New Documentary “Bought” Exposes the Hidden Story Behind Vaccines, Pharma, and Food

via: Mercola.com
Dr. Mercola
November 9, 2014

“Your health is now brought to you by Wall Street. If you thought they hurt us with the banks, wait ’til you see what they are doing to our health care.” – Jeff Hays, “Bought”

The new documentary Bought dives deeply into the inner workings of the industries at the core of our food and healthcare system, exploring the truth about how vaccines and drugs are developed and rushed to market and the ongoing secrecy behind the genetic engineering of our food supply.

For a limited time proceeds from renting or purchasing this film will be donated to the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a non-profit organization advocating for vaccine safety and informed consent protection in the public health system.

Filmmaker Jeff Hays believes, as I do, that you have a right to the truth so that you can make educated decisions about your health, food, and medicine. Unfortunately, the truth is not easy to come by today.

Like the banks, the food and drug industries have grown more powerful and less transparent over time, and profit has become the primary motive. Hays may be best known for his 2012 documentary “Doctored,” which exposes how the medical and drug industry conspire to control the health care system.

Hays’ new film peels back the layers to show how the drug, vaccine, and chemical technology industries have joined forces as one supervillain, with its “undisclosed location” smack-dab in the middle of the White House.

You can’t effectively address one industry without addressing them all, as they are now inextricably linked. Until enough people raise their voices, nothing is likely to change. According to Hays:¹

“From opiates, to statins, to a blizzard of psychotropic medications that do far more harm than good, the film covers how our entire health care system, from education to practice has been Bought… three story lines converge on Wall Street, in a tale of corruption, greed and shocking lack of conscience.”

Federal Vaccine Court: Designed Specifically to Clean Up the Trail of Destruction Left by Vaccines

Vaccines are a $30 billion per year industry. Today, four dominate the world market (Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi Pasteur, and GlaxoSmithKline). Given the furor that erupts when anybody publicly questions vaccine safety, you would assume that the US government considers vaccines completely safe.

But in reality, that’s not the case as evidenced by the establishment of a Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) where vaccine injury claims are decided in a Federal Vaccine Court² to compensate vaccine victims, but in reality protects the vaccine industry from lawsuits. The official line by federal health officials is that vaccines are safe and never cause autism.

However, the fact is that for many years, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Justice and the Federal Vaccine Court have been quietly settling cases of brain inflammation and permanent brain damage (encephalopathy) that included symptoms of autism.

These VICP awards have been made to cover treatments related to autism. The VCIP was established in 1986 when Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act,³ which protected vaccine manufacturers, pediatricians and other vaccine providers from nearly all civil liability for injuries and deaths caused by government recommended and mandated vaccines.

If vaccines are so safe, then why has the government set up a federal compensation program specifically to manage the damage they cause? In Bought, families who have won and lost in Vaccine Court share their heartbreaking stories.

These parent and health care professionals speaking out about their experiences are articulate, knowledgeable, and compelling witnesses to the damage that vaccines and one-size-fits-all vaccine policies have done. They are not part of some anti-vaccine campaign—in fact, the reason they were in Vaccine Court is because of what happened when they DID vaccinate their children!

Most Vaccine Reactions Are Never Connected to Vaccines

Proving causation is extremely difficult with vaccine injuries in part because there are huge gaps in vaccine safety science and, also, unless a vaccine reaction is immediate and obvious, parents may not connect their child’s deterioration in health to the shots the child was given.

When parents report their child’s regression into chronic poor health following vaccination to their child’s pediatrician, they are typically told the illness couldn’t possibly be related to the vaccine or vaccinations the child was given.

Sometimes reactions occur within hours or days of vaccination and are dramatic and life threatening and the child is taken to the emergency room and the vaccine reaction symptoms are recorded in the child’s medical record. Usually, only the most clear cut and identifiable vaccine reactions end up in Vaccine Court—the ones where the “dots” are easily connected.

Unfortunately, at that point the damage is done and the child may be left with lifelong chronic illness and disability. The vast majority of vaccine adverse reactions are never reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). Still, CDC’s VAERS database⁴ lists 8,000 different adverse vaccine reactions, from localized swelling and anaphylactic shock to autism, coma, and death.⁵

Because of the factors already discussed, the actual number of reactions is probably much higher than the database reports. As vaccine safety advocate Dawn Loughborough said in “Bought:”

“We used to have this idea we were protecting children from infectious diseases. And we created the National Vaccine program with children in mind, but somewhere in time protecting the program became more important than what’s happening to our children.”

Continue Reading At: NaturalSociety.com

Big Pharma Seeks Legal Immunity For Damages From Experimental Ebola Eaccines

via: NaturalNews.com
Ethan A. Huff
October 29, 2014

The same drug manufacturers that stand to profit immensely from the sale of Ebola vaccines say they require full legal immunity from any potential lawsuits that might arise when people are harmed by various adverse effects from these “emergency” drugs.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) CEO Andrew Witty told World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Margaret Chan that his corporation, which is currently leading the way in producing Ebola vaccines, shouldn’t have to shoulder any of the burden of responsibility for their safety.

