The legacy of back room wheelin' and dealin' by the drug industry, which routinely pays off doctors and academic researchers to hawk oftentimes dangerous and ineffective pharmaceuticals and medical devices, could soon be blown wide open by newly enacted legislation passed as part of the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
The Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which was successfully moved through the Senate with the help of an extensive investigation led by Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), provisions that doctors who receive payoffs from drug or vaccine companies must disclose this when pushing new therapies or medical procedures from what would otherwise appear to be unbiased intentions.
The law was reportedly added to Obamacare because it was unlikely to pass on its own due to intense industry pressures against any sort of reform. Paying off doctors has become the bread and butter of Big Pharma drug marketing. It's both discreet and highly effective, repeatedly creating the illusion that the medical profession at large endorses the latest drugs and medical procedures, many of which aren't safe and don't work.
According to the Harvard Business Review's (HBR) Paul Thacker, who served as Sen. Grassley's lead investigator from 2007 to 2010, doctors and medical groups routinely accepts cash payments from the drug industry for speaking engagements, scientific papers, and other medical propaganda designed to make drugs and medical devices appear safer and more effective than they actually are.
An investigation spearheaded by NPR (National Public Radio), Consumer Reports, and ProPublica found that in the three years leading up to its publishing in late 2010, drug companies had settled cases totaling $7 billion for paying doctors to promote drugs. In many cases, doctors were encouraged to prescribe drugs for off-label conditions, or to prescribe expensive drugs when they weren't actually needed.
"Companies were paying physicians to give speeches on behalf of their products and to publish studies (ghostwritten by the companies) that downplayed those products' side effects," wrote Thacker in a recent piece for HBR, noting that many medical professionals have been resistant to congressional efforts to reign in this unconscionably deceitful practice.
"After we launched investigations of more than three dozen patient-advocacy groups and professional medical societies, it became clear why: Most of those organizations depended on income from industry, and many physician-leaders of these groups received large consulting fees."
Though drug companies have had to fork out billions of dollars' worth of fines in recent years for defrauding the government and pushing many a dangerous and ineffective drug on consumers, including the infamous Vioxx and Avandia scandals, it is still apparently worth it for the industry to use trusted physicians as mouthpieces for ruthless drug promotion.
And even with tighter restrictions on payment disclosure, drug companies are likely to continue bribing the medical industry to push their unsafe and potentially deadly products. According to a 2012 study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, formerly known as Archives of Internal Medicine, disclosure requirements are unlikely to affect either prescribing behavior or health care costs, which could render them moot.
At the same time, a separate study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) revealed that disclosure does affect the way some physicians view published medical studies. When it is transparent that a paper was funded or ghostwritten by a drug company, doctors are likely to scrutinize it more harshly, found researchers.
Interestingly, medical science has made much greater strides towards addressing conflicts of interest problems than general science. While NEJM and JAMA instituted their first conflict of interest policies back in 1984 and 1985, respectively, the two leading science journals, Science and Nature, didn't institute theirs until 1992 and 2001, respectively.
In 2009, researchers from Tufts University found that science journals have almost always lagged behind medical journals in addressing conflicts of interest, and are generally worse at enforcing their already established disclosure policies.
"Industry has funded campaigns to undermine scientific work that has major public health implications, such as secondhand smoking, obesity, regulation of chemicals, and climate change," added Thacker. "In each case, hidden money buys off science experts, funds think-tank papers, and litters journals with ghostwritten studies."
Thacker's solutions include requiring all agencies that deal with the publishing of science to fully disclose all income sources and other potential conflicts of interest. He also urges the medical community to adopt universal reporting standards that others in the field of science can mimic, while at the same time disallowing the further publishing of any ghostwritten studies drafted by special interests.
Sources:
http://www.gpo.gov (pdf)
http://www.naturalnews.com
http://archinte.jamanetwork.com
http://www.nejm.org
http://www.tandfonline.com
Published just this month in the International Journal of Toxicology, the study “Glyphosate Commercial Formulation Causes Cytotoxicity, Oxidative Effects, and Apoptosis on Human Cells: Differences With its Active Ingredient,” proposes what most of us have already surmised: Glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide du jour – RoundUp – is utterly killing us. What’s more – it kills us in much smaller servings than the Agriculture industry is dishing out in its common GMO and pesticide spraying practices, and it is made stronger by the additional chemicals used in the RoundUp formula.
“Aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), and a glyphosate formulation (G formulation) were examined in HepG2 cell line, at dilution levels far below agricultural recommendations” and they are causing toxic effects on the human genome. It is the adjuvants in RoundUp working together with the glyphosate which really causes the problem.
