http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DevelopmentApprovalProcess/DevelopmentResources/DrugInteractionsLabeling/ucm114848.htm
Why Learn about Adverse Drug Reactions (ADR)?
Institute of Medicine, National Academy Press, 2000
Lazarou J et al. JAMA 1998;279(15):1200–1205
Gurwitz JH et al. Am J Med 2000;109(2):87–94
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Over 2 MILLION serious ADRs yearly
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100,000 DEATHS yearly
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ADRs 4th leading cause of death ahead of pulmonary disease, diabetes, AIDS, pneumonia, accidents and automobile deaths
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Ambulatory patients ADR rate—unknown
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Nursing home patients ADR rate— 350,000 yearly
ANATOMY OF A CONSPIRACY
ANATOMY OF A CONSPIRACY
MEDICAL MURDER IN THE MATRIX
MEDICALLY CAUSED DEATH IN AMERICA: AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH DR. BARBARA STARFIELD
by Jon Rappoport
March 8, 2012
Once in a while, I insert a plug for myself in an article. The purpose of this is to sell my products at www.nomorefakenews.com. Since the year 2001, I’ve probably written as many articles as anyone on the internet. They’re all free. So visit my store. Look over the seminars and consider buying one of them. Especially consider THE MATRIX REVEALED. End of plug.
I rerun this Dr. Barbara Starfield article — wherein I show you the email interview I did with Dr. Starfield in December 2009 — regarding her paper published in JAMA in July 2000 entitled Is US health really the best in the world?, just to push the wheel another turn.
The Starfield paper can be downloaded freely (as a .pdf) from here (via http://www.drug-education.info via en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Starfield). The paper is fully cited as Starfield B. Is US health really the best in the world?. JAMA. 2000; 284(4):483-4. Dr. Barbara Starfield’s wiki page is here.
Each time I do this, I try to write a new introduction. Here is one…
The late Dr. Barbara Starfield exposed, in a prestigious mainstream medical journal, the horrific extent of medically caused death in America.
Since the July 26, 2000, publication of her review, “Is US health really the best in the world?”, there has been virtually no mainstream criticism of her findings.
And press coverage has been minimal. Articles did appear in 2000-2001, but then the issue itself vanished. So we have press silence, which is necessary and invaluable in any conspiracy.
We also have silence from the thousands of medical personnel who work as doctors, nurses, bureaucrats, teachers in medical schools, researchers and executives in pharmaceutical companies. And no one at the FDA has spoken up.
“Well, this couldn’t be a conspiracy because too many people would have to be in on it.”
This is what we often hear when someone utters the word “conspiracy.” But you see, it happened here. And it happened here because, in part, the silent ones are trained not to question their education and the tons of propaganda issued by their bosses and by the so-called experts.
In other words, they are true believers. They aren’t attending meetings in rooms where they pledge secrecy and collaborate. They go along to get along. They keep their doubts to themselves to protect their jobs. They support the structure. They have faith in the efficacy and safety of modern medicine, because they been told what to think and what sources of evidence to accept.
If you put a black coat on a table and told them to look at it, they would say it was white.
At another level, we have the managers and supervisors and researchers and executives of drug companies. They know, of course, that any indictment of the safety of their drugs would threaten their jobs. They choose to believe their drugs are safe. They choose to believe all is well. They wear blinders. They trust the PR their own companies issue about the wonders of the drugs they sell.
And they are walled off from thinking about the dangers of drugs manufactured by other companies. They don’t look (or care to look) at the big picture.
Teachers in medical schools, which, like major media, are heavily financed by pharma money, ignore negative information about drugs. They pretend it doesn’t really exist. They pretend there are occasional scandals in an otherwise calm sea of progress and research.
At the drug companies, you of course have the outright liars and cheaters. They bury clinical trials of drugs that show the drugs are dangerous. They rationalize their actions in many ways. For example: “Well, you can always put together a study which will show a drug has negative effects. It happens. But if you do another study on the same drug, you could very well get a positive outcome. It’s unpredictable. We’re simply putting our best foot forward. The whole area of testing drugs on humans is fraught with with incontrollable variables…”
You add up all these factors and all these people working at different levels in the medical complex—including the doctors who write the prescriptions, who are trained to believe that any drug certified as safe by the FDA is really safe—and you have a de facto conspiracy.
And as Dr. Starfield pointed out in our interview, lobbyists in Washington and pharma money exert a powerful influence on elected and appointed government officials. Therefore, no Congressional investigations into drug safety and harm. No prosecutions. In fact, drug companies are now required to pay the FDA fees to finance that agency’s work in approving or denying approval to new drugs these companies want to market for public use. In other words, the drug companies are paying clients of the FDA.