Witty maintains, in other words, that GSK should be allowed full access to the financial benefits associated with selling Ebola vaccines to the public, but with absolutely none of the risk. And his company and others will likely get what they want, since they hold remarkable sway in the political realm.

“I think it is reasonable that there should be some level of indemnification because the vaccine is essentially being used in an emergency situation before we’ve all had the chance to confirm its absolute profile,” Witty told BBC.

“That’s a situation where we would look for some kind of indemnification, either from governments or from multilateral agencies.”

Taxpayers funding development of high-profit drugs for which drug companies will not be held liable

There are currently no approved drugs or vaccines for Ebola, which is why GSK and others have been racing to pump new ones through the pipeline. This process, which normally takes five or six years to complete, is being done in about five or six months, hence concerns over the safety of the final products.

But the shady reality is that governments, not vaccine companies, are actually the ones financing the development of experimental Ebola drugs and vaccines. And they are doing so on the taxpayer dime, which means vaccine companies are not only developing their vaccines for free but also gaining access to unlimited profit potential driven by fear.

Read More At: NaturalNews.com

Bill Gates Leveraged Philanthropy: Corporate Profit versus Humanity

via: Mercola
by: Dr. Mercola
July 31, 2012

A recent commentary in Education Week takes a fresh look at the Gates Foundation’s philanthropy. The money it spends on all kinds of projects around the world is no small chunk of change–$26 billion since its inception in 1994 has been donated to help developing countries and the United Nations fund world health goals¹.

Unfortunately, some of the chosen projects appear to clash with the Foundation’s underlying goals, such as its partnership with the biotech giant Monsanto. Besides questionable partnerships, the foundation and Gates himself also have personal investments in some of the projects they fund.

Philanthropic Leverage

The featured article discusses “philanthropic leverage,” or “the idea that you can use a little money to access a lot of money,” stating that this is exactly what the Gates Foundation is doing²:

“Gates’ leveraged philanthropy model is a public-private partnership to improve the world, partly through targeted research support but principally through public advocacy and tax-free lobbying to influence government policy. The goal of these policies is often to explicitly support profitability for corporate investors, whose enterprises are seen by the Gates Foundation as advancing human good. However, maximum corporate profit and public good often clash when its projects are implemented. “

I have already gone on record stating Bill Gates might be one of the world’s most destructive do-gooders. He seems completely oblivious of the fundamental flaws in the science behind genetically engineered (GE) foods, for example. GE crops have been shown to be far less nutritious than conventional and organic counterparts, in addition to destroying soil composition (to learn more, see my interview with Dr. Don Huber). How is that alleviating global malnutrition and disease?

Conflicts of Interest Rampant in Gates’ Charitable Work

The featured article also highlights the many obvious conflicts of interest plaguing the Gates Foundation and its founder. As already mentioned, the Gates Foundation has partnered with Monsanto—a company that seeks to replace sustainable agricultural practices with its own patented genetically engineered seeds, which must be re-purchased each planting season.

The global agricultural “charity” work performed by these two is far from charitable; rather the end result will be a monopoly of the food supply and entire nations, as they effectively strip poor nations of their food sovereignty.

Another partner is GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)—the same company that just plead guilty in the largest health fraud case in US history. Through their partnership with the Gates Foundation, GSK “centrally controls enormous world funds for purchase, pricing, and delivery of vaccines for world public health,” the featured article states³.

Both the Foundation and Bill Gates also own stock and profit financially from their partner corporations. For example, in the second quarter of 2010, the Gates Foundation purchased 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock with an estimated worth of $23.1 million—a decision that met with heavy criticism once it leaked out.

Furthermore,

“[T]he Foundation owns a profit-generating portfolio of stocks which would seem to work against the Foundation’s declared missions, such as the Latin American Coca-Cola FEMSA distributorship and five multinational oil giants operating in Nigeria,”the featured article reveals⁴. “These corporate investments, now moved to a blind trust whose trustees are Bill and Melinda Gates, are collaterally supported by the Foundation’s tax-free lobbying and advocacy activities.”

The “Hidden” Media Influence of the Gates Foundation

The Foundation also funds large media organizations like ABC and The Guardian, thereby influencing the health related stories that end up seeing the light of day. According to an article published last year in the Seattle Times⁵:

“To garner attention for the issues it cares about, the foundation has invested millions in training programs for journalists. It funds research on the most effective ways to craft media messages. Gates-backed think tanks turn out media fact sheets and newspaper opinion pieces. Magazines and scientific journals get Gates money to publish research and articles. Experts coached in Gates-funded programs write columns that appear in media outlets from The New York Times to The Huffington Post, while digital portals blur the line between journalism and spin.

