(NaturalHealth365) Just when health advocates thought they couldn’t be more concerned about widespread water fluoridation practices, alarming new research delivers a devastating blow to proponents of this dubious public health intervention. A brand new study published, in BMC Pediatrics, reveals the true extent of damage fluoridated water inflicts on our children’s developing brains.
This comprehensive longitudinal study examined a massive dataset spanning over two decades (1990-2012), tracking more than 73,000 children enrolled in Florida’s Medicaid system for their first ten years of life. What researchers David A. Geier and Mark R. Geier uncovered should send shockwaves through communities still blindly accepting fluoride in their drinking water.
Fluoride exposure dramatically increases autism and intellectual disability risks
The findings are nothing short of alarming. Children exposed to fluoridated water showed a staggering 6.26-fold increased risk of autism spectrum disorder compared to unexposed children. They also experienced a 2.02-fold greater risk of intellectual disability and a 1.24-fold increase in specific developmental delays.
Even more troubling, these associations were dose-dependent – meaning the more fluoride children were exposed to, the greater their risk of developing these life-altering conditions. This directly contradicts the establishment narrative that has downplayed fluoride’s dangers for decades.
Government agencies continue ignoring mounting evidence
Despite this damning new evidence, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) still maintains water fluoridation is “one of the ten greatest public health achievements of the 20th Century” – a claim that appears increasingly disconnected from scientific reality.
This willful ignorance is nothing new. The study authors point out that previous research by the CDC examining fluoridation and dental claims in Louisiana Medicaid from 1995-1996 completely failed to conduct any safety assessments. This pattern of evaluating supposed benefits while deliberately avoiding investigating potential harms has characterized fluoride promotion for decades.
The truth can no longer be suppressed
Dr. Hardy Limeback, former head of preventive dentistry at the University of Toronto, questions the establishment’s priorities: “How many IQ points were lost in Medicaid kids living in fluoridated communities? How many more autistic kids can be blamed on fluoride exposure from birth to age 10?”
Karl Jablonowski, a senior research scientist quoted in the study, puts the findings in stark perspective: “In terms of absolute risk, if this study is correct, out of every thousand children, water fluoridation induces autism in 11, intellectual disability in 5, and specific developmental delay in 49.”
He adds, “That is a trade-off no parent would make, no doctor would recommend, and no society would allow.”
Fluoride damages developing brains even at low exposures
The study confirms what independent researchers have warned about for years – fluoride is a potent neurotoxin that can cause significant harm even at the low levels typically found in municipal water supplies.
Recent studies from Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. consistently show associations between higher fluoride exposure and worse neurocognitive outcomes. A meta-analysis published in January demonstrated that fluoride exposure is associated with significant reductions in children’s IQ scores.
These effects shouldn’t be surprising. The researchers explain that “fluoride-associated neurotoxicity is associated with increased oxidative stress, synaptic and neurotransmission dysfunction, disruption of mitochondrial/energy metabolism, and calcium channel dysregulation.” In other words, fluoride interferes with the fundamental biological processes necessary for proper brain development.
What you can do to protect your family
With approximately 75% of U.S. public drinking water contaminated with fluoride, protecting your family requires immediate action:
Avoid fluoridated toothpaste and dental products, especially for children
Be aware that children can only excrete about 45% of fluoride through their kidneys – the very organs damaged by fluoride exposure
This latest research adds to the overwhelming evidence that fluoride represents a clear and present danger to children’s neurological development. As more independent studies confirm these risks, the practice of adding this industrial waste product to our drinking water increasingly appears as one of the most reckless and harmful public health experiments ever conducted.
Formaldehyde, a common chemical in household products like furniture and building materials, poses significant health risks including cancer, asthma and fertility problems, according to investigations by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
A long-awaited EPA report, released in 2024, downplayed formaldehyde risks, particularly for workers and people near industrial zones, amid pressure from chemical industry groups and political figures
Formaldehyde “off-gases” from products over time, especially in warm environments, making it particularly concerning in indoor spaces like homes and workplaces where people spend significant time
Studies show formaldehyde exposure increases asthma risk in children, and each increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter leads to a 10% higher risk
Consumers will be able to reduce exposure by ensuring good ventilation, choosing low-emission products, letting new furniture air out and staying informed about product labels and safety standards
Visualize yourself walking into a new home and noticing a strange, sharp smell. While you may think it’s coming from the fresh coat of paint, that smell also lurks in cleaning products or even your brand-new furniture. This invisible culprit in your home is formaldehyde, a chemical found in many everyday products.
Formaldehyde Is Dangerous to the Public
While formaldehyde has various industrial uses, an investigation by ProPublica1 on a report2 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) raises concerns about its potential health risks in our daily lives.3 Specifically, it’s been found to cause cancer more compared to other chemicals released in the air, and that it also causes a host of other health issues, such as asthma, miscarriage and fertility problems.4
However, the report doesn’t end there. What’s more concerning is that the EPA downplayed the threat formaldehyde poses to people living in factories and industrial zones that release it into the air. Why? The most logical answer is that the chemical industry is colluding with certain high-ranking government officials. As noted in ProPublica’s analysis:5
“While a note accompanying the EPA’s report stated that workers have the greatest exposure to the chemical, the agency’s risk assessment adopted weaker standards for protecting workers from formaldehyde than had been proposed in a previous draft …
But even before the agency released the report, House Republicans urged the administration to invalidate it. And a chemical industry group immediately attacked the report as flawed, accusing the EPA of ‘pursuing unaccountable lame duck actions that threaten the U.S. economy and key sectors that support health, safety and national security’ …
When Trump first assumed office in 2017, the agency was preparing to publish a report on the toxicity of the chemical. But one of his EPA appointees, who was given a high-ranking role in the agency’s Office of Research and Development, was a chemical engineer who had worked to fend off the regulation of formaldehyde as an employee of Koch Industries, whose subsidiary made formaldehyde and many products that emit it.
The report was not released until August 2024, long after Trump’s appointee left the agency.”
As noted in ProPublica’s investigation, the previous draft of the EPA’s report, created back in March 2024, already had a final assessment saying that the health risks “are not unreasonable.” To make things worse, both the first and final drafts concluded that “formaldehyde in outdoor air isn’t a threat that needs to be addressed.”
This puts the people living near industrial areas (known as fence line areas) at risk with little hope of government protection because the regulations aren’t leaning towards their health and safety.6
What Is Formaldehyde and Where Do We Encounter It?
Formaldehyde is a simple organic molecule, similar to the building blocks of other familiar chemicals like sugar and vinegar. In its pure form, it’s a gas with a pungent odor. However, it’s often used in a liquid form combined with other chemicals in various products.
Think of pressed wood furniture like desks, bookshelves or cabinets. The glue that holds these wood pieces together often contains formaldehyde. Similarly, building materials like plywood, laminate flooring and even some types of insulation contain formaldehyde. Beyond construction materials, formaldehyde is found in certain glues, some fabrics like wrinkle-free clothes and even nail polish removers.
One of the main concerns with formaldehyde is its tendency to “off-gas,” meaning it slowly releases from these products as a gas over time, especially in warm or humid environments. This invisible gas then becomes part of the air you breathe indoors. Interestingly, the “new car smell” you experience is partly due to formaldehyde off-gassing from interior materials.7
While everyone encounters some level of formaldehyde throughout life, certain professions have a higher risk of exposure. For example, employees in tire manufacturing plants, hairdressers who use products with formaldehyde-based preservatives and furniture makers are at increased risk of inhaling higher levels.8
The Unreasonable Risk — Formaldehyde and Health Concerns
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), formaldehyde exposure causes a range of health problems, depending on the level and duration of exposure. Generally, it irritates the eyes, nose and throat.9 This is similar to the discomfort you experience from exposure to strong cleaning products.
But, as noted by the ProPublica report, there’s a more concerning issue — the link between formaldehyde exposure and an increased risk of certain cancers, particularly nasopharyngeal cancer.10
Beyond cancer, formaldehyde exposure is also linked to respiratory problems like asthma, especially in children. In one study, researchers noted that children exposed to formaldehyde at home are more likely to develop asthma. Specifically, they noted that each time formaldehyde exposure increases by 10 micrograms per cubic meter, the risk of asthma also goes up by 10%.11
Industry vs. Regulations — Who Will Prevail?
The EPA report concluded that formaldehyde exposure poses an “unreasonable risk” to human health, raising concerns for consumers and prompting calls for stricter regulations.12,13 But, as the ProPublica report stated, the EPA was criticized for its initial assessment.
The American Chemistry Council argues that stricter regulations will significantly impact jobs and the economy since formaldehyde is a “building block” chemical.14,15 Regulations for improved safety are currently under attack as well. Unsurprisingly, the EPA gave in:
“Compared to the draft published in March, which was heavily criticized by industry, the final version contained weaker standards for protecting workers. The acceptable levels of workplace formaldehyde exposure set in the final version of the assessment were significantly higher than the levels in the earlier draft of the report …
Last month, Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, urged the incoming administration to make revisiting the Biden EPA’s work on formaldehyde ‘a top priority for 2025.’
In a letter to Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to run the agency, Sessions derided this week’s report as ‘based upon unscientific data that was utilized by unaccountable officials at the EPA to tie the hands of the new Administration and hamper economic growth.’ (The letter was first reported by Inside EPA.)
Sessions, who is a co-chair of the new Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency caucus and a staunch ally of Trump, recommended scrapping the EPA’s assessments of formaldehyde and reversing course on ‘broader Biden policies’ on chemicals.”
The ongoing debate must center on finding the right balance. Stricter regulations will lead to the development of safer alternative materials and practices. However, immediate changes will have economic consequences. As such, scientists, government agencies and industry leaders should work together to find solutions that prioritize both public health and economic stability.
Simple Steps for a Safer Home
Based on the published reports, it’s clear that formaldehyde presents a clear danger to your health. While authorities figure out a way to balance regulations and economic growth, there are several strategies available to minimize your exposure to formaldehyde at home and create a healthier environment.
The first step is prioritizing good ventilation. Open windows and doors whenever possible to allow fresh air to circulate and dilute any formaldehyde off-gasing. Additionally, use exhaust fans in kitchens your kitchen, making sure to turn them on whenever you’re cooking.16
When purchasing new furniture or building materials, look for products labeled as “low-emission” or “formaldehyde-free.” These products are designed to release minimal amounts of formaldehyde into the air. While they may be slightly more expensive, the long-term health benefits are worth considering. Most furniture is made using different wood composites held together by glue to bind everything together. As noted in a January 2025 report by Children’s Health Defense:17
“The adhesives used in this type of furniture can contain formaldehyde, which goes through a process called off-gassing, where the chemical is released into the air over time. Federal regulators have set limits on how much of the chemical some composite woods can release.
But those limits, set more than a decade ago, are still well above the level that EPA scientists recently established to protect people from asthma, allergic reactions and other breathing problems.
So, at the very least, you want to look at the item’s packaging for a label that shows it is compliant with the standards set under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).”
Another helpful tip is to let new furniture or carpets air out in a well-ventilated space for several days before bringing them indoors. This allows most of the initial formaldehyde to off-gas before you start using the furniture.18
Stay Informed for a Healthy Future
Staying informed about the latest research and regulations regarding formaldehyde exposure is crucial for protecting you and your family’s health. Aside from government health agencies, various public organizations provide up-to-date information on the health risks and best practices for minimizing exposure. Frequently reading up on these sources will help you stay informed about any new findings or changes in regulations.
Consumer awareness and advocacy play a significant role in influencing industries to adopt safer practices. Thus, where you spend your money will be noticed by manufacturers.
By choosing products from companies that prioritize low emissions and transparency about their materials, consumers will eventually push manufacturers away from using formaldehyde. Supporting companies that prioritize health and safety sends a powerful message and encourages innovating safer alternatives.
Being aware of the symptoms of formaldehyde exposure is also important. If you have related concerns, especially if you experience persistent symptoms like respiratory problems, skin irritation or other unusual health issues, it’s important to discuss them with your doctor. They’ll assess your risk and provide personalized advice.
Taking Control of Your Indoor Air
Finally, consider adding some greenery to your home. Certain houseplants have been shown to help remove formaldehyde and other toxins from the air. While they won’t eliminate formaldehyde entirely, they’ll be able to contribute to a healthier indoor environment. For a list of the plants, read my article “The Importance of Reducing Indoor Pollution.” There, I give other tips, such as using a high-quality air purifier and cleaning appliances regularly.
The health risks associated with formaldehyde exposure, as highlighted by the ProPublica report, are a legitimate concern because most people are exposed to it. However, by taking proactive steps to minimize exposure in your home and workplace, you’ll significantly reduce your risk. Again, remember to turn on ventilation when cooking, choose low-emission products and be mindful of off-gasing from new items to make a real difference on your health.
While the issue of formaldehyde seems overwhelming considering how ubiquitous it is, remember that you have the power to make informed choices that help you take control of your health.
Gavin de Becker is one of the leading security resource experts in the world; his private security firm protects about 70 well-known U.S. families and individuals, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In our interview, we discuss the importance of paying attention to your instincts and how to decipher between the two types of fear — true fear and unwarranted fear
You should always follow your gut instincts or inner wisdom — your intuition — including true fear telling you to avoid certain people or situations
Unwarranted fear is often used as an instrument of control, including in the context of COVID-19, the pandemic and COVID jabs
Two antidotes for fear include not watching television news and embracing the principle of subsidiarity, which means living as locally as possible
Gavin de Becker is one of the leading security resource experts in the world. His private security firm, Gavin de Becker and Associates, protects about 70 well-known U.S. families and individuals, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who are at risk of assassination or other violence but don’t have Secret Service coverage. However, he also engages in public education to help protect the general population:
“In my public education work, I write books, and that’s to take the strategies that are used to protect senators, congressmen, presidents, governors, and make them available on an accessible level to regular people. The reason being that a public figure in America is attacked about once every five years, but a woman is killed by a husband or boyfriend about once every five hours.
And so, I wanted to take what I had learned and say, ‘Well, what are the ways that there this crossover so that regular people who are subject to victimization and targeting can be safer?’”
In our interview, we discuss the importance of paying attention to your instincts, how to decipher between the two types of fear as well as how fear is used as an instrument of control, including in the context of COVID-19, the pandemic and COVID jabs.
What Triggered the 40% Rise in Deaths Among Young, Healthy Americans?
De Becker wrote the afterword to Ed Dowd’s book, “Cause Unknown,” which discusses the unexplained 40% spike in deaths that occurred among young athletes and other healthy Americans during the third and fourth quarters of 2021. A new edition, covering 2023 deaths, also came out in March 2024.
Media largely blamed the deaths — which they’re now referring to as sudden adult death syndrome, or SADS — on COVID-19, delayed diagnosis, suicide and other factors. But de Becker explains:
“Could it possibly be that a new vaccine product, mass vaccinated by compulsion on the population, could have anything to do with it? If you had 100 kids die, one of the questions you would ask is, what do they have in common? Did they all attend that same event where the air conditioning had a virus in it? Did they all take the same street drug, for example?
Well, in this case, we know that the overwhelming majority of young athletes were vaccinated [for COVID-19] and typically two or three vaccinations. And you can’t exclude that one possible cause when we know for an absolute fact that the mRNA vaccines do cause myocarditis and pericarditis, it’s acknowledged by the CDC.
