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Fact-checking Fortune: Has Polio Vaccine Saved 20 Million Children From Paralysis?
The Defender | December 23, 2024
A Dec. 13 article in Fortune called the polio vaccine used in the U.S. today “not only safe but also effective.”
The article also claimed that because 3 billion children have been vaccinated against polio since 1988, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, that means “20 million people who would’ve otherwise been paralyzed by polio are walking today.”
How accurate is the 20 million figure?
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) website, in 1988, there were 350,000 reported polio cases worldwide in a global population of 5.1 billion people. If, as the WHO website states, “One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis,” that would amount to 1,750 cases of irreversible paralysis linked to polio in 1988.
Using that figure — 1,750 cases in 1988 — and factoring in 1.2% annual population growth, the estimated number of cases of irreversible paralysis between 1988 and 2024 would total approximately 80,910 — not 20 million, as Fortune reported.
Here are four other facts about polio vaccines the Fortune article doesn’t address.
1. Polio vaccines used in U.S. don’t prevent infection or transmission.
According to Fortune, the polio vaccine is “safe and effective.” Here’s why that statement oversimplifies the issue of polio vaccines and leads to misleading conclusions.
There are two kinds of polio vaccines used in the world today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They are the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) and the oral polio vaccine (OPV).
The OPV is used for mass vaccination campaigns of children outside the U.S., as was recently done in Gaza. However, the U.S. exclusively uses IPV polio vaccines, according to the CDC.
The IPV products, which are injected, contain an inactivated — or dead — poliovirus. According to the CDC, the IPV protects against “severe disease caused by poliovirus” but “does not stop transmission.”
According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative, the IPV also doesn’t prevent infection.
Two stand-alone IPV products are licensed in the U.S. by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both are manufactured by Sanofi. The other five are combination vaccines that target polio plus other illnesses, including diptheria, pertussis and tetanus.
One of the two stand-alone IPV products, Poliovax, was discontinued. The FDA page on licensed polio vaccines doesn’t explain why.
That leaves IPOL as the sole stand-alone polio vaccine licensed in the U.S.
2. Global polio vaccine campaigns can lead to ‘vaccine-derived’ polio outbreaks.
As its name suggests, the “oral polio” vaccine, or OPV — used only outside the U.S. — is delivered orally. The OPV contains a weakened vaccine-virus that activates an immune response in the body, according to the WHO.
Unlike the IPV products used in the U.S., the OPV prevents transmission, according to the CDC and the WHO. However, the weakened vaccine-virus used in the OPV can cause polio variant outbreaks.
The CDC states that the U.S. stopped using OPV “to eliminate the risk of polio variants that can occur with OPV.”
According to the WHO, the continued use of the OPV “poses a risk to wiping out the disease” because the weakened vaccine-virus originally contained in the OPV can begin to circulate among people who didn’t get the vaccine.
“When this happens,” the WHO said, “if it is allowed to circulate for sufficiently long enough time, it may genetically revert to a ‘strong’ virus, able to cause paralysis, resulting in what is known as circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses.”
Vaccine-derived polioviruses were responsible for the recently reported cases of polio in Gaza and the 2022 case reported in New York.
In March 2023, seven children were paralyzed by vaccine-derived polio linked to the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
In other words, the viral infections in these cases resulted from exposure to the vaccine-virus used in the OPV — not from exposure to a naturally occurring, or “wild,” strain of the poliovirus.
The last wild poliovirus case reported in the U.S. was in 1979, according to the CDC.
3. Risk of paralysis from poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.
Approximately 90-95% of poliovirus infections are asymptomatic, according to the FDA package insert for IPOL, the only stand-alone IPV product used in the U.S. The package insert also provides general information on polio, including this:
“Nonspecific illness with low-grade fever and sore throat (minor illness) occurs in 4% to 8% of infections. Aseptic meningitis occurs in 1% to 5% of patients a few days after the minor illness has resolved.
“Rapid onset of asymmetric acute flaccid paralysis occurs in 0.1% to 2% of infections, and residual paralytic disease involving motor neurons (paralytic poliomyelitis) occurs in approximately 1 per 1,000 infections.”
In other words, according to the FDA, the risk of becoming paralyzed as a result of a poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.
4. All polio vaccines used today are genetically modified.
Unlike the original polio vaccines developed in the early 1950s by Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin, the IPV and OPV being administered today are genetically modified.
In 2020, the WHO authorized a new genetically modified OPV for emergency use in polio outbreaks. According to a 2023 article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, nOPV2 was developed through a global partnership between public health, governmental, philanthropic and nonprofit organizations, including the Gates Foundation.
IPOL, the only stand-alone polio vaccine used in the U.S., uses technology that involves growing the poliovirus on monkey kidney cells whose chromones were modified to cause them to multiply forever.
In 2022, attorney Aaron Siri, on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, petitioned the FDA to “withdraw or suspend the approval for IPOL for infants, toddlers, and children until a properly controlled and properly powered double-blind trial of sufficient duration is conducted to assess the safety of this product.”
The petition stated that modified monkey kidney cells “are susceptible to infection by dozens of viruses, including HPV, measles, rubella, reovirus, SV40 virus, and SV-5.”
According to the petition, Sanofi’s IPOL vaccine hasn’t been adequately proven safe because the clinical trials relied on for licensing the product did not include a control group and declared the vaccine safe after following the trial participants for up to only three days after injection.
The FDA has not withdrawn or suspended its approval of IPOL as requested by Siri, and the agency continues to rely on the existing clinical trials and the agency’s own safety assessment lasting only up to three days.
The CDC recommends children receive four doses of IPOL, starting at age 2 months. The second dose is given at 4 months. The third is given at 6-18 months, and the fourth is given anytime between 4 and 6 years.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
This article is part of a series of articles by The Defender responding to the latest media coverage of vaccines, triggered by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Trump’s Picks for Surgeon General and Top Posts at FDA, CDC Earn Mixed Reviews
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | November 25, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees to lead three key federal public health agencies “would help the incoming president shift the priorities of agencies that are linchpins in public health” — but they’re also “controversial,” according to NPR.
Trump tapped Dr. Marty Makary to head the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. Dave Weldon to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and physician Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for surgeon general.
“The roles will be key to helping to enact Trump’s second term health agenda, which could include agency reform and changes to public health policies,” Axios reported.
The three agencies report to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Earlier this month, Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr., founder of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), to lead HHS.
Weldon previously criticized COVID-19 vaccines and restrictions. Makary and Nesheiwat first expressed support for vaccines and other pandemic-related policies but have become more critical in recent years.
Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate who has worked with the FDA as a consumer representative, addressed mainstream criticism of the nominations. She told The Defender that “the pharmaceutical and medical-industrial complex is very worried.”
She added:
“The pharmaceutical and food industries have faced little resistance from regulators and Congress. The strong pushback we’re seeing now suggests they fear what might happen under an administration willing to challenge the status quo.”
Dr. Joseph Varon, president of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, told The Defender, “Leadership in these agencies is critical for fostering trust in public health and ensuring evidence-based policies. We hope the nominees are committed to transparency, innovation and addressing the ongoing challenges in healthcare, particularly the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Makary: U.S. government the ‘greatest perpetrator of misinformation’
Makary, a public health researcher and surgeon at Johns Hopkins University, developed the surgical safety checklist, adopted by the World Health Organization and credited with saving many lives. Makary worked with the first Trump administration, including on surprise medical billing, NPR reported.