That leaves only the question of intent. The intent to do harm.
A little common sense helps here. If I and other reporters can discover the true extent of the devastation caused by pharmaceutical drugs, then certainly highly placed medical bureaucrats and executives of drug companies are aware of the same data.
And among those people, and particularly among those who actually finance and own drug companies, there are individuals who consciously set out to achieve the results that are beyond debate: widespread debilitation, destruction, death. Or, alternatively, are quite willing to stand by and witness genocidal levels of “negligent homicide.”
Why do I say this? Because, to begin with, such people, knowing the overall effects of the drugs, are in a position to stop the carnage. But they don’t.
And then there is the circumstantial evidence of history. At the outbreak of World World 2, the most powerful pharmaceutical-chemical company in the world was IG Farben, the Nazi behemoth that actually put Hitler over the top in Germany and ensured he would be the dictator of the nation.
Farben established the pharmaceutical torture chamber along side the Auschwitz concentration camp, and paid to have prisoners brought to their lab for grotesque “medical experiments” on a regular basis.
Farben was composed of German companies, among which were Bayer, Hoescht, and BASF. At the close of the War, Farben executives were put on trial at Nuremberg. Among them, Fritz ter Meer, a high-ranking scientist-executive in Farben’s ranks.
Convicted of plunder and mass slavery, ter Meer was found guilty and sentenced to a mere seven years in prison. His sentence was commuted after four years. In 1954, he emerged as a member of the managing board of Bayer, which by then was running on high profits.
According to the Dr. Rath Foundation (which will offer immense amounts of information about Farben to the serious reader), ter Meer also became one of the architects of the Codex Alimentarius, that powerful organization dedicated to destroying the nutritional-supplement industry and the widespread benefits it provides.
I suggest several books: The Devil’s Chemists (Josiah E Du Bois); The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben (Joseph Borkin); Thy Will Be Done (Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett).
The last book is an immense exploration of Nelson Rockefeller’s quest to obtain and exploit natural resources in the South American Amazon region. This multi-faceted campaign, which involved a large missionary organization and several governments, resulted in the genocide of indigenous peoples.
Rockefeller-family interests of course include oil, pharmaceuticals, and the entire direction and paradigm of modern medical practice. The family’s Standard Oil company was a major partner with Farben for years.
Circumstantial evidence? Yes. But a great deal of future investigation is suggested here.
And now, reprinted, my interview with Dr. Barbara Starfield.
MEDICALLY CAUSED DEATH IN AMERICA
An Exclusive Interview With Dr. Barbara Starfield
by Jon Rappoport
The American health system, like clockwork, causes a mind-boggling number of deaths every year.
The figures have been known for a decade. The story was covered briefly when a landmark study surfaced, and then it sank like a stone.
The truth was inconvenient for many interests. That has not changed.
On July 26, 2000, the US medical community received a titanic shock to the system, when one of its most respected public-health experts, Dr. Barbara Starfield, revealed her findings on health care in America. Starfield was, and still is, associated with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. [Note: This interview was conducted in 2009. Dr. Starfield died in June, 2011.]
The Starfield study, “Is US health really the best in the world?”, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, came to the following conclusions:
Every year in the US there are:
12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries;
7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals;
20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals;
80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals;
106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.
The total of medically-caused deaths in the US every year is 225,000.
This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer.
The Starfield study is the most disturbing revelation about modern health care in America ever published. The credentials of its author and the journal in which it appeared are, within the highest medical circles, impeccable.
On the heels of Starfield’s astonishing findings, media reporting was perfunctory, and it soon dwindled. No major newspaper or television network mounted an ongoing “Medicalgate” investigation. Neither the US Department of Justice nor federal health agencies undertook prolonged remedial action.
All in all, those parties who could have taken effective steps to correct this situation preferred to ignore it.
I interviewed Dr. Starfield by email (December 6-7, 2009). This is an edited version of the interview.
Q: In the medical research community, have your medically-caused mortality statistics been debated, or have these figures been accepted, albeit with some degree of shame?
A: The findings have been accepted by those who study them. There has been only one detractor, a former medical school dean, who has received a lot of attention for claiming that the US health system is the best there is and we need more of it. He has a vested interest in medical schools and teaching hospitals (they are his constituency).
Q: Have health agencies of the federal government consulted with you on ways to mitigate the effects of the US medical system?
A: NO.
Q: Are you aware of any systematic efforts, since your 2000 JAMA study was published, to remedy the main categories of medically caused deaths in the US?
