THE VACCINE NATION

by Jon Rappoport

MARCH 10, 2012. Well, it’s actually vaccine world.

Anyway, let’s start here. In my new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, I print many interviews with a retired propaganda operative, Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym). Ellis is the very best authority I’ve ever found on the subject of media deception and how that game actually works. The nuts and bolts. The cultivating of “reliable sources” who lie to reporters night and day. The spreading of false medical information. The strategies for building a long-term propaganda campaign. The subtle and not-so-subtle methods of hypnotizing the public consciousness. It’s PhD stuff you can’t obtain in a university.

In a conversation about so-called epidemics and pandemics, Ellis handed me this nugget:

“Look, there will be one phony epidemic after another. You already know that. You’ve ferreted out the statistics. On the one hand, these non-epidemics are pumped up and promoted to convince people they must get vaccinated. On another level, the promotion is for the purpose of conditioning people to accept any and all medical advice, to drag them into the system.

“But here’s what you’re missing. People like me know, up front, that these scare-promotions could very well fail. Because the public is, unfortunately, smarter than we often give them credit for. They’ll decide not to get vaccinated. But you see, I don’t care about that. Because it’s all about cost-benefit analysis. Do you see? What does it cost to promote an epidemic that isn’t an epidemic? And what are the LONG-TERM benefits of doing that? How many people who REFUSE THE VACCINE are nevertheless tipped and tilted a little bit toward accepting, in general, the authoritarian medical religion? How many people are, essentially, hypnotized JUST A LITTLE BIT in the direction of surrendering their freedom to medical dictates?

“When I was working full-bore in this area, that’s the way I thought about things, because I knew there would be many, many medical propaganda campaigns over the course of many years. And I also knew that, all in all, they would bear fruit. They would wear people down. And that was my goal. To finally, on that last day, get someone to say, ‘All right, I give up. The authorities must be right.’

“That’s what I worked for. That day. That moment. The payoff. You have to pace yourself for the long haul. You have to accept losses and look to the future. Outfits like the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization are trying to get people to accept their falsehoods right now. That’s their job. That’s all they know. People like me didn’t think in those terms.

“Really, a major part of propaganda should involve changing the RHYTHMS of the mind. You want to establish certain HARMONIES in the mind that add up to acceptance…”

I was struck by Ellis’ words, because I had known a few people who were very intelligent and very skeptical, people who had been diagnosed with one thing or another, who were still healthy, who had refused to take a medical drug that was prescribed for them. I had seen them, over a period of years, slowly gravitate toward the Priest in the White Coat, slowly believe published studies I knew to be false, slowly give in and finally take that drug—and THEN THEY HAD GOTTEN SICK AND DIED.

Ellis and I had a number of conversations about THAT, and he told me it was one reason he finally retired from the game. He has a lot to feel guilty about and he knows it. He doesn’t ask for forgiveness and I don’t offer it. Just the way you wouldn’t offer forgiveness to a president who sent men and women to die in a war that wasn’t necessary.

Okay. With that as background, let’s move ahead.

I’ve written many articles about the so-called outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics of the last 25 years—SARS, bird flu, West Nile, Swine Flu… The stats show these illnesses, at best, were duds. They never spread to a fraction of the extent predicted.

And was there ever prediction! Everybody and his cousin got in on the act. Doctors, public health agencies, political leaders, conspiracy researchers. Frankly, to blow my own horn a little, I was one of the people who put this crap to bed. I raked the fear mongers over the coals and showed, from a number of angles, why the predictions were based on no firm evidence at all.

But the mainstream epidemic mongers did accomplish one goal. They took the opportunity to hammer the global population over the head with the idea that WE ALL MUST GET VACCINATED.

In some countries, alas for them, it didn’t work. People caught on the to the basic scam.

However, the PR never stops. In one small example, the governor of Washington state, last year, signed into a law a measure that makes it mandatory for parents (who want to opt out of vaccinating their kids) to first visit a health practitioner, who is now duty bound to provide information about vaccines. This doctor’s appointment has to precede a parent’s decision to claim a religious or philosophical exemption from vaccines for her child.

The medical strategy is to keep up relentless repetition about the need for and value of vaccination—and these fake epidemics provide the opportunity in spades.

The PR campaign also provides citizens, who think they’re quasi-doctors and scientific elitists, with the chance to spout off about vaccination as a duty of every responsible parent. Typical boomer nonsense.

However, it does work, because peer pressure is a strong force—and so parents who are on the outside looking in, and don’t want to vaccinate their kids, are thought of as crazies. Dangerous crazies, who are exposing their own children, and other children in the community, to illness.

Many PR campaigns have this component. They may not succeed in all their goals, but they do define two basic groups—the normals and the nuts.

The normals (android types) look at the nuts and build up resentment toward them. And the nuts feel oppressed.

It’s called a squeeze play.

During the centuries of Roman Church domination, it was called excommunication.

From a purely political angle, it’s quite ingenious, this vaccine promotion…because it pretends that, without all the shots, whole populations will fall under the gun of communicable disease and we will all revert back to darker times.