The efforts are part of what the foundation calls “advocacy and policy.” Over the past decade, Gates has devoted $1 billion to these programs, which now account for about a tenth of the giant philanthropy’s $3 billion-a-year spending.”

Uncritical support of genetically engineered crops and an emphasis on technological fixes for health problems, such as vaccines instead of improved hygiene and sanitation, are examples of the one-sided propaganda the Gates Foundation promulgates. It’s not all bad, of course. Bill Gates’ money has certainly gone to some worthy projects along the way, but it appears what began as a sincere attempt to help society has, in more recent years, given way to primarily supporting the status quo of the richest and most powerful industries on the planet, to the detriment of those they claim to be the beneficiaries of their “charity.”

Continue Reading At: Mercola.com

GSK whistleblower says Glaxo Marketing VP ‘Sir’ Andrew Witty was deeply involved in massive criminal cover-up

via: NaturalNews
Friday, July 27, 2012
By: Ethan A. Huff

[NaturalNews] The recent landmark ruling against drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which as we recently reported led to a massive criminal fine of more than $3 billion and a guilty plea by the company of committing felony crimes (http://www.naturalnews.com/036499_Glaxo_whistleblower_bribery.html), was followed by an apology from GSK Vice President of Marketing “Sir” Andrew Witty for the company’s “past” failures. But according to whistleblower Gregory Thorpe, the apology is meaningless, as Witty had been working for GSK during the years when the company was proven to have been engaged in illegal activity, and was more than likely involved in it.

Not only that, but Thorpe was the one punished by GSK for coming forward with the truth, a retribution that he has had to sustain for more than a decade, while Witty was recently “knighted” by the U.K. government for his supposed service to the British economy and pharmaceutical industry. If anything, Witty’s ridiculous apology is nothing more than a lame attempt at shifting blame from himself to supposed “past” scapegoats, all the while claiming that GSK is now a new company that operates honestly.

Thorpe; however, says that he and Blair Hamrick were the ones that tried to change GSK for the better by coming forward with evidence that the pharmaceutical giant was engaged in a massive criminal enterprise that involved illegally marketing drugs, bribing doctors, and drugging children. And rather than change, the corrupt-to-the-core leadership team at GSK, which included Witty, put Thorpe and his family through years of hell for exposing the truth.

“[Witty] calls [the corruption] echoes of the past, another era, another company, yet he was there,” wrote Thorpe in the comment section of a recent article on the GSK scandal published by the U.K.’s Yorkshire Post (YP). Like most other mainstream reports on the GSK scandal, YP glosses over Witty’s potential involvement in the GSK scandal, and all the corresponding unanswered questions, and seems to accept his apology as valid and sufficient.

“Did he participate? Did he know? What did he know? Why did he not come forward? Why won’t he answer these questions?” asks Thorpe about Witty’s likely participation in the GSK scandal. “I blew the whistle, I was tossed out after 24 years with the company. I was terminated and retaliated against for the last 11 years … GSK covered up their conduct, got caught, and now Witty is ‘sorry’?”

“They took 11 years from me and my family suffered. I was blackballed in the pharmaceutical business. In the meantime, Witty was ‘knighted.'”

You can read Thorpe’s full comments at the bottom of the following article:
http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk

If that comment gets deleted, here’s our captured screen shot of it:
http://www.naturalnews.com/images/YorkShirePost-Glaxo-Mistakes-GThorpe.jpg

$3 billion may seem like a lot, but it is nothing for a massive company like GSK

Even though it represents the largest criminal penalty in pharmaceutical history, the $3 billion fine levied against GSK is mere pocket change in the bigger picture of the company’s overall financial assets and revenues. GSK openly admitted to engaging in a longstanding, organized criminal enterprise that likely cost thousands of people their lives — does a measly $3 billion fine and a phony apology really serve justice in light of this?

According to the allegations originally filed by Thorpe and Hamrick against GSK, which the company has now pleaded guilty to, GSK’s entire marketing strategy involved exploiting and defrauding government health programs; illegally promoting drugs for off-label uses that included marketing them to children; and bribing doctors to promote drugs to patients that did not need them in exchange for illicit kickbacks.

You can watch the recent interview between Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and whistleblower Blair Hamrick, where Hamrick explains this and much more, here:
http://tv.naturalnews.com/v.asp?v=1FE6404520AA77A877753AA936722510

Since Witty held numerous high-level positions at GSK during the time in which the company was proven to have engaged in the most colossal criminal conspiracy yet unveiled in the pharmaceutical industry, he had to have, at the very least, been aware of what was going on at the company — and more than likely, he was actively involved in it. But either way, Witty did not come forward and speak up about GSK’s crimes, nor did he defend Thorpe and Hamrick in trying to turn the company around by exposing its corruption.