A: No systematic efforts; however, there have been a lot of studies. Most of them indicate higher rates [of death] than I calculated.
Q: Can you offer an opinion about how the FDA can be so mortally wrong about so many drugs?
A: Yes, it cannot divest itself from vested interests. [There is] a large literature about this, mostly unrecognized by the people because the industry-supported media give it no attention.
Q: Did your 2000 JAMA study sail through peer review, or was there some opposition to publishing it?
A: It was rejected by the first journal that I sent it to, on the grounds that ‘it would not be interesting to readers’!
Q: Would it be correct to say that, when your JAMA study was published in 2000, it caused a momentary stir and was thereafter ignored by the medical community and by pharmaceutical companies?
A: Are you sure it was a momentary stir? I still get at least one email a day asking for a reprint—ten years later! The problem is that its message is obscured by those that do not want any change in the US health care system.
Q: Since the FDA approves every medical drug given to the American people, and certifies it as safe and effective, how can that agency remain calm about the fact that these medicines are causing 106,000 deaths per year?
A: Even though there will always be adverse events that cannot be anticipated, the fact is that more and more unsafe drugs are being approved for use. Many people attribute that to the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is (for the past ten years or so) required to pay the FDA for [product] reviews—which puts the FDA into an untenable position of working for the industry it is regulating. There is a large literature on this.
Q: Aren’t your 2000 findings a severe indictment of the FDA and its standard practices?
A: They are an indictment of the US health care industry: insurance companies, specialty and disease-oriented medical academia, the pharmaceutical and device manufacturing industries, all of which contribute heavily to re-election campaigns of members of Congress. The problem is that we do not have a government that is free of influence of vested interests. Alas, [it] is a general problem of our society—which clearly unbalances democracy.
Q: What was your personal reaction when you reached the conclusion that the US medical system was the third leading cause of death in the US?
A: I had previously done studies on international comparisons and knew that there were serious deficits in the US health care system, most notably in lack of universal coverage and a very poor primary care infrastructure. So I wasn’t surprised.
Q: Do the 106,000 deaths from medical drugs only involve drugs prescribed to patients in hospitals, or does this statistic also cover people prescribed drugs who are not in-patients in hospitals?
A: I tried to include everything in my estimates. Since the commentary was written, many more dangerous drugs have been added to the marketplace.
INTERVIEWER COMMENTS:
This interview with Dr. Starfield reveals that, even when an author has unassailable credentials within the medical-research establishment, the findings can result in no changes made to the system.
Yes, many persons and organizations within the medical system contribute to the annual death totals of patients, and media silence and public ignorance are certainly major factors, but the FDA is the assigned gatekeeper, when it comes to the safety of medical drugs. The buck stops there. If those drugs the FDA is certifying as safe are killing, like clockwork, 106,000 people a year, the Agency must be held accountable. The American people must understand that.
As for the other 119,000 people killed every year as a result of hospital treatment, this horror has to be laid at the doors of those institutions. Further, to the degree that hospitals are regulated and financed by state and federal governments, the relevant health agencies assume culpability.
It is astounding, as well, that the US Department of Justice has failed to weigh in on Starfield’s findings. If 225,000 medically caused deaths per year is not a crime by the Dept. of Justice’s standards, then what is?
To my knowledge, not one person in America has been fired from a job or even censured as result of these medically caused deaths.
The pharmaceutical giants stand back and carve up the populace into “promising markets.” They seek new disease labels and new profits from more and more toxic drugs. They do whatever they can—legally or illegally—to influence doctors in their prescribing habits. Some drug studies which cast new medicines in a negative light are buried. FDA panels are filled with doctors who have drug-company ties. Legislators are incessantly lobbied and supported with pharma campaign monies.
Nutrition, the cornerstone of good health, is ignored or devalued by most physicians. The FDA continues to attack nutritional supplements, even though the overall safety record of these nutrients is excellent, whereas, once again, the medical drugs the FDA certifies as safe are killing 106,000 Americans per year.
If you would care to add up the figures: FDA certified drugs are killing A MILLION people per decade.
No prosecutions? No federal remedy? No mainstream coverage of the biggest ongoing scandal in the nation?
Physicians are trained to pay exclusive homage to peer-reviewed published drug studies. These doctors unfailingly ignore the fact that, if medical drugs are killing a million Americans per decade, the studies on which those drugs are based must be fraudulent. In other words, the whole literature is suspect, unreliable, impenetrable, criminal.
© 2012 Jon Rappoport – All Rights Reserved http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/anatomy-of-a-conspiracy/
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