For-profit corporate influences on for-profit medicine and for-profit "blue ribbon panels" explains much of what is regarded as the very profitable "standard of care" in medicine today. It also explains the prescribing habits and politics of many of us physicians.
Indeed, there has been a crisis of confidence among a small minority (as usual, a minority) of conscientious physicians, citizens, voters and employees of those institutions. Some of the folks that have become aware of what is happening may eventually rise up to blow a whistle on the creeping corporate domination of what is left of free, democratic America.
One only has to consider the corporate intrigue that has allowed the emergence of the anti-democratic, pro-corporate agendas of NAFTA, ALEC, Citizens' United, the PATRIOT Act, the Homeland Security Act, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, PNAC, the National Defense Authorization Acts, the endless war agendas, etc, etc.
Most of my readers see the evidence of that assertion on a daily basis. It is everywhere. It is blatantly evident when listening to politicians, watching the news on TV, reading the newspaper, paying for our unaffordable health insurance (that has unaffordable co-pays) and inaccessible health care (with large, unaffordable deductibles) or when filling our next unaffordable prescription at the pharmacy. Everywhere you look, Big Business is extracting money from our pockets. Big Pharma and Big Insurance don't even try to hide their nefarious agendas anymore. They, like most powerful, wealthy, sociopathic organizations, seem to have no shame.
Big Business, Big Pharma, Big Insurance and Big Medicine Aren't Necessarily Good for Your Health
In medicine, the mark of corporate dominance is obvious in the drug commercials on TV and in the silencing of the voices of conscientious science-based drug and vaccine skeptics.
It has increasingly come to my attention that institutions such as the CDC, the FDA, the AMA, the AAP, the AAFP and even the prestigious Mayo Clinic (perhaps to keep competitive with other for-profit, corporate-influenced medical institutions) have begun taking money from corporations interested in selling their products and services at a high profit.
In the case of Big Medicine and Big Pharma, this money-influencing takes the form of pharmaceutical company-generated "unrestricted" grants, speaker's bureau fees, advertising income in medical journals, funding for drug-related research and the granting of stock options for being helpful to the corporations. Those institutions, once supposedly non-profit institutions that were independent of outside corporate influences, now often act as spokespersons for the multinational pharmaceutical and vaccine industries.
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To their shame, these organizations often act like Big Pharma lobbyists and often ignore (and even suppress) a lot of the new evidence-based medical research data that may contradict the established, sometimes out-of-date medical dogmas that most well-off establishment groups adhere to. Ignoring or repressing new research and ostracizing conscientious researchers is bad medicine and bad science.
Some Unwelcome Truths About Gardisil
A case in point is the widespread, premature acceptance of Big Pharma giant Merck & Company's genetically-engineered, human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine, Gardisil, a vaccine blockbuster that has been on the market since 2006.
That multibillion dollar/year vaccine is advertised to (theoretically) prevent cancer of the cervix (which normally takes 20 - 30 years to develop, and therefore the alleged protection against cancer has NOT YET BEEN PROVEN - because the FDA allowed the vaccine to be fast-tracked!). Gardisil costs patients $130 - $150 for each of the three recommended shots (not including office calls). Merck, the obscenely wealthy and powerful Big Pharma corporation recommends that the three shots be given over a 6 month period in order to obtain sufficient immunoglobulin levels to render the patient temporarily resistant to only four strains of HPV or two strains in the case of Glaxo's Cervarix HPV vaccine.
But any protection obtained from Gardisil applies to only four of over a hundred known strains of HPV that aren't in the vaccine, some of which also have a correlation with cervical cancer and genital warts. In addition, because of individual variations in immune response to vaccination (which the vaccine companies admit perplexes them), a number of patients will still not obtain serologic "immunity" to the handful of viral strains even after three inoculations. Furthermore, it is still not known how many booster shots will eventually be recommended over the years before the risk of cervical cancer finally emerges.