I’ve spent many hours writing and talking about this false premise—how the decline of infectious disease in the West was the result of non-medical factors: basic sanitation, elimination of overcrowding, the rise of the middle class, and improved nutrition. (See Ivan Illich’s groundbreaking classic, Medical Nemesis.)

The vaccination PR campaign has the objective of making everyone into a Group. One big group. All of humanity. Interdependent. The Global Village. That’s the vector of attack against our freedom to choose, to vaccinate or not:

“No, you can’t do that. You’re part of everyone else, and if you don’t follow our vaccine directives, you’re endangering the collective.”

This is why, for the last 23 years, I’ve been educating people about the fact that medical propaganda and enforcement are the very best method for attaining long-range political control. The propaganda has no apparent partisan slant. It seems to favor no political cause at all. It has a neutral concerned scientific attitude. Along with, of course, the notion that the experts know everything and we, the children, know nothing.

And since we know nothing, we have no right to exercise our freedom to choose. That freedom stops at the door of “science.”

If you believe that one, you’re cooked. They’ve got you.

Look up the road into the future. Use a little common sense and a little imagination, and you’ll be able to see where this is heading. Unless it’s derailed.

I’m betting it’s not a place you want to be.

That’s why freedom matters.

I know, freedom is now a dirty word. Well, that’s the result of a whole other propaganda op.

They’re connected, believe me. The medical cartel and political collectivism. They’re together on an elite chessboard.

Two streams coming together.

Here are the best official statistics I could dig up for the phony epidemics I’ve been talking about. These numbers are global, and cumulative:

SARS: 774 deaths.

WEST NILE: 1,088 deaths

BIRD FLU: 262 deaths

SWINE FLU (H1N1): 25,000 deaths.

Keep in mind that the CDC claims ordinary seasonal flu in the US kills 36,000 people a year, and the World Health Organization states that ordinary seasonal flu kills between 300,000 and 500,000 people a year, globally. NONE of that is called an epidemic.

Quite interesting. Quite instructive. What it tells you is this: the phony epidemics are largely PR and propaganda campaigns. They’re launched and funded and maintained to condition people to Medical Authority. Operant conditioning, mind control, brainwashing.

However, the wild card in all this is the Internet. During the last go-around with Swine Flu, there were enough of us who blew the whistle on the CDC and the World Health Organization to derail the whole operation. Governments and their medical partners were screaming and ranting and lying on every front, and it didn’t work. We exposed their lies, chapter and verse. We demonstrated that the “level-six pandemic” was a fraud.

The non-official media won.

Millions of people started to wake up from their trance.

So now the medical/government honchos don’t know what to do. They want to launch another phony epidemic, and I’m sure they will. But they don’t know how to promote it. They’re gagging on their own lies. They’re searching for newer and better methods of propaganda.

The vaccine manufacturers are furious. They struck a deal some years ago with governments that would allow them to keep making vaccines at a high rate of profit, sell those vaccines to governments with a no-return policy, and avoid huge lawsuits when people who took the vaccines died…they were riding high. But now?

The governments and their propaganda machines didn’t deliver. They fell down on the job. They lost the information war. To us. And now we’re ready to pounce on the next load of insanity and de-certify it. We know where the lies are. We can expose them.

This is a model to emulate in other venues. Other issues can be dealt with in this way.

When Swine Flu was birthed in La Gloria, Mexico, on a huge commercial pig farm in 2009, it was assumed the whole world would eventually line up and dutifully take a jab of vaccine.

Of course, what happened on that pig farm was simple. There were, to use a mainstream-media phrase, feces lagoons everywhere. Pig feces. In the open air. And workers were getting sick. Sure they were getting sick, because that’s precisely the kind of environment where people DO get sick. It isn’t one germ, it’s the whole setting. Live in tons of rotting waste for a long time and you WILL get sick.

And then outside contractors came in and sprayed all sorts of toxic chemicals on the lagoons—and more people got sick. No big surprise there, either.

And then, guess what? The CDC sent a team of researchers down to La Gloria to find out what was making the workers sick. Are you kidding me? These researchers dutifully took samples and they announced to the world, after a short pause, that they had found a unique virus. Wow. A virus that could kill millions of people around the world.

And the game was afoot. The lie that compounded into more lies.

CLEAN UP THE FECES! That should have been the “expert medical advice.” But of course it wasn’t, because who makes money from shoveling dung?

And then, several months later, the World Health Organization, BASED ON REPORTS OF 20, THAT’S 20 SO-CALLED CASES OF SWINE FLU, DECLARED THE “DISEASE” A LEVEL-SIX PANDEMIC…the highest threat level possible.

And in doing so, as documented by Peter Doshi in the British Medical Journal, the World Health Organization CHANGED ITS DEFINITION OF PANDEMIC SO THAT IT NO LONGER REQUIRED SEVERE WIDESPREAD DEATH.

They changed the definition.

But not the level of warning and concern and propaganda.

There is a lot more to this story, and I’ve written a number of articles about in this blog.

Point is, the official lies were taken apart one by one, and by the end, it was a debacle for the Church of Biological Mysticism. They retreated into the woodwork.