Earlier this year, Makary published “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets it Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.” The book highlighted evidence that many modern-day health crises in the U.S. were caused or hastened by the medical establishment.
According to The Gateway Pundit, “Makary was initially an advocate for the COVID vaccine but changed his perspective as more data became available.” NPR noted that Makary “voiced support for lockdowns early in the pandemic and encouraged universal masking” but later “became increasingly outspoken” against such policies.
In 2021, Makary called the Biden administration’s CDC “the most political CDC in history” for not being forthcoming with the public about COVID-19 and the vaccines. According to the New York Post, he criticized the CDC and Biden administration for their “unsupported claims” about COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness.
Makary has also been vocal about the potency of natural immunity to COVID-19, criticizing the medical establishment’s “complete dismissal of natural immunity.”
In May, he criticized The New York Times for being slow to report on the thousands of people injured by the COVID-19 vaccines.
Last year, Makary said during congressional testimony that “public health officials have made many tragic mistakes during the pandemic.” Those mistakes included ignoring natural immunity, dismissing the possibility of COVID-19 originating from a lab leak, closing schools, masking toddlers and “pushing boosters for young people.”
In September, Makary appeared alongside Kennedy at a congressional roundtable hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on the chronic disease epidemic. During the roundtable, Makary said, “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation has been the United States government.”
In his announcement, Trump said Makary would work with Kennedy to “properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our Nation’s food supply and drugs and biologics being given to our Nation’s youth, so that we can finally address the Childhood Chronic Disease Epidemic.”
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s chief scientific officer, told The Defender Makary has a “steep learning curve regarding vaccines in general” but has taken “encouraging stances late in the pandemic about the COVID vaccine and countermeasures.”
Scott C. Tips, president of the National Health Federation, said Makary represents “a mixed bag of mainstream medicine and outside-the-box thinking.” He credited Makary for opposing “mandatory COVID-19 injection boosters” and criticizing the FDA’s rejection of natural immunity.
Epidemiologist and public health research scientist M. Nathaniel Mead praised Makary’s nomination. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a physician with a deeper understanding of what ails our healthcare system and what’s needed to restore integrity to the FDA after six decades of regulatory capture.”
“Makary seems uniquely positioned to bring meaningful change,” Witczak said. “He understands the systemic harm caused by overmedicalization and the corporate capture of healthcare. His history of challenging mainstream narratives during COVID shows he isn’t afraid to speak out.”
Weldon sponsored bill to ban mercury from vaccines
Dr. Dave Weldon is an Army veteran who served as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives between 1995 and 2009.
In a statement, Kennedy praised Weldon’s experience, saying he “will bring the truth and transparency needed to restore the public’s confidence” in the CDC.
In 2007, Weldon sponsored a bill that would have banned mercury from vaccines, expressing concern about “an enormous inherent conflict of interest within the CDC,” because the agency promotes vaccination while assessing their safety.
According to Politico, Weldon also “raised concerns about the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and Gardasil, Merck’s papillomavirus virus, or HPV vaccine.
While in Congress, Weldon also introduced legislation outlawing human cloning and helped secure a deal that banned patents on human organisms, including genetically engineered embryos, according to The Associated Press.
According to NPR, Trump said Weldon would “proudly restore the CDC to its true purpose, and will work to end the Chronic Disease Epidemic,” and “prioritize Transparency, Competence, and High Standards.”
John Gilmore, executive director of the Autism Action Network, said Weldon “was sounding the alarm on failures in the vaccine system 20 years ago.” He said Weldon attended conferences like Defeat Autism Now and listened to mothers of vaccine-injured children, which is “not a behavior many doctors are inclined to do.”
Hooker said he was “very encouraged” by Weldon’s nomination, and that he’d like to know more about Weldon’s position on “the bloated vaccine schedule as well as COVID-19 countermeasures.”
He credited Weldon with helping independent thimerosal researchers gain access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a collaborative project that monitors vaccine safety and conducts studies on vaccine side effects.
Hooker, who participated in that project, said “Our access to the VSD was rescinded months later because [the CDC] didn’t like our results, which included a definitive link between thimerosal and autism. Weldon indeed will need to implement myriad changes to the flawed and fraudulent process.”
Weldon is the first nominee for CDC director who will face a Senate confirmation process, due to legislation passed in 2022, NPR reported.
Nesheiwat: ‘egregious unethical & harmful’ to add COVID shots to childhood schedule
Nesheiwat, Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, is a medical contributor to Fox News and medical director at CityMD, a network of urgent care centers in New York and New Jersey.
Nesheiwat previously promoted the benefits of getting vaccinated against COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, NPR reported. According to The Gateway Pundit, Nesheiwat has since changed her position and her “recent statements indicate a significant shift in her perspective.”
In October 2022, Nesheiwat tweeted, “If CDC approves a COVID vaccine addition to the routine schedule of vax for kids, it will mark the most egregious unethical & harmful decision to children. No mandates. Especially for a vax that can’t prevent disease.”
Nesheiwat has also questioned the efficacy of the COVID shots, tweeting in February 2023, “Covid vax does not prevent disease like we once thought it did per the cdc /Pfizer etc.,” and has tweeted in support of natural immunity.
In a statement, Trump called Nesheiwat an advocate for preventive medicine and praised her “commitment to saving and treating thousands of American lives.”
Mead said Nesheiwat’s about-face on vaccines “shows she has the ability to think critically,” which could help her “serve as a bridge builder at a time of deep division.”
A ‘historic opportunity to shake up the establishment’
Calling healthcare in the U.S. “horribly broken,” Hooker said the three nominees will face several challenges if confirmed because federal public health agencies require reforms.
Hooker said:
“Corporate influence, including the corporate capture of these agencies, is the biggest problem to be tackled. First and foremost, we need to protect children … from the highly flawed policies of these agencies.
“All influences from Big Pharma, Big Food and Big Ag need to be completely rooted out and the whole edifice should be rebuilt brick-by-brick to include only those policies that help and never harm children.”
Gilmore said public health agencies should publicize “all the data they have available.” He also called for a ban on vaccine mandates. “We have to be able to sue in a real court for vaccine injuries,” he added.
Varon called for independent clinical trials and for “independent scientific inquiry and reducing undue influence from corporate or political pressures.” He also called for promoting early treatment protocols for emerging diseases and giving physicians “the flexibility to treat patients with evidence-based approaches.”
“This moment represents a historic opportunity to shake up the establishment,” Witczak said. “After years of feeling like leaders were paying lip service — or working against the public — I finally see hope for meaningful reform. It’s time to restore these agencies’ missions to serve the public, prioritize safety, and act with integrity.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Corporate Media Meltdown Over Trump’s CDC Director Pick Dr. Dave Weldon
A look a the possible changes ahead for the CDC under his leadership
By Jefferey Jaxen | November 25, 2024
Former seven-term congressman Dr. David Weldon was chosen by President-elect Donald Trump going into this past weekend to serve as director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Amidst the flurry of possible appointments grabbing headlines, Dr. Weldon has the opportunity to change the way America has handled public health for decades.
The Washington Post described Dr. Weldon in the second sentence of its breaking news article as “… a strong critic of the CDC, especially its vaccine program.” The reporting meant the sentence to be a negative, ironically, it’s probably now a breath of fresh air for most Americans post-COVID.
“… increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves” wrote Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, less than a month ago when admitting most people don’t believe corporate/legacy media anymore. It’s like WAPO’s recent reporting on Weldon already forgot this warning.
The New York Times claimed that Dr. Weldon was “skeptical of vaccine safety,” a designation that would have worked to neutralize his voice in years past when the outlet still garnered attention and respect.
STAT News wrote, “The former Florida congressman sponsored legislation that would have carved out the CDC’s vaccine safety research…”
The Vaccine Safety Bill to ‘carve out research’ Dr. Weldon introduced in 2007 wanted to establish an independent agency within the Department of Health and Human Services to handle the nation’s vaccine safety. His reasoning at the time was that the CDC had an inherent conflict of interest being responsible for both vaccine safety and promotion—an issue unchanged to this day.
In Weldon, the public also finds a rare leader who has been willing to ask politically forbidden questions about links between vaccines and autism along with the greater questions about health outcomes of children receiving HHS’s childhood vaccine schedule compared with children who had not been vaccinated. In addition to why there’s been limited investigation to determine what children may be as risk of being harmed by vaccines.
“The thing I continue to find extremely disturbing is the fact that the CDC still does not allow researchers access to the vaccine safety data… The best way to get answers on the vaccine safety data is to open it up and let objective scientists come in and look at it.” – Rep. Dave Weldon at the Vaccines & Autism House Government Reform Committee 2002
One of the key data tranches Weldon is referring is vaccine safety datalink or VSD. A monitoring system using electronic health record data from health sites around the country to assess vaccine safety and detect adverse events in near-real time. Also a system that the public and independent researchers are blocked from accessing.
Besides the possibility of allowing the sunlight of independent researchers to comb through once-hidden vaccine data while dedicating resources to health-affirming tools outside of one-size-fits-all shots, Dr. Weldon will have veto power over the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
ACIP makes recommendations about which vaccines are added to the U.S. schedule, among other decisions. The committee needs final approval from the director of the CDC to implement their calls. Dr. Weldon would hold a power position over a committee who unanimously rubber-stamped every COVID vaccine and booster from infants to the elderly, among other questionable call throughout the years leading to reduced public trust.
Another approach long-called for, and even once implemented by the CDC, would be to automate their Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to instantly detect and report potential safety issues with the shots they promote.
In 2006 this was attempted through a $1M HHS grant to create a spontaneous reporting system to VAERS at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. The researchers found that “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported” yet predictably, the CDC never followed up.
As many new to this conversation are rushing the gates to further their careers or gain influence and power on the back of the rapid political change we find ourselves at the beginning of, there have been those holding a strong space with little fanfare. Dr. Dave Weldon is one such individual.
His decades-long hopes to reform the CDC and, more importantly, protect American children and families from unrestrained harms brought upon so many by liability-free injectable pharmaceutical products which have enjoyed a privileged position away from full public and scientific scrutiny may soon see the light of day.
To the readers, is the CDC even salvageable at this point?
What other major areas of reform could help rapidly transform public consciousness around health and healing?
Trump names RFK Jr. to cabinet position
RT | November 14, 2024
US President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), declaring that the former Democrat will ensure that “everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals [and] pollutants.”
Trump announced his choice in a social media post on Thursday evening. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to public health,” he wrote.
“HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming health crisis in this country,” he continued. “Mr. Kennedy will restore these agencies to the traditions of gold standard scientific research… to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
The New York Post claimed the previous day that some of Trump’s closest advisers were pushing for Kennedy to be given an advisory position, but that the former Democrat was “stubborn” in demanding control of HHS.
If confirmed, Kennedy would oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other sub-agencies. Kennedy has been vocally critical of all of these agencies, and vowed to enact sweeping reforms if placed in charge of them.
A long-time vaccine skeptic and proponent of organic agriculture, Kennedy has promised to “get processed food out of school lunch immediately,” to recommend that fluoride be removed from the water supply, and to crack down on the use of chemical pesticides and herbicides in farming.
Kennedy announced last October that he would run for the presidency as an independent candidate, ending his bid to challenge President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party’s primary elections. He suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump in August, citing Trump’s support for free speech, his promise to end the Ukraine conflict, and his willingness to tackle what Kennedy called “the chronic disease epidemic” afflicting American children.
The CDC Planned Quarantine Camps Nationwide
By Jeffrey A Tucker | Brownstone Institute | November 7, 2024
No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse.
Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn’t stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed.
It was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back.
Features of the CDC’s edicts did incredible damage. It imposed the rent moratorium. It decreed the ridiculous “six feet of distance” and mask mandates. It forced Plexiglas as the interface for commercial transactions. It implied that mail-in balloting must be the norm, which probably flipped the election. It delayed the reopening as long as possible. It was sadistic.
Even with all that, worse was planned. On July 26, 2020, with the George Floyd riots having finally settled down, the CDC issued a plan for establishing nationwide quarantine camps. People were to be isolated, given only food and some cleaning supplies. They would be banned from participating in any religious services. The plan included contingencies for preventing suicide. There were no provisions made for any legal appeals or even the right to legal counsel.
The plan’s authors were unnamed but included 26 footnotes. It was completely official. The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy.
It was called “Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings.”
“This document presents considerations from the perspective of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) for implementing the shielding approach in humanitarian settings as outlined in guidance documents focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings. This approach has never been documented and has raised questions and concerns among humanitarian partners who support response activities in these settings. The purpose of this document is to highlight potential implementation challenges of the shielding approach from CDC’s perspective and guide thinking around implementation in the absence of empirical data. Considerations are based on current evidence known about the transmission and severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and may need to be revised as more information becomes available.”
By absence of empirical data, the meaning is: nothing like this has ever been tried. The point of the document was to map out how it could be possible and alert authorities to possible pitfalls to be avoided.
The meaning of “shielding” is “to reduce the number of severe Covid-19 cases by limiting contact between individuals at higher risk of developing severe disease (‘high-risk’) and the general population (‘low-risk’). High-risk individuals would be temporarily relocated to safe or ‘green zones’ established at the household, neighborhood, camp/sector, or community level depending on the context and setting. They would have minimal contact with family members and other low-risk residents.”
In other words, this is what used to be concentration camps.
Who are these people who would be rounded up? They are “older adults and people of any age who have serious underlying medical conditions.” Who determines this? Public health authorities. The purpose? The CDC explains: “physically separating high-risk individuals from the general population” allows authorities “to prioritize the use of the limited available resources.”
This sounds a lot like condemning people to death in the name of protecting them.
The model establishes three levels. First is the household level. Here high-risk people are“physically isolated from other household members.” That alone is objectionable. Elders need people to take care of them. They need love and to be surrounded by family. The CDC should never imagine that it would intervene in households to force old people into separate places.
The model jumps from households to the “neighborhood level.” Here we have the same approach: forced separation of those deemed vulnerable.
From there, the model jumps again to the “camp/sector level.” Here it is different. “A group of shelters such as schools, community buildings within a camp/sector (max 50 high-risk individuals per single green zone) where high-risk individuals are physically isolated together. One entry point is used for exchange of food, supplies, etc. A meeting area is used for residents and visitors to interact while practicing physical distancing (2 meters). No movement into or outside the green zone.”
Yes, you read that correctly. The CDC is here proposing concentration camps for the sick or anyone they deem to be in danger of medically significant consequences of infection.
Further: “to minimize external contact, each green zone should include able-bodied high-risk individuals capable of caring for residents who have disabilities or are less mobile. Otherwise, designate low-risk individuals for these tasks, preferably who have recovered from confirmed COVID-19 and are assumed to be immune.”