“The glyphosate formulation studied also triggered two ‘death proteins’ in human cells known as caspase 3/7, inducing pathways that activate programmed cell death (apoptosis), a clear sign of significant toxicity.”
As many scientists have suspected, glyphosate does not reveal its true toxicity alone – but works in tandem with the other chemicals in RoundUp so that the levels of toxicity on human cells becomes catastrophic. One plausible cause is that the surfactant polyoxyethylene amine within Roundup dramatically enhances the absorption of glyphosate into exposed human cells and tissue.
Read: Glyphosate Found to Fuel Cancer Cells Growth
Another study published in November of last year points to adjuvants working with glyphosate to cause a particularly lethal concoction. “Ethoxylated adjuvants of glyphosate-based herbicides are active principles of human cell toxicity” states:
“. . . Here we demonstrate that all formulations are more toxic than glyphosate, and we separated experimentally three groups of formulations differentially toxic according to their concentrations in ethoxylated adjuvants. Among them, POE-15 clearly appears to be the most toxic principle against human cells, even if others are not excluded. It begins to be active with negative dose-dependent effects on cellular respiration and membrane integrity between 1 and 3ppm [parts per million], at environmental/occupational doses.
We demonstrate in addition that POE-15 induces necrosis when its first micellization process occurs, by contrast to glyphosate which is known to promote endocrine disrupting effects after entering cells. Altogether, these results challenge the establishment of guidance values such as the acceptable daily intake of glyphosate, when these are mostly based on a long term in vivo test of glyphosate alone. Since pesticides are always used with adjuvants that could change their toxicity, the necessity to assess their whole formulations as mixtures becomes obvious”
Argentina has sued Monsanto for its toxic, cancer causing chemicals and GMO, but if you want to be able to sue Monsanto for their dastardly deeds, you better speak up. It is becoming nearly impossible to sue the company in the US, and legal action is just one way of taking down this eugenically motivated monster.
One of the problems with pharmaceuticals (as opposed to most natural remedies) is the fact that, whenever you swallow a pill or receive an injection, you are forced to place your trust in whoever manufactured the medication.
There is no way to determine beforehand whether or not the dose you are taking is safe and effective -- you can only rely on the assumption that the drug has been manufactured according to rigorous standards and thoroughly tested in regard to its efficacy and purity.
Unfortunately, although those standards and testing procedures exist, many unscrupulous drug manufacturers have been caught deleting or altering test results for batches of pharmaceuticals or their ingredients that should have been rejected, but which instead have found their way onto the shelves of U.S. hospitals and pharmacies.
This is a widespread problem, particularly regarding generic medications being imported into the U.S. by drug makers who manufacture their products in other countries, such as India and China.
A recent report published by Bloomberg News has revealed that U.S.-owned drug manufacturing facilities in India have been caught routinely deleting failed purity test results for batches of drugs which subsequently were shipped to the United States and prescribed to unsuspecting patients.
According to FDA documents obtained by Bloomberg, there were 5,301 incidences of deleted test results in one Indian lab facility alone -- a lab owned by Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.
It was reported by the FDA that, when test samples at the lab failed to pass chemical analyses for purity, the results were deleted so that other samples could be taken from the same batches which gave passing results.
This was not an isolated case. Alarmingly, the practice seems to be common among pharmaceutical labs in India, which is the second-biggest drug exporter (behind China) to the U.S.
According to Bloomberg:
A review of FDA documents by Bloomberg News found that similar actions on quality tests have happened at dozens of other companies' plants across India that make drug ingredients and pills for export to the U.S. While not as visible as the dead frogs and flies inspectors have found in other Indian labs, the pattern of data integrity breaches worries doctors in the U.S. and elsewhere. They say they fear prescribing generic drugs that may not do what they're supposed to.
Indian pharma labs manufacture mostly generic drugs or ingredients used in other drugs. The ten largest Indian drug makers rake in $15 billion per year, according to Bloomberg's calculations, and there is very little oversight of the industry.
When drugs are shipped to the U.S., there are no purity tests required as they enter the country. This means that the FDA must rely on the manufacturers to police themselves -- there are only around one dozen FDA inspectors in India, and they conduct investigations only when enough complaints are lodged about a particular drug.
India itself only has 400 staff and 1,500 additional personnel working for its Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation, while there are 600 drug manufacturing factories in the country which are registered in the U.S.
G.N. Singh, India's Drugs Controller General, has said that he is hoping to increase the total number of personnel to 10,000 or 12,000 within the next five years, but that may be an unrealistic goal.
India only began requiring manufacturer compliance last year to laboratory guidelines it introduced in 2012. Meanwhile, there's no way of knowing how many tainted drug shipments have reached the U.S. and how many of them are still being prescribed to American patients.
