they’re eating too much and feeling guilty about it.” Fucking Shire. It’s not bad enough that all of these kids are taking their meds. They want to get some women hooked on speed before their patent expires. These are addictive medicines. … And there’s no evidence that this “disorder” has any pharmacological basis that needs to be medicated.

AK: You write that psychiatric drug prescription rates are highest for women between the ages of 35 and 64. This overlaps with the time when women are most likely to be raising families and at the peak of their careers. Do you think women are trying to handle all of these stressors and that’s why they are asking for and receiving psychiatric medications at higher rates?

JH:This is not going to go over well, but I’m going to say a couple of things. First of all, perimenopause symptoms in terms of insomnia, irritability and mood changes happen all through your 40s. People have this idea that menopause is a one-day event that occurs some time in your mid-50s. It’s not. It’s a marathon of symptoms through most of your 40s, into your 50s; it can last 7-14 years.

The other issue is that my practice is full of women in their late 30s and early 40s who would like a child. Maybe they’re not dying to be married, but they’d like a child. And they would prefer it to be in a monogamous relationship. And they’re living in New York City where guys have a shelf life ‘til they are 50 and no one really wants to commit because it’s possible they can upgrade somewhere else. And they’re not happy. They’re freaking out because this is something they always thought they were going to have and they wanted but they’re not getting.

So one thing I came across in the three years of researching this book is that there is evidence suggesting that SSRIs are interfering with mating. We already know that contraceptives totally interfere with mating, but it turns out that SSRIs also do so. I have so many patients that are on an SSRI and an oral contraceptive. In New York City that is a very common combination of medication, and it has a real impact on mating and sexuality. I’m afraid it’s this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where people are unhappy because they’re not mating, but they’re on drugs that completely interfere with their ability to mate.

AK: The American Psychiatric Association  says  men are much less likely to seek treatment for anxiety and depression. Could that skew the rates at which women are diagnosed and medicated?

JH:If you look at other cultures there isn’t this two-to-one difference. There does seem to be a definite issue with hormones, in that if you look at kids’ rates of diagnosis of depression, or if you look at post-menopausal women versus men in that age group there’s not this two-to-one difference. But there is that difference when women are cycling, say from around 12 to 55.

AK: Two-to-one difference in terms of rates of diagnosis?

JH: Yes. There’s no question that men are more reluctant to seek psychiatric help. That’s always an understanding in psychiatric care that there are a lot of men who are undiagnosed who really need treatment but aren’t getting it because there is still a lot of stigma there. There’s very little of that for women. But it is this suppression of the feminine that’s at play.

AK: In some of the responses to your op-ed, some people  took issue  with framing mental health issues in relation to gender because, of course, not all men and women are the same. There are plenty of sensitive, intuitive guys and plenty of women who have no patience for the sob stories of others. Hormones obviously play a role, but how much can really be attributed to biology versus culture and nurture?

JH:You can’t really pick them apart. A 300-page book is very different than an 800- to 900-word op-ed.…There were major things I wanted in that piece that got cut out. Like I said in the beginning, there is the feminine, this yin and yang, in everyone. Not one person is all feminine or all masculine; we’re all a mix. Gender is fluid. I understand that. But I have to make some generalities. I’d say that everything I say in Moody Bitches that isn’t about hormones applies to both men and women. I think that the suppression of the feminine is a problem in both genders and the world needs more yin energy.

AK: I guess the only other concern is that it can end up reinforcing sexist stereotypes. Back when Hillary Clinton was running in 2008, members of the press actually asked  if we could have a female president because she might get moody during her period. Maybe that connection could be reinforced in people’s minds?

JH: The other thing I’d say is that moody doesn’t necessarily mean hysterical. That someone can be emotionally expressive is not a bad thing. That’s sort of the message people are missing here. I’m sorry for the shorthand; I just didn’t think the title “emotionally expressive women” would sell books. But that’s what I’m talking about. The idea that a woman who is in tune with her body and knows how she feels and can speak her mind about it, that is scary to men. Emotionally expressive does not mean unstable.