The plan says in passing, contradicting thousands of years of experience, “Currently, we do not know if prior infection confers immunity.” Therefore the only solution is to minimize all exposure throughout the whole population. Getting sick is criminalized.
These camps require a “dedicated staff” to “monitor each green zone. Monitoring includes both adherence to protocols and potential adverse effects or outcomes due to isolation and stigma. It may be necessary to assign someone within the green zone, if feasible, to minimize movement in/out of green zones.”
The people housed in these camps need to have good explanations of why they are denied even basic religious freedom. The report explains:
“Proactive planning ahead of time, including strong community engagement and risk communication is needed to better understand the issues and concerns of restricting individuals from participating in communal practices because they are being shielded. Failure to do so could lead to both interpersonal and communal violence.”
Further, there must be some mechanisms to prohibit suicide:
Additional stress and worry are common during any epidemic and may be more pronounced with COVID-19 due to the novelty of the disease and increased fear of infection, increased childcare responsibilities due to school closures, and loss of livelihoods. Thus, in addition to the risk of stigmatization and feeling of isolation, this shielding approach may have an important psychological impact and may lead to significant emotional distress, exacerbate existing mental illness or contribute to anxiety, depression, helplessness, grief, substance abuse, or thoughts of suicide among those who are separated or have been left behind. Shielded individuals with concurrent severe mental health conditions should not be left alone. There must be a caregiver allocated to them to prevent further protection risks such as neglect and abuse.
The biggest risk, the document explains, is as follows:
“While the shielding approach is not meant to be coercive, it may appear forced or be misunderstood in humanitarian settings.”
(It should go without saying but this “shielding” approach suggested here has nothing to do with focused protection of the Great Barrington Declaration. Focused protection specifically says: “schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.”)
In four years of research, and encountering truly shocking documents and evidence of what happened in the Covid years, this one certainly ranks up at the top of the list of totalitarian schemes for pathogenic control prior to vaccination. It is quite simply mind-blowing that such a scheme could ever be contemplated.
Who wrote it? What kind of deep institutional pathology exists that enabled this to be contemplated? The CDC has 10,600 full-time employees and contractors and a budget of $11.5 billion. In light of this report, and everything else that has gone on there for four years, both numbers should be zero.
Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.
Fluoride in Water Poses ‘Unreasonable Risk’ to Children, Federal Judge Rules
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 25, 2024
In a decision that could end the practice of water fluoridation in the U.S., a federal judge late Tuesday ruled that water fluoridation at current U.S. levels poses an “unreasonable risk” of reduced IQ in children.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can no longer ignore that risk, and must take regulatory action, Judge Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California wrote in the long-awaited landmark decision.
More than 200 million Americans drink water treated with fluoride at the “optimal” level of 0.7 milligrams per liter (mg/L). However, Chen ruled that a preponderance of scientific evidence shows this level of fluoride exposure may damage human health, particularly that of pregnant mothers and young children.
The verdict delivers a major blow to the EPA, public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and professional lobbying groups like the American Dental Association (ADA), which have staked their reputations on the claim that water fluoridation is one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century and an unqualified public good.
Fluoride proponents refused to reexamine that stance despite mounting scientific evidence from top researchers and government agencies of fluoride’s neurotoxic risks, particularly for infants’ developing brains.
Instead, they attempted to weaken and suppress the research and discredit the scientists carrying it out.
Rick North, board member of Fluoride Action Network, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told The Defender, “What’s false is the CDC claiming that fluoridation is one of the 10 greatest health achievements of the 20th century. What’s true is that ending fluoridation will be one of the 10 greatest health achievements of the 21st century.”
“The judge did what EPA has long refused to do, and that is to apply the EPA standard risk assessment framework to fluoride,” said Michael Connett, attorney for the plaintiffs. “In so doing, the court has shown that the widespread exposure to fluoride that we now have in the United States is unreasonably and precariously close to the levels that we know cause harm.”
The EPA can appeal Tuesday’s decision. The agency told The Defender it is reviewing the decision and has no comment at this time. The U.S. Department of Justice, which represents the EPA in the lawsuit, also said it has no comment.
EPA’s argument ‘not persuasive’
The ruling concludes a historic lawsuit — one that has dragged on for seven years — brought against the EPA by environmental and consumer advocacy organizations like the Fluoride Action Network, Moms Against Fluoridation and Food & Water Watch, along with individual parents and children.
It is the first lawsuit to go to a federal trial under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), as amended by Congress in 2016. The TSCA allows U.S. citizens to petition the EPA to evaluate whether a chemical presents an unreasonable risk to public health and should be regulated.
If the EPA denies a TSCA citizen petition — which the agency did when the plaintiffs asked it to reexamine water fluoridation in 2016 — the petitioners are entitled to a “de novo” judicial review of the science without the deference to the agency typically afforded it in legal cases.
Chen’s 80-page ruling, issued six months after closing arguments in February, offers a careful and detailed articulation of the EPA’s review process for chemicals that pose a hazard to human health and evaluates and summarizes the extensive scientific data presented at trial.
Chen wrote, “EPA’s own expert agrees that fluoride is hazardous at some level.” He cited a key report issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) National Toxicology Program (NTP), which undertook a systematic review of all available scientific research at the time of publication.
The report “concluded that fluoride is indeed associated with reduced IQ in children, at least at exposure levels at or above 1.5 mg/L,” Chen wrote.
The NTP also reported that although there are technical challenges to measuring fluoride’s toxic effects at low levels, “scientists have observed a statistically significant association between fluoride and adverse effects in children even at such ‘lower’ exposure levels,” Chen wrote.
He said that despite recognizing that fluoride is hazardous, the EPA’s defense rested largely on the fact that the exact level at which it is hazardous is too unclear for the agency to determine whether the chemical presents an unreasonable risk.
This argument is “not persuasive,” Chen wrote.
Pregnant women exposed to fluoride in water at levels exceeding the hazard level
The EPA requires a margin of error by a factor of at least 10 to exist between the hazard level for a toxin and the acceptable human exposure level. “Put differently, only an exposure that is below 1/10th of the hazard level would be deemed safe under Amended TSCA, given the margin of error required,” Chen wrote.
That means that even if the hazard level were 4 mg/L — well above the 1.5 mg/L identified by the NTP — the safe level of fluoride exposure would be 0.4 mg/L, well below the current “optimal” fluoride level in the U.S., Chen wrote.
The much lower probable hazard level established by high-quality studies indicates that many pregnant women in the U.S. are already exposed to fluoride in water at levels exceeding the hazard level.
“Under even the most conservative estimates of this level, there is not enough of a margin between the accepted hazard level and the actual human exposure levels to find that fluoride is safe,” Chen concluded.
“Simply put, the risk to health at exposure levels in United States drinking water is sufficiently high to trigger regulatory response by the EPA under Amended TSCA.”
The law dictates that the EPA must take regulatory action, but it does not specify what that action has to be. EPA regulatory actions can range from notifying the public of risks to banning chemicals.
Philippe Grandjean, M.D., Ph.D., adjunct professor in environmental health at Harvard and chair of environmental medicine at the University of Southern Denmark, top researcher on fluoride’s neurotoxicity and expert witness for plaintiffs in the case told The Defender he thought the court’s decision was “well-justified.”