There is often a lag between the time an FDA inspection is made and a resulting export prohibition is implemented -- sometimes the process takes weeks or even months.
In the case of Sun Pharmaceuticals, it took the FDA four months to ban the lab's exports after the inspection in which computer files containing the deleted test results were found.
The files containing the deleted test data might never have been recovered if it weren't for the fact that the lab was using a software program that prevents test results from being erased. The software, a chromatography data system (CDS), is designed to "help labs comply with government regulations."
Luckily, in this case, someone finally paid attention -- but not until after the practice of hiding test results occurred more than 5,000 times.
It appears fairly obvious that the the laws regulating the importation of drugs into the U.S. favor those who make and sell them, and not those who take them. To rely on the foreign labs to largely police themselves and have no testing requirements at U.S. borders when the shipments arrive seems ludicrous, especially when the consequences could threaten lives.
All this points to the fact that Big Pharma cares more about profits than it does about people -- and that U.S. authorities are not doing enough to ensure that the drugs we are taking are safe.
Source:
http://www.bloomberg.com
(Story by Prof Jason Kissner, republished from GlobalResearch.ca)
We can now be extraordinarily confident that the U.S. government is lying, in key material respects, about the latest Ebola outbreak--and not just because it lies about nearly everything of political consequence. This article shows that there are compelling reasons to believe we are being told three big lies about Ebola. It also offers a simple, rational, yet disturbing, explanation that very tidily accounts for all three lies. The explanation supposes that the current Ebola outbreak consists in an act of U.S.-linked bioterror.
One key U.S. driven lie has to do with the Western MSM's insistence that nobody of any repute believes that Ebola might be airborne. On this issue, the Public Health Agency of Canada remarks:
A few scientific studies expressing concern about the airborne possibility are cited in this article, and other such studies are not hard to find.
So there are people with authority to speak to the issue who believe that there is some cause for concern regarding the airborne Ebola prospect, but the U.S. government/MSM complex instead lies and acts like this isn't the case.
Before getting to the second U.S. lie, it is important to mention three facts that have not received enough discussion. First--and this may be of pivotal significance--we still have no ideahow Ebolagot to West Africa. See for yourself; there's never been an Ebola outbreak in West Africa before.
Perhaps the racist U.S./MSM view is that all African countries are the same, so who cares?
Second, the current outbreak, in terms of the number and international breadth of infections, does seem to be far more contagious than any previous outbreak; as the previous link shows, we now have at least 1,975 cases.
Now pause for a moment and take this fully on board: the 1,975 cases exceed the total number of Ebola cases from 1977 to 2014's outbreak. So it's no surprise that we have, for example, signs of infected individuals in Albania.
The second lie really is a lie of nondisclosure, and concerns the reality that the MSM has not told us that we are dealing with a biologically distinct form of Ebola that has never been seen before.
So, consider the following disconcerting information appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2014 regarding the current West African, Guinean outbreak of Ebola:
Furthermore, from the same study:
So, the Guinean variant of Ebola we now confront has been found to be sufficiently genetically distinct from all previous versions of Ebola that it has been assigned its own genetic branch, or clade, and it is believed to have evolved in parallel from an ancestor held in common with a variant of Ebola native to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon. Moreover, the current outbreak began not in June or July, but as early as April 2014 and perhaps even earlier than December, 2013.
And, we seem to have a single introduction of the Guinea (West African) Ebola variant into the human population. Thus, we seem not to have, for example, something along the lines of multiple bites of humans by supposedly Guinea variant Ebola infected fruit bats.
Finally, the Western Africa Ebola outbreak does not appear to be traceable to Central Africa or anywhere else, and so we still do not know how Ebola got to West Africa.
Let us briefly summarize before presenting the third U.S. Ebola lie and concluding with a reasonable explanation that ties the three lies together.
The Guinea Ebola variant has never been seen before. It might well be far more contagious than any Ebola variant hitherto encountered; it could even be airborne. We still have no idea how Ebola arose in West Africa, but it did so some time ago--well before the Western MSM started to spew its lies.
Now the third U.S. Ebola lie: In a Matt Drudge-linked article entitled "The Federal Government's Inconsistent Ebola Story", we find that the U.S. government is telling two completely inconsistent stories regarding the circumstances surrounding delivery of MappPharmaceuticals' magic ZMapp Ebola drug to Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol. Thus, we have:
According to the CDC, it was Samaritan's Purse, the private humanitarian organization that employs Dr. Brantley, who reached out to them in an attempt to find an experimental Ebola drug. The CDC says it passed Samaritan's Purse along to NIH, who referred them to contacts within Mapp.
The New York Times first reported this version of events on Aug. 6, and the statement was posted on the CDC's website a few days later,where it remains.