AK: Some responses  to your piece expressed concern that people who do genuinely need psychiatric help or medication would be discouraged because they’ll think they can just get through it or that their feelings are within the range of normal. So where do we draw the line?

JH:I am not anti-medication in the right situations. These pills work. They make people feel happier and more relaxed. I get why people take them. But I am suggesting that there are healthier ways that are less of a quick fix that I think some of these people who are on meds should try. The whole survival guide section of my book is about that. You can add all these things to meds, or you can do them instead of taking meds. This idea that you’re going to go to your internist or family doctor and get the same thing from them in six minutes that you get from talking to a therapist for an hour-long initial evaluation is ludicrous. You have to find out what the family history is, what the genetics are, whether there’s been any medication use in the past and what the response has been. I fear people are taking it less seriously.

The other thing that I would say is I have patients who take a little dose of SSRIs just in the week before their periods; I have patients who take medications during the winter but not the rest of the year. You don’t have to take a daily dose for years on end just because you have these phases where your mood is changing. You can take a more targeted approach instead of this blanket method. But obviously there are people who really do need their medication and I do not want to encourage them to man up. What I’m saying is, don’t repress or be scared to be sad or upset. The only reason we’re repressing all these feelings is for the comfort of other people, and I think that’s a huge problem.

For a record of all of Dr. Holland’s sources, see the notes section on moodybitches.com.

AlterNet, March 19, 2015.

Would you ever pay money for pills containing crushed-up houseplants, powdered rice or fragments of psychiatric medications? If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who take dietary supplements, the answer could very well be an unknowing yes.

It may surprise people to learn that there are hardly any regulatory requirements for vitamins and supplements in the U.S. The $36 billion industry has avoided Food and Drug Administration rules that generic medications must adhere to, such as testing products to prove that they are effective and safe before they go on the market. In fact, a 1976 congressional amendmentpushed through by Democratic Senator William Proxmire ensures that the FDA can never limit the potency of vitamin pills, classify them as drugs, or require that they can only contain useful ingredients. This loose oversight opens the door to all kinds of errors, from mislabeled ingredients to overly strong suggested doses that can leave consumers with lasting health problems.

Arriving at this regulatory no man’s land was no easy feat. Since the scientific underpinnings of vitamins were first discovered in the 1920s, a two-headed pro-vitamin propaganda campaign has been launched by the Dietary Association of America and by industry lobbyists and their supporters in Congress. In the 1940s and ‘50s, food scientists and marketers promoted vitamin- and additive-enriched foods, advertising their longer shelf lives and vague “nutritional benefits.” This strategy, which allows companies to artificially inflate prices and promote nutritionally vacant products as healthy, endures. At the same time, alternative medicine advocates, supplement industry leaders and their beneficiaries in the House and Senate have fought proposed regulations tooth and nail, arguing that they infringe on our ability to make our own healthcare decisions.

As journalist Catherine Price argues in her book Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest for Nutritional Perfection, this multi-decade effort has worked. Over half of American adults currently use dietary supplements, according to the latest Centers for Disease Control figures, and even those of us who don’t likely assume they are safe. We have blindly accepted vitamins and supplements as miracle cures for our ailments, without even knowing what we’re putting into our bodies. In a phone interview, Price told me how our vitamin obsession came about and what we can do to curb it.

Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Allegra Kirkland: Why do you think people remain so unaware of the lack of research supporting supplements and vitamins? Would you attribute it primarily to misleading messages promoted by supplement makers or just the faith that people have in the government to only approve products that are safe for consumption?

Catherine Price: I think both of those are probably true. I also think that vitamins and supplements are covered so often in the news that it seems like we should know a lot. I should clarify that when I’m talking about vitamins I only mean the letter vitamins, so just the 13 A, C, D, E, K and B vitamins. Every other week there’s a story about Vitamin B, right, so that gives the sense that scientists are on it even though there are often contradictory stories. The widespread coverage of vitamins makes it seem like we know more than we do.