He said the ruling made it incumbent on the EPA to go beyond simply ending water fluoridation.
“EPA will have to consider what to do in the southwestern parts of the country where the fluoride content of groundwater is too high due to minerals in the soil containing fluoride,” he said. “And then there is the question about ingestion of toothpaste.”
The CDC and the ADA did not immediately respond to The Defender’s request for comment.
More than 70 years of controversy
For more than seven decades, U.S. public health officials have steadfastly supported water fluoridation, claiming the practice is a key strategy for maintaining and improving dental health.
Proponents of water fluoridation, with help from the mainstream press, often attempted to cast those questioning fluoride’s benefits and raising concerns about its safety as conspiracy theorists.
The EPA in 1975 recommended adding fluoride to water at an optimal level of 1.2 mg/L for its dental benefits, but recommended a maximum level of 4 mg/L, the ruling said.
As more evidence has emerged about fluoride’s adverse health effects, including skeletal fluorosis, recommended levels were revised.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, officially lowered the recommended dosage for water fluoridation in 2015 from 0.7-1.2 mg/L to 0.7 mg/L after considering “adverse health effects” along with alleged benefits.
However, evidence that fluoride poses a neurotoxic risk has existed for decades.
In 2017, after the EPA rejected their citizen petition to end fluoridation of drinking water in the U.S. based on evidence of health risks, namely neurotoxicity, the plaintiffs filed the lawsuit.
A seven-day trial took place in federal court in San Francisco in June 2020, but Chen put the proceedings on hold pending the release of the NTP’s systematic review of research available on the neurotoxic effects of fluoride.
The NTP sought to publish its report — which consisted of a “state of the science” monograph and a meta-analysis — in May 2022, but dental officials at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research pressured HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine to prevent the review from being published.
The ADA also sought to suppress the report.
Levine told the NTP to not publish the report but to put it on hold and allow for further review.
Plaintiffs submitted documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act exposing this intervention to the court. The revelation prompted Chen to rule that the trial should go forward using the draft report from the NTP.
The trial resumed in January in San Francisco, with arguments presented over the course of two weeks.
The NTP’s monograph was finalized and published last month on its website. The meta-analysis is forthcoming in a peer-reviewed journal.
Connett said that Congress created the citizen petition provision in TSCA as a counterweight to bureaucratic lethargy and as a check on the EPA.
The statute, he said, is a powerful tool for overcoming politicized science.
“When science becomes fossilized in political inertia, the citizen petition provision of TSCA is a very powerful tool for citizens,” Connett said. “Through this case, we have been able to effectuate what Congress had envisioned with this part of the statute.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Measles “Outbreak” In Maine Was Vaccine-Induced All Along
Informed Consent Action Network | September 24, 2024
ICAN’s attorneys obtained documents related to the widely reported May 2023 “outbreak” of measles in Maine. As it turns out, test results from the CDC confirmed that the measles case was “consistent with vaccine strain,” meaning there was no “outbreak” and, instead, it was the vaccine that caused the child’s rash.
On May 5, 2023, the Maine CDC reported that a child had “tested positive” for measles. News outlets immediately began fearmongering, hinting that the “outbreak” was due to low vaccination rates:
- “Measles can be serious for anyone…” (Maine CDC Facebook Page)
- “In severe cases, measles can cause pneumonia, brain swelling and death.” (Bangor Daily News )
- “The CDC says roughly one to three of every 1,000 children infected with measles die.” (USA Today ) Note: the death rate is actually more like 1 in 500,000.
- “Measles was declared eliminated from the US in 2000… But vaccination rates in the US have dropped in recent years, sparking new outbreaks.” (CNN)
- “Anyone who is not immunized or does not know their measles immunization status should get vaccinated.” (Maine CDC Press Release)
The Maine CDC reported that even though the child had received a dose of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, it was “considering the child to be infectious out of an abundance of caution.” In the meantime, the Maine CDC indicated it had sent a specimen to CDC headquarters to determine the specific strain of measles; however, it did not mention how the child would have been exposed to the wild strain of measles, such as international travel, nor did it share how recently the child may have received the vaccine.
According to a WHO report, about 2% of those who receive the measles vaccine develop a rash, called VARI (vaccine-associated rash illness). In fact, one study recommends assuming the rash is vaccine-caused and that “testing should only be considered if exposure to the wild-type (not vaccine-strain) virus is strongly suspected.”
So, it is unclear why the Maine CDC raised the alarm and then took so long to confirm the specific strain. The child was diagnosed on May 3, but it took the Maine CDC five days to ship the sample to the CDC. It then took the CDC seven days to report the results and for the Maine CDC to announce the child was not infectious.
ICAN, through its attorneys, requested relevant records and received them. Incredibly, they reveal that the positive measles test was “[c]onsistent with vaccine strain,” which is apparently an “acceptable” form of measles because, as the Maine CDC announced, the strain that the child tested positive for was not considered “an infectious strain of the virus,” despite causing traditional symptoms of the disease. Decidedly absent from Maine’s announcement was the fact that the child got measles as a result of the vaccine. Maine and the CDC simply hid this fact from the public.
Maine’s actions make sense, however, when considering that it may have just been following a CDC marketing presentation which states that the perfect “recipe” for creating demand for vaccines “requires creating concern, anxiety, and worry” by, for example, having medical experts and public health authorities “state concern and alarm (and predict dire outcomes)” and show “[v]isible/tangible examples of the seriousness of the illness (e.g., pictures of children, families of those affected coming forward) and people getting vaccinated (the first to motivate, the latter to reinforce)” — all things we saw implemented during this “outbreak.”
Lead Counsel, Aaron Siri, Esq. lays out the details here.
ICAN will continue to follow-up on reported outbreaks across the country. In the meantime, catch up on some of ICAN’s additional work on vaccine policy:
Proud to Be Suing Hospitals and Doctors That Inject Hep B Vaccines Into Newborns Without Parental Consent
Injecting Freedom by Aaron Siri | September 21, 2024
Informed Consent Action Network is supporting an initiative that is long overdue: suing doctors and hospitals that inject newborns with a hepatitis B vaccine without parental consent.
The hepatitis B vaccine is a case study in agency capture. The target for this product was sex workers and intravenous drug users, and the rare pregnant mother who was hepatitis B positive. The problem was that CDC could not get the sex workers and intravenous drug users to take this product. The story would have ended there if pharma didn’t stand to earn billions through a wider mandate of this product.
With those billions at stake, an argument was made that if all newborns were vaccinated (not just the tiny number whose mothers were hepatitis B positive) then we could catch these babies before they became prostitutes or heroin addicts. CDC’s advisory committee, stacked with individuals receiving funding from pharma, added it to the routine childhood schedule in 1995.
Parents who decide not to inject their babies with this product have varying reasons. Some simply conclude that their baby won’t be having sex or sharing dirty needles with drug addicts—usually a safe assumption. Others are horrified that the two hepatitis B vaccines available for babies were licensed based on clinical trials with only 5 days of safety monitoring.
Let me repeat: 5 days. If that sounds incredible and shocking, it is because it is incredible and shocking. But that is the simple, cold hard truth. See for yourself in Section 6.1 of the package insert for Engerix-B and Recombivax HB, the only hep B vaccines licensed in the U.S. for use in newborns. ICAN has even formally petitioned FDA to withdraw license of this vaccine until a proper clinical trial is conducted.