… Interestingly, [CDC] just did release something for FOIA, a … 140-page report on myocarditis and pericarditis associated with the [COVID-19] vaccines. Every single page redacted, every single page … Why does the CDC ever have secrets? That’s supposed to be the organization that keeps us informed.”
De Becker describes “Cause Unknown” as a book to give to someone you love who needs to be awakened.
“That book is a book you can hand somebody you love who you’ve been unable to reach, and it’s just possible that they might choose not to vaccinate their 14-year-old kid or they might take a different attitude and not take all nine of these injections that are currently recommended by the CDC,” he says. “We are on injection number 10, will be the next one, currently recommended by the CDC for children.”
The Importance of Listening to Your Intuition
De Becker is the author of “The Gift of Fear,” which came out in 1998 and became a No. 1 national bestseller. It’s still the No. 1 bestseller in the world on violence to this day. The book empowers you to embrace your gut instincts or inner wisdom — your intuition. De Becker says:
“The word intuition … the root of it … means to guard and protect. And that’s what it does for us. It is the sense, we could say the sixth sense, that keeps us safe, sort of our nuclear defense system. And, indeed, the gut has lots of neurons — more than a dog has in fact.
And there’s a form of thought, if you will, or connection to the universe that when we just know something without knowing why, when we don’t use logic, we just say, go back to the house, call the house, move away from this person, get out of this underground parking lot, don’t call this person back, don’t date this person, don’t stay late with this manager of this restaurant when he asks you, whatever it may be.
Sometimes, the overwhelming majority of times, people are not sinister toward us and don’t mean us harm, but sometimes they do. And when you get that signal from intuition, it is very, very important to listen to it. And I say that intuition is always correct in at least two ways. One, it’s always about something. And number two, it always has your best interest at heart.
Now, it might be that the information that you deduce from an intuitive feeling of hesitation or fear or curiosity, maybe your interpretation will be wrong, but the fact that you listen and give it a hearing is very important.”
There are two distinct types of fear, according to de Becker — true fear and unwarranted fear. True fear is the instinctual response to an immediate threat, characterized by the physiological reactions that prepare your body to either confront or flee from danger.
This type of fear is an intuitive signal that warns you of genuine danger and helps preserve your safety. “What I call true fear is the automatic immediate reaction of the body,” de Becker says. “Something is wrong here. I see a snake or a tiger, right away I have a physical reaction. And that fear should always be listened to.”
Unwarranted fear, on the other hand, encompasses fears that are not directly linked to immediate threats. These can include anxieties and worries about potential future events that may never occur, often leading to unnecessary stress and precautionary behaviors that do not enhance personal safety.
Unwarranted fear can be influenced by societal factors, past experiences and individual perceptions of risk that may not accurately reflect actual danger. De Becker argues that understanding the distinction between these two types of fear is crucial for recognizing when fear is a helpful guide and when it is a hindrance to living a fulfilled life. He explains:
“The unwarranted fear, like the fear of I’m boarding a plane and I think, ‘Oh, this plane’s going to crash, don’t get on it.’ If that’s based on a news story I saw two weeks ago about a plane crash in Brazil, that’s going to be unwarranted fear in the category of anxiety.
But if it’s based on seeing the two pilots stumble out of the bar drunk at the airport, that’s something I might want to listen to. So, you at least ask yourself the question, what’s this about?
Many of us have had that feeling about don’t get on this airplane, for example. And sometimes, it’s hard to act upon, and sometimes it will be unnecessary or misinterpreted. But if you ask yourself if it’s based on memory or imagination, that is not true fear. If it’s based on something in your environment, something you see or smell or hear or feel, that is often true fear and should be listened to.
… Fear does have a gift for us and no animal in nature, even the strongest lion that’s suddenly afraid, will say, ‘Oh, it’s probably nothing.’ But we do that. A woman will be standing at an elevator in a building late at night, an office building and the elevator doors open up and there’s a man in there who causes her fear. We don’t know why only a human being will get into a steel soundproof chamber with someone who causes them fear.
An animal won’t do it. And so, we override, we prosecute our own intuitive feelings. And my life is full, and yours too, of people who said, I knew it, but I still did such and such. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I still hired that person or I knew I had a feeling about that environment and I stayed in it.”
Fear as an Instrument of Control
Fear isn’t only a tool you can harness to keep yourself out of harm’s way. In the interview, we also discussed how fear is used to control and manipulate populations.
“All governments and all leaders have used fear as an instrument of control. And all governments also benefit from division in their countries,” de Becker says. “And the reason that they benefit from division in their countries is … you want people to be energized in their focus on each other and not on those in power.”
De Becker describes some recent historical events that have used fear to gradually take a way freedom and liberty, from Y2K, when it was said all technology would stop functioning when it turned to the year 2000, to COVID-19:
“After 9/11, every big office building suddenly implemented security procedures where you had to show ID to get into the building. Now, we have to remember, you didn’t need ID to fly an airplane into the building. The security response was absolutely unequal to what had actually happened. Airplanes have been flown into buildings.
That’s one kind of thing, intruders trying to get in your building and documenting everybody and passes. And we became a national security state over fear of terrorism.
Then you have killer bees was another thing that was posted on the public. And terrorism is an interesting thing because you start with an enemy like a country. It’s a real country, there it is, it’s Russia, it’s China. Then you go to communists. Communists are the problem. Then you go to communism is the problem.
Now, you’re getting down to a very fine, almost talcum powder, and then you go to terrorists are the problem. Then you go to terrorism, which is an idea, is the problem. And finally, we have landed on the smallest possible particle, the virion, the virus. Virus is the problem.”
In early March 2020, de Becker did a report for clients on the actual risks of COVID and quickly learned the odds of dying from COVID were remote for healthy people. Still, fear was used to implement order and control.
“This was a war by governments on citizens. And it completely shifted the power … such that you could accomplish with words getting billions of people to stay in their homes, getting everybody in America to not go to work. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed forever,” de Becker says. “… And what happens when you’re afraid is that you’ll take any train that’s leaving the station even if it’s not going where you want to go. And that’s what America did.” He adds:
“The reality is that very, very few people were in danger and it should not have been used to lock down societies and close schools and these things that were tremendously damaging to young people and ultimately to all people. So this was a power move. It will always be something, terrorism, communism, terrorists, Russia. It will always be something.”
Two Strategies to Avoid Fear and Stay Safe
Even if you’re living in a society where fear is being used to manipulate the common narrative and impose control, you can opt out of the madness. One strategy to do so, de Becker says, is to not watch television news, including local news channels, which he says are nothing more than “40 hours a week of original content designed to get your attention with fear.”
Instead, he recommends seeking out your own information, particularly in the form of reading, which gives you knowledge without accompanying alarming images. De Becker explains:
“Reading allows you to decide what happens to your body. Whereas seeing something alarming does not allow you to decide what happens to your body. The body does not understand media. Meaning when I see a terrible thing on the news … I have no way of knowing whether it’s close or far away. I have no way of knowing whether it’s true or not true. And I have no way of knowing whether it’s dated or recent.
But in all cases, just like a movie, it will cause alarm. You’ll recoil from it. When you read something, even something alarming, you can decide how it is brought into your system and how you deal with it. So, I really encourage people to seek their own information when they’re curious and not allow television producers to decide what’s important in your life and much of what’s on the news.”
The second strategy de Becker recommends is embracing the principle of subsidiarity, which suggests matters be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. In essence, it’s a framework for decentralization that supports the empowerment of small, local units. By living as local as possible, de Becker suggests, we can all embrace autonomy and bow out of the fear around us:
“Another great gift that’s available to us is to work on subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is a word I only learned in the last couple of years, but that is government at the most local level possible and living at the most local level possible. And somebody I read the other day, he called it the great nearby instead of the great beyond.
… I don’t live in a global relationship. I live in with the people in my life, the people in my community, the people I know, and the people I choose … it’s fine to think globally, but remember that every time there’s a global crisis that only lends itself to a global solution, that is power telling you what to do, because you can’t do anything about the global crisis or the global solution.
These are used to control conduct. And so, living as locally as we can is a very wonderful antidote for the fear that is being sprayed at us out of a fire hose 24 hours a day.”
It’s been less than a year since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended two new respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccines — yet CDC data and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) already show reports of 34 deaths, 302 serious adverse events and according to news reports this week, a safety signal for Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS).
Reported cases include several instances of severe adverse events in newborns, including the death of a 27-day-old baby who was wrongly administered the vaccine, and in pregnant women and people in age groups for which the RSV vaccines were not approved.
Abrysvo is also approved for pregnant women, targeting RSV prevention in babies. The FDA approved Abrysvo and Arexvy in May 2023.
According to CDC data, approximately 9.65 million RSV vaccine doses — 6.58 million Arexvy doses and 3.06 million Abrysvo doses — were administered as of Feb. 16.
Members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) presented the data on deaths and adverse events related to the RSV vaccines at a Feb. 29 meeting.
Yet, ACIP — and news media reports — primarily focused on GBS safety signals, glossing over deaths and the administration of the vaccines to unauthorized age groups.
Instead, CDC officials claimed it’s too early to determine if the RSV vaccines caused the adverse events and reiterated that the shots are safe, according to The Associated Press (AP).
Experts who spoke with The Defender disputed the CDC’s reassurances. Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said “34 deaths in 10 months should be sufficient to pull the RSV vaccines from the market. But the FDA will not do that — nor will there be full investigations regarding these deaths.”
“I am greatly concerned with the excessive application of the RSV vaccine,” said cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough. “We are beginning to see the tip of the iceberg in terms of serious side effects.”
CDC creating ‘illusion of safe and effective’
According to the CDC data presented at the Feb. 29 ACIP meeting, of the 34 deaths reported as of Feb. 16 following RSV vaccination, 22 were linked to Arexvy and nine to Abrysvo. In three instances, the report listed “no brand name.”
Yet, discrepancies in the data are evident, as the public-facing VAERS database indicates only 29 RSV vaccine-related deaths as of Feb. 23. And according to Albert Benavides, founder of VAERSAware.com, three more “hidden” deaths reported after RSV vaccines are listed in VAERS, but the vaccine name is unlabeled.
Benavides, who identified discrepancies and contradictions in VAERS data and has called attention to the existence of two parallel VAERS databases — one that is public-facing and one that is not — said, “It is simply gross and despicable the CDC and FDA are allowed to pass off this data obfuscation as pharmacovigilance.”
He added: “VAERS administration is simply not publishing all legitimate reports received.”
One of the deaths recorded in VAERS involved a 27-day-old baby from New York — even though the RSV vaccines are not approved for children. According to the report, which was entered into the VAERS database on Jan. 8, the newborn was vaccinated at a doctor’s office “and he passed away right there.” The date of death was unspecified.
Other RSV vaccine-related death reports included:
A report involving a foreign woman of “unknown” age but who was pregnant. She received Abrysvo Dec. 27, 2023, and died Jan. 1, 2024.
A 67-year-old New Jersey man who received Arexvy Oct. 14, 2023, and died two days later — a death acknowledged by GSK as “related to Arexvy.”
A 69-year-old Florida man who received Arexvy concurrently with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine Sept. 28, 2023, and died two days later. According to the VAERS report, an EKG on the date of his death was “grossly ‘abnormal’” despite no known cardiac history and an “unremarkable” cardiac exam two months prior.
A 70-year-old California man who received Arexvy concurrently with a flu vaccine on Sept. 5, 2023. Increased coughing and fever began “less than 24 hours later” and lasted for four days, until “the patient was found deceased at home.”
A 73-year-old Virginia male who received Arexvy Jan. 24 and was diagnosed with GBS. Symptoms began 11 days after vaccination. He died Feb. 15.
An 81-year-old New Mexico woman who received Arexvy concurrently with the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, and pneumonia, adenovirus and flu vaccines, on Oct. 19, 2023. On Oct. 29, 2023, she sustained a hemorrhage and later died.
An 85-year-old Colorado man who received Abrysvo and a flu vaccine on Sept. 11, 2023. Two days later, he “developed symptoms of shingles in his eye” and later “developed meningitis/encephalitis that led to a host of other complications that ultimately led to his death” on Dec. 21, 2023.
According to Benavides, other deaths likely related to RSV vaccination are “hidden” within VAERS, with details such as the vaccine name listed as “unknown” in some reports.
This includes the Jan. 8 death of a preterm newborn in Texas. According to VAERS, the baby was “not breathing” hours after vaccination and subsequently died. The vaccine lot number listed in the VAERS report corresponds with Abrysvo.
Benavides said mislabeled reports hide the true extent of adverse events:
“Not publishing legitimate reports is one of their Vegas tricks. They delete legitimate reports after publication, purposely delay published reports, allow reports to be published without critical data fields like age, date of vaccination or death, even when reports are properly documented in the summary narrative.
“It’s not a stretch to believe VAERS administration is systematically and actively scrubbing data fields that were present on initial submission to create the illusion of ‘safe and effective.’”
These reports include a male born prematurely in New York who received Beyfortus and the hepatitis B vaccine at birth, and died of “fluid buildup in the lungs.” Another report lists an Arkansas male of “unknown” age who died of cardiac arrest on Feb. 14, although this was deemed unrelated to the “Beyfortus vaccine received” the prior day.
‘Startling’ number of Guillain-Barré cases following RSV vaccination
VAERS lists 3,834 adverse events relating to the RSV vaccines as of Feb. 23, with approximately two-thirds of the reports pertaining to Arexvy. A total of 302 reports are classified as serious adverse events, with slightly over half connected to Arexvy.
Yet, the ACIP meeting and subsequent news stories largely focused on a single safety signal: a higher-than-normal incidence of GBS in RSV vaccine recipients.
According to The New York Times, GBS causes the immune system to attack the nerves, leading to paralysis and death in severe cases. According to AP, “An estimated 3,000 to 6,000 people develop G.B.S. in the U.S. each year,” mostly older adults.
“Rare cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome have been linked to other vaccines, including those against influenza and shingles,” the Times reported. The Times did not mention incidences of GBS connected to COVID-19 vaccination.
AP reported that health officials estimate “About two cases of Guillain-Barré might be seen in every 1 million people who receive a vaccine.” CDC data indicate the GBS incidence rate for Abrysvo recipients was 4.6 cases per million people.
GBS incidences were lower for Arexvy, but according to AP, officials are also performing “follow-up tracking” in people who received this particular vaccine.
“Given that the RSV vaccine was first approved in the U.S. on May 3, 2023, the number of VAERS reports for GBS, death and atrial fibrillation are indeed startling,” Hooker said.
According to VAERS, 34 GBS cases related to RSV vaccination were recorded. Most were in the 65-79 age group, but at least two cases were reported in people under age 60, even though the RSV vaccines are not approved for those age groups. CDC data presented at the Feb. 29 ACIP meeting said 23 GBS reports have been “verified.”
From these “verified” reports, 15 involved Abrysvo, 14 patients were male, seven received a COVID-19 vaccine at the same time they received the RSV shot, the median age was 71 and one patient died.
The ACIP presentation referred to one GBS report “in a non-pregnant female patient aged 50s years” who received Abyrsvo. VAERS includes reports of other GBS cases in patients in age groups not authorized to receive the RSV vaccines.
In one instance, a 6-month-old girl from California received Abrysvo and several other vaccines at a military site on Nov. 30, 2023. She sustained “life threatening” cardiac arrest. The RSV vaccine “was given by mistake,” according to her VAERS report.