AK: At this point it there have been a number of health outbreaks and major public lawsuits, like New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman forcing major retailers to stop selling mislabeled store-brand supplements. But they don’t really seem to have made a difference in people’s perceptions.

CP:With the attorney general stuff that’s been going on in New York, the supplement industry is taking the stance of ‘the public didn’t trust us already and this is making them trust us even less.’ It’s so interesting because I think from the consumer’s perspective, you’re saying the consumers are weirdly trusting and it doesn’t matter how many stories they are. The people who love supplements are still going to think their brand is fine.

AK: Do you think it’s a good approach to target retailers instead of manufacturers?

CP:First I should say that the supplement industry is pushing back and saying that they used the wrong testing methods. They used DNA barcoding. … That’s the number-one defense being made by the supplement industry, that therefore it’s all invalid. …It’ll be very disappointing if it is because that’s just so sloppy, but the problem is that the FDA just doesn’t have the money and the manpower to enforce its own very limited ability to regulate the industry. …They are actually serving a public good in investigating stuff the FDA hasn’t been able to.

I think it’s going to be a more efficient way to shed light on the problem than it would be to try to change everything in terms of the legislation. It’s interesting to me that they started off going after the highest level [retailers]: Walmart, Target, GNC. That just speaks to how complicated and difficult it is to pin blame and to actually figure out who to go after in the world of supplements because it’s such a long supply chain. They’re basically just the last step in the chain. They’re getting someone else to put together the store-brand supplements and then basically just putting their name on them. In the beginning I was like, well this is a little ridiculous because you’re basically asking Walmart to open up a chemistry lab and test every supplement that it’s selling. That’s not going to happen. But it seems now they’re trying to go further down the supply chain.

AK: Subsequent efforts to pass or amend legislation completely have been shut down by the supplement industry and its supporters in Congress. What do you think the best approach is for weaning the public off of them?

CP: I think we should approach this on multiple fronts, probably. But I also think you can divide the public into one side which could be swayed and then one side that loves their supplements so much and distrusts Big Pharma so much that they’re just not going to listen. … I think journalistic investigations are useful but I don’t think we’ll ever get to a point where you can wean everyone off these things unless they just weren’t on the market. And that would be kind of impossible because you can still buy everything on the Internet.

One of my hopes for my book and for other investigations is for people to become more aware of the information that’s out there and make an intelligent decision about it. So at least you have to admit that there are issues in this industry before you take the pill. …

It’s funny. Even when people know that supplements haven’t been tested for safety or efficacy, people who love them will still be like, “Well I know this company, they grow their own herbs.” Or “This is a big company that makes multivitamins.”

For the most part, multivitamin companies are never going to try to cheat you or hurt you deliberately, but there are still issues that come up just like there are issues that come up with generic medications. Buyer beware for all of this stuff.

AK: Utah Senator Orrin Hatch took a lot of flack for his support of the supplement industry because it funded his reelection campaigns. In general, does the fight for tighter regulation of this industry fall along partisan lines, with Republicans opposing what they see as big government’s intrusion into their personal healthcare choices and Democrats advocating for consumer protection?

CP: I would say no. In general, yes, the Republicans are anti-regulation and the Democrats are more into consumer protection. But in terms of who the biggest supporters of the supplement industry are, Orrin Hatch is Republican, but the guy who inspired the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, [former Iowa Senator Tom Harkin], was a Democrat. They’re on both sides of the aisle and a lot of that has to do with what the businesses are in their states.

In the southwest for whatever reason, supplements are huge. In Utah it’s the number-one industry in the state. I think the last count was something like $7.2 billion a year. So that explains Orrin Hatch. And some of the other ones I think it’s just those are their constituents, they have businesses there, they’re giving them campaign donations, and these guys are just [being] politicians.

AK: Big Pharma companies like Pfizer are now manufacturing these products, but they don’t seem to be on the receiving end of any of the supplement industry criticism. Why do you think that is?