(In that petition you can read about all the related legal work our firm has done on behalf of ICAN, including confirming that this ridiculously inadequate safety review period is, in fact, true.)
There are also other reasons parents choose not to inject this product into their babies, including the anemic post-licensure safety studies, harms suffered by an older sibling from this product, or religious beliefs.
All that said, we are proud to be bringing lawsuits against doctors and hospitals across the country that vaccinate newborns with this product without parental consent. You can read more about this on ICAN’s page, our firm’s page, or stay tuned for a segment about this on The HighWire.
Their vaccine injury reports disappeared from VAERS — So they developed a tool for anyone to track their own reports
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 11, 2024
A team of researchers is developing a tool to track reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), so vaccine-injured people can follow what happens to the reports they submit.
As part of a broader effort to hold public health agencies accountable, the tool will also make it possible to audit the VAERS system by identifying what types of reports are deleted, insufficiently updated or contain errors.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which jointly oversee VAERS, have refused to do this work despite multiple appeals by advocates for the vaccine-injured, according to React19, the group leading the initiative.
React19, founded by a small group of medical professionals injured by COVID-19 vaccines, works with institutions and providers to increase understanding and awareness of patients experiencing lasting effects following COVID-19 and/or COVID-19 vaccines.
The group is teaming up with computer programmer Liz Wilner, founder of OpenVAERS — a website that provides tools for more easily accessing and searching VAERS data — and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) to develop the tool.
The idea for developing the automatic VAERS report tracking tool came out of a VAERS audit the group conducted in 2022 to assess how the FDA and CDC were following up on COVID-19 vaccine injury reports.
React19 worked with outside experts to review a sample of 126 VAERS reports filed by some of its members who wanted to know what happened to their reports.
After tracking down each person’s reports and following them through the VAERS system, they “were kind of shocked at how bad it is,” members of React19 told The Defender.
They found that only 61% of the reports filed were correctly logged and published in VAERS. Twenty-two percent of the reports were never issued a permanent ID and are therefore not publicly visible, 12% were deleted and in 5% of the cases, a report couldn’t be filed or their report number remains unknown due to system errors.
That means more than 1 in 3 reports searched couldn’t be found in a database that is meant to be publicly accessible and transparent. It also suggests that problems of “omission of data and underreporting may be even greater than estimated,” according to the audit report.
The group also found that the medical status of the deleted reports, “by and large, had a worse outcome than the ones that were still in the system,” they said. For example, they said, in the public-facing VAERS system, 23% of reports were for permanent disabilities — but in the deleted reports, 53% were for permanent disability.
“One of the more alarming things we found out was that not all death reports are investigated,” Brianne Dressen, React19 founder, told The Defender.
The group brought this to the attention of public health officials in their meetings, sharing examples of reports that had been updated by people’s families when they died, but didn’t show up on the public system.
They also found that many follow-up reports containing updates on worsening symptoms were gone from the system.
At the time, the group was meeting regularly with top officials, including Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, to discuss vaccine injuries and why the agencies were doing nothing to address them.
In those meetings, according to Dressen and React19 member Dr. Joel Wallskog, when they raised the issue that the agencies weren’t following up on VAERS reports, the FDA told them VAERS wasn’t a reliable indicator for vaccine injuries, because anyone could file an injury complaint, including “Mickey Mouse or Michael Jackson.”
“We told them we know thousands of people that have not had any follow-up on their VAERS reports that are not Mickey Mouse, and they’re suffering it every single day waiting for you guys to get back to them to investigate what happened to them,” Dressen said.
“And of course then they never did anything. So we were like, OK, fine. If they’re not going to generate the evidence, then we will ourselves.”
The group submitted their findings to Marks during a meeting with him and his team. Based on their findings they also requested an external audit of the entire VAERS system and posed a series of questions listed on their audit report webpage.
They never heard from the agencies again.
“We were like, really?” Dressen said. “We were having these regular meetings with them every one month or every two months, and then after that, they wouldn’t meet with us anymore.”
Dressen, who was injured in the AstraZeneca clinical trials and whose diagnosis of post-vaccine neuropathy and other vaccine-related disorders was confirmed by the National Institutes of Health, said her own VAERS report is not visible to the public. The agencies haven’t told her why.
More recently, still hoping for accountability from the public health agencies, React19 submitted its audit and complaint to the Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The only response they received was an autoresponse confirming receipt of the complaint.
Attempt to ‘bring power back to the people’
In its small pilot audit, React19 found the VAERS system is “obviously broken from top to bottom.” According to Dressen, “One thing we can easily conclude is that the FDA and CDC have no interest in addressing these issues.”
Now, the group is scaling up the project to do a larger audit with more data.
With help from OpenVAERS and CHD, the team built a backend, automated administrative tracking system that eliminates the need to manually search for each report and its journey through VAERS — something the analysts had to do for the first iteration of their audit.
Participants will register on the React19 website and will be invited — if they are interested — to share their stories as part of the organization’s project to collect and publish vaccine injury testimonials.
Users can share any information they have about their VAERS report — their ID number if they have one, or if not, details about their case. Then they will receive a monthly email with the status of their report.
For example, someone who has a user ID and a public-facing report will be informed if their report disappears. In the case of those people who filed a VAERS complaint but never got an ID number, the system will search each month for the record and try to find the ID.
“We’ll be able to track these reports through the system and figure out what happens to them,” Wilner said. “Do they disappear? Do they appear and the person doesn’t get notified? Do they appear incorrectly?”
“So people will be able to track their own reports with less effort and React19 will be able to audit a much larger user base than they initially did.”
Wilner said auditing VAERS in this way also reveals details about how the agencies are “either lying or deliberately obfuscating the process.” In the first audit, it was clear there was no systematic or automated way that, for example, reports were deleted.
The tracker and the audit will provide valuable data that no one else has. Rather than having only the stories, Wilner said, they will have the data backing up those stories. “Now we have a group of injured people that are all talking with one voice.”
“Without more pressure and more discovery,” Wallskog said, “I don’t think we’re ever going to get the truth out. Ultimately, we want to get this information to the masses of people that just don’t know what’s happening, particularly with this data, and that we’ve all been duped.”
Dressen said the project is an attempt to “bring the power back to the people.”
The COVID-19 vaccine produced a large swath of vaccine injuries all at the same time, she said. Auditing the COVID-19 entries in VAERS will provide an opportunity “to show through massive numbers where those problems are, not just with the systems that are supposed to be monitoring vaccine safety, but also the actual harms themselves and what those are, but the government’s not doing their job on that.”
The two faces of VAERS and the problem of accountability
Wilner said Dressen’s injury report, sitting in VAERS limbo, spoke to one of the major issues around claims of transparency in the database — that there are two versions of VAERS, a public-facing database and a private one.
The BMJ reported last year that it investigated the VAERS database and found that the public facing database contains only initial reports. And “a private, back end system containing all updates and corrections — such as a formal diagnosis, recovery, or death.”
The CDC told The BMJ that this was part of patient confidentiality, but the publication found that in the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System, they do update the database — “raising the question of why VAERS can’t do the same.”
And during the React19 audit, the group found that VAERS was sometimes deleting people’s legitimate reports or the more detailed updated reports that some people were submitting.
Another problem, Wilner noted, is that a lot of key information — such as race, pregnancy and report provider — is unnecessarily withheld from public VAERS reports. She also said the agencies sometimes leave reports on there that are clearly false or jokes, which then discredits the database in the public’s eyes.