And a 28-year-old Kentucky female who received Abrysvo on Dec. 1, 2023, soon developed “facial weakness,” despite “no history of similar symptoms.” She was hospitalized for seven days and diagnosed with GBS.
Risks of RSV vaccines evident during clinical trials
Despite the deaths and safety signals connected to the RSV vaccines, CDC officials at the Feb. 29 ACIP meeting adopted a reassuring tone regarding the vaccines’ safety.
“Due to the uncertainties and limitations, these early data cannot establish if there is an increased risk for GBS after vaccination,” Shimabukuro said, according to the Times.
According to AP, “CDC officials also presented estimates that the vaccines have prevented thousands of hospitalizations and hundreds of deaths from RSV, and that current data indicates the benefits of vaccination outweigh the possible risks.”
“R.S.V. vaccines may prevent an estimated 120 to 140 in-hospital deaths and about 25,000 outpatient visits per million doses administered,” the Times reported.
“Pfizer is committed to the continuous monitoring and evaluation of the safety of Abrysvo” and is conducting four safety studies examining the risk of GBS, said Reema Mehta, Pfizer’s vice president of risk assessment and safety, in remarks quoted by AP.
“There are limitations to all of these data, and further analysis by FDA, CDC and the vaccine manufacturers are needed to confirm and quantify any potential risk,” said Alison Hunt, a GSK spokesperson, in remarks quoted by the Times.
Dr. Daniel Jernigan, director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, claimed at the hearing that VAERS is “not intended to determine if a vaccine is causing an adverse event.”
Saying that such criticisms were “a ploy to remove emphasis” from adverse events, Hooker said, “VAERS inaccuracies are only in under-reporting, not misreporting.”
“The [2011] Lazarus study conducted at the request of CDC shows that perhaps 1% of all vaccine adverse events are captured by VAERS and that the true vaccine adverse event rate is around 1 in 39,” he said.
According to Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist and biological warfare expert, “The FDA and CDC have enormous amounts of data on well over 100 million Americans” but “refuse to study the data.”
According to AP, public health officials were aware of GBS instances identified during clinical trials and “different systems were watching for signs of problems.”
Nass said there is little evidence that RSV vaccines are saving lives in either babies or the elderly.” But, she said, “There was good evidence, even in the pre-marketing data, that the RSV vaccines caused neurologic complications, including GBS.”
“Why would anyone take an RSV vaccine that has a reasonable chance of causing a neurologic illness to prevent colds? The answer is that they are not being told the truth,” Nass said, calling for RSV vaccines to not be licensed or used until their safety is proven.
McCullough said RSV “is like a mild cold and easily treated at home. He said the risk of “fatal paralysis, cardiac side effects and vaccine death far outweigh the occasional case of RSV, which we have been managing for many years in internal medicine.”
“I do not recommend the new RSV vaccine to older adults,” he said.
Public health agencies have refused to study or to publicly release data comparing the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated children, according to experts who spoke during Monday’s U.S. Senate roundtable discussion on “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel.”
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of articles covering Monday’s U.S. Senate roundtable discussion, “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?” hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). Read earlier coverage here, here and here.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), participated in the roundtable. He told The Defender that the corruption of public health agencies was an “issue [that] came up again and again, with solid data,” during the roundtable.
“It was very significant for CHD to have a seat at the table at the briefing and also significant how much Sen. Johnson knew of and appreciated our work,” he said. “We have a much wider reach than we give ourselves credit for and I believe we’ll get more such invitations to speak to and influence congressional representatives.”
“Sen. Johnson and several others are highly energized regarding the woeful pandemic response, including the society-wide release of mRNA technology, with an astounding increase in vaccine adverse events,” Hooker added.
‘Cumulative effect’ of childhood vaccine schedule has never been tested
During Monday’s roundtable, Hooker provided an overview of the childhood vaccination schedule in the U.S. and its expansion over the years.
“In 1962, children received five vaccine doses. In 1986, the schedule expanded to 25 doses of five different vaccine formulations. Shortly after the passage of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, the law was amended to … erect a liability shield protecting vaccine manufacturers — and the schedule expanded dramatically.”
The vaccine schedule has continued to expand. “By 2023, 73 doses of 16 different vaccine formulations were given to children up to age 18,” he said, adding that this expansion occurred despite a lack of safety testing.
“The FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] approved these formulations individually only with minimal and inadequate safety testing, and the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has never tested the cumulative effect of the vaccine schedule on childhood health outcomes,” he said.
“None of the 14 routine vaccines on the CDC’s recommended schedule … was ever put through long-term double-blind placebo-based safety trials prior to licensure,” Bigtree said. “Since this type of trial is really the only way to establish that a pharmaceutical product is safe, it is misinformation to state that the vaccines are safe.”
Hooker said research shows “that for every one child that is saved from death from COVID-19, there are 30 child deaths associated with the COVID-19 vaccine. So, the risk-to-benefit ratio in terms of mortality is 30 to 1.”
Bigtree said the incidence of chronic illness in children has significantly increased.
“In the 1980s, when we were giving 11 doses of about three vaccines, the chronic illness rate, which includes neurological and autoimmune disease, was 12.8%. Once we passed the 1986 Act and we had the gold rush of vaccines explode … the chronic illness rate, neurological and autoimmune disease skyrocket[ed] to 54%,” he said.
Bigtree also noted that the latter figure refers to data from 2011-2012, saying the situation may have worsened since then.
“We have no idea since then how bad this has gotten. But what you were looking at right there is the greatest decline in public health in human history,” he said.
“The warning label lists nearly 50 potential side effects, many of them serious, and that is just the first vaccine given to a baby on their first day of life,” he said. “The safety study for that hepatitis B vaccine was only four days long and had no placebo comparator. That is not science, that’s insanity.”
“We currently have a lawsuit trying to have that vaccine removed until they do proper safety testing,” Bigtree said, referring to ICAN v. FDA, filed in March 2020 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. A decision is pending.
Government withholding data on outcomes for vaccinated, unvaccinated children
According to Hooker, government health agencies possess data on health outcomes for vaccinated and unvaccinated children but have refused to publicize it.
“They do not publish the results [or] let any independent scientist in to look at that information,” he said. “They refuse to publish the results and they really know why. It’s because the bloated vaccination schedule is responsible and is, I would say, in part responsible for the epidemic of chronic disorders that we see in children in the U.S.”
Hooker said public health agencies “have the records,” which are contained in “a database called the Vaccine Safety Datalink. It’s over 10 million individuals, with 2 million from 10 participating HMOs … I would say that within that database there are at least 10,000 unvaccinated children that can be studied.”
He added: “You are not able to access the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which has almost 30 years’ worth of research from these HMOs. It should be open to the public.”
Hooker said the CDC has not responded to “over 120 FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests” he submitted, adding that he has “gone through congressional representatives to get the Vaccine Safety Datalink itself. It is simply something that they will not do.”
According to Hooker, this is because of financial conflicts of interest involving the CDC.
“CDC buys and sells $5 billion worth of vaccines a year through the Vaccines for Children program. They also spend half a billion dollars a year … advertising and through public relationship campaigns for vaccinations in general, as compared to a woeful budget of $50 million that is being used for vaccine safety every year.”
Public health agencies ‘derelict in their duty … to protect children’
Speaking on the “War Room” Monday, Hooker said government health agencies have not fulfilled their duties toward the public.
“The CDC, FDA and NIH (National Institutes of Health) are derelict in their duty … to protect children and adults against vaccine injury in order to report to Congress the state of vaccine safety science, and their responsibility to the American public and to public health in order to protect the American public,” according to Hooker.
Hooker continued, “The CDC will not look at vaccinated versus unvaccinated children” because “they know what the outcome would be and independent researchers have shown that for a large number of chronic diseases, even infectious diseases, the unvaccinated children fare better, and the unvaccinated children are healthier.”
Noting that “28 vaccines are given in the first year of life, one vaccine on the first day of life and upwards to eight vaccines when an infant is just two months old,” Hooker said. “If you look at the aluminum toxicity alone, it far surpasses the single-day toxicity limit for aluminum exposure in newborns.”
“There is no study, no official study by the CDC, FDA, NIH where they’ve looked at the 28 vaccines in totality, what the cumulative effect would be versus completely unvaccinated children. They just refuse to do that study,” he said.
Hooker added that “When you look at developmental delays, when you look at asthma, when you look at ear infections, when you look at allergies, when you look at ADD [attention deficit disorder], ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder], autism,” unvaccinated children fare “way better.”
Financial conflicts of interest involving public health agencies were further addressed by Booker in his interview with Bannon.
“50% of [the FDA’s] revenues come from Big Pharma through what’s called the Fast Track Program,” Hooker said.
“CDC buys and sells $5 billion worth of vaccines through the Vaccines for Children program. They buy them and then they distribute them to the public health departments of the states. And so, government agency capture is what follows from the financial entanglements with these agencies,” he added.
Hooker said this was the impetus for writing the book he co-authored with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD’s chairman on leave, titled “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak.”
“The reason why Kennedy and I wrote the book is, we wanted to do these comparisons and really emphasize these are studies that the government refused,” Hooker said.
‘Many more people’ questioning the ‘vaccine construct’
Hooker told Bannon that despite government censorship, an increasing percentage of the public is becoming aware of adverse health outcomes related to childhood vaccines.
He said:
“Before the COVID-19 vaccine or COVID-19 pandemic, those of us that were concerned about vaccine safety were considered to be on the fringes. But more and more people started to question the government’s motives, the foisting of a completely new genetic technology on the population, untested.
“And so, many, many more people are opting out of vaccination … and many, many more people besides that are questioning the whole vaccine construct.”
Hooker told Bannon he “want[s] to see us move from briefings to hearings” and called for legislation that would require “all of the books to be open.”
“All of that needs to be opened up. All the coffers, all the redacted emails from Tony Fauci and Francis Collins. Everything needs to [come to] light,” he said.
Separately, Hooker told The Defender that Johnson is planning on holding more briefings that are very similar in scope to Monday’s hearing. “Johnson and others in the U.S. Senate are poised to hold hearings and introduce legislation depending on what happens in the November elections,” he said.
Hooker said he’d like to see Congress apply more pressure on the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “to release hidden information regarding the pandemic as well as the entirety of the Vaccine Safety Datalink.”
“I’ve tried for years to get them to release the data with no success,” he said. “I hope to continue to beat the drum with more powerful voices so the information will be released and available for independent scientists.”
The vaccine industry intentionally deceives us about the risks and benefits of vaccines in order to make a profit, with complete disregard for human suffering and the destruction of public health over time
One of the reasons the polio vaccine doesn’t work is because polio isn’t caused by an infectious virus. It’s caused by toxins. Poliovirus is a commensal virus that is completely harmless in the absence of toxic onslaught
The changing of definitions is part of the vaccine industry’s playbook. The definition of a “vaccine” was radically altered to allow for the use of experimental modified RNA gene therapy
Another part of the fraud is using another vaccine as the control in lieu of a true placebo. You simply cannot prove a vaccine is safe by comparing it to another, most likely unsafe, vaccine
According to Dr. Suzanne Humphries, there are no worthwhile vaccines, not even smallpox or tetanus. Tetanus can be successfully treated using high-dose intravenous vitamin C and other essential nutrients
Vitamin C works because tetanus is a bacterial disease caused by an obligate anaerobe that cannot survive in the presence of oxygen. Other oxidative therapies that could be used if the infection is related to a wound include hydrogen peroxide and ozone therapy
In this interview, Dr. Suzanne Humphries discusses the recent update to her classic book, “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History,” published in 2013. “Dissolving Illusions” is one of my favorite books on vaccines, so I was honored to write the foreword for this 10th anniversary edition.
The ‘Safe and Effective’ Narrative Is a Carefully Fabricated Illusion
That word, “illusions,” is an apt one, because the vaccine industry really is all about promoting illusions. They intentionally deceive us about the risks and benefits of vaccines in order to make a profit, with complete disregard for human suffering.
“What I’ve learned over 15 years of really immersing myself in this is that it’s the same old story over and over and over again,” Humphries says. “Sometimes people ask me, ‘What is the driver? Why do they do this?’ My answer is that I cannot completely answer why. Yes, certainly, there’s greed involved, especially today, but I think there’s probably some more sinister operations at play.
The one thing we can say is that for 225 years, the same story has been repeated over and over again, which is that vaccines come out, and they make previous diseases that were not really very problematic worse. The vaccines cause problems.
The death rates were always coming down for any disease before any therapy came in at all, whether it’s an antibiotic or a vaccine … Trying to help humans live better, longer lives, to strengthen their bodies and their resilience, that’s always been the key.
Yet at the same time, there’s been this dampening force over humanity, contaminating the blood of humanity with animal products and disease, viruses and spores and things that you can’t even imagine. They used to call the smallpox vaccine ‘pure lymph,’ but it was pus. It’s a horror story. It’s always been a horror story. So, to me, COVID was just another day at the office.”
Malicious Acts
In the interview, Humphries recounts the impetus behind the book. She first became aware that vaccines might be problematic when she was working as a nephrologist in northern Maine.
After a three-years-long struggle with the hospital administration, who refused to listen to any of her concerns, she finally got out, paid off her student loans and moved into a pop-up camper on a friend’s farm in Virginia, where she wrote the first edition of “Dissolving Illusions,” together with Roman Bystrianyk, who had been researching the history of disease and vaccines since 1998.
She spent the next seven years giving lectures around the world, and got her fair share of death threats. The brake line on her car was sabotaged, someone shot a crossbow arrow into the ground in front of her front door, and an obvious nut job detailed how he intended to torture and kill her in horrible ways. All for speaking out about the hazards of vaccines and the lies that keep the vaccine industry going.
“I think it’s because when you’re someone that has credibility — I was considered a top doctor in Maine, as a nephrologist — and comes out saying what I was saying, it is a big threat. It’s not necessarily that I was some important person, but it was where I came from,” she says.
Humphries also recounts how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been hiding vaccine injuries by deleting reports filed.
“I started reporting these vaccine injuries to the CDC. I would report them because my colleagues around me wouldn’t. But then they started bringing them to me, going ‘Here’s another one, Suzanne. Here’s another one.’ Each time I would report one, I would get a call from the CDC saying, ‘OK, someone else will be calling you,’ and then I’d get another call.
It was just a creepy, weird thing. Then after six months, I get a call from the main representative of the CDC, this doctor, and we had a flat out fight on the phone. He said to me, ‘What happened to you that you think all these vaccines are causing so many problems?’
I’m like, ‘What happened to me is that I’ve been watching it happen, and then you’re giving this live flu vaccine to children when the insert tells you exactly the symptoms you’re going to get, which is the flu.’ He’s like, ‘Well, that’s my specialty and that absolutely doesn’t happen.’ I said, ‘Well, I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on that.’ He hung up on me, and that was the last I ever heard of him.
And guess what? They never made it to the VAERS database. They were deleted. I had the actual vaccine lot numbers. Everything was meticulously documented in these reports.”
What’s in the ‘Dissolving Illusions’ Update?
One of the silver linings of the COVID mass injection campaign is that it has awakened many to the notion that vaccines aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The COVID shots are so toxic, even though the injuries are being swept under the carpet like never before, there are just so many of them that the carnage cannot be hidden. And, because government and health authorities refuse to acknowledge the problem, many are now questioning all vaccines, not just the COVID shot.