CP:The one thing I know Big Pharma companies are involved in are multivitamins and minerals and Omega-3 products—kind of the more common ones. I think that they’re not getting flak in part because people don’t realize that Pfizer creates One-A-Day. People don’t recognize the affiliation, but also they’re kind of staying in safe grounds. Multivitamins and minerals are less problematic, Omega-3s are less problematic. If you do have a big brand there is of course still the possibility that there could be problems, but they actually do want to protect their reputation. The people I’ve spoken to have said that’s a good place to start when trying to assess one of these products: how big is the manufacturer?

I also heard an interesting talk by this woman at the FDA about good manufacturing practices, which are basically rules that are supposed to help make sure that what’s on the label is in the bottle. The FDA has been finding that 70 percent of the supplement firms that they’re inspecting aren’t compliant, which is horrifying because the GMP has been fully implemented since 2010. But they’re finding that places that have over 500 employees tend to have GMPs in place. They’re doing a much better job, they know the rules and they’re trying to both source their ingredients from reputable companies.

AK: A lot of these products were only developed in the last decade or two and there’s hardly any research into the long-term effects of taking them, or taking them in combination with prescription drugs. So even if you do ask your doctor if a certain combination is safe, you can really only get a qualified answer because they don’t know yet. How do we address that?

CP:You’ve raised a good point. All the default advice is, talk to your doctor. And it will say that on the back of your supplement label, too. But in reality, not only are a lot of doctors not aware of this issue, but it would be impossible for them to tell you, not just because there hasn’t been research done on every interaction or every product but again, you don’t really know if what’s on the label is actually what’s in the supplement bottle.

There have been instances as I mentioned in the book where they’ve tested and found things like analogs of prescription or illegal drugs in supplements. So you think you’re taking an herbal remedy for something and you’re actually taking an anticoagulant. That’s one reason that I personally don’t take any of that stuff, because you just don’t know.

But there’s an interesting example from the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, with this doctor named Paul Offit. … He established this requirement at the hospital where they only have a tiny number of supplements that they allow to be given to patients. They have to have scientific evidence behind them and be proven to be safe. So basically when a parent comes in with a kid, they ask what supplements they’re on. Because a lot of the time the parent gives the hospital a supplement that they want them to administer to their kid, but the hospital will not [necessarily] do that…. [If the supplement is not on the approved list] you need to sign a waiver that says, we don’t know what’s in it, we don’t know what it’s going to do or how it’s going to track, and none of this is our liability.

I think that responsible hospitals and responsible doctors are moving in the direction of admitting their ignorance and saying, Hey, we’re not going to be involved in this because we don’t know what it will do.

As an example of how crazy this can get, people talk about Big Pharma, but Big Supplements, I mean, it’s a $36 billion industry and when they instituted this policy some of the industry groups launched a letter-writing campaign to his bosses and the board of the hospital demanding that he be fired. He didn’t, but it turned out some people on the board really loved supplements and this became an issue. If you speak out against this and you’re forceful enough, there are concentrated efforts to silence you.

AK: Have you received any negative press or pushback?

CP:Well as a freelancer I’m like, thank God, I can’t get fired. What I found is that I get accused of being a shill for Big Pharma.

My response is that I think Americans are totally overmedicated also and the reason we want to take pills of all kinds is because we don’t want to make the lifestyle changes necessary to actually improve our health.

AK: We’re so obsessed with the veneer of health and willing to throw money at the problem, but not do the actual work of getting healthy. In terms of vitamin-enriched foods, do you think people are specifically seeking them out or are they so ubiquitous at this point that we can’t avoid them?

CP: I think it depends on the consumer. I think some people just aren’t paying attention at all. They’re probably the people who should be taking a multivitamin and changing their diets. But they wouldn’t be added to products if they didn’t help sell products. You know, Vitaminwater just got sued and it exists because the extra vitamins make it appealing to people. It was similar to the POM Wonderful ads. You know, the death-defying pomegranate juice? There was a big case against them and this is similar, in terms of having labels that are misleading in terms of what they were promising. …There’s an uptick in class-action lawsuits against these guys.