On the CDC website, Wilner said, “you’re basically looking at a doctored set of books.”
Wallskog said the agencies “try to live on both sides of the fence” with VAERS, presenting it as a key tool for monitoring vaccine injuries. But when it shows a safety signal or an issue with vaccines, they discredit it as a problematic surveillance system with a lot of limitations that can’t be trusted.
“It’s incredibly frustrating for injured people,” he said.
The team working on the new VAERS tracking system and audit said they hope it will raise public awareness and force the public health agencies to take responsibility for the vaccine injuries.
“Rochelle Walensky said the CDC is charged with finding legitimate vaccine injuries and reporting them,” Wilner said. She added:
“If that’s the case, where is that? We don’t have access to the actual database to figure it out so we want to know where is the report from the CDC on the people that were actually injured by the COVID vaccine that the government accepts were legitimately injured? That report doesn’t exist.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
‘Follow the Science’: Have the Bad Guys Finally Gone Too Far?
By Sharyl Attkisson | The Defender | September 9, 2024
In this exclusive excerpt from her new bestseller, “Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails,” journalist Sharyl Attkisson details how public health agencies and some public universities are so captured by commercial interests that they function as little more than an advertising arm of Big Pharma.
In the case of vaccine makers, success comes with inventing shots that can be added to the list of what’s required for schoolchildren. Better yet, invent shots that the public can be convinced to get, repeatedly, for the rest of their lives. Instant billion-dollar blockbuster!
This has led to a questionable dynamic where the one-time standard that vaccines were required to meet — that they must be vital, safe, and effective — fell by the wayside. Instead the government aggressively serves as promoter of dubious versions that may not be necessary, may not work very well, and come with the risk of serious side effects.
In 1975, the cost of vaccinating a child from birth to age six was $10 (in 2001 terms, adjusted for inflation). As more vaccines were added to the list, the cost ballooned to $385 in 2001. Today it’s thousands of dollars. The costs are largely hidden to us since we get inoculated for free or with minimal out-of-pocket payments. But make no mistake, we’re paying the bills in the form of insurance premiums, and tax dollars to state and federal programs that provide vaccines at little to no direct cost to the patient. Vaccine companies are reaping enormous profits.
Sometimes getting and keeping a vaccine on the market requires sleight of hand. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), our premier infectious disease federal health agency, is happy to give a little help to its vaccine industry partners or, as the CDC calls them, “stakeholders.” The agency’s best and brightest can even adjust the veritable meaning of the word “vaccine.”
The CDC used to define “vaccines” quite simply as agents that “prevent disease.” But in 2021, that had to be changed. It became undeniable that Covid vaccines didn’t prevent the disease (or transmission, or even illness). Logic might suggest that the Covid vaccines would have to be withdrawn from the market. After all, they didn’t even meet the definition of a vaccine. Instead the CDC quietly redefined the word “vaccine” to make the Covid shots seem successful after all.
On the CDC’s vaccine web page, sometime between September 1 and 2, 2021, somebody removed a key phrase from the definition. On September 1, the CDC defined a vaccine as “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.” But on September 2, the phrase “protecting the person from that disease” was removed, like it never even happened. Now, the CDC says, vaccines merely “stimulate the body’s immune response.”
Think of it. The CDC unilaterally redefined two hundred years’ of the world’s understanding of what constitutes a vaccine, without so much as an explanation, public discussion, hearing, or vote. Once you understand that our top, trusted medical authorities are willing to sneakily move goalposts and change meanings of words to protect a market, you’re a long way to beginning to understand how deep the corruption goes.
It’s one thing to be barraged by marketing to convince you to buy a shiny new car. But it’s quite another to get sold a bill of goods by our trusted health experts when it comes to our most precious possession. Our increasingly elusive quest for good health has become a commodity to be bought and sold by today’s snake oil salesmen and their coconspirators, but on a far grander scale …
In their defense, pharmaceutical companies are doing exactly what they were built to do: make money. The thought that they’re somehow different from other multinational corporations, that they are motivated by altruism and can be trusted to be honest about the failings of their own products, is a fallacy. There’s no law that requires them to put patient health ahead of profits. There’s nothing that forces them to stop promoting a pill even if they secretly know it doesn’t work or has dire side effects. It could be argued they have a fiduciary duty to try to downplay or even cover up negative information about their products if it could hurt their bottom line.
Our sick and broken system is the fault of politicians, federal agencies, the medical establishment, and the media. They have a far different responsibility than private drug companies. But they’ve allowed themselves to be so captured by commercial interests that they function as little more than an advertising arm of the pharmaceutical industry …
It’s grown exceedingly common that when patients get sick during a study, instead of the drug company considering the illness to be a possible side effect — which is what should be the response — they seek to explain it away. They blame anything other than the experimental medicine.
Another blatant example of this twisting of science can be found in a May 2023 study to look at whether serious neurological, or brain and nerve, disorders were connected to Covid-19 vaccines. The study was entitled, “Observational Study of Patients Hospitalized With Neurologic Events After SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination.” It was published in Neurology Clinical Practice.
The first problem I see when reviewing the study is that, although some side effects don’t surface until months or years after a medicine is taken, the study scientists drew their conclusions based on a mere six-week period. They looked at only 138 people hospitalized after a Covid vaccination, and a limited number of neurological conditions, including stroke or blood clots, encephalopathy or brain damage, seizure, and intracranial bleeding.
But what really captures my attention is the study’s nonsensical conclusion. It states that since all 138 vaccinated, hospitalized patients had “risk factors” or “established causes” for their neurologic illnesses, such as high blood pressure for stroke victims, this proves the Covid vaccines are safe. “All cases in this study were determined to have at least 1 risk factor and/or known etiology accounting for their neurologic syndromes. Our comprehensive clinical review of these cases supports the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines,” reads the study discussion.
You don’t have to be a scientist to detect a serious flaw in their reasoning. It’s like claiming that an old person who falls down the stairs and breaks a hip — was injured by being old, and it had nothing to do with the fall down the stairs. Having high blood pressure to begin with doesn’t mean if you have a stroke after Covid vaccine, you can automatically rule out the vaccine as having an impact. In fact, you should immediately ask whether the vaccine might prove riskier to people with preexisting vulnerabilities.
Surely even a novice scientist should know this. So why did this ridiculous study get published? It looks suspiciously as if someone is trying to dispel growing safety concerns about the vaccines. I decide to find out who.
I learn that the study was conducted at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and New York–Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. It was funded by taxpayer money through the CDC. I email the primary study author, Dr. Kiran Thakur: “The study seems to imply that because people who suffered certain neurological events shortly after Covid vaccination had risk factors, it exonerates the vaccines from blame. But did the authors consider that people with existing risk factors could be at greater risk for vaccine adverse events?”
Instead of answering the question, Dr. Thakur replies, “Can you clarify the purpose of your questions (to be published, personal inquiry or otherwise).” When I reply that her responses might be published, she goes dark on me. When I persist in asking her to respond, she finally answers: “Declining, thank you.” Why isn’t a legitimate scientist happy to answer a simple question about her work? What’s the big secret?
Reaching a dead end with Dr. Thakur, I query the medical journal’s editorial staff. They loop me back to Dr. Thakur, saying only she can answer my questions. Shouldn’t the journal be asking the same questions?