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Merck's former Doctor: 'Gardasil is the greatest medical scandal of all time'
I predict that Gardasil will become the greatest medical scandal of all time because at some point in time, the evidence will add up to prove that this vaccine, technical and scientific feat that it may be, has absolutely no effect on cervical cancer and that all the very many adverse effects which destroy lives and even kill, serve no other purpose than to generate profit for the manufacturers. Gardasil is useless and costs a fortune! In addition, decision-makers at all levels are aware of it! Cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, paralysis of the lower limbs, vaccine-induced MS and vaccine-induced encephalitis can be found, whatever the vaccine." - Dr. Bernard Dalbergue
No Guarantee of Vaccine Efficacy and Lots of Risks
Just two years after Gardisil's introduction into the US, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reported the following HPV vaccine-related problems, including 32 deaths (that were more or less equally distributed following either the first, second or third inoculation). The median interval from vaccination to death was 14.5 days.
HPV vaccine-related problems that were reported on the VAERS site included autoimmune hemolytic anemia, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, lymphadenopathy, pulmonary embolus, nausea, pancreatitis, vomiting, asthenia (weakness), chills, death, chronic fatigue, malaise, autoimmune diseases, hypersensitivity reactions (including anaphylactic/anaphylactoid reactions, bronchospasm, and urticaria), arthralgia, myalgia, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, dizziness, Guillain-Barré syndrome, headache, motor neuron disease, paralysis, seizures, syncope (sometimes resulting in falling with injury), transverse myelitis, and deep venous thrombosis.
But contrast what Mayo Clinic's 2016 website says about adverse reactions to HPV vaccines: "may cause soreness at the injection site (the arm), headaches and low-grade fever. Sometimes dizziness or fainting occurs after the injection... Cervarix (GlaxoSmithKline's bivalent HPV vaccine) might also cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea or abdominal pain."
For some reason (corporate interests being served?), Mayo's website fails to mention ANY of the serious adverse effects that were reported on VAERS. The principle of informed consent is being shamefully side-stepped by the Mayo Clinic. Not giving adequate information about the risks and benefits of a treatment makes a health provider liable to a malpractice lawsuit if adverse outcomes occur, notwithstanding the 1986 law.
As of January 2015 VAERS revealed that there had been 220 reported HPV vaccine-related deaths, 1,283 reported disabled patients, 3,945 reported hospital admissions, 12,305 reported admissions to an emergency room, 595 reported abnormal Pap smears, 262 reported cases of cervical dysplasia and 100 reported cases of cervical cancer! It is important to mention that the FDA admits that as few as 1% of adverse reactions to drugs or vaccines are ever reported by patients or physicians, so these numbers are likely to be falsely low. In other words, the real number of adverse events related to HPV could be as much as 100 times higher than the reported 38,217!
Despite their "confidence" in the efficacy of the vaccine, Merck and Glaxo still advise that inoculated patients follow the same schedule of regular Pap smears that unvaccinated women are advised to follow. In other word, there is no guarantee the shots will work.
Of course, ever since the outrageous, pro-Big Pharma, Reagan-era National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, nobody in America can sue vaccine companies (or their physicians or clinics apparently) for deaths, injuries, diseases or disabilities caused by vaccines. There is a separate vaccine-injury court for that, and it has a huge backlog of cases. The program is called The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program of 1988 (VICP).
The VICP was set up two years after the NCVIA Act, but it is not financed by the vaccine industry. Rather, it is paid for entirely by a surcharge that patients have to pay each time they get a vaccination. Many roadblocks are set in place on the path to compensation that prevents justice from being granted to the vaccine injured. Most applicants that appear before that VCIP court are harassed and traumatized by delays, and every recipient who is finally awarded compensation is angry at the stingy level of payment, which never takes into account the lifelong cost of being permanently disabled.
According to the following list of VICP claims (posted at the website of just one law firm), most permanently injured patients (most of them are permanent neurological injuries) are awarded a small fraction of what is needed to sustain life for the rest of their lives.
This list only represents a fraction of the claims that were paid out in 2015. Read it and weep. And then, after also considering the fact that there are 271 new vaccines in the Big Pharma developmental pipeline (to perhaps be mandated by the CDC), reassess what corporate-influenced, for-profit medical institutions are telling us about the safety of America's over-vaccination program.
"American College of Pediatricians Latest to Warn of Gardasil HPV Vaccine Dangers" :
Open Letter to Eric Holder Regarding the Big Pharma's Campaign to Get Every Pre-Adolescent Child in America Vaccinated for HPV
For another view about the dangers of HPV vaccines, as well as a discussion on the debatable science of HPV-related cervical cancer, check out Dr Russell Blaylock's viewpoint.
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