But, as the Morning Consult reports in the same article, we also have:
But the NIH told Morning Consult one of its scientists on the ground in West Africa approached the charity before the group had even decided to pursue an experimental alternative.
A statement from Samaritan's Purse also conflicts with the CDC's telling of events, and indicates the NIH and other government agencies may have played an active role in procuring the drugs.
Hence, we have the U.S. government saying both that delivery of the drug to the aid workers was initially government's idea, and that it wasn't initially government's idea. Since both of these possibilities cannot be true, we have our third U.S. federal Ebola lie.
But whose idea was it, really, to deliver the ZMapp magic serum (which is said to have begun reversing Brantly's condition within 20 minutes to an hour)? In all likelihood it was the U.S. government's idea, at a minimum for the following reason mentioned in the Morning Consult article:
Let's put all of the above together and move toward wrapping matters up.We have what appears to be the most contagious variant of Ebola ever encountered, its genetic form is novel in important respects, and we still have no idea how it arose in West Africa.
Yet, we are told that an experimental drug, ZMapp--produced by a previously unheard of U.S. firm with U.S. Department of Defense ties--is functioning in miraculous fashion. Furthermore, the U.S. government cannot keep its story straight about who initiated the delivery of the experimental drug to the U.S. aid workers, but there are compelling reasons to suppose it was the U.S. government that engineered the delivery.
All of the foregoing should prompt us to ask: When was Mapp Pharmaceutical's magic drug ZMappdeveloped?
The following language, drawn from an article at International Business Times, might provide guidance:
A statement from Mapp said:
One very interesting thing to note is the parties involved in producing ZMapp. Two of the parties are the U.S. government and the Public Health Agency of Canada - and the Public Health Agency of Canada, you will recall, is the very same agency that "strongly suspects" that Ebola might be airborne (see the second paragraph of this article). Yet, we are constantly told the U.S. government suspects no such thing.
But there are even more important things to consider.
Does "ZMapp was first identified as a drug candidate in January 2014" mean that ZMappwas designed from the ground up, pretty much when the outbreak began, with the specific purpose of treating the Guinea Ebola variant (see above for timing of the outbreak)? Or, does it mean that ZMapp was repurposed in some way to grapple with the Guinea variant? Or does it perhaps mean something else entirely?
In any event, if the above MappPharmaceuticals statement is true, this much is perfectly clear: a major decision about ZMapp and its potential efficacy was made in January 2014, and that decision appears to have been made very close on the heels of the beginning of the current Guinea Ebola outbreak.
Therefore, if ZMapp really is the miraculous success it is purported to be, we are given to believe that, in Research and Development terms, results must have been achieved virtually overnight. This is because with the beginning of the outbreak of the brand newGuinea Ebola variant dated to around December 2013, Mapp could not possibly have had much time before its January 2014 decision to target the Guinea Ebola variant with ZMapp.
Or might Mappin fact have had plenty of time?
One possibility is that Mappdid have plenty of time, because it knew about the brand new Ebola variant before its debut appearance in West Africa. This would be very strong evidence of a bioterror conspiracy, would it not? Of course, we are very far from sure about this prospect.
However, even if we are to believe that Mapp did not know about the novel Guinea Ebola variant before that variant's first appearance, but did in fact advance anyway with ZMapp againstthe Guinea variant in January 2014, wemust still ask exactly how ZM appended up being effective against a brand new variant Mapp would, under the present assumption, have only just encountered.
Perhaps Mapp had been in the process of designing ZMapp so that it could successfully attack already extant Ebola variants, and whatever properties made it effective against those already extant variants also transferred to the novel Guinea variant?
Maybe.
But if that is so, ZMapp should prove successful against variants of Ebola other than the Guinea variant. Will it?
If it doesn't prove successful against variants of Ebola other than the Guinea variant, I do not see how one can logically avoid the conclusion that the West African rooted, Guinea variant of Ebola amounts to U.S. government linked bioterror.
Unless, of course, one is willing to invoke what amounts to a miraculous stroke of luck consisting in the design of a solution that successfully attacks something that's never been seen before and was not anticipated--even though the solution fails against related versions of the same problem.
In closing, please note that the U.S. act of bioterror explanation economically accounts for all three U.S. lies discussed in the article. It explains why the U.S. government is lying about the airborne status of Ebola, why the U.S. government/MSM hybrid is in no hurry to disclose the geographical and virological novelties of the Guinea variant, and, finally, why the U.S. government, out of one side of its mouth, wants to act like its "miracle experimental drug" had to be pried out of its greedy and comprehensive regulatory hands.
It must be stated, though, that there is one last possibility after all, which is that the Dr. Kent Brantly miracle recovery is no real recovery at all.
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