Next I turn to Columbia University. I ask to see the study materials and related communications. I want to learn Who was behind this study, and did the peer reviewers or anybody else flag the obvious flaws? It’s a reasonable request because we, the public, funded the research and own the information. Besides, a basic tenet of scientific research dictates that there should be transparency in data and all aspects of studies. In fact, a study isn’t considered legitimate unless the data is available so that it can be verified and replicated by others with the same results.
But Columbia University stalls in responding to my emails. So I file a formal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the material. More time passes, and Columbia informs me that it’s a private institution and it doesn’t have to follow Freedom of Information Act law. I appeal on the basis of scientific transparency. Why does Columbia want to keep details of an important, publicly funded study secret? Isn’t that contrary to tenets of sound science? My appeal falls on deaf ears. University officials tell me they’ll only respond to validly issued and served subpoenas or court orders, and that “[s]ubpoenas to the University must be served on the Office of the General Counsel.”
Think of the audacity. A private university can take our tax money for a study, then refuse to answer questions about it because they’re a private university. To me it looks like the CDC can legally launder taxpayer dollars to third parties to produce what amounts to propaganda, then cover their tracks under a shroud of secrecy.
Next, I decide to file a FOIA request directly with the CDC, which is undeniably subject to the Freedom of Information Act. However, I know from experience that federal agencies spin the FOIA process into a tool to obfuscate. They rarely follow the provisions requiring them to turn over materials within twenty working days. And punishment for their violations is virtually nonexistent.
Sure enough, the CDC sits on my FOIA request for forty-two days before emailing to let me know they haven’t yet begun processing my request. They say I need to be much more specific, or they won’t consider responding. This raises one of the newer tricks federal agencies use to make it tougher for us to access information we own. They require FOIA requests to be impossibly precise. In the past, it was enough for a requester to provide a topic and date range. Agencies would search computer records using keywords. But now they claim they can’t do that.
The CDC FOIA officers now demand that I somehow discover and present them with names of each specific, archaic department and subdepartment that should be searched and the title of any documents I’m looking for. They further insist I provide names and titles of each person within those departments whose email accounts should be searched. And I must give them the number of the grant that awarded the taxpayer funds for the study. Problem is, I have no way to know any of that. The grant number was strangely omitted from the published study, and I have no clue how I would find names of the people who might have records, or what departments they work in. That’s a key part of what the FOIA response would reveal. Using these avoidance tactics, a federal agency can heighten their odds of keeping public documents secret …
There may be a silver lining. The bad guys finally went too far.
With Covid: the disinformation, intolerance for dissent, shutdowns, mandates, forced or withheld medical treatment, mass firings, and attacks upon tens of thousands of scientists sparked the formation of a diverse coalition. This coalition includes a mix of liberals, conservatives, and nonpartisans. It’s made up of freethinking parents, students, doctors, nurses, researchers, elected officials, and celebrities.
Many had never before questioned public health narratives or their doctors. Most had blindly supported them. But today, members of this new coalition find themselves probing widely pushed orthodoxy on Covid and beyond, rightly asking what else the media and top public health officials have misled us on.
Now, redemption from the grasp of those who seek to control our health and our lives may come through a collective awakening that’s already begun.
“Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails,” by Sharyl Attkisson, is now available at bookstores everywhere.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Court Finds Kennedy Has Standing in Our Consolidated Case
As I predicted, our new co-plaintiff Kennedy meets even the Supreme Court’s stringent standing requirements, the injunction against the government is back in play.
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | August 26, 2024
As I explained in a previous post, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s companion lawsuit Kennedy v. Biden has been consolidated by the court into our Missouri v. Biden case. Based upon documents we obtained on discovery, the court recently found that Kennedy meets the Supreme Court’s stringent standing criteria. We only need one co-plaintiff with standing to bring the case and the petition for the injunction. So the injunction is back in play, and we will likely find ourselves at the Supreme Court again in a few months. Unless SCOTUS invents another technicality on which to temporize, they will be forced to rule on the merits of the evidence against the government, which we believe is overwhelming.
On the issue of Kennedy’s standing, U.S. District Court judge Terry Doughty last week ruled: “There is not much dispute that both Kennedy and CHD [Kennedy’s nonprofit Children’s Health Defense] were specifically targeted by the White House, the Office of Surgeon General, and CISA, and the content of Kennedy and CHD were suppressed. Therefore, Kennedy must now show a substantial risk that in the near future, at least one platform will restrict the speech of Kennedy in response to the actions of one Government Defendant.” Citing evidence we uncovered in Missouri v. Biden, Doughty explained: “The Court finds that Kennedy is likely to succeed on his claim that suppression of content posted was caused by actions of Government Defendants, and there is a substantial risk that he will suffer similar injury in the near future.”
As reported in The Kennedy Beacon Substack:
The latest ruling is not only significant for Kennedy but for the future of online speech. In June of this year, the Supreme Court ruled that the state attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana did not have standing to bring their case on government directed mass censorship. Now that Kennedy and the CHD have been found to have standing in the matter, the Supreme Court will likely have an opportunity to judge the issue on its merits rather than on a technicality as it did when making its standing ruling on an injunction in June.
If Kennedy and his co-plaintiffs are able to demonstrate to judges that the Biden administration’s intrusion into the actions of major social media companies resulted in censorship, the country will be one step closer to a major legal ruling guaranteeing freedom to speak online without the censorious interference of the federal government.
In related news, Kennedy announced Friday that he is suspending his presidential campaign. While he has deep disagreements with Trump on several issues, he is endorsing Trump’s candidacy to advance the key issues on which they have substantial agreements—including stopping government censorship and propaganda. His 48-minute speech announcing this decision was an extraordinary moment in American politics and is worth watching. In addition to discussing the issue of government censorship, which seriously hamstrung his ability to campaign, Kennedy’s remarks focus also on the root causes of the current epidemic of chronic disease in the United States.
While there is online buzz that Trump may tap Kennedy as Attorney General, I anticipate if Trump is elected he will appoint Kennedy to his cabinet as Secretary of Health and Human Services, a department which includes the CDC, FDA, and NIH. This could prove a welcome opportunity for the reform of our public health agencies. I am currently working with a team of policy analysts and health freedom advocates on concrete policy proposals for just such reforms, and will keep you posted on our progress with that project.
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Book Excerpt
The Case for Dismantling the Rules-Based International Order
By Professor Glenn Diesen | December 23, 2024
The so-called “rules-based international order” aims to facilitate a hegemonic world, which entails displacing international law. While international law is based on equal sovereignty for all states, the rules-based international order upholds hegemony on the principle of sovereign inequality.
The rules-based international order is commonly presented as international law plus international human rights law, which appears benign and progressive. However, this entails introducing contradictory principles and rules. The consequence is a system devoid of uniform rules, in which “might makes right”. International human rights law introduces a set of rules to elevate the rights of the individual, yet human-centric security often contradicts state-centric security as the foundation of international law.
The US as the hegemonic state can then choose between human-centric security and state-centric security, while adversaries must abide strictly by state-centric security due to their alleged lack of liberal democratic credentials. For example, state-centric security as the foundation of international law insists on the territorial integrity of states, while human-centric security allows for secession under the principle of self-determination. The US will thus insist on territorial integrity in allied countries such as Ukraine, Georgia or Spain, while supporting self-determination within adversarial states such as Serbia, China, Russia and Syria. The US can interfere in the domestic affairs of adversaries to promote liberal democratic values, yet the US adversaries do not have the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US. To facilitate a hegemonic international order, there cannot be equal sovereignty for all states. … continue
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