AK: The looseness of the language is so interesting. They can’t use specific words like “treat” or “cure’"or "prevent” but they basically use synonyms to make very bold claims.

What are some key words people should look out for? How can you know if a product is legitimate or shady?

CP:I would say that your first instinct should be that it’s shady. I think your second step should be to ask yourself why you’re taking it. If you think about it, if you’re taking a supplement that’s not a vitamin, that’s not a mineral, one that wasn’t recommended by our doctor specifically for a deficiency, then you’re taking it because you want a drug-like effect. If you want to improve your prostate health or support urinary continence or whatever, that’s a medicinal use. So it doesn’t matter what the label says; if you’re taking it as a drug that’s a pretty good sign that it should be thought of that way and treated with that kind of caution.

But if a consumer is still insistent about taking these things, they should do their homework and there are a couple of resources that I can recommend. One is the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. They have a section called Herbs at a Glance and they round up the science or non-science around a lot of these plants, which is useful and free.

Consumerlab.com is a company that tests products to see if they really contain what they claim and they also do a really good roundup of the science and the concerns. USP and NSF are two verification programs that try to prove that what’s in the bottle is on the label and vice versa. Companies pay to verify their products and then have a seal put on them. So if you’re just trying to verify that you’re taking what you think, that’s a good thing to look for.

The basic takeaway is: ask yourself why you’re taking it, and buyer beware. People simultaneously take supplements for drug-like purposes and then justify it by saying they’re natural. And what I try to communicate is that those two things don’t go together.

« La vaccination obligatoire, qui revient à une expérimentation humaine sans consentement, est contraire au Code de Nuremberg », expliquait Mary Holland, docteur en droit et professeur d’Université à la tribune des Nations Unies, le 4 mai 2016.

En effet, à la suite des atrocités médicales nazies, le monde a adopté le Code de Nuremberg qui affirme que « le consentement volontaire du sujet humain est absolument essentiel ».

Le pacte international relatif aux droits civils et politiques souligne également l’interdiction de l’expérimentation dans son texte de 1966.

Il stipule : « Nul ne peut être soumis sans son libre consentement à une expérience médicale ou scientifique. »

Opposer le Code de Nuremberg et le pacte des droits civils et politiques à la vaccination de force est parfaitement approprié.

Nous sommes bien confrontés à une expérimentation humaine de génie génétique d’ampleur mondiale qui comprend deux volets :

1°) le volet chimico-biologique puisque les vaccins contiennent du Phénol, Thimerosal, Mercure, Aluminium, Ethylène Glycol, Formol, Benzetonium, Squalène, SV40, cellules cancérisées, Benzonase, ADN et ARN viraux, Edulcorants, OGM, albumine humaine, antibiotiques sous forme de trace de néomycine, polymyxine B, kanamycine, gentamycine, streptomycine, trométamol.

Ces éléments combinés sont mutagènes et à une certaines doses mortels.

2°) le volet nanométrique puisque les vaccins contiennent des nano-composants de tungstène, titane, zirconium, hafnium, strontium, aluminium, nickel, fer, antimoine, chrome, or, zinc, platine, argent, bismuth, cérium, cuivre, plomb, étain, baryum, vanadium, magnésium, souffre, silicium, calcium, sodium, manganèse…

Les preuves de la présence de ces nanocomposants vaccinaux ont été apportées par les docteurs Antonietta M Gatti et Stefano Montanari pour le Conseil National de Recherche d’Italie.

Les résultats de leurs nano-diagnostics ont été publiés dans l’International Journal of Vaccines le 23 Janvier 2017. (voir Morphéus n°81).

Les résultats de ce nano-diagnostic sur 44 vaccins dont les onze obligatoires sont sur les bureaux de tous les fabricants de vaccins.

Ces derniers, n’ayant aucune réponse scientifique à apporter, s’empressent de mettre leurs sbires aux postes des ministères de santé publique.

Ils entendent tuer dans l’œuf cette information et prendre des mesures très coercitives pour imposer leurs vaccins.

