Read This To Save Lives

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Truly individualistic freethinkers will have selflessly opted to read this article on how to save lives.

You might have heard of the Opioid Epidemic currently occurring in America, where back in 2016, over 42,000 people died. It is predicted that by 2029, over 1.2 million Americans will die from an opioid overdose. It is estimated for every 100 people in America, there are 43 prescriptions for opioids.

Opioids are a class of highly addictive painkillers, and pharmaceutical companies use all sorts of strategies to get the public hooked.

For example, Purdue Pharma used both fraud and kickback schemes - a bribe, essentially, where a doctor earns commission for every pharmaceutical product they push - in order to foist opioids upon the unsuspecting public and get them addicted.

Is This The Only Time?

If you thought killing 1.2 million people by getting them addicted to drugs by bribing doctors was disgusting, you will probably find the idea of jacking up the prices of life-saving drugs to completely unaffordable levels to be even more disgusting.

As Dr Peter Bach of Drug Pricing Lab remarks:

The one truth about cancer drugs is that prices are always higher than they were the year before […] every time we get a new drug that costs more, it signals that you can get away with charging even more.

The current price some cancer drugs go for? $475,000, per tablet. And that will continue to rise. Imagine having to pay more than a house to save your life. It is like mafia blackmail. They know they can get away with these absurd prices because the only other option is to die. Your money or your life. Such moral arbiters of reason.

How are they able to get away with this?

Lobbying

Pfizer spent $11,580,000 in 2022 on lobbying the US government, ranking a mind boggling 12th out of 8,607 lobbying firms, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Source: OpenSecrets.org

Pfizer used that corporate lobbyist money, not only to get favourable laws passed, but also to suppress whistleblowers within their own organisation exposing fraud and corruption.

What Sort Of Fraud?

Pfizer has quite a few cases of fraud, for example, in 1992 Pfizer sold a ‘fully tested’ heart valve, which killed at least 300 people after it turned out to be defective. They settled out-of-court. Obviously, it hadn’t been tested.

In May 2004, Pfizer paid $430 million fine for bribing doctors with kickbacks to promote Neurontin for unapproved drug usage, inflating costs of Medicaid. At the time, the second largest fine for fraud. 6 years later, a jury also found Pfizer guilty of racketeering charges for Neurontin and gave a $142.1 million fine.

As PolicyMed notes, the deception involving Neurontin was widespread, including publishing misleading articles in medical journals:

Pfizer was found to have misrepresented Neurontin’s effectiveness for off-label uses directly to doctors, sponsored misleading informational supplements and continuing medical education programs, suppressed negative information about Neurontin, and published articles in medical journals that reported positive information about Neurontin’s off-label effectiveness.

In July 2004, Pfizer settled out-of-court for $60 million for selling defective diabetes tablet Rezulin, killing people with acute liver failure or forcing people to get a liver transplant, of which at least a hundred people were fatally injured.

In July 2009, Pfizer settled out-of-court for $75 million, and effectively $40 million was a bribe for the Nigerian government. They had conducted unethical experimentation on Nigerian children using deception (reminiscent of the unethical Tuskegee Syphilis experiment on black people) with the supposed ‘antibiotic’ drug Trovan.

In September 2009, Pfizer was fined $2.3 billion, receiving one of the biggest fines in US history for fraud, involving false claims for the 'medicines' Bextra and Celebrex, promoting it for unapproved uses, and bribing doctors with kickbacks to promote the product.

In 2016 the UK government fined Pfizer £90 million (~$100 million) for ‘excessive drug prices’ for anti-epilepsy drugs, having overcharged the NHS (National Health Service), repeating the ‘money or your life’ theme.

Why Don’t Medical Professionals Call This Out?

Pfizer publicly admitted that it bribed 4,500 doctors and other medical professionals a total of $20 million if they spoke on Pfizer’s behalf when advising to patients recommended drugs, and also paid $15.3 million to 250 academic medical centers and other research groups for clinical trials similarly.

It was an open secret, as in 2012, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fined Pfizer $45 million for bribing doctors overseas. Quoting from the SEC's remarks:

In China, for example, Pfizer employees invited “high-prescribing doctors” in the Chinese government to club-like meetings that included extensive recreational and entertainment activities to reward doctors’ past product sales or prescriptions.