Instead, Thorpe and Hamrick made the decision to do the right thing by themselves, and consequently suffered years of torment by pharmaceutical big-wigs like Witty that continued to hide their company’s evil deeds from the public. And now that the truth has been exposed in plain sight, Witty and his company are getting off scot-free with a canned apology and a relatively small, at least for GSK, financial penalty?

Be sure to read the full NaturalNews report on the GSK scandal here:
http://www.naturalnews.com/036499_Glaxo_whistleblower_bribery.html

Sources for this article include:

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk

http://www.justice.gov/opa/documents/gsk/plea-ex-b.pdf

http://www.naturalnews.com/036499_Glaxo_whistleblower_bribery.html

Read More At: NaturalNews.com

Hey, Mr. Obama: Big P[HARM]A Prescription drugs kill 6200% more Americans than homicidal shootings

via: NaturalNews
Thursday, July 26, 2012
by: Mike Adams

[NaturalNews] In the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado Batman movie theater shooting, President Obama chimed in on the gun control debate yesterday, saying, “Every day, the number of young people we lose to violence is about the same as the number of people we lost in that movie theater. For every Columbine or Virginia Tech, there are dozens gunned down on the streets of Chicago or Atlanta…” (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/25/obama-calls-measures-…)
What he didn’t say, however, is that every day 290 people are killed by FDA-approved prescription drugs, and that’s the conservative number published by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

As no one seems to believe these numbers are real, I’ll quote the source: The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Vol 284, No 4, July 26th 2000, authored by Dr Barbara Starfield, MD, MPH, of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.

That study, which is twelve years old — and drug deaths have risen considerably since then — documents 106,000 deaths per year from the “adverse effects” of FDA-approved prescription medications.

To reach this number from outbreaks of violent shootings, you’d have to see an Aurora Colorado Batman movie massacre take place every HOUR of every day, 365 days a year.

If a massacre of people using slugs of lead is bad, why is a massacre of people using deadly chemicals perfectly acceptable?

A medical massacre that dwarfs the number of deaths from shootings

No one in Washington talks about prescription drug deaths. There are no sobbing victims shown on the evening news. This “chemical massacre” happens quietly, behind closed doors. Yet to achieve this level of mass death in the world of plane crashes, for example, you’d have to see a jumbo jet airliner crashing into the ground once a day, every day of the year.

But that’s only the beginning of the mass death caused by modern medicine, where greed-driven doctors are routinely bribed by the drug giants (http://www.naturalnews.com/036510_doctors_bribes_drug_companies.html) and thereby make the “Joker” James Holmes look like a boy scout by comparison. As NaturalNews previously revealed, just one company — GlaxoSmithKline — had a bribery network of 49,000 doctors who received financial kickbacks to prescribe more Glaxo pharmaceuticals to patients.

According to the report Death by Medicine, by Drs. Gary Null, Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman, Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith, the medical establishment kills 783,936 people in the United States every year. (http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2004/mar2004_awsi_death_02.htm)

Those deaths include:

• 106,000 Americans killed from drug side effects
• 115,000 Americans killed from bedsores
• 98,000 Americans killed from medical error
• 88,000 Americans killed from infections
• 32,000 Americans killed from surgery
• 37,000 Americans killed from unnecessary procedures

… and so on. See the source link, above, for the rest of the numbers.

The bottom line total comes to 783,936 deaths every year from “conventional” medicine (drugs and surgery medicine).

You are 6200% more likely to be killed by your doctor than by a shooter

According to the CDC’s numbers from 2007, the total number of homicide shooting deaths in the United States each year is roughly 12,600 (Xu, Jiaquan; Kenneth D. Kochanek, Sherry L. Murphy, Betzaida Tejada-Vera (2010-05-20). “Deaths: Final Data for 2007” (PDF). National Vital Statistics Reports (CDC) 58(19): 11. Retrieved 2011-04-07.)

This means that your risk of being killed by your doctor is 62 times higher than the risk of being killed by a shooter. Put another way, that’s a 6200% higher risk.

It seems that before we even think about the issue of gun control, we need a national debate on DOCTOR control.

After all, when doctors inadvertently kill people by prescribing deadly chemotherapy cocktails or deadly prescription drugs, they don’t even get arrested for it! But they do get financial kickbacks, exotic vacations paid by drug companies, free travel, free meals and other perks of being a Big Pharma whore. Plus, they’re free to go on killing other people, over and over again. While doctors obviously don’t intend to kill people, they nonetheless keep doing so as long as they get their bribes, kickbacks and perks. (http://www.naturalnews.com/036417_Glaxo_Merck_fraud.html)

If Obama really wanted to protect Americans from being killed, he’d call for restrictions on the prescribing of deadly pharmaceuticals. But don’t hold your breath on that one, because when it comes to actually protecting the American people from medical massacres, or GMOs, or toxic fluoride in the water supply, the real Joker is Obama himself.