Protections juridiques

Il existe d’autres protections juridiques par exemple : l’article 3 de la Déclaration des droits de l’homme, le nouveau Code civil qui reconnaît le principe du respect à l’intégrité du corps humain, l’article 36 du code de déontologie médicale, les différents arrêts de la Cour sur l’information transparente due au patient.

Citons aussi la loi Kouchner disant qu’aucun acte médical ne peut être pratiqué sans consentement libre et éclairé du patient. Enfin, l’article 1111 de la santé publique dit que tout citoyen a le droit à la liberté d’accepter ou de refuser un acte médical, et la vaccination est un acte médical.

Cependant, la preuve est faite qu’il s’agit d’une expérimentation vaccinale nano-chimico-biologique sans le consentement des populations, cela relève bien du Code de Nuremberg et du pacte international relatif aux droits civils et politiques.

Il s’agit donc bien de traduire tous les acteurs de cette folie vaccinale expérimentale devant une Cour de Justice Internationale qu’ils aient réussi ou non à imposer leurs soupes vaccinales…"

Sometimes pharmaceutical reps bring free food to the place where I intern at. And yes, pharmaceutical companies are evil but I will eat the free Panera Bread they bring.

We brought a cancer drug to the market last quarter. It’s already saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Yet in development, it killed a quarter of a million lab mice. Now, I didn’t ask for their little permissions. I’m not going to ask for yours.

Merrick-The Old Guard(2020)

Yesterday was National Rheumatoid Arthritis Awareness Day. It’s a bit of a pointless holiday, and I didn’t even know it existed until about 3 hours ago - I’m guessing due to the fact that the Arthritis Foundation is shit, has a 1 star rating on Charity Navigator, and has been accused of misusing funds in the past. So….they probably haven’t had time to roll out an advertising campaign.

In any case, if you didn’t know, RA is an autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system is a worthless idiot and attacks your body’s own soft and joint tissues, and can potentially render them useless through damage and deterioration.

I have RA. But I am lucky. My RA was diagnosed very early and I had it treated very aggressively.

I am also lucky because I have insurance that helps offset the cost of my revoltingly, ridiculously, disgustingly expensive medication. One month of Enbrel costs anywhere between $3,400 and $3,800. See?

It’s such an expensive medication that I actually have to use two insurance plans to afford it. Which means, if I did not have insurance, I’d be paying approximately $45,000 per year simply to stay alive.

And that is for justone of my medications, as you can tell from the above photo, where I’ve blocked out all the other medications I am also required to take to stay alive. Paying for Enbrel out of pocket would leave me unable to afford rent, food, or clothing - other things which are also required to stay alive.

Though I am currently fortunate enough to have a job that provides me with healthcare, I’ve been without insurance in the past. Back before the Affordable Care Act, I was unable to stay on my parents’ plan when I graduated and then was constantly denied coverage due to my pre-existing conditions. I basically roamed around LA, terrified of getting into a catastrophic accident while simultaneously attempting to treat pneumonia in the back of a CVS.

Obamacare is not without its flaws, I acknowledge that. But if your garbage disposal is broken, you don’t burn down your house and start over - you fix the fucking garbage disposal. So in honor of National RA Awareness Day, which is, as we’ve established, a real thing - please consider writing or calling your representatives (especially Paul Ryan) and telling them that repealing ACA without a replacement would be disastrous. It is important, and saving lives, and making it so people don’t have to choose between bankruptcy or having their immune systems kill their own bodies.

.

Contact Your Representatives: http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

Contact Your Senators: https://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/

Contact Paul Ryan: https://paulryan.house.gov/contact/

Whistleblower teacher makes shocking claim that ‘most are autistic’

Transing of children is abuse and the legally sanctioned medical experimentation of pharmaceuticals on youth. All puberty blockers are simply drugs that are prescribed for off-label use. The most frequently prescribed is Lupron, a powerful chemotherapy drug made only and specifically for palliative care during end-stage advanced prostate cancer. It was originally developed for and prescribed to patients who were dying, and not expected to recover, as a last resort.