Doctors and medical health professionals are supposed to put patients’ well-being first. However, even as early as 2015, CBS news reported half of US doctors were already receiving money from pharmaceutical firms:

About half of U.S. doctors received payments from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries in 2015, amounting to $2.4 billion, a new study reports.

This number has likely increased in the intervening years, as little has been done to stop it. It adversely impacts the judgement of medical health professionals. Doctors are not required to disclose their financial conflicts of interest to patients, nor are there any regulations that meaningfully ban this practice of ‘gift-giving’.

Pharmaceutical companies have effectively infiltrated the medical industry in other ways. For example, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) reported the pharmaceutical industry offered health agency reviewers jobs within the pharmaceutical industry:

[…] researchers who studied the careers of FDA medical reviewers found that more than half of the hematology-oncology assessors who reviewed drugs between 2001 and 2010 went on to work for the biopharmaceutical industry […]

One prime example of the pharmaceutical industry being in bed with regulators is former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who previously worked under George Bush, has ties to GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Tolero to name a few, and after he stopped working at the FDA in 2019 joined Pfizer’s Board of Directors.

Scott Gottlieb argued against drug price controls and insisted ‘Obamacare’ was to blame, whilst also suggesting lowering the standards of testing in drugs. Scott Gottlieb’s replacement as FDA commissioner, Stephen Hahn, would go on to join:

[…] Flagship Pioneering, the venture capital firm that launched Moderna, as chief medical officer to lead its preemptive medicine and health security initiative […]

With both medical health professionals and regulators unduly influenced, in a process called ‘regulatory capture’. As the BMJ observed that industry fees accounted for 89% of the budget of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the health regulatory agency of Europe. Other countries, such as Brazil, experience similar issues.

Do These Harms Expand Elsewhere?

Yes. In Brazil, Pfizer tried to insulate themselves against lawsuits over injuries, and lawsuits for fraud, by trying to force the Brazilian government to sign a contract indemnifying them from any and all such damages - with the Brazilian government culpable, including ‘sovereign assets’, including embassies and military bases as collateral for Pfizer. They tried to make similar demands against South Africa.

The inability to hold pharmaceutical companies to account for criminal actions and harms puts people at risk of injury or death, as seen in the defective heart valve case or the opioid epidemic, where people died before any action was taken.

This isn’t the first time the pharmaceutical companies have successfully lobbied and coerced governments into giving them immunity from the law. In 1989, the pharmaceutical industry successfully got a law passed by US Congress stating it:

Provides that no vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death: (1) resulting from unavoidable side effects; or (2) solely due to the manufacturer's failure to provide direct warnings.

The law was called the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and was created in response to children who had experienced injuries as a result of vaccines. But it wasn’t to benefit the children, rather it protected the deep pockets of the pharmaceutical industry from the angry parents seeking to litigate over harms.

The pharmaceutical companies would do it again, insulating themselves from any consequences of their harms - intentional or otherwise - with the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act), that not only gave the vaccine companies immunity to liability for the COVID-19 shots, but also excused the government from compensating any of the injured as well.

But It Is Safe, Right?

A question has to arise, if such products really are safe, why are pharmaceutical companies so worried about litigation over harms? Why engage in fraud regarding effectiveness of drug usage, bribery of medical professionals supposed to protect patients? Why infiltrate regulation industry meant to scrutinise products if their products are safe and effective? Why waste all that money if the product will be successful in trials and tests?

If they truly care about people’s safety, why engage in deception with the Nigerian trials involving children? Why jack up drug prices to unaffordable levels to extort the dying, weak and injured? Why hide defects in medical products, or try to push drugs people don’t need, and get them addicted?

Could there be evidence of harms, such as in scientific peer-reviewed papers? Bearing in mind peer-review is a slow, resource-intensive process that takes many people to compile and write up and review, there are alone at least fourteen peer-reviewed papers indicating Pfizer’s COVID-19 shots cause Myocarditis, and over 700 studies indicating issues with COVID-19 shots in general.

In October 2021, despite the overwhelming evidence, only a handful of countries - Finland, Sweden and Norway - opted to suspend only the Moderna shot, despite the fact the technology used by Pfizer and Moderna are so similar that Moderna filed a patent lawsuit against Pfizer, and despite numerous issues being linked with COVID-19 shots in general.