Read More At: NaturalNews.com

Why Did the Wall Street Journal Bury the Merck Fraud Story?

via: Mercola
by: Dr. Mercola
July 23, 2012

It was big news when court documents were unsealed revealing a whistleblower lawsuit accusing drug giant Merck of fraud and lying about the true efficacy of its mumps vaccine. Just about every media, large and small, picked it up and the world was abuzz about the hundreds of millions of dollars the lawsuit claimed Merck had defrauded from the U.S. government.

The Wall Street Journal published the story in the form of a Dow Jones news release written by Jon Kamp on June  22, 2012, and links to the story began popping up on social media like Facebook.

Then, suddenly, the link to the story no longer worked, and if anyone clicked on the link in social media, it would show up “page not found.” Apparently the story had been pulled, and when search engines and Internet archives wouldn’t even show it, it looked as if it had never been published on the Journal’s site at all. It was erased nearly clean–except for a small stock-watcher’s website, 4Traders.com, which did a good job of erasing it from its main site but didn’t catch it in the cache.

The question is, why did the WSJ pull the story and try to erase as if it never existed when there were actual court documents for evidence?

Is it possible that an event that occurred on June 25¹—three days after the story broke—could have influenced the story being pulled? On that day, the Wall Street Journal’s “elite” network of CFOs from the world’s top corporations met at the WSJ². Merck is on that executive council³.

My team attempted to connect with the WSJ on this issue, but as of this time, we have not yet received an answer as to why this article was pulled.

 

Merck Accused of Falsifying Efficacy Studies and Lying about Effectiveness of Mumps Vaccine

 

Merck has actually been slapped with two class-action lawsuits over their mumps vaccine (which is part of the trivalent measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine). The first, which was initially filed in 2010, was unsealed late last month.

Two former Merck virologists, Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, claim they witnessed first-hand the improper testing and falsification of data that was done to hide the fact that the vaccine has significantly declined in effectiveness⁴.

By artificially inflating the efficacy, Merck was able to maintain its monopoly over the mumps vaccine market—and that is the main point of contention of the second class-action lawsuit, filed by Chatom Primary Care⁵.

According to Courthouse News Service⁶:

“Merck has known for a decade that its mumps vaccine is “far less effective” than it tells the government, and it falsified test results and sold millions of doses of “questionable efficacy,” flooding and monopolizing the market… Chatom says in its antitrust complaint that Merck falsely claims its mumps vaccine is 95 percent effective. That claim “deterred and excluded competing manufacturers,” who would enter the risky and expensive vaccine market only if they believed they could craft a better product…

Merck is the only manufacturer licensed by the FDA to sell the mumps vaccine in United States, and if it could not show that the vaccine was 95 percent effective, it risked losing its lucrative monopoly…

That’s why Merck found it critically important to keep claiming such a high efficacy rate, the complaint states. And, Chatom claims, that’s why Merck went to great lengths, including “manipulating its test procedures and falsifying the test results,” to prop up the bogus figure, though it knew that the attenuated virus from which it created the vaccine had been altered over the years during the manufacturing process, and that the quality of the vaccine had degraded as a result.”

 

How Merck Faked and Manipulated Vaccine Trials to Achieve Desired Results

 

According to these two lawsuits, Merck began a sham testing program in the late 1990’s to hide the declining efficacy of the vaccine. The objective of the fraudulent trials was to “report efficacy of 95 percent or higher regardless of the vaccine’s true efficacy.”

According to Krahling and Wlochowski’s complaint, they were threatened with jail were they to alert the FDA to the fraud being committed. The sham testing program was initially referred to as “Protocol 007,” the Chatom anti-trust claim states. Suzanne Humphries recently wrote an excellent summary for GreenMedInfo.com⁷, explaining in layman’s terms how the tests were manipulated⁸.

Here’s a brief extract. For more, please refer to the original source article:

“For the new testing method, the children’s blood was tested for its ability to neutralize the virus using the vaccine strain virus, instead of the wild type strain that is much more infective, and the one that your children would most likely catch… But still it was not 95% effective. In order to make the blood pass the test, antibodies from rabbits was added. The addition of rabbit antibody increased the efficacy to 100%. But that was not the end, because the test has to be done on pre-vaccine blood and post-vaccine blood.

Just the addition of rabbit antibody made the pre-vaccine blood go from 10% positive to 80% positive and that was such an obvious sign of foul play that yet another manipulation had to be made.

The desired end result is to have very low pre-vaccine antibody and 95% or more post-vaccine efficacy as measured by antibody neutralization. So, yet one more change in procedure was made: The pre-vaccine tests were all redone… According to the Merck scientists, they did this by fabricating the “plaque” counts on the pre-vaccine blood samples, counting plaques that were not there. What this allowed was a mathematical dilution of the pre-vaccine positive blood counts.”