Now, this drug - which is also given to pedophiles as a form of chemical castration - is a so-called “puberty blocker”. It was developed by Takeda-Abbott (TAP) Pharmaceuticals. In 2001, TAP paid an industry-record $885 million and pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of conspiring with doctors to bill government health insurers for free samples of Lupron; they provided kickbacks to doctors for prescribing the drug for off-label use. Whistleblower Dr. David B. Redwine claimed he was offered $100,000 to find reasons to prescribe the drug to patients. The company has to date paid out a record 1 billion for cases of fraud and deception about the harms of their drugs.

Transgenderism is a socially engineered marketing campaign for pharmaceutical companies which intentionally takes the guise of a human rights issue and exploits and abuses homosexual youth and children struggling with mental health and autism.

“An astonishing 17 pupils at a single British school are in the process of changing gender, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Most of the youngsters undergoing the transformation are autistic, according to a teacher there, who said vulnerable children with mental health problems were being ‘tricked’ into believing they are the wrong sex.”

twinsfawn:

tag yourself i’m human orifices in the work of heironymous bosch

macgyvermedical:

*upsells vaccines because I know I get to keep the next big styrofoam cooler they come in as a perk*

*obligatory this is a joke: the us healthcare system, including big pharma, doesn’t make any money from vaccines, in fact we frequently lose money on them, including administration fees. The real money is in hypertension and type II diabetes, where most people are on multiple expensive brand-name drugs and have to come to the clinic 4x per year for monitoring and management, and have life-threatening sequelae the put them in the hospital if the don’t take the meds or go to the appointments. Your anger and suspicion are best placed on the insurance companies, then big pharma (who tbh would prefer you didn’t take the vaccines, because then they could sell you expensive branded antivirals and IV antibiotics, and palliatives for the rest of your life if you get long-measles, which is a thing), then your local hospital upcharging chronic disease management and elective surgeries to squeeze a <1% margin while covering such legally-mandated and socially responsible money pits as the emergency department and vaccine programs.

“People with depression may benefit as much from acupuncture as they do from counseling, suggests a new study.Researchers found one in three patients was no longer depressed after three months of acupuncture or counseling, compared to one in five who received neither treatment.“For people who have depression, who have tried various medical options, who are still not getting the benefit they want, they should try acupuncture or counseling as options that are now known to be clinically effective,” said Hugh MacPherson, the study’s lead author from the University of York in the UK.”

I would love to see a really well-formed study that looks at several factors in treating depression:  acupuncture, counseling, medication, community, and diet.  Acupuncture certainly helps people feel better (as I’ve seen in treating thousands of people in my own practice).  I think counseling and community are wonderful factors as well.  

When it comes to medication, I feel less qualified to comment.  Possibly there are people who can do without the medication, if they had a regular practice of meditation, exercise, and acupuncture. I offer acupuncture to anyone who comes to me, and I do my best to make it affordable.

For a qualified opinion, and to read in depth about prescription medications for psychiatric illness, including depression, consider this book: Anatomy of an Epidemic, by Robert Whitaker.  Whitaker says, 

“ In 1955,  there were 355,000 adults in state and county mental hospitals with a psychiatric diagnosis. During the  next three decades (the era of the first generation psychiaric drugs), the number of disabled mentally ill rose to 1.25 million. Prozac arrived on the market in 1988, and during the next 20 years, the number of disabled mentally ill grew to more than four million adults (in 2007.) Finally, the prescribing of psychiatric medications to children and adolescents took off during this period (1987 to 2007), and as this medical practice took hold, the number of youth in America receiving a government disability check because of a mental illness leapt from 16,200 in 1987 to 561,569 in 2007 (a 35-fold increase.) “ (emphasis mine).

I am pleased that acupuncture offers a viable alternative for those who need help and may not be able to tolerate pharmaceuticals.  I choose to offer affordable options for acupuncture, which allows people to get long-term relief if they are willing to make the time to come for treatment.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-acupuncture-depression-idUSBRE98N17420130924