Understanding the nuts and bolts of propaganda and the subtleties, too, helps to take the machine apart and leave it on the ground, inoperative, next to the feces lagoons.

JON RAPPOPORT

Jon is the author of the new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, and, with Robert Scott Bell, a 10-hour audio seminar, VACCINES: ARMED AND DANGEROUS.

Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize early in his career, Jon has published articles on medical fraud, and politics in LA Weekly, CBS Healthwatch, Spin, Stern, and other magazines and newspapers in the US and Europe.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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 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

Jon is the author of the new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, and, with Robert Scott Bell, a 10-hour audio seminar, VACCINES: ARMED AND DANGEROUS.

Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize early in his career, Jon has published articles on medical fraud, and politics in LA Weekly, CBS Healthwatch, Spin, Stern, and other magazines and newspapers in the US and Europe.

He is the is author of several books, including The Secret Behind Secret Societies and The Magic Agent (a novel).

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Part 2, Inventing Medical Reality

Placebo washout: Another outrageous medical coverup

by Jon Rappoport

February 24, 2012

NoMoreFakeNews.com

(Note: For part-1 of this article, click here.)

Here is yet another way to do medical studies that guarantee a waterfall of lies will spread out far and wide. Another way to make the studies look good when they aren’t.

Let’s say you went into a school to see if it was a good place for your child to acquire a real education. And you were shown overall performance records of the students on standardized tests, and these records looked quite impressive.

Upon inquiring a little further, though, you came across an interesting point. The head of the school believed that some students just didn’t perform well on tests—and so he had excused them from taking any exams.

Shocked, you said to him, “Your performance records are a sham. They don’t reflect the truth. You’ve stacked the deck.”

And he replied, “Not at all. I’ve merely kept statistics on those pupils who have the ability to take tests. That’s the important population. The others shouldn’t be tested at all. In this venue, they don’t count.”

Keep that analogy in mind as we proceed.

I want to alert you to a staggering medical practice in clinical trials of psychiatric drugs.

It’s called “placebo washout.”

Basically, it works this way. Before a drug company starts to test the effectiveness of a new medicine they want to market, they bring together all the volunteers—and they give them a sugar pill.

They tell them, “We’re going to give you a sugar pill.”

After a ten-day period on the placebo, the researchers weed out the people who improved, got better, feel better. They dump them from the ensuing clinical trial. Bye bye.

They don’t want these people around for the real clinical trial that is to follow.

Of course, they claim there are good reasons for this washout strategy. But the fact is, eliminating these volunteers from the study makes it far more likely that the drug being tested will look good, when it shouldn’t.

First, in case you don’t believe placebo washout is a real and widespread practice, here are two references that unequivocally state it is:

RP Greenberg et al, PMID 857037, PubMed-indexed for Medline;

and JG Rabkin et al, “Baseline Characteristics of 10-day placebo washout responders in antidepressant trials,” PMID.

It’s real. They give everybody a sugar pill, and then they dismiss all those who got better on it.

Then they get down to the actual clinical trial. They divide the remaining volunteers into two groups. Those who will receive the drug, and those who will be given another placebo.

Nobody is told which group they’re going to be in. That’s the whole point. Blinding the study enables researchers to compare the number of people who get better on the drug with those who get better on the placebo.

You see, it’s common knowledge that some people will get better on anything. That’s why they form the two groups. They have to prove (to the FDA) the drug is performing better than the sugar pill.

General estimates vary on what percentage of people get better on placebos. 35-45%, some researchers say, is a rule of thumb. Sometimes the % is higher.

But wait! The researchers ALREADY kicked out the people who got better on the sugar pill during the 10-day preliminary washout!

What’s going on here?

Well, in the actual clinical trial, where half the people get the placebo and half get the medicine, some people who get the placebo—armed with the hope that they might be getting the medicine—will feel better, even though they’re only swallowing sugar pills.

And the researchers must show that more people who are getting the drug are feeling better than those who are getting the placebo.

That’s the whole reason for this type of clinical trial.

“See, 47 people who took the drug feel better. And only 22 people who took the sugar pill feel better. Therefore, the drug really works.”

Sure it works. Because you already kicked out all the people who felt better on a placebo in the washout phase.

In effect, you did a screening. You “cut out the competition.”

It’s like saying, “We have a great runner on our team. His times in the 100-meter dash are exceptional…there’s only one thing. In track meets, we insist he run only 80 meters and you have to imagine it’s 100.”

The FDA, which approves all drugs for public use, knows all about the placebo washout con job. Researchers know this. Shrinks know this. Drug companies know this. Even some medical reporters know this.

And yet, the practice goes on.

Placebo washout is on the order of saying, “Yes, we tested the new plane and it performs magnificently. Of course, we didn’t put it into the air. We rolled it across the runway.”

If there are any psychiatrists out there who are reading this, any researchers who want to defend placebo washout, I suggest we set up a debate with Dr. Peter Breggin, psychiatrist and author. But I warn you. Buckle up. It’ll be a bumpy ride.

Placebo washout. Rigging