The FDA & Big Pharma Alliance: Lethal cover ups

(NaturalNews) It is undeniable that the FDA has a controversial relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. Not a single psychiatric drug is released into the market for administration until the FDA gives its safety a legitimate stamp of approval. But how legitimate is this stamp and are these drugs truly safe? (Story republished from TheOpenMind.com)

The medical cartel formed by the matrimony between the FDA & Big Pharma must come under scrutiny and both parties must be held accountable for their inexcusable corruption. We're talking about repeated scientific fraud, campaigns to aggressively silence the FDA's own scientists and other independent health organizations, and debilitation wreaked on innocent lives, people who trusted in the FDA approved medication to heal themselves. The so called safety of these drugs released by the FDA has been called into question by a concerned minority who feel the need to speak out against the malpractices responsible for the astoundingly high count of medical drug related deaths in the USA.

A notable American pediatrician and advocate for ethical health care, Barbara Starfield, drew widespread attention to a report presented in the Journal of the American Medical Association in the year 2000, where it was estimated that the number of deaths related to pharmaceutical drugs was approximately 106,000 per year. Starfield's mission was to make this information available to the public, since our mainstream media was not taking the initiative to do so. Despite a record high number of deaths and injuries, neither the federal government nor the legislative body of justice took remedial action.

A more recent statistic borrowed from a report presented by the Institute of Safe Medication Practices reveals that in 2011, prescription drugs were the leading cause for 128,000 deaths and 2-4 million 'serious, disabling, or fatal injuries.' This is glaring evidence that no real action steps have been taken in the past 15 years to address the core issue of FDA approved drug safety. Not only does the death toll remain frightfully high; the entire situation remains frightfully concealed from the masses. This report was compiled by a brave band of investigators who were able to penetrate the FDA's private database of "serious adverse medical related events" and further labeled this "one of the most significant perils to humans resulting from human activities" today.

We are faced with a situation that has witnessed a whopping ONE MILLION Americans dying in the past decade due to the negligence and cavalier attitude of the medical cartel. It is hard to fathom what is more concerning: the sheer number of lives expended for bureaucratic profit or the fact this information has been suppressed from the public. What is clear is this. Weighing mass profit over the lives of a multitude of innocent people is a genocidal crime. To the FDA and Big Pharma, the masses appear no different than disposable guinea pigs for the medical cartel to run their experiments on. Charles Leife, a New York University journalism professor, uncovered many instances of misconduct in FDA backed clinical trials, such as data from several test patients being excluded and fabrications of chest radiographs. Leife maintained that the FDA was routinely diverging from ethical clinical practices and wrote:

When the FDA finds scientific fraud or misconduct, the agency doesn't notify the public, the medical establishment, or even the scientific community that the results of a medical experiment are not to be trusted...The FDA has repeatedly hidden evidence of scientific fraud not just from the public, but also from its most trusted scientific advisers, even as they were deciding whether or not a new drug should be allowed on the market. Even a congressional panel investigating a case of fraud regarding a dangerous drug couldn't get forthright answers. For an agency devoted to protecting the public from bogus medical science, the FDA seems to be spending an awful lot of effort protecting the perpetrators of bogus science from the public.

FDA approved prescription drugs have been rushed to the market in as little as 6 months from their date of conception, just so that the industry can begin to rake in money before the absolute safety of these drugs are determined. Risky drugs like Fosamax and painkillers such as Vioxx were on the consumer shelves, bolstered by aggressive marketing and rushed reviews that lied about their safety. It was not long until the lethal side effects of these drugs began to rear their ugly head in the form of severe neuropsychiatric events such as agitation, violence, nightmares, insomnia and suicidal ideation.

In all these cases of unforeseen problems cropping up with people who had been prescribed supposedly safe substances, the FDA and its partner in crime Big Pharma argued that the side effects of a drug can only emerge when tested on a much larger number than the relatively small groups of people they sample in controlled clinical trials; supposedly making safety clinical trials irrelevant? In other words, FDA claimed it was impossible to predict how their drugs would affect each and every potential user in the population since everyone would react uniquely to the drug.

The FDA authorities have also neatly shed responsibility for harm done to consumers by pointing to their disclaimer note, explaining that adverse side effects may emerge. You can read it here.