“It’s a dark night of the soul when you wake up to it,” Humphries says. “Your whole world does get a bit shattered, because you start to realize that the entire medical system is corrupt and backwards and that there’s probably better ways to do just about everything.
And you know what? For 225 years, doctors have been saying that, and for 225 years, those doctors have been ignored. That’s one of the reasons we wrote the second book, ‘The Dissolving Illusions Companion book.’
It’s another huge book, about 600 pages, with 230-something doctors giving different quotes about what they saw, boots on the ground, for smallpox vaccines to the toxoid vaccines to scarlet fever, typhoid, and the worsening of all diseases that occurred after they gave vaccines.
Some of them basically come out and say, ‘The entire profession of medicine is a complete waste of time. [They’re doing] damage to humanity. It would be better if all the doctors just were taken off the Earth and for humanity to do nothing.’
What we’ve done over the past 10 years is, in my travels, I would have to do more research to present different diseases. I would go one place and they say, ‘We want to hear about tetanus,’ or they want to hear more about whooping cough. More medical literature has also come out. So, we’ve added basically another book to ‘Dissolving Illusions.’
We’ve expanded it by 200 pages. We’ve added on a chapter on tuberculosis, which was called the White Plague. There’s an extra addition to the smallpox chapter. I’ve added about 20 or 30 new pages to the pertussis chapter. There is a chapter on deadly medicine, the practices from the early 1800s through to the 1940s that were provably causing lots of harm.
Roman came up with more charts. There’s a follow-up on the polio chapter. Dr. Jacob Puliyel, who lives in India, wrote the papers on the oral polio vaccines, how they were causing paralysis in children. We added those follow-up papers, as well as a lot of other data that we left out of the original chapter to try to save space, but it’s so important, it really needs to be put out there.”
The Polio Illusion
Based on the available science, Humphries is convinced that one of the reasons the polio vaccine doesn’t work is because polio isn’t caused by an infectious virus. It’s caused by toxins. Poliovirus is a commensal virus that is completely harmless in the absence of toxic onslaught.
“We have to distinguish poliovirus from poliomyelitis,” Humphries explains. “Poliomyelitis is when there’s damage to a certain part of the spinal cord or the brain stem in the gray matter and causes paralysis in one or more muscle groups. It can cause paralysis to nerves that supply the diaphragm, which is why the iron lung was brought in.
[Poliomyelitis] was always attributed to a virus, which is really interesting when you consider that the early researchers were trying to infect monkeys with poliovirus and they couldn’t infect them. They stuck it up their noses. They would inject it into their bodies. They couldn’t cause paralysis in these monkeys until they injected matter from other paralyzed humans or animals into their brains.
That’s what it took to actually paralyze them. It’s a commensal virus. Polio is a commensal virus that has existed from time immemorial. When researchers went down to the Brazilian rainforest and found the Xavante Indians and convinced them to give them some blood samples and fecal samples, they found that just about 100% of these native people were colonized with polio, and there was no history of paralysis anywhere in the tribes.
Nobody talked about people that couldn’t breathe. They were fetchingly healthy. Same happened in the Philippines. When you look at the people living close to the earth, living healthy lives, and then comes the … [Western] lifestyle habits of sugar, tobacco, medicines that contain mercury, lead, arsenic and vaccinations spreading syphilis.
Latent syphilis gives you poliomyelitis. Lead can give you poliomyelitis. Arsenic is probably the most interesting, because not only does it clinically give you the exact scenario of poliomyelitis, but even in the spinal cord, it’s exactly the same. That’s been proven. I’m not a virus denier. There is actual virus that is commensal.”
Are Viruses Real?
By now, you’ve probably heard the theory that there are no viruses, period. That the entire field of virology is a hoax, and that what we perceive as viruses are merely a type of cellular debris being shed when your body is trying to detox. Having delved deep into the science of infectious disease, Humphries disagrees with this theory. Viruses do exist. The question is whether they’re as dangerous as they’re made out to be. Humphries comments:
“You get chickenpox one time and you’re immune to it forever. You can be exposed to it over and over again and you don’t get it. Well, if it’s a detox, like they say, why doesn’t it carry on? I’m still as polluted as I probably was 10 years ago. I’m not getting chickenpox over and over again. I got it one time.
Why do these children that are nonimmune get it? … When you look at it that way, it’s like, ‘Come on, people. These viruses are all different. They have different manifestations.’ Influenza virus is a completely different entity.
The measles virus hasn’t really shifted genetically very much over the years. The natural one hasn’t. What’s really shifted it is the vaccines. When you start injecting people with the virus, having it go into the body in an unnatural way so that there is not a full immune response, that’s what causes mutations in the viruses because they’re able to work their way around the vaccine.
It’s happened very slowly with measles. It happened very quickly with the whooping cough bacteria, because of the really inefficient vaccine that was created for that.
The flu shots don’t work at all. Even Anthony Fauci came out with paper in 2023 that was almost a confession; about how poorly they’ve done with these viral vaccines and flu shots, and how if they were compared to all the other vaccines, they wouldn’t even be allowed to be on the market.
He said the COVID vaccines have the same problem. It’s because they’re not getting immunity where immunity is required, which is on the lung and the mucosal surfaces. How crazy to inject into a muscle a vaccine and think that you’re going to get solid immunity on the nasal and upper respiratory mucosa. Absolute insanity.
Same with the polio vaccine … Salk comes along and creates this injectable vaccine. They had to manipulate that data so much. They had to change the definition of what they considered as polio.
That’s what we added to [the polio] chapter. We’re showing the charts and what they would look like in their pure form, without changing the definitions. The rates of polio actually went up hugely after that vaccine was introduced. So, there’s never been a vaccine that’s really worthwhile giving.”
Changing Definitions Is Part of the Illusion
The changing of definitions is part of the vaccine industry’s playbook. They had to do the same for the COVID pandemic. Not only was the definition of “pandemic” changed, but also the definition of a “vaccine,” to allow for the use of experimental modified RNA gene therapy.
“They did the same thing they did with the Salk vaccine,” Humphries says. “See, history just repeats itself. So, the first vaccine that came out, the Salk vaccine, had merthiolate [thimerosal], a mercury compound, in it to kill off unwanteds, but Salk wasn’t happy with the field trials — the results of the antibody response from those children — so they took the merthiolate out.
So, we had one vaccine that was used for the testing and another that was given to the public. The same happened with the COVID vaccine. The mRNA technology, that’s not how the original ones were given.
I did a talk not that long ago in Denver, where I went into this in depth; how the vaccine that was given for the trials was completely different to the one given to the public. It was much more pure for instance … It was a very, very different vaccine that was used on the population. Then of course, that vaccine changed. So, different companies had different ways of manufacturing.”
Another part of the fraud is using another vaccine as the control in lieu of a true placebo. You simply cannot prove a vaccine is safe by comparing it to another, most likely unsafe, vaccine.
Yet that’s how it’s done. By using a toxic “control,” many of the adverse effects are automatically hidden as people in the control group end up suffering similar adverse events, and at a similar rate. This tactic was used in some of the COVID shot trials as well.
Why You Don’t Need a Tetanus Vaccine
According to Humphries, there are no worthwhile vaccines, not even smallpox or tetanus, and certainly not the polio vaccine. She’s treated several cases of tetanus in the last five years, including in at least one fully vaccinated individual, using high-dose intravenous vitamin C and other essential nutrients.
One of the reasons why this works is because tetanus is not a viral disease. It’s a bacterial disease caused by the Clostridium tetani bacterium, an obligate anaerobe. It can reside in soils, but it can also reside in your intestine where there’s no oxygen.
Oxygen is toxic to it. If you expose that organism to oxygen, as you do with vitamin C (because the metabolite of vitamin C is hydrogen peroxide), it’s instantaneously killed. Ozone therapy would likely be even more effective, for this reason.
So, if you get tetanus from a wound, the last thing you need is a tetanus shot or tetanus antibodies. All you need to do is apply ozone to the wound. It’ll instantly destroy the bacteria. Applying hydrogen peroxide would also work. As explained by Humphries, vitamin C is also a neutralizer of toxins, which is another reason it works.
Tetanus is a spore, and it transforms under anaerobic conditions into a toxin-producing organism. If you can neutralize the toxin and kill the microbe, then you’ve won the battle. One hundred percent, we’ve won the battle. Humphries comments:
“In rabbit studies, they got tetanus spores and ground glass and put it under the skin of rabbits, sewed it up. If they gave rabbits vitamin C at the time that they did this, 100% of them survived. If they did it afterwards, the majority of them survived. If they already had high levels of vitamin C, all of them survived.
So, the rabbit study showed us that not only is tetanus preventable, it’s treatable. I don’t necessarily believe that by [injecting] a toxoid, that you’re going to respond …
There are so many case reports of people with paralytic tetanus after having five vaccines … I don’t care what wound I have. There’s no way a tetanus vaccine or a tetanus immune globulin, which is a human pooled blood product, is going into me …
[The tetanus shot] actually changes your T-3 to T-4 ratio. This is all documented. I didn’t put it in the book, but I’ve got a video out there from when I was in Finland, showing that it definitely changes the way your immune system works. All vaccines do.”
More Information
What people have to realize is that the schemes used to push the COVID shots is nothing new. “It’s pretty much exactly the same as it’s been for 225 years, where the recipients are not the beneficiaries of this technology and humanity is not getting healthier by any means as a result of it,” Humphries says.
To truly understand the vaccine industry’s modus operandi, be sure to pick up Humphries’ “Dissolving Illusions” 10th anniversary edition. It’s coming out in two forms: a standard hard copy, and a special coffee table edition. The standard hard copy has been translated into 10 languages, with more coming. Kindle and audio book formats are also available.
Also consider picking up a copy of “The Dissolving Illusion’s Companion” book, which features the quotes of hundreds of doctors, stories of vaccination tragedies, the timeline of vaccines, rare documents that have been scrubbed off the internet, a recommended reading list and much more. For more details and free sample chapters, see dissolvingillusions.com. In closing, Humphries comments:
“This is a really important point: It’s not just about not vaccinating. If you’re going to feed your children garbage and if you’re not going to have a healthy lifestyle, I say go vaccinate, because when you get sick and you have to go to the hospital, you’re going to be abused.
But if people follow your recommendations — you’re like the underscore to ‘Dissolving Illusions,’ you’re the solution to how to stay healthy so that the perceived need for these vaccines isn’t there …
Historically, [survival] has not been about vaccines. It’s not been about medications, it’s not been about antibiotics. It’s always been about plumbing, nutrition, fresh air, vitamin D, lifestyle, and keeping poisons out of our bodies. That’s always what it’s been about in terms of survival.
Does that mean we’ll never get sick? No, it doesn’t. But I personally believe it’s good to get sick once in a while and get some of that effusions out of your lungs and your nose. I think that does us some good once in a while.”
Brianne Dressen was “healthy” and “in prime physical condition” when she decided to participate in the clinical trial for the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in 2020. But within an hour of her vaccination, she experienced the first of several serious adverse events, resulting in symptoms that “changed every aspect” of her life.
“Instead of being an active, caring parent, I’m essentially a bystander in [my children’s] lives and I get to cheer them on from the sidelines now, instead of being super-mom,” Bressen said. “That, to me, has been the worst punishment of all.”
Doctors told her that she was merely experiencing “anxiety” and, having lost her ability to walk, that she simply “wasn’t trying hard enough.”
But when the NIH abruptly aborted this study in early 2022, “We realized that no one was going to help us, so we had to do it ourselves,” Dressen said. She subsequently founded React19, a nonprofit organization advocating for vaccine injury victims.
Dressen, along with Children’s Health Defense (CHD), has called for the release of government documents relating to the aborted NIH study.
Dressen attended a Feb. 15 U.S. House of Representatives hearing on vaccine safety. She discussed this and more on this week’s “The Defender In-Depth” podcast.
‘We realized that we had been duped’
According to Dressen, the NIH brought her and other vaccine-injured individuals to its headquarters in 2021 for testing and examinations.
“We thought we were contributing to something that was going to then result in thousands more [people] that we knew of at the time to be able to get help,” she said. “They promised us …that’s what they were going to do with the information that they were collecting. They didn’t.”
Dressen said the NIH canceled a follow-up appointment she had for September 2021, telling her that “Delta is raging, so we don’t want to cause any undue harm.”
Later, “all of a sudden, communication just stopped,” she said. “At that point, we realized we had been duped.”
“The real root of the problem is that the information they have never made it out,” Dressen said. “We realized that we had to start speaking out.”
To get that information, CHD filed a Freedom of Information Act request followed by a lawsuit, which forced the NIH to release 7,500 pages of documents at a rate of 300 pages per month. The documents released so far have been heavily redacted.
“It’s no surprise that they’re going to do what they need to do to protect [themselves], and sadly that means that they’re not going to be … serving the best interest of the public,” Dressen said. “They’re going to take care of themselves.”
From the documents released so far, “one of the most interesting things … is actually what is not being said” — specifically, that NIH doctors were “not exploring any other causal link” to account for the symptoms the vaccine-injured were experiencing.
In other words, the NIH acknowledged the COVID-19 vaccines caused Dressen’s and others’ injuries.
“The other interesting thing is that [the NIH was] providing small treatment recommendations” to the vaccine-injured, including “sending references … to doctors that could help them further,” Dressen added.
‘Obscene to see the lengths to which they’re willing to go to protect themselves’
At the Feb. 15 hearing, the three witnesses, including Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. Daniel Jernigan of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Dr. George Reed Grimes of the Health Resources and Services Administration, defended the COVID-19 vaccines, the government’s surveillance of vaccine injuries and treatment of the vaccine-injured.
Dressen said she “wasn’t shocked” about the witnesses’ testimony, but considers it “obscene to see the lengths to which they’re willing to go to protect themselves.”
Despite the witnesses’ claims that government vaccine injury surveillance systems such as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) have been effective, Dressen said her own experience, and an audit by React19, tell a different story.
Dressen said React19’s audit “found that 1 in 10 [VAERS] reports were deleted” and approximately 20% of VAERS reports “never make it out for public review.” As a result, “1 in 3 reports, real reports in the VAERS system [are] not visible for the public,” but are instead confined to a non-public-facing section of VAERS.
Dressen said she and others from React19 met with Marks in late 2022 to present these findings. According to Dressen, the FDA asked to review this information, but despite “a year and a half of these very laborious, exhaustive emails” following this meeting, the agency has taken no action.
According to Dressen, Marks also did not acknowledge her presence at the hearing, even after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) pointed her out. Instead, “one of the staffers turned and kind of looked out of the corner of her eyes.”
“We’re not going to go away,” Dressen said. “At this point, it’s very firmly understood that the FDA isn’t going to do what they’re supposed to be doing. They’re going to have to be forced into it.”
Dressen also addressed revelations made by Grimes at the hearing that the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), which handles COVID-19 vaccine injury compensation claims, has issued payouts to only 11 individuals.
“They paid out $41,000 total to 11 people. Compare that to $10 billion that the White House has paid out for increasing vaccine uptake and $3 billion of which went to the CDC for ‘vaccine confidence,’” Dressen said. “We know where the priorities of the health agencies lie.”
‘We’re going to take this head-on’
Dressen said React19 is “working with CHD’s lobbyists and other advocacy groups to try to figure out how the vaccine-injured can get real help.”
“We’re going to take this head-on, because there’s no other way to be able to beat this type of corruption,” Dressen said. “The end goal truly is to try to restore the health of the people that have been harmed.”
It’s extremely rare to get too much folate from foods, but it is possible to get too much folic acid, the synthetic version of folate found in supplements and fortified foods
In pregnant mice, high levels of folic acid harmed brain development in offspring, and low levels of vitamin B12 made the damage worse
The combination of low vitamin B12, which often occurs in people eating vegan or vegetarian diets, along with high folic acid, could be increasing neurodevelopment disorders in children
Due to prenatal supplements and fortified foods, many people have abnormally high levels of folic acid
Studies looking into the effects of folic acid on autism development are conflicting, with some showing a protective effect, but a growing body of evidence points to potential harms when consumed in excess
The terms folate and folic acid are often used interchangeably, but they’re not the same. Folic acid is the synthetic version of folate, or vitamin B9. While folate is found naturally in foods like leafy greens, folic acid is found in supplement form as well as in fortified foods, such as cereal and bread.
It’s extremely rare to get too much folate from foods, but it is possible to get too much folic acid,1 with potentially significant adverse effects. In pregnant mice, high levels of folic acid harmed brain development in offspring, and low levels of vitamin B12 made the damage worse.
The combination of low vitamin B12, which often occurs in people eating vegan or vegetarian diets, along with high folic acid “could potentially be driving neurodevelopment problems among children in the U.S.,” independent journalist Nina Teicholz tweeted.2
Folic Acid Food Fortification May Have a Dark Side
In the 1990s, U.S. health officials recommended that women who may become pregnant should take 400 micrograms (mcg) of folic acid daily to reduce the risk of having a baby with neural tube defects. However, since the neural tube closes early on during pregnancy — about 28 days after conception — some women may miss the vulnerable period during which folate is critical.
“For folate to be effective, it must be taken in the first few weeks after conception, often before a woman knows she is pregnant,” explains the Harvard School of Public Health.3 This is why the U.S. Food and Drug Administration started folic acid fortification in foods in 1998.4 It’s now required that folic acid be added to enriched breads, flour, cornmeal, pastas, rice and other foods made with cereal grains.5
According to the CDC, neural tube defects have decreased since the beginning of folic acid fortification, such that “about 1,300 babies are born each year without a neural tube defect who might otherwise have had a neural tube defect.”6 But while neural tube defects have declined, other health conditions — namely neurodevelopmental disorders — have risen.
“There’s no doubt the introduction of folic acid diet fortification has been beneficial, substantially lowering the incidence of neural tube defects,” Ralph Green, UC Davis professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, said in a news release. “However, too much folic acid may have detrimental impacts on brain development, and that’s something we need to sort out.”7
Davis and colleagues conducted a study that found excess folic acid is associated with neurodevelopmental risks, especially in concert with vitamin B12 deficiency8 — a significant concern as folic acid intake has grown.
Many People Have Abnormally High Levels of Folic Acid
“The food industry has been adding folic acid to breakfast cereals, snack foods, and vitamins, and that has likely increased intake above recommended guidelines,” Green said. “The safe upper limit for folate is 1,000 micrograms per day. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data showed that a substantial percentage of women’s diets were above that limit.”9
Many women consume folic acid not only in fortified foods but also in prenatal vitamins. The study, published in Communications Biology, noted, “[T]otal folate intake, largely in the form of FA [folic acid], has risen substantially as have blood folate levels in populations, with a considerable proportion persistently exhibiting extreme supraphysiological concentrations in their blood, as well as increases in unmetabolized folic acid (UMFA) in those taking supplements.”10
Meanwhile, both too little and too much folic acid during pregnancy may influence neurodevelopment in offspring, previous research has found, by modulating prenatal neurogenesis.11 High amounts of supplemental folic acid — 1,000 μg per day or more — during pregnancy have also been linked with impairments in neurocognitive development in 4- to 5-year-old children.12
Other research revealed that daily folic acid doses of more than 5,000 μg led to reduced psychomotor development in children compared to children whose mothers took lower doses of 400 to 1,000 μg.13,14
Neurodevelopmental Disorders Skyrocketed Since Folic Acid Fortification
As folic acid in foods increased, so, too, have neurodevelopmental disorders. “Data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that in recent decades several neurodevelopmental disorders have seen considerable rises in prevalence, chief amongst them autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but also attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and epilepsy,” according to the Communications Biology study.15
CDC data show that 1 in 36 U.S. children has autism16 — up from 1 in 10,000 in the 1970s.17 The rapid rise suggests environmental factors are involved. “One environmental exposure that has increased substantially over recent decades is intake of the B vitamin folate in the synthesized, oxidized form of folic acid,” the researchers wrote.18
While studies looking into the effects of folic acid on autism development are conflicting, with some showing a protective effect, a growing body of evidence points to potential harms when consumed in excess. The scientists explained:19
“Some of the latest research in this area using data from the Boston Birth Cohort uncovered a positive association between maternal plasma folate levels and autism risk. Autism incidence was greatest in children born to mothers with the highest maternal plasma folate levels, exceeding the cutoff suggested by the WHO (>45.3 nmol/L).
Moreover, subsequent work showed that children with cord blood levels of unmetabolized FA (UMFA) in the highest, versus lowest quartile, had a greater risk for developing ASD.
Similarly, a Swedish study testing association of 62 maternal blood biomarkers during early pregnancy with later ASD diagnosis identified total folate as having the highest odds ratio at 1.7. These results are supported by epidemiological investigations from the Rochester Epidemiological Project in Rochester, MN and earlier CDC data.”
Even Moderately High Folic Acid May Harm Brain Development
For the study, researchers investigated folic acid intake in mice on brain development in their offspring, specifically the cerebral cortex, which plays a role in cognitive and emotional functions, as well as psychiatric disorders. One group of mice was fed normal levels of folic acid and B12, while four other groups were fed diets including:20
High folic acid
Low vitamin B12
High folic acid and low vitamin B12
High folinic acid, a natural folate
While the natural folate led to no changes to the developing mouse brains, changes in neural development occurred with exposure to high levels of folic acid. The most pronounced abnormalities occurred in those given high folic acid low vitamin B12. Study author Konstantinos Zarbalis, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, explained:21
“These different dietary conditions appear to influence the way neurons arise in the developing brain. With high levels of folic acid or B12 deficiency, there was a change in neural development.
Cortical neurons that usually emerge during a later stage of brain development were produced over a longer period of time and required a longer period to settle in and assume their proper position in the developing brain. In addition, both high folic acid and B12 deficiency appear to cause many neurons to develop fewer interconnections.”
The team found that “even moderately excessive amounts” of folic acid had a detrimental effect on prenatal cortical development, which was made worse by vitamin B12 deficiency.22
The Folate Cycle Depends on Vitamin B12
The findings highlight the complex interplay that occurs between various nutrients in your body, and why proper balance is so critical to optimal health. This is particularly true for folic acid and vitamin B12. According to the Communications Biology study:23
“The folate cycle is critically dependent on the availability of the essential micronutrient, vitamin B12 (B12), which is a required cofactor for the methionine synthase reaction in which homocysteine is converted to methionine through transfer of a methyl group from N-5-methyltetrahydrofolate (CH3-THF). B12 is needed for this reaction to enable folate cycle progression and regeneration of tetrahydrofolate (THF) from CH3-THF.
In the absence of B12, folate becomes functionally trapped in the form of CH3-THF. This suggests that the effects of FA excess, which paradoxically may decrease functional folate availability, can be further exacerbated by B12 deficiency, as studies on cognitive performance of older adults have suggested.”
Vitamin B12, also known as cobalamin, is necessary for your body to make red blood cells as well as for proper nerve function and DNA synthesis. Without adequate levels, a number of physical symptoms, ranging from numbness to fatigue, can occur. Mental health can also suffer significantly, as vitamin B12 plays an important role in neurological function.
It’s been shown, for instance, that people with depression and high B12 levels have better responses to treatment,24 while up to 30% of patients hospitalized for depression may be B12 deficient.25
The only reliable and absorbable sources of vitamin B12 are animal products, which is why vegans or strict vegetarians who abstain from animal products and do not supplement their diet with vitamin B12 will often become deficient and may face increased risks of neuropsychiatric and neurological problems as a result.26
As Teicholz tweeted, “In many countries, pregnant women for decades have been told to take folic acid to prevent neural tube defects in their babies. Yet folic acid also added to refined grains (which we eat a LOT of) … sending folic acid levels [up]. Low B12 occurs with vegan/vegetarian diets,” which could be responsible for increasing neurodevelopmental disorders among U.S. children.27
Where to Find Natural Folate
While too much synthetic folic acid in fortified processed foods and supplements may be problematic, your body needs natural folate in your diet for optimal mitochondrial function,28 protein metabolism and breaking down homocysteine, which can be harmful in high amounts.29
The best way to increase your levels of this important micronutrient is to eat foods rich in natural folate, which include asparagus, avocados, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and spinach. Meanwhile, vitamin B12-rich foods include grass fed beef liver, wild rainbow trout and wild sockeye salmon. If you suspect you may be deficient, weekly B12 shots or a high-dose, daily supplement may be necessary.
The SSRI antidepressants are some of the most harmful (but most profitable) medications on the market, and this was shown throughout their clinical trials
In turn, once they hit the market, the FDA was overwhelmed with a deluge of adverse reactions being reported and the public demanding the drugs be investigated
Remarkably, rather than address these issues, the FDA for decades did everything it could to cover up what was happening and protect the SSRIs
The pharmaceutical executive who got Prozac (the first SSRI) to market testified that this required a variety of criminal tactics (e.g., overt bribery). Likewise, the Bush family was in bed with Prozac’s manufacturer and stocked their administrations with executives from the company, which further helps to explain the FDA’s unscrupulous conduct
In yesterday’s article, I reviewed the immensely concerning data that emerged throughout the SSRI antidepressant trials. Sadly, rather than this data being listened to, it was given a pass by the FDA, a pattern we have tragically seen occur with numerous highly lucrative pharmaceuticals. In my eyes, three things stand out about the SSRI saga.
The first is that numerous whistleblowers came forward and provided clear proof of exactly how this corruption transpired. The second is that the corruption reached the highest levels of government.
The third is that the FDA went to incredible lengths to protect the SSRIs, something many of us would not believe could be possible had we not just witnessed it throughout COVID-19.
Note: One of the greatest issues with the SSRIs is how addictive the drugs are (stopping them can cause severe withdrawals which are highly damaging to the nervous system and sometimes precipitate violent psychosis). If you are considering stopping them, I strongly recommend working with a health professional who is experienced in this regard.
For those who do not have access to one, I compiled a detailed summary of how to safely withdraw from them here (in the second half of this article).
John Virapen
It is exceedingly rare for a pharmaceutical executive to speak out against their industry (as doing so will permanently blacklist them from being hired again). In turn, the only ones I know of (besides an executive I’ve privately corresponded with) are Peter Rost and John Virapen, both of whom found themselves in very unique circumstances which enabled and compelled them to speak out against their industry and disclose the sociopathic behavior they observed within it.
Note: Rost’s story, along with similar accounts from the other Pfizer whistleblowers can be found in this article and this article.
One of the pharmaceutical executives directly involved in obtaining the approval for the original SSRI antidepressant, Prozac, developed a great deal of guilt for what he was complicit in once a large number of SSRI-linked deaths occurred. In turn, after he was unjustly fired, John Virapen chose to speak out.
Virapen chronicled those events in “Side Effects: Death — Confessions of a Pharma Insider.” These included outrageous acts of bribery to get his drugs approved, and photographing physicians with prostitutes provided by Eli Lilly so that they could be blackmailed into prescribing Lilly’s drugs. For those interested, this is a brief talk that Virapen gave about his experiences. I greatly appreciate the fact he used candid language rather than the euphemisms almost everyone else does:
At the start of the saga, Lilly’s senior management knew Prozac was garbage and wanted to shelve the drug, but since Lilly in dire financial straits they decided to go all in on the approval of Prozac in the hope it could save the company. Prozac, in turn, had initially been proposed as a treatment for weight loss (as this side effect of Prozac had been observed in treatment subjects).
However, Lilly ultimately concluded (as explained above) it would be much easier to create the illusion Prozac treated “depression” and then get a post-marketing approval for the treatment of weight loss.
As Prozac took off, it became clear that depression was a much better market, and the obesity aspect was forgotten. Lilly then used a common industry tactic and worked tirelessly to expand the definition of depression so that everyone could become eligible for the drug and aggressively marketed this need for happiness to the public, before long, transforming depression from a rare to a common one.
Unfortunately, while the marketing machine had no difficulties creating a demand for Prozac, the initial clinical trial data made it abundantly clear that the first SSRI, Prozac, was dangerous and ineffective. Lilly settled on the strategy of obtaining regulatory approval in Sweden, and using this approval as a precedent to obtain approval in other countries.
Virapen was assigned to this task and told by his superiors that if he failed, his career was over. Virapen, unfortunately, discovered that whenever he provided Lilly’s clinical trial data to experts, they laughed and had trouble believing he was actually seeking regulatory approval as Prozac’s trial data was just that bad.
Sweden (following their regulatory procedures) elected to allow an outside independent expert to make the final determination on whether Prozac should be approved or not. The identity of this expert witness was concealed, but Virapen was able to determine that it was Anders Forsman, a forensic psychiatrist and member of the legal council on the Swedish National Board of Health.
After meeting with Virapen, Forsman proposed an untraceable bribe. Then, upon receiving payment, wrote a glowing letter in support of Prozac, fully reversing his previous position (he had ridiculed it just two weeks before) and guided Virapen through re-writing the trial to conceal the 5 attempted (4 of which were successful) SSRI suicides in it.
Forsman’s “expert” opinion resulted in Prozac being partially approved and formally priced for reimbursement in Sweden, which was then used as a precedent to market it around the world at that same lucrative price.
Note: After leaving Lilly, Virapen tried to have Forsman prosecuted for bribery. Despite the chairman for the Institute against Bribery submitting a report to the Department of Justice affirming bribery had indeed occurred, Forsman (who repeatedly lied throughout the process) was not prosecuted because he was not an official employee of the agency. Forsman in turn was allowed to continue his professional career and was employed by the state long after the investigation ended.
Virapen noted that during this time, German drug regulators who had clearly and unambiguously stated that Prozac was “totally unsuitable for the treatment of depression” suddenly reversed their position, leading Virapen to suspect that similar under-the-table activity must have occurred in Germany.
David Healey, a doctor and director of the North Wales School of psychological medicine, likewise concluded that the German approval was due to “unorthodox lobbying methods exercised on independent members of the regulatory authorities.”
Note: A key reason why the German regulators initially refused to approve Prozac was because the specific criteria used for determining an improvement in depression was highly subjective and the benefit was only being reported by the trial psychiatrists but not the participants themselves.
Not long after saving Eli Lilly, Virapen was fired. Virapen believes he was fired because he was a man of color in an otherwise Caucasian company (he was told this by his supervisor).
Peter Gøtzsche, a leading expert in pharmaceutical research fraud, on the other hand, attributed this to typical organized crime tactics where Lilly sought to conceal their illegal activity by firing Virapen and his two assistants (as immediately after their abrupt termination, none of them were permitted to access their offices, and thus could not obtain any of the files that proved that they had bribed Forsman).
In short, given how horrendous the data supporting their safety and efficacy was, you must be wondering how the SSRIs made it through the regulatory approval process.
George H.W. Bush
There is a lot of dark history to the Bush family. The Bush dynasty was founded by Prescott Bush, who built his family fortune by collaborating with the Nazis directly against the wishes of the U.S. government (The Guardian, for example, confirms it here).
His son, George H.W. Bush had the unique accomplishment of being the only CIA chief to later become president, and during his brief tenure there was responsible for numerous crimes against humanity in South America. After leaving the CIA once Carter became president, Bush (senior) served as a board member for Eli Lilly.
He then joined the Reagan Administration as Vice President, where he helped to push through the catastrophic decision for the FDA to approve aspartame for consumer use (aspartame was so dangerous even the FDA did not want to approve it). After succeeding Ronald Reagan as President, Bush chose Dan Quayle as his Vice President:
“In Talking Back to Prozac (1994), I pointed out that Prozac was approved under the first Bush administration and that George Bush had been a member of the board of directors of Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of Prozac. I also pointed out that Vice President Dan Quayle was from Indiana, the home state and international headquarters for Eli Lilly.
At the time the FDA was approving Prozac, Quayle employed former Eli Lilly personnel on his own staff, and Quayle had considerable leverage over the FDA as the chair of a special committee that was investigating its operations.
I questioned whether the FDA might have rejected Prozac and that the entire SSRI onslaught might never have gotten started if the president and vice president of the United States had not been so closely affiliated with Eli Lilly.”
Bush’s son, President George W. Bush likewise followed in his father’s footsteps and appointed Eli Lilly executives to senior positions within his administration. In fact, he even inserted a provision into the Patriot Act to exempt vaccine manufacturers, including Eli Lilly, from liability for thimerosal (Mercury) within vaccinations.
In short, Bush profoundly changed the FDA’s regulatory conduct. Consider this example shared by John Virapen that occurred a few years before Bush became president. In 1980, Eli Lilly applied for the approval of benoxaprofen, and aggressively promoted this new blockbuster medication.
Not long after being approved, in 1982, benoxaprofen was taken off the market after being linked to a small number of deaths, and Eli Lilly underwent a lengthy investigation conducted by the Justice Department, where it was concluded that Lilly intentionally covered up the deaths caused by their drug. Benoxaprofen is banned, but nothing remotely similar has been done for the SSRIs.
The FDA’s treatment of the SSRIs is one of the only instances I know of, where, like the COVID vaccines, the agency has not only ignored, but actively tried to conceal a horrific number of adverse events for a pharmaceutical despite receiving widespread protest from the public. This was most likely heavily influenced by the Bush Administration being in bed with Eli Lilly.
As such, it is insightful to see how this has played out over decades, as we ponder how the FDA will handle the COVID vaccines and what we need to do to address this mess. First, consider the FDA’s behavior when Bush was not yet the president:
“Initially, the FDA was skeptical and noted serious flaws in Lilly’s trials. An FDA officer wrote in 1984 that patients who didn’t do well after two weeks had their blinding broken, and if they were on placebo, they were switched to fluoxetine (resulting in six weeks of fluoxetine being compared to two weeks on placebo).
An FDA review also discovered that 25% of the patients had taken an additional drug, and when the FDA in 1985 removed patients on other drugs from Lilly’s trials, there was no significant effect of fluoxetine.
By adding benzodiazepines, Lilly broke the rules for its trials but didn’t inform the FDA, and when the FDA later learned about it, the agency permitted it and thereby broke its own rules. The public and the doctors were never informed about this ruse.”
Prozac was ultimately approved in December 1987, at which point 3 of the 4 studies that this approval was based upon used benzodiazepines to conceal the agitating or psychotic syndromes created by the SSRI drugs.
Note: A good case can be made that many of the benefits attributed to SSRIs actually were due to the benzodiazepines that were used concurrently with them.
Once Prozac entered the market in 1988, adverse event reports began to accumulate, and by 1991, Prozac had one of the highest rates of adverse events ever reported to FAERS (similar to VAERS but for other pharmaceutical injuries).
As there was less regulatory capture at the time, these red flags were sufficient to convene a Congressional hearing on the SSRIs (whereas today, except for one held a month ago by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, this still has not happened for the COVID-19 vaccines).
Note: In the first nine years, the FDA received 39,000 adverse event reports, far more than for any other drug. In those, there were thousands of suicides (e.g., by 1999 over 2000 Prozac suicides had been reported), horrendous crimes, hostility, psychoses, confusion, abnormal thinking, convulsions, amnesia and sexual dysfunction.
A 1991 FDA hearing was convened where many witnesses told stories about out-of-character suicides and homicides. The advisory committee members, many of whom had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies producing SSRIs, ignored those reports and unanimously rejected the following proposal:
“There is credible evidence to support a conclusion that antidepressant drugs cause the emergence and/or the intensification of suicidality and/or other violent behaviors.”
Note: Internal Lilly documents revealed that the FDA had already been working with Lilly on the suicide issue (and that previously Lilly had disclosed to German regulators that Prozac doubled the risk of suicide compared to placebo). However, at the meeting, the chair of the FDA committee interrupted an outside expert who tried to share this, resulting in most of the presentation being conducted by Lilly employees who were able to present Lilly’s narrative to everyone).
Similarly, at the time this hearing occurred, the FDA’s own employees had been raising concerns about the safety of Prozac. Furthermore, a later obtained document showed that the FDA knew that the suicide rate on Prozac was 0.52% (vs. 0.18% on placebo), and that in Pfizer’s Zoloft submission (which reported a 26% decrease in suicide attempts), when the FDA counted the deaths correctly, there was actually a 29% increase in them.
Sadly, buying out “expert” committees is a standard industry practice. To further illustrate the illegitimacy of these committees (who are entrusted to decide much of public policy), consider this report from Kim Witczak, a citizen activist who was able be appointed to one of them:
“Fast forward, after Pfizer settled the Chantix lawsuits Pfizer went to the FDA to ask to have the black box neuropsychiatric warning removed from their drug label. By this time, I was the Consumer Representative on the FDA Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee.
We were going to review Pfizer’s new EAGLE study. I was really looking forward to being part of this committee and had many questions to ask about the safety, the lawsuits, the internal company documents discovered and reviewed by experts, and most importantly, the victims.
After all, Pfizer just settled the lawsuits for almost $300 million and silenced everyone. One would think the FDA committee would want to have all information including what was discovered in lawsuits involving 2700+ victims before making any decisions to remove the warnings.
A few days before the FDA Advisory Committee, I received an email from the FDA that they wanted to talk with me about the upcoming advisory committee meeting. Someone (cough Pfizer) brought it to their attention that I had an “intellectual bias” and shouldn’t serve on the committee.
The roomful of FDA staffers told me that I was being recused from serving on this meeting. I told them if they think safety is an intellectual bias (or a point of view), I will always have one.
Much to their surprise, I said I would still like to address the committee and speak during the open public hearing. I ended up flying out a few days later on my own time and dime to make sure my comments and questions were asked even though they wouldn’t be part of the official public record of this meeting.
Ultimately, in an unprecedented move, the FDA removed this serious black box warning that involved violence, hallucinations, suicide, and other psychiatric side effects. To this day, this story has never really been told by the media. These side effects didn’t suddenly go away. Just the FDA black box warnings.”
As detailed above, lawsuits against SSRI manufacturers like Lilly have repeatedly revealed those companies deliberately concealed the adverse events that occurred in their trials. Similarly, Lilly also chose to commit fraud by illegally failing to report 76 of 97 cases of suicidality from Prozac in a post-marketing surveillance study it submitted to the FDA.
Furthermore, Lilly also failed to report that, Cymbalta, an SNRI frequently marketed for treating chronic pain, was found to cause severe withdrawals once discontinued in half of those who had received it for at least 8 weeks. In turn, in the first quarter of 2012, more reports were submitted to the FDA on serious drug withdrawal effects for Cymbalta than for any other regularly monitored drug, including two opioids.
Note: Paxil is also notorious for being highly addictive (e.g., in their original license application they stated 30% of trial subjects experienced withdrawals), but for the first ten years it was on the market, GSK adamantly claimed it was not addictive. Eventually (in 2001) the WHO stated Paxil had the greatest withdrawal issues of any SSRI on the market (which was followed by a warning from the FDA in 2002).
GSK in turn finally “admitted” this by revising its prescribing instructions to state the risk of withdrawals was not 0.2% but instead 25% (a 125 fold increase).
Organized Cover-Ups
One of the most blatant examples of how far the FDA will go to protect the industry occurred in 2003, when while examining a clinical trial for giving Paxil to children, the FDA noticed that more episodes of “emotional lability” (rapid, often exaggerated changes in mood) were reported in children on Paxil than those on a placebo.
The FDA decided to investigate what the actual symptom Paxil’s manufacturer was concealing behind this label, and was informed most cases referred to suicidality. One of the FDA’s safety officers, Andrew Mosholder, a child psychiatrist, further investigated this issue and concluded that 22 studies showed that children given antidepressants were nearly twice as likely to become suicidal as those given placebos.
His superiors at the FDA who had recently hidden Paxil’s tendency to cause suicidality in children predictably disputed his report, and did not allow it to be released to the public or presented at an advisory meeting. A year later in 2004, the report was leaked, and in a very telling move, the FDA chose to conduct a criminal investigation of the leak rather than address the clear safety concerns it had raised.
Kim Witczak spearheaded many different initiatives against the SSRIs. For example, she filed a wrongful death, failure to warn lawsuit against Pfizer (which Pfizer responded to by sending investigators around her neighborhood to dig up dirt on her). Her lawsuit was able to obtain many crucial documents from Pfizer proving that they knew how dangerous their SSRI was (including the same out-of-body experiences which her husband had had before killing himself).
Her lawsuit eventually provided the ammunition to get a black box warning (easily visible red-alerts the FDA occasionally mandates for pharmaceuticals) placed on the SSRIs.
Note: Documents showed that Lilly initially planned to have a warning for Prozac causing psychosis in the USA package insert, but ultimately only did so in Germany, as their regulators, unlike the FDA, required Lilly to insert this warning.
Because of her efforts, like the previous example showed, Witczak was provided with a direct view into the corruption within the FDA. For example, this is how they addressed the “problem” that lawsuits against the SSRI manufacturers were causing their confidential documents (detailing the actual harms of the drugs) to be released:
“Pfizer used the FDA to intervene in Baum Hedlund’s civil lawsuits. It was discovered that Pfizer paid industry defense lawyer Dan Troy $300k for some legal work shortly before he was appointed FDA Chief Counsel by President Bush. In his new role at the FDA, Dan Troy was the mastermind behind the FDA preemption amicus “friend of the court” brief intervening on behalf of pharmaceutical companies in civil lawsuits.
The brief [falsely] argued that because drug was FDA approved, the lawsuits were “preempted” and should be dismissed.
The brief [falsely] claimed even if a company wanted to warn consumers, the FDA wouldn’t let them update their warning label if the FDA didn’t agree. Many Zoloft suicide lawsuits were tossed out by judges who believed the FDA was final authority on the drug label. Pfizer even tried arguing the FDA preemption brief in my lawsuit. Not once, but twice.
We worked with NY Representative Maurice Hinchey to help expose the $300k Dan Troy received from Pfizer. Ultimately Dan Troy resigned his FDA Chief Counsel post but not before damage was done. He ultimately went back to work for private industry including becoming global Chief Counsel at GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Paxil, another SSRI.”
Sadly, paying off regulators (e.g., by giving them cushy jobs of the pharmaceutical industry) is very common (the practice is known as the “revolving door”). For instance, many of the authors of government studies (e.g., FDA employees) who questionably determined the SSRIs were “safe and effective” were also paid off by the SSRI manufacturers.
In 2004, due to the mounting political pressure, the FDA finally released a black box warning linking SSRIs to increased suicidality in children. Despite knowing about this problem long before the SSRIs came to market, it took over two decades for the FDA to provide this critical warning.
More importantly, this only happened after massive public pressure, countless lawsuits proving these effects were deliberately concealed by the manufacturers, public hearings, and leaked reports publicly shaming the FDA.
Note: In 2006, the warning was extended to everyone under the age of 25. As this cut off was completely arbitrary (many of the SSRI suicides occurred in much older individuals) a large press conference was organized the day beforehand so those believing it needed to be applied to all ages could have the time to speak the FDA would not permit them to have during its hearing.
Although their action did not convince the FDA to change course, next year in 2006, the FDA did and applied that warning to all ages groups.
By 1990, the public was demanding for the FDA to determine if SSRIs were linked to increased suicidality. As the evidence proving this was unambiguous, the FDA deliberately avoided publishing a report on this topic. Sixteen years later, shortly after the FDA was exposed for suppressing the link between suicidality in children and SSRIs, the FDA finally published a meta-analysis addressing this question.
The 2006 meta-analysis encompassed 372 placebo-controlled trials of SSRIs (and related drugs) involving 100,000 patients, and showed that up to the age of 40, SSRIs increased suicidal behavior, while in older patients SSRIs decreased this risk.
Note: A common tactic in the pharmaceutical industry is to hyper-focus on one specific set of side effects so that the other side effects can be covered up.
For example, from comparing the incidences of blood clots I hear about relative to the percentage of people who chose the J&J vaccine, I am relatively certain that the mRNA vaccines are more likely to cause blood clots than J&J’s, but whenever this topic is raised, people default to believing only J&J can cause blood clots since it was linked to a few cases of central venous thrombosis and there was a brief period where the vaccine was suspended by the FDA to “assess” this risk.
I suspect that the FDA’s long-delayed meta-analysis and the black box warning were a direct response to the leaked report proving an indisputable link between SSRIs and adolescent suicidality that was produced to shield the other side effects from scrutiny. Sadly, these warnings have done very little to curb the usage of these drugs, as evidenced by how large their market has become.
Rather they served as a way to protect that market as they both were an alternative to pulling the drugs (which is what should have happened) and downplayed the side effects as much as possible (e.g., borrowing from the industry’s playbook, “abnormal thoughts” became abnormal dreams).
Furthermore, the FDA’s meta-analysis almost certainly also understated the risk. For example, the FDA gave the studies they analyzed a free pass on the variety of design flaws that made it easy to conceal their adverse events. In fact, the FDA reached out to many of the SSRI manufacturers and asked them to adjudicate (remove) possibly suicide-related adverse events in their trials as they saw fit and send those results to the FDA.
When analyzing the 2006 meta-analysis, Gøtzsche found numerous other signs of deliberate fraud by the FDA. For example, in many cases (often due to data revealed from litigation), a single study within the meta-analysis was shown to contain more cases of suicide from an SSRI than the 5 suicides the FDA claimed had occurred throughout all 372 of its studies.
From extensively reviewing all the data, Peter Gøtzsche, reached the overall conclusion that there are likely to have been 15 times more suicides on antidepressant drugs than reported by the FDA in its 2006 meta-analysis.
Note: In 2006, 35 million was spent by American’s National Institutes of Mental Health to conduct the STAR*D study, which assessed if SSRIs cured “treatment resistant” depression (making it the largest study on SSRI efficacy ever conducted) and was designed to assess typical patients in real life scenarios (although the care they received was likely better than what is seen in clinical practice).
It found 3% or less of subjects had their depression cured (with it not remitting for the year of observation within the trial). However, the NIMH repeatedly stated “about 70% of those who did not withdraw from the study became symptom-free,” significantly exaggerated the improvements in the patients, and that SSRI treatment was far more effective than placebo, despite no placebos being used in the trial.
In my personal opinion, when your results are off by an order of magnitude, this can only occur through deliberate fraud, something many of us have regrettably come to realize has occurred at both the CDC and the FDA throughout the COVID-19 vaccination campaign.
As it so happened, by 2013, the FDA employee in charge of the 2006 meta-analysis had completely transitioned to the private sector and had made a consulting firm dedicated to helping psychiatric drugs sail through the FDA.
Note: A variety of other large studies have used similar methods to conceal the dangers of the SSRIs. Since I can’t cover all of them here, I chose to focus on ones conducted by the US government.
The Big Lie
When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1925, he described how people could be induced to believe a colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” While he initially used this idea to attack others (e.g., the Jews), before long he fully adopted it, allowing the Nazi regime to become one of the most powerful forces of propaganda in history.
Many others have also used this approach. For example (as discussed in a recent article), for decades, US health authorities (and professional medical associations) have repeated the mantra that their vaccine is “safe and effective” while simultaneously suppressing all evidence to the contrary (e.g., from their own scientists).
This in turn has resulted in numerous disastrous vaccines (which everyone knew were bad) being pushed onto the market and not being taken off until a significant amount of injuries had occurred. With the SSRIs, we see a similar degree of audacity, as time and time again the SSRI advocates will insist their drugs are safe and effective despite all evidence to the contrary. For example:
“In 2014, the medical director at the Norwegian drug agency, Steinar Madsen, said at a meeting that antidepressants work for 50-60% of the patients. I [Peter Gøtzche] replied that his statement illustrated why we cannot trust our drug regulators and reminded him that the FDA had found in their analysis of 100,000 patients that antidepressants worked for only 10% of the patients.
Throughout the 1990s, while swearing publicly that fluoxetine didn’t increase the risk of suicide or violence, Lilly quietly settled lawsuits out of court and kept the incriminating evidence hidden by obtaining court orders to seal the documents.
[In 2011 the CEO of a company that sold five antidepressants], claimed in a radio programme that SSRIs reduce suicides in children and adolescents. When the stunned reporter asked him why the package inserts warned against suicide attempts, also for Lundbeck’s drugs, he replied that he expected the leaflets would be changed by the authorities!
The radio interview took place while Lundbeck’s US partner, Forest Laboratories, was negotiating compensation with 54 families whose children had committed or attempted suicide under the influence of Lundbeck’s antidepressant drugs.
[BBC Journalist] Shelley Joffre, showed that the GSK spokesperson, Dr Alastair Benbow, lied in front of a running camera. He denied, for example, that paroxetine could cause suicidality or self-harm while he sent data to the drug regulator one month later that showed exactly this, and which immediately led to a ban on using paroxetine in children.”
Note: The UK drug regulators also lied to the public to cover for GSK (which is based in the UK) by stating that the discovery Paxil caused those suicides was completely new to the company (whereas documents showed it had in fact known about it for at least eight years). Furthermore, when US senator Charles Grassley later asked GSK for how long the company had known that paroxetine increases the suicide risk, GSK repeated this lie, claiming GSK had not detected the risk until 2006.
Given their willingness to blatantly lie, even to a US Senator, it should come as no surprise these companies concocted elaborate ways to silence their critics. For example, GSK has publicly stated:
“Major depressive disorder is a potentially very serious illness associated with substantial morbidity, mortality, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and completed suicide. Unwarranted conclusions about the use and risk of antidepressants, including paroxetine, do a disservice to patients and physicians.”
Many psychiatrists (especially those being paid off by the pharmaceutical industry) in turn have used similar arguments to silence all criticisms of their drugs. Sadly these tactics are not unique to the psychiatric industry. For example, in a previous article I discussed the significant dangers (and complete lack of benefit) from statins.
In turn, whenever statins are questioned, rather that defend them, cardiologists will often insist you are “killing patients” by scaring them away from the drugs, and this argument has been successfully against both physicians and news programs which questioned statins. In turn, as you might guess, that tactic has also been used against critics of the SSRIs.
“In New Zealand, psychiatrists and suicidologists managed to convince the government [with very weak evidence] that publishing information on suicides causes copycat suicide, which in turn made it a criminal offense for victims or the media to publicly discuss SSRI suicides.”
Likewise, this same playbook has been used against critics of a controversial vaccine. Sadly, since there had been numerous trial runs with other deadly products, by the time COVID-19 happened, the “dangerous misinformation” playbook had been developed, and that label was immediately plastered onto anyone who questioned any part of the pandemic response (e.g., the lockdowns, the suppression of early treatment or the COVID-19 vaccines).
This in turn set the stage for where it somehow became acceptable to argue people should be forced to vaccinate against their will despite a significant amount of evidence (and public opinion) existing that argued against vaccinating. In many ways, this is not that different from how psychiatric medication mandates are often pushed upon patients who (due to their side effects) simply do not want them.
Note: There are many sad stories of this — including numerous ones where the courts supported the psychiatric mandate no matter how much work was done to overturn them.
Conclusion
In my eyes, one of the most important things to consider in this article is just how many people are taking SSRIs, and by extension, just how many injuries the percentages I provided in this article translate to. Whenever a drug is being considered for approval, one of the primary concerns by the regulator used to be the total expected harms suggested by the preliminary data — yet as we can see both in the SSRI saga and throughout COVID-19, that principle has simply been discarded.
As I ponder how things could have gotten this way and how symbiotic the relationship has become between the pharmaceutical companies and the drug regulators, I am reminded of this iconic scene from Idiocracy:
The saddest thing about the SSRI saga is that as inexcusable as it was, things were much less corrupt then than they are now, especially within the federal government. At the time that the public challenged the SSRIs, the media would air stories critical of the malfeasance within the federal government and lawsuits could compel the pharmaceutical companies to disclose the harms they were hiding from the public, and Congress was willing to investigate.
Now, all the vaccine manufacturers have almost complete protection from liability and except for a few commentators on Fox News, no one so much as dares to question the vaccines (or any other pharmaceutical for that matter). One comment Kim made on our sad state of affairs really stuck with me:
Note: Renowned journalist Sharyl Attkisson has made an excellent case the prolific censorship we have become accustomed to began during the Obama presidency.
My hope is that the harm of the COVID-19 vaccines is so egregious and unambiguous, and more importantly, has affected so many people, that it will prompt enough public outcry to fix or at least improve this systemic corruption.
In this series, I have tried to illustrate how the gross malfeasance that allowed the SSRIs to be brought onto the market and kept there despite countless red flags telling the FDA the drugs were not safe. Overcoming the pressure to take these drugs off the market in turn required a lot of money to be behind those drugs.
In the final part of this series, we will explore how the SSRI industry convinced the world everyone needed their (typically worthless) pills (while simultaneously causing many effective SSRI treatments to be dismissed and forgotten). Much of our culture is shaped by the pharmaceutical industry brands diseases and I believe the tactics they use must be recognized so our society stops falling victim to them.
I thank each of you for reading this series and helping bring attention to this tragedy as many people I am close to have been.
A Note From Dr. Mercola About the Author
A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician in the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate his exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and I’m grateful to share them. I also respect his desire to remain anonymous as he is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.
There is a longstanding precedent for the government to protect “emergency” vaccines that were rushed to market by concealing the evidence those vaccines are harming people and stonewalling attempts to make safer vaccines
The vaccine adverse event reporting system was created because vaccine safety activists forced the government to create a database of vaccine injuries which the public had the legal right to view
VAERS data is often dismissed because it is “unscientific.” However, each time a “more scientific” vaccine safety monitoring system is created, the government refuses to release its data — because, as we’ve seen throughout COVID-19, those data sets show the vaccines are in fact quite dangerous
Recently a New Zealand whistleblower, at great personal risk, released a vaccine payment database indicating that a significant number of people were being killed by the vaccine. This data is consistent with other leaked government datasets
Throughout my lifetime, I have heard people claim that the future will bring better technology and that science will make the world a better place and solve all our problems. Yet, again and again, these promises fail to materialize, and we are perpetually stuck waiting for science’s promised future.
In many cases however, the technology was in fact developed. The problem however was that the technology’s development threatened someone’s ability to make money (or gain power) so the technology was buried and never saw the light of day.
For example, throughout COVID-19 we heard numerous promises that a solution to the pandemic was around the corner (e.g., the miraculous vaccines) yet each time an un-patentable solution (e.g., ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine) was found, the pandemic-industrial-complex ruthless suppressed it to ensure their grift could continue.
Within the field of data, a similar issue exists. The mantra from Silicon Valley which has gradually entered the rest of the culture is that “more data” is the solution to all of our problems. However, once that data gets in the way of someone’s ability to make money, it often never sees the light of day.
In a recent article, I showed how there have been numerous vaccine disasters where a rushed vaccine was developed, the FDA was warned by its own scientists the vaccine was not safe (often due to its rushed production method) and then rather than heed those warnings, the government chose to bring the vaccine to market and have every authority repeat the mantra that the vaccine was “safe and effective.”
Then once Americans began to be injected and data started accumulating showing the vaccine was indeed not safe, the government instead chose to double-down on its position, insisting the vaccine was safe and doing whatever it could to cover up that inconvenient data — all of which also happened with the COVID-19 vaccines.
In each of the past vaccine disasters, the dangers of the vaccine were eventually exposed by the media, before long the unsafe vaccine was pulled from the market, and ultimately, there was some degree of accountability (e.g., the responsible officials had to resign or the victims received financial compensation through the courts).
Seeing that this was not good for business, the vaccine industry in turn adopted a few strategies which radically tilted the deck in their favor:
•Bill Clinton in 1997 legalized direct to consumer pharmaceutical (drug) advertisement (something only otherwise legal in New Zealand). Since most of the pharmaceutical industry’s expenditures are in advertising, this allowed them to become the dominant advertisers on television, and within a few years, the networks stopped being willing to air stories critical of vaccinations, even when the CEO personally supported the story being aired.
Note: The final unsafe vaccine the American media exposed was George W. Bush’s 2002 “emergency” smallpox vaccine (which rapidly ended the program because there were too many injuries in the military). Not long after, in 2006, the incredibly dangerous HPV vaccine entered the market, and despite a deluge of injuries, the American media would not touch it — instead it was exposed by a Danish network in 2015.
• Vaccine manufacturers were exempted from liability for their products — instead vaccine injuries were delegated to a federal compensation program which only allowed a narrow range of injuries to receive compensation. This understandably took away the industry’s motivation to produce safer vaccines.
• The vaccine industry worked with the FDA to create a variety of regulations for “emergency” vaccines which waived both the existing requirements to prove safety or efficacy and the ability to pursue the manufacturers in the legal system (either by directly suing them or though the federal vaccine injury compensation program).
Note: The “compensation” program for the COVID vaccines, according to a 2/21/23 congressional report has thus far not provided compensation to anyone injured by these “emergency” products.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
In 1986, an Act was passed by Congress to address the growing problem of vaccine injuries. Many remember this act because it gave legal immunity to the manufacturers through the federal compensation program. However, what’s less appreciated about it is that the activists also were able to force two other provisions into it.
First the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was to appoint a Director and a National Vaccine Advisory Committee that would guide the federal agencies to:
“Develop the techniques needed to produce safe and effective vaccines.
Coordinate and provide direction for safety and efficacy testing of vaccines.
Promote the development of childhood vaccines that result in fewer and less serious adverse reactions than those vaccines on the market [in 1986].
Make or assure improvements in … the licensing, manufacturing, processing, testing, labeling, warning, use instructions, distribution, storage, administration, field surveillance, adverse reaction reporting, and recall of reactogenic lots or batches, of vaccines, and research on vaccines, in order to reduce the risks of adverse reactions to vaccines.”
Note: This has been a longstanding problem with vaccines — hence why the activists insisted something would be done about the hot-lot issue (as the DPT makers did not want to spend a bit more on manufacturing so hot-lots didn’t get out to the public).
Additionally, the Secretary was expected to:
“Within 2 years [of 1986] and periodically thereafter, the Secretary shall prepare and transmit to the Committee on Energy and Commerce of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Labor and Human Resources of the Senate a report describing the actions taken [to make safer vaccines].
Within 3 years [of 1986] complete a review of all relevant medical and scientific information [including the research mentioned above] on the link between DPT [and MMR] vaccination and the following conditions …”
Note: Once this report was completed, the secretary was to submit it to Congress, make it publicly available it and modify the vaccine injury table so those conditions would also be covered by the national vaccine injury compensation program, and then repeat this process at least once every 3 years.
The vaccine industry really did not want to do this, so except for DPT (where outside pressures forced them to), those safer vaccines never got made. In turn, the federal bureaucracy [e.g., the FDA and CDC] got around this law by simply choosing to be non-compliant — something RFK Jr. and Aaron Siri finally proved in 2014 when the H.H.S. admitted in court it had not done much of what the act required.
Note: Since 1986, very few conditions have been added to the table of vaccine injuries that will be covered. For reference, those injuries are: rapid-onset chronic arthritis, thrombocytopenic purpura specific autoimmune disorders and catching measles from the MMR vaccine, intussusception from the rotavirus vaccine, and Guillain-Barré Syndrome from the flu vaccine.
Second, it became mandatory to report vaccine injuries (although in practice this happens less than 10% of the time) and for those reports:
“… all information reported under this section shall be available to the public.”
Note: An exception was made for personally identifying medical information.
This gave birth to VAERS, the system we now use to report adverse reactions to vaccines and independent researchers around the world in turn use to assess the safety of various vaccines.
This provision was put in because those early vaccine safety activists had over and over run into the same problem we still face now — doctors and vaccine manufacturers refused to report the injury (to avoid liability) and the government refused to share any of the information it had demonstrating vaccines were unsafe, which in turn was used to argue there was “no evidence” vaccines were unsafe.
Once VAERS broke their information blockade, the government then switched to doing everything it could to undermine the system, such as:
• Continually attacking its credibility and reliability (and likewise having the scientific establishment fail to do the same).
• Refusing to fix it when solutions were proposed (e.g., in 2010, an AI system was created that detected far more vaccine injuries and concluded VAERS was only identifying 1% of those that were occurring — as you might expect, that system was never adopted).
• Failing to hire the staff needed to run it. This in turn, became a huge problem once the COVID vaccines entered the market (as we went from 50,000 reported injuries a year — which the staff at VAERS could not handle to over 1.7 million from the COVID vaccines).
Note: At the time the COVID vaccines got an emergency use authorization, on a now deleted page [archived here], when explaining how vaccine safety would be monitored, the FDA stated that the U.S. government “has a well-established post-authorization/post-approval vaccine safety monitoring infrastructure that has been scaled up to meet the needs of a large-scale COVID-19 vaccination program,” and specifically listed VAERS as part of that infrastructure.
V-Safe
Since VAERS had many alleged shortcomings (e.g., you had no idea how many people were being sampled by it and you had no idea if the reports were being legitimate), a new system was created for the COVID-19 vaccines to effectively evaluate if they were indeed “safe and effective.” However, before long, vaccine safety advocates noticed two major issues.
First, it was not possible to easily input many of the injuries into V-Safe that were commonly occurring after the COVID-19 vaccines. Second, the public was not given access to the raw data. Instead, we were given curated assessments of the data from “trusted” experts, who not surprisingly, concluded the V-Safe data showed the COVID vaccines were safe.
Fortunately, ICAN was familiar with these tactics and after 463 days of work defeated the CDC in the courts with an appropriately drafted FOIA request. From that data, ICAN discovered that those “trusted” experts lied and V-Safe actually showed numerous red flags with the COVID-19 vaccines (although much of the V-Safe data sadly has still not been made available).
Note: A similar issue exists throughout the pharmaceutical industry as it will repeatedly conduct trials that show their drug or vaccine is quite dangerous, and then concoct a way to hide those dangers from the final trial report.
The industry is able to get away with this because neither the government nor medical profession (both of whom are often taking money from the industry) calls out that behavior and because Big Pharma has successfully lobbied for its trial data to be deemed proprietary and thus permissible to withhold from the public.
In short, as I tried to demonstrate here, and in the first, second and third part of this series, the government has proven time and time again that it will bury data that indicates a vaccine is dangerous or makes the public doubt its declarations that all vaccines are “safe and effective.”
This in effect shows why “more data” is not our salvation as we will only be fed a curated picture of it that shows what the establishment wants us to see — rather than an inconvenient truth which requires us to fix an existing problem and actually make the world a better place.
Note: The one place where data has “made things better” is in marketing — as in that industry, there is a financial incentive to have accurate data as that is needed to maximize sales.
So throughout COVID-19, since the government deliberately withheld almost all the data that the COVID vaccines are harmful, we in turn instead have had to use the following data sources:
• Anecdotal ones (e.g., this Substack started almost two years ago after I decided to publish a log of all the injuries occurring within my personal circle, which included 45 fatal or likely to be fatal vaccine injuries) — These reports tend be reflexively dismissed as “not being credible” but since they are so frequent and so many are seeing them, it has not been possible to gaslight the population into believing they just “random coincidences” (especially since the sudden cardiac deaths in the young was is so unmistakably unusual).
Note: Large polls have likewise shown this. One for example found almost half of Americans believed they were suffering from side effects of the vaccine (with 7% characterizing them as “major”), another found half of Americans believed the vaccines were killing people, and a recent one found a quarter of Americans knew someone they believe had been killed by the vaccine.
• Data from clinical trials — Since it is often quite difficult to clearly untangle what a pharmaceutical does once it gets into the market (as so many other variables get added to the picture), the general consensus is that the risks and benefits of it need to be determined in the controlled environment of a clinical trial.
Unfortunately, as there is often so much money on the line, pharmaceutical companies will inevitably rig their trials to favor of their drug (which is why truly independent studies consistently paint a quite a different picture of each drug). In the case of the COVID vaccines, not only were the trials clearly deceptive but numerous whistleblowers came forward testifying as such. Sadly, their testimonies were almost completely ignored.
Note: Despite all of this, the data on the COVID-19 vaccines was still bad enough that the published data made it clear the vaccines were not safe. This is largely because the one thing which is very difficult to hide (e.g., by reclassifying the event) in a clinical trial is how many people in each group died. As a result, I typically consider the primary metric to judge a trial by its effect on overall mortality.
• Population wide datasets showing a massive increase in deaths and disabilities — Since COVID occurred throughout 2020, whereas the vaccines were introduced at the start of 2021, those datasets frequently make it quite easy to identify the impact of the vaccines.
Note: Ed Dowd’s team has done an excellent job of compiling this data, showing the immense cost it has had for our economy and demonstrating that it is statistically impossible it could have happened by chance.
• Data the government withheld that was obtained through lawsuits — The previously mentioned CDC V-Safe data is one example. Likewise, the documents Pfizer submitted for their FDA approval which ICAN also obtained through the courts is another example.
Note: The “FDA approved” vaccine (Comirnaty by Pfizer) was never actually brought to the market.
This was done so it could be claimed the COVID-19 vaccine was “FDA approved” (and thus possible for various groups to mandate), but simultaneously, for the dangerous vaccine to retain the blanket liability shield its Emergency Use Authorization provides (hence you can only obtain the EUA but not FDA approved Pfizer vaccine). In essence, we have a situation analogous to Schrödinger’s cat.
• Data leaked by whistleblowers — Since the government never will voluntarily disclose data which makes it look bad, data that can only be obtained through leakers inevitably is quite concerning. Similarly, whenever data of this type is requested, the government will always find ways make an unlimited number of excuses to not release that data (e.g., it doesn’t have it or releasing it would violate patient privacy).
Medicare Data
Steve Kirsch has been leading the charge to get the data which will objectively show how safe and effectives the vaccines actually are. Since he has reliably published that information and protected his sources, numerous whistleblowers have contacted him and shared data they risked their livelihoods to obtain.
One of Kirsch’s fundamental principles has been that record level data (raw data) that combines vaccination status with mortality is needed for the world to assess if the vaccines are saving lives or killing people.
Since Medicare has one of the most comprehensive data sources to answer that question (as Medicare tracks when each member is vaccinated and when they die), Kirsch has been working diligently to get that data. Likewise, Medicare was cited by the FDA in the same way VAERS was — as a way to monitor the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
Note: All the graphs that follow were produced by Steve Kirsch).
First, let’s first look at a typical vaccine:
While it’s not entirely safe (e.g., I’ve admitted an elderly patient to the hospital who suffered a zeta potential collapse from the pneumococcal vaccine), the pneumococcal vaccine is fairly unlikely to kill you, and has a small chance of saving your life from pneumococcal pneumonia. Rather, most of the issues it creates are chronic in nature and take more time to show up.
In turn, if we look at the graph, we notice a few things. First, there is a drop the risk of dying (mortality) immediately after receiving the vaccine. This is a result of the “Healthy Vaccine Effect” which highlights that sick people at risk of dying are less likely to be vaccinated, and for this reason, the brief initial drop in each graph needs to ignored.
Note: The one spike at the very start most likely represents the small portion of patients who have a severe and immediate reaction to the vaccine like the patient I discussed above.
Secondly, the overall risk of dying stays steady after receiving the vaccine, and if anything is slightly reduced (which I believe comes from the vaccine actually doing what is supposed to do). In short, the above graph is representative of a relatively safe vaccine.
Next, lets go to the flu shot, a vaccine I consider to be more problematic and likely to injure you (e.g., I’ve run into far more cases of significant injuries following the flu vaccine):
As you can see, there is a distinct spike (roughly 15%) in death following vaccination before the death rate returns to baseline. Now let’s look at what happens with the COVID-19 vaccines:
Here we instead have a spike that never regresses and instead continues increasing to 30% above baseline. What that seems a bit abstract, it’s a huge deal and provides a concise way to quantify the wave of death we are seeing around us.
Note: Given that that same trend is not seen in the flu or pneuomcoccal vaccines which were given in the same time period, it is difficult to argue anything besides the COVID-19 vaccine could be causing it.
Let’s next look at the death trends from one, two and three COVID vaccines.
Note: The drop off at the end is likely due to the data series being incomplete.
Let’s quickly put all of that together into a chart Steve notated:
New Zealand’s Data
Recently, an insider at New Zealand’s ministry of health provided Steve with records tagged to the individual’s age, time of vaccination, number of vaccinations, and date of death (if applicable). This was extremely useful for untangling what is going on, particularly given that New Zealand has a relative small population (5.2 million people) and is known for having relatively good record keeping.
This data set comprised 4,193,438 vaccination records (approximately 12 million COVID vaccinations have been administered in New Zealand), and was composed of 2,215,730 unique individuals (37,285 of whom died). So in essence, it covered a third of the vaccinations and slightly over half of the population. Let’s see what it found:
This graph again shows that the COVID vaccine dramatically increases your risk of dying (Mortality Risk or “MR”), and sadly, that this effect persists for months afterwards. Likewise, that risk increases as you get more of the vaccines.
This is important because it is both consistent with what we’ve seen throughout the vaccination campaign (the vaccine toxicity increases with each successive dose) and the general laws of toxicology (more doses of a toxin are more likely to kill someone). The next chart is what I consider to be one of the saddest ones:
Throughout my medical career, I have heard a few stories I could never confirm (e.g., from a nurse who had worked at a facility years ago) of an influenza vaccination campaign being followed by a significant number of deaths in the nursing home.
The best explanation I was able to come up with for those events was that the elderly tend to have a poorer physiologic zeta potential (due to declining kidney function) and as a result, they are much less able to tolerate the additional impairment in zeta potential that either an infection (e.g., the flu) or a vaccine can create.
However, while I believed this was an issue, the effects I observed were less overt (e.g., the progressive cognitive decline following the vaccine) rather than overt and life-threatening (e.g., while it happened, it was quite rare I admitted someone to the hospital for a vaccine injury in the pre-COVID vaccine era).
Note:Suzanne Humphries MD, a nephrologist who has done a great deal of important work exposing the dangers of vaccines said her work in this field was started her observation the flu shot would frequently precipitate a kidney injury that required hospitalization or worsen it in a patient who had already been hospitalized for one.
Once the COVID-19 vaccines hit the market, one of the most common stories I heard was an elderly patient who had rapid cognitive decline after the vaccine and then died shortly afterwards. In each case, while the relative was certain it was caused by the vaccine, the death was written off as “Alzheimer’s” or “old age.”
I, in turn, believe much of this resulted from these vaccines being much more toxic than the typical vaccine (e.g., they had a much larger effect on the physiologic zeta potential).
This wave of injuries was particularly depressing to watch, because even when large clusters of deaths occurred at a nursing home following the vaccination no one seemed to want to acknowledge this was a problem and reconsider the vaccinations. Rather, before long, the residents often got boosted.
Note: In addition to numerous examples where this was documented, I know of one worker who witnessed it first hand at their facility but had no avenues to report what he was seeing.
Remarkably enough, in medicine, one of the central dogmas when caring for the elderly is that they are “vulnerable” patients who need to be protected since they often lack the ability to advocate for themselves.
While I completely agree with this (you see many sad cases of the elderly being taken advantage of because they cannot protect themselves), that dogma goes out the window for vaccines because of the widespread belief they are “100% safe and effective.”
In turn, the medical field believes the elderly should always be vaccinated as much as possible regardless of the injuries that occur from doing so or how unclear their consent was to being vaccinated in the first place.
Note: One of the most important things to appreciate about this data is that the deaths are only the tip of the iceberg, and for each death, there are a significantly greater number of chronic and debilitating injuries (e.g., Dowd’s team found there were 10-20 times as many disabilities as deaths).
Replicating the Data
Many of the physician authors I believe have done the best job illustrating the crimes of the pharmaceutical industry have had a common mantra — the data for the drugs we consume must be made public. Yet, over and over this never happens, and those authors in turn are able to show the catastrophic harm that occurs from the data being kept secret.
Conversely, Kirsh’s aim has been to make all the data he has collected be available to the public so everyone can access it and verify his claims (which can be accessed here).
Note: Datasets from a variety of sources are posted in the Wasabi folders. With the spreadsheets containing the NZ data, each column was randomized so that the statistics of the dataset would be maintained, but personally identifying information would not be.
In turn, before publishing this, I attempted to see if I could replicate Kirsch’s findings and see what else I could find within the dataset. Since many graphs have been produced showing an increase in mortality following the vaccine rollout, I decided to see how the deaths in the vaccinated would compare to the total deaths in the population.
Note: If you use the randomized data Steve has provided to create this chart, the sheet you will produce will be very similar but slightly different from this one. Additionally, the peak in deaths is more pronounced if you were to instead make this chart with the elderly.
What all of this data (and others like countless VAERS analyses) have shown is that the COVID vaccines have killed millions of people, and that the majority of those deaths occur months after the shot and predominantly affect the elderly.
If you have a background in data analysis, I would strongly advise you try to look at the data as well, both to confirm for yourself the vaccines are indeed harmful and to see what else you can find in the dataset.
New Zealand’s Data Analyst Goes Public
On November 28th, the chief data analyst for New Zealand (and the source of the above data) decided to go public and disclose what he was uniquely positioned to observe with the vaccination roll-out. Specifically, he found that there was a massive spike in deaths immediately following the vaccines being deployed.
Furthermore, he also shared that in a few instances, hot lots were being given that killed between 4.5% – 21.3% of the recipients and that a few vaccinators had between a 10% – 24% death rate in those they vaccinated, but for some reason did not speak up. His entire presentation can be seen in the video below and helps put into words what it is like to be shouldered with the responsibility he had (while everyone else was staying silent).
Note: An 8 minute shortened version of this video can be viewed in this article.
Conclusion
Ever since I first saw how over the top the efforts were to sell the COVID vaccines, my belief has been that marketing and sales would predict everything which would happen with them. More specifically, each time a market was capped, the rules would be changed so a new market could be opened up. To illustrate:
Initially the vaccines were sold under a scarcity model to get as many people as possible to receive them.
Once the scarcity model stopped working, they were traditionally marketed to the population.
Once that market was capped, bribes (e.g., gift cards) were given to incentivize more people to vaccinate.
Note: Many of those bribes were so ridiculous (e.g., drugs, donuts and sex) they made many realize there had to be something wrong with the vaccines.
Once that market was capped soft mandates (e.g., to travel or go to a bar or to a concert) were implemented.
Once that market was capped, hard mandates were implemented (e.g., losing your job or being kicked out of your educational program).
Once that market was capped, they started pushing the vaccine on children.
Once that market was capped, they decided the vaccine actually didn’t fully protect you and boosters were needed.
Once that market was capped, they decided more boosters were needed and eventually that the vaccine would instead become an annual shot.
As I watched this predictable chain of events, I also told many people that once it was clear the vaccines could not be sold anymore, they would begin acknowledging the injuries were real (e.g., Yale recently published a paper on “Post Vaccination Syndrome” which will likely be shared throughout the medical community). This would of course be done so they could pivot to selling proprietary pharmaceutical drugs that could be used to treat the vaccine injuries.
Note: I suspect this new wave of therapeutics will also include monoclonal antibodies to the original spike protein (which Biden took off the market) and complement factor B inhibitors, new anticoagulants and the existing (but expensive) intravenous immunoglobulin therapy.
At this point, all of us believe the healthcare authorities are fully aware of the current disaster and are doing everything they can to cover it up. In turn, we expect a few people will be thrown under the bus to protect the industry so business can essentially continue as usual. I believe things are very close to a tipping point now because:
The majority of the population knows the vaccines are not safe or effective.
More evidence (and leaks) keeps on emerging of the vaccine’s harm.
There is no longer a financial incentive to cover that up and the funding to keep pushing for them to be on the market (since no one will buy them). Rather the incentive is now to pivot to the even more profitable treatment of them.
Getting to this point we are now has taken a lot of work from many dedicated activists, and I want to sincerely thank Steve for the work he’s put into gathering this data. After he informed me of what he was putting together, I realized the importance of it and hence spent the last two weeks compiling this series which could put those leaks into context.
I hope it was helpful for each of you and provided a human face to the immense amount of human suffering which is encapsulated within the abstract data points presented in this article.
A Note From Dr. Mercola About the Author
A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician in the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate his exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and I’m grateful to share them. I also respect his desire to remain anonymous as he is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.
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