This wouldn’t be the first time governments have refused to acknowledge links to harms. Back in 2013 - 4 years after the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak - the UK government recluctantly admitted that the Swine Flu vaccine caused narcolepsy, despite previously insisting for years it did not.

Narcolepsy is a neurological disease that can cause a person to become unconscious and ‘fall asleep’ near instantly, putting them at extreme risk of harm, such as drowning in bathtubs, falling down stairs, or if they were driving, to have a fatal car accident. It requires they have a carer with them for the rest of their lives, and although pharmaceutical companies try to tout such a horrific harm is non-fatal, their lives are effectively ruined as they are unable to hold most types of jobs or complete most types of tasks without possible risk of serious self-injury.

Benefits Outweigh Risks?

Rather than denying the risks exist, pharmaceutical companies instead try to downplay them with sleight-of-hand probabilistic reasoning suggesting any risk - even completely unnecessary ones - are not a concern so long as there’s greater benefit.

This is a particularly absurdist approach in medical safety because it would justify even unnecessarily bad medical practices so long as there was even the slightest net gain. It invites lax - even maliciously - low standards in medicine and shuns any attempts at improvement.

If Dr Murdergood kills 49% of his patients and saves the other 51% percent, this is acceptable under the ‘benefits outweighing the risks’ paradigm. There’s no prompt to examine the situation to see if Dr Murdergood might be killing their patients with illegal practices (bribes, faulty equipment, bad procedures, etc), and no questions asked if risk can be lowered.

Notice they’re more concerned with getting you to accept the risk, rather than trying to address and reduce the risk?

Where Is The Real Risk?

In the peer-reviewed study Age-specific mortality and immunity patterns of SARS-CoV-2, it remarked that:

We estimate that the infection fatality ratio is lowest among 5-9-year-old children

More specifically, in the UK in 2021, there were roughly 8.9 million pupils, of which a pre-print study titled “Deaths from COVID ‘incredibly rare’ among children” remarked:

[...] a team of researchers picked through all hospital admissions and deaths reported for people younger than 18 in England. The studies found that COVID-19 caused 25 deaths in that age group between March 2020 and February 2021.

That would mean for 25 deaths in 8.9 million, it would be a 1 in 356,000 chance of a child dying if they got COVID-19. In contrast, Yale’s remark of the ‘uncommon’ myocarditis estimated it at 12.6 per million, or roughly 1 in every 79,365 receivers of a COVID-19 shot.

Contrary to Yale’s remark, however, myocarditis - damage to the heart - is not mild, as it seriously weakens the heart. One peer-reviewed study lists the effects:

1. Life-threatening heart failure or rhythm disturbance

2. Acute chest wall syndrome with angina pectoris-like symptoms, often after an infection

3. Acute onset of heart failure

4. Chronic heart failure

Norway - one of the few countries to suspend the Moderna shot over myocarditis - reported the risk rate for blood clots caused by the AstraZeneca COVID-19 shot was estimated at 1 in 20,000:

These cases represent a 1 in 20.000 risk for Norwegians of experiencing the adverse reaction.

A serious blood clot, if left untreated, can become fatal, with the clot breaking off, and either entering the heart and causing heart failure, or entering the brain and causing a potentially fatal stroke.

How You Can Save Lives

Allowing pharmaceutical companies to run rampant putting lives at risk whilst being free from any legal or moral consequences, is putting lives at risk where people could become maimed or die, including loved ones, children, parents, elderly, family and friends, all because they wish to jack up the prices and profit regardless of who gets hurt. So it is urgent we put a stop to this. Governments think it is acceptable if they just cover the funeral costs.

So contact your local Representatives, tell them you’re opposed to such immoral and unethical practices, and demand:

• They start adopting laws that require more stringent safety tests on medical products

• Make pharmaceutical companies liable again for their wrongdoings

• Pass laws to prevent pharmaceutical industry insiders infiltrating the regulatory health agencies

• Tell them to bring an end to revolving door jobs

• Introduce more stringent reporting on harms and risks

• Introduce an FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) style investigation whenever a medical product death occurs.

• Encourage people to report adverse effects as “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”

And be sure to share this article with your friends.

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