Not only is the FDA guilty of releasing questionable drugs and misinformation regarding their benefits to the public, but they have also waged aggressive campaigns of terror against natural healers, nutritional supplement companies and other companies promoting holistic health, for these appearing threatening to their monopoly on pharmaceutical medicine.

A prime example of this tyranny can be seen in the FDA campaign against the Life Extension Foundation, which publishes information about the healing power of nutritional supplements and genuine anti-aging breakthroughs within the domain of natural health. In 1987, 25 armed FDA agents along with a troop of US Marshals burst into the LEF offices in Fort Lauderdale and detained their leader William Faloon at gunpoint. Employees were lined up against the walls and searched. Over the next 12 hours, thousands of official documents were seized, including nutritional products and 5000 informational newsletters that were about to be mailed off to the members and subscribers of the LEF. Sound appropriate?

In 1990, armed FDA agents raided and shut down an independent pet food store pioneered by Sissy Harrington McGill for the "crime" of using vitamin supplements to keep pets healthy. A similar raid was waged upon Ken Scott who founded an independent vitamin business in a rural town called Mt Angel in Oregon. Scott was accused guilty of selling nutritional supplements containing the powerful coenzyme Q10, which was known to promote cellular and cardiovascular health. He was also a passionate natural health activist and educated his consumers by forwarding them news articles that described the benefits of his products in greater depth. The FDA succeeded in shutting his business down with little resistance. These kinds of raids have been numerous and the cases touched upon in this article are only the tip of the iceberg.

One can read more about these worrisome campaigns against natural health here & here.

The scientific inquiry pursued by the medical cartel under the guise of a humanitarian agenda is nothing but a fraudulent enterprise, fueled mostly by financial greed and an impatience to generate quick revenue. The FDA, being a government supported $20 billion dollar a year empire, has been able to casually sidestep all accusations pointed at them for being singlehandedly responsible for creating a silent holocaust. The political leaders of this country have not revealed a slightest awareness of this problem. There are doctors who are aware of these statistics and the lethal impacts of psychiatric drugs remain equally silent and continue to issue prescriptions for them. Martha Rosenberg from TruthOut conducted a powerful interview with a former FDA drug reviewer named Ronald Cavanagh who bluntly exposed the FDA as a criminal organization with a host of mob strategies to protect its crimes. Cavanagh described these as "widespread racketeering, witness tampering and witness retaliation." He disclosed that he was "threatened with prison" and that the safety of his children were also threatened, all of this being done to prevent him from speaking with Congress or collaborating with criminal investigators. He wasone of the few people within the FDA who insisted that a drug needed to actually be safe before being released. His honesty and integrity was perceived as a jarring threat to the FDA. Cavanagh's bold assertion that the drug pyridostigmine that was administered to US troops to shield them against the effects of nerve gas was ineffective and "actually increased the lethality" of certain agents did not sit well with the FDA authorities. Such cases of censorship of FDA's own scientists are rampant at this institute.

A recent survey released by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the scientists at the FDA described the agency as an environment of intimidation, censorship & scientific fraud. According to this survey taken by 997 FDA scientists, 40% feared retaliation for voicing safety concerns over the drugs being released into the market. Over one-third of the scientists didn't even feel safe voicing concerns within the agency to their peers. This is because many of those scientists, such as Cavanagh, are being routinely intimidated to alter their research findings to suit the political and commercial agenda. This survey revealed an astounding 18.4 percent of scientists who have experienced being asked, for non-scientific reasons, to exclude or alter technical data in their work. Sixty one percent of the survey respondents admit to having knowledge of cases where the Department of Health and Human Services have "inappropriately injected themselves into FDA determinations or actions." Only 47 Percent of the scientists within the FDA believed that the "FDA routinely provides complete and accurate information to the public."

What we are dealing with besides a silent genocide is a classic case of government-fueled censorship of information. The oppression of valuable knowledge that, if fell into the hands of the people, would provide them with an opportunity for self-reflection and a greater degree of autonomy, loosening a reliance on the established bureaucracies and shattering the illusion of benevolence they falsely promote.

The entire story and can be read at TheOpenMind.com.