This is a perfect example of how medical research can be manipulated to achieve desired results, and why it may be wise to question vaccine makers’ study results. Clearly, there needs to be a truly independent review in the mix… As reported by the Courthouse News Service⁹:

“Chatom claims that the falsification of test results occurred” with the knowledge, authority and approval of Merck’s senior management.”

While I do not advocate indiscriminately abstaining from all vaccines, I strongly encourage you to exercise a major dose of due diligence as vaccines can cause serious reactions that can have devastating consequences. I believe in informed consent and the freedom to choose. There can be little doubt anymore that drug companies are in it for the profits, and virtually no price seems too high for them when it comes to protecting their profit-making.

Continue Reading At: Mercola.com

Alternative media blows the lid on Big Pharma’s massive bribery network

via: NaturalNews
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
by Mike Adams

[NaturalNews] Two of the most influential alternative media organizations on the ‘net — InfoWars.com and NaturalNews.com — have blown the lid wide open on Big Pharma’s massive bribery network. Through exclusive interviews with pharma insiders, InfoWars and NaturalNews have done what the mainstream media refuses to do: grant a platform to credible whistleblowers who are exposing the systematic, criminal Big Pharma bribing of doctors who willingly accept kickbacks to write prescriptions for high-profit pharmaceuticals.

These revelations are surfacing on the heels of the drug industry’s largest settlement in history: GlaxoSmithKline’s $3 billion fine and guilty plea to committing felony crimes (http://www.naturalnews.com/036416_GlaxoSmithKline_fraud_criminal_char…). NaturalNews editor Mike Adams (the Health Ranger) was able to connect with one of the key whistleblowers who initiated that nine-year DOJ investigation, and he went on the record with shocking allegations about off-label pharmaceutical marketing and the systematic bribery of doctors (http://www.naturalnews.com/036499_Glaxo_whistleblower_bribery.html).

The video interview with Blair Hamrick is available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_RJ9QPG70U
and:
http://tv.naturalnews.com/v.asp?v=1FE6404520AA77A877753AA936722510

Blair was also interviewed by Adams on the Alex Jones Show (www.InfoWars.com), where he revealed additional information about Glaxo’s activities such as the “coaching” of pharmaceutical sales reps to enroll doctors in elaborate kickback schemes. The video of that interview is available below.

Caller blows the whistle on the physician bribery underground

Following Blair’s interview on the Alex Jones Show, a woman who identified herself as “Ally” called in to the show and described, in authentic language and tone, how she had worked inside a company that managed the “kickback” relationships between drug companies and doctors. On live national radio, she proceeded to describe details about how doctors would earn up to $6,000 a day as part of Big Pharma’s speakers bureaus. In her own words, below, she explains how doctors and physicians lined up to cash in on the bribery payoffs, happy to sell their souls to Big Pharma while pimping out drugs that were often shown to be dangerous — even deadly — to the consuming public.

Hear her call-in conversation with the Health Ranger at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEbWrNL4_SY

Continue Reading At: NaturalNews.com

Big Pharma’s massive bribery network exposed!

via: TheHealthRanger
July 17, 2012

Exclusive: Glaxo whistleblower goes public with shocking details of bribery, marketing fraud and other pharma crimes

via: NaturalNews
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
by Mike Adams

[NaturalNews] GlaxoSmithKline employee and whistleblower Blair Hamrick has helped make medical history. Together with his colleague Gregory Thorpe, Blair blew the whistle on criminal practices taking place inside GlaxoSmithKline which have now led to the largest criminal admission and financial settlement in the history of western medicine. GSK is paying a $3 billion fine while pleading guilty to felony crimes. (http://www.naturalnews.com/036416_GlaxoSmithKline_fraud_criminal_char…).

Blair recently joined Mike Adams on the Health Ranger Report for a video interview. In this astonishing interview, Blair describes his firsthand knowledge of the “bribery” of physicians, the push for off-label marketing of drugs for unapproved health conditions, the illegal marketing of drugs to children, how 80 percent of physicians were willing to be “on the take,” and other astonishing details from behind the scenes of the criminally-operated medical mafia known as Big Pharma.

The full video interview is available on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_RJ9QPG70U

And on TV.NaturalNews.com at:
http://tv.naturalnews.com/v.asp?v=1FE6404520AA77A877753AA936722510

Blair Hamrick is also being interviewed on live national radio by Mike Adams on the Alex Jones Show, Tuesday, July 17th, beginning at 12 noon Eastern / 9 am Pacific (www.InfoWars.com). Those who miss the live broadcast can download the audio file from the Alex Jones Show archives at www.PrisonPlanet.TV

Below, we’ve published selected transcribed statements from Blair Hamrick as revealed in the above videos.

The worst decision ever made by any drug company

The $3 billion settlement was achieved with the help of the law firm known as Kenney & McCafferty (http://quitam-lawyer.com), specializing in whistleblower cases.

“When our clients were forced out of their marketing positions, GlaxoSmithKline (‘GSK’) had proof of illegal off-label prescription drug marketing. Our clients properly reported those marketing misdeeds to management in 2001. An ensuing GSK internal investigation verified their allegations, but the company took no action, choosing hefty profits over compliance and patient safety,” said whistleblower attorney Tavy Deming of Kenney & McCafferty. (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/glaxosmithklines-gsk-3-billio…)

“GSK could have saved hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion or more dollars of the $3 billion it paid today by following through on the combined Human Resources / Corporate Compliance investigation they launched. Instead they ignored evidence of improper marketing and physician kickbacks. When you look at the detail and accuracy of Greg Thorpe’s written complaints distributed to the highest levels of Glaxo it’s almost surreal that the company took no corrective action. Now more than a decade later, GSK is essentially admitting that Thorpe had been right in 2001,” Kenney said. “It’s been a very, very, very long 10 years for whistleblowers Thorpe and Blair Hamrick.”

Court documents reveal even more details

The following PDF document contains selected pages from the “seventh amended complaint” filed in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, where Gregory Thorpe and Blair Hamrick sued Smith Kline Beecham and GlaxoSmithKline.

This document shows some of the GENERAL ALLEGATIONS against GlaxoSmithKline. View the full document here:

http://www.naturalnews.com/files/GSK_7th_amended_complaint_Select_Pag…

These allegations are vast and disturbing. They include:

From 1997 to the present and continuing, GSK’s marketing plan, devised at a senior executive level, has been to “Exploit the Bolus” of government-funded healthcare programs such as Medicaid and Tricare, with the direct and intended effect of causing the submission of false claims to such programs as identified herein.

GSK has illegally and fraudulently promoted and marketed the sale of its drugs for off label, non-medically accepted uses… As part of this scheme, GSK overtly and aggressively targeted physicians identified by GSK’s prescription tracking methods to have the largest volumes of patients enrolled in government-funded healthcare programs such as Medicaid and Tricare.

GSK has paid illegal remuneration (i.e. kickbacks) to physicians and other health care providers with the purpose and intent of inducing those physicians and healthcare providers to prescribe GSK drugs in return in violation of the federal Anti-Kickback law and the analogous anti-kickback laws of the Plaintiff States.

Top level GSK managers and executives, including but not limited to GSK’s Chief Executive Officer J.P. Garnier, current President of Pharmaceutical Operations David Stout, Vice Chairman of Pharmaceuticals (and former President of Pharmaceutical Operations) Robert A. Ingram, Senior Vice President Stan Hull, Regional Director Mike Bennett, and Vice President and Head of Corporate Compliance Arjun Rajaratnam, have been aware of GSK’s illegal marketing schemes and have played an active role in supporting and promoting these schemes.

Continue Reading At: NaturalNews.com

Why Your Doctor’s Advice May Be Fatally Flawed

via: Mercola
by: Dr. Mercola
July 13, 2012

Curious about the prevalence and extent of scientific misconduct, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Pharmacoeconomic Research investigated the reasons why research studies were retracted, and from whereⁱ.

The highest number of incidents of misconduct occurred in the drug literature, as compared to general biomedical literature. Nearly 75 percent of the retracted drug studies were attributed to scientific misconduct, which includes:

• Data falsification or fabrication
• Questionable veracity
• Unethical author conduct
• Plagiarism

This is a significant rise when compared to a 1998 review—cited in the featured NewsWise article—in which 37 percent of scientific retractions between 1966 and 1997 were due to scientific misconduct. Even more shocking: According to data from Thomson Reuters, the numbers of scientific retractions have climbed more than 15-fold since 2001ⁱⁱ!

The most unfortunate thing about this is that these are the types of studies many health care professionals rely on to make treatment recommendations. Large numbers of patients can be affected when false findings are published, as the average lag time between publication of the study and the issuing of a retraction is 39 months. And that’s if it’s ever caught at all.

Just How Scientific is “Science-Based Medicine” Really?

I am a big believer in the scientific method, provided it’s applied appropriately that is. And that’s the key issue here. In order to qualify in the first place, the research must be unbiased, unprejudiced and free from any significant conflicts of interest. Sadly, this is not the case with most of modern medicine—especially not when it comes to drug research, as evidenced by the featured findings.

It’s quite shocking that nearly three-quarters of all retracted drug studies are due to pure falsification of data. Especially when you consider that even well-researched drugs can still have significant side effects.

Just imagine the potential for tragedy when a drug is based largely on pure fantasy!

Vioxx is perhaps one of the better examples of what can happen when a drug is manufactured and sold under false pretenses. It killed more than 60,000 people in just a few years time, before it was removed from the market. In the case of Vioxx, there are lingering questions about the soundness of the research backing the drug in the first place. Back in 2008, Dr. Joseph S. Ross of New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine came across ghostwritten research studies for Vioxx while reviewing documents related to lawsuits filed against Merck.

According to an April 16, 2008 article on MedHeadlinesⁱⁱⁱ:

“In about 96 journal publications, Ross and his colleagues discovered internal Merck documents and e-mail messages pertaining to clinical study reports and review articles, some of which were developed by the company’s marketing department, not its scientific department. In others, there is little evidence that the authors recruited for the report made substantial contribution to the research itself. … Some of the authors listed in the Merck study reports of concern… question the true nature of ghostwriting. One neurologist originally listed as “External author?” and then listed as Dr. Leon J. Thal, of the University of California, San Diego in the final draft, died a year ago in an airplane crash.”

An editorial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)^iv that year by Drs. Psaty and Kronmal also questioned whether Merck might have deliberately manipulated dozens of academic documents published in the medical literature, in order to promote Vioxx under false pretenses.

Avandia is another potent example. This diabetes medication hit the market in 1999 and quickly became a blockbuster drug. By 2006 its annual revenue was $3.2 billion. A year later, a damning study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) linked Avandia to a 43 percent increased risk of heart attack and a 64 percent higher risk of cardiovascular death than patients treated with other methods.

Between 1999 and 2007, Avandia is estimated to have caused over 80,000 unnecessary heart attacks^v, although the actual numbers of people harmed or killed by the drug is still largely unknown. The most recent analysis by the Cleveland Clinic in 2010^vi, which used data from 56 clinical Avandia trials, calculated that for every 37 to 52 patients who take Avandia for five years, one additional heart attack can be expected as a result of the drug. As a result, the authors of this meta-analysis estimate the number of deaths caused by Avandia to be around 48,000, between 1999 and 2009.

This is a steep price, to say the least, for a disease that does not require drugs to begin with. Avandia is a poster child for the lethal paradigm of faux science as GlaxoSmithKline, the manufacturer of Avandia, hid damaging information about the drug for over 10 years^vii, as it would adversely affect sales!

Again and again we are confronted with indisputable evidence that the drug paradigm is about money, not health, and certainly not dependable scientific inquiry.

Since that 2007 NEJM study, data from various trials, studies and meta-analyses have consistently confirmed the dangers of Avandia, and based on the evidence amassed over the past three years, the European Medicines Agency is now recommending the withdrawal of rosiglitazone-containing diabetic drugs due to the increased risk of ischaemic heart disease. NEJM also hit the nail on its head with the statement that,

“[T]he case of rosiglitazone underscores the need for a robust evidence base to demonstrate the safety of medicines administered long-term.”

Unfortunately, a committee of independent experts recommended that Avandia remain on the US market, despite its risks, and an FDA oversight board voted 8 to 7 to accept the advice.

It’s important to understand that our current medical system has been masterfully orchestrated by the drug companies to create a system that gives the perception of science when really it is a heavily manipulated process designed to manipulate and deceive you into using expensive and potentially toxic drugs that benefit the drug companies more than it benefits your health. Across the board, drugmakers do an excellent job of publicizing the findings they want you to know, while keeping very quiet about the rest.

It’s important to realize that all research is NOT published. And it should come as no surprise that drug studies funded by a pharmaceutical company that reaches a negative conclusion will rarely ever see the light of day… What this means is that even if you scour the medical literature to determine what the consensus is on any given medical topic, what you’ll find is an overwhelming preponderance of data in favor of the drug approach that in no way, shape or form reflects the reality of the scientific investigation that went into that specific drug.

How Drug Companies Manipulate Research Evidence to Fool You

The pharmaceutical industry as a whole has become the poster-child for fraud, deception, and manipulation of science for profit. Nearly 20 percent of the top 100 Corporate Criminals listed for the 1990s were in fact drug companies!

In an online series called Transparency and Medicine featured on the web site The Conversation^viii, Jon Jureidini discusses how science-based medicine is clouded by marketing departments that control and distort information in the medical literature. Jureidini is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Adelaide (Australia), who got an inside look at this murky mess while examining drug company internal documents as an expert witness in a case against a pharmaceutical company. The voluminous amounts of documents he was given access to showed “serious misrepresentation” of both the effectiveness and safety of certain drugs, with published articles making the research appear positive, while negative secondary outcomes were deleted.

When you consider that this is the type of research data that then ends up being used to make treatment decisions for years to come by many expert review panels, is it any wonder the United States has the most expensive health care in the world, while STILL experiencing a decline in life expectancy and other health indexes? The whole idea that modern medicine is science-based has become laughable, as the evidence tells a whole different story…

Continue Reading At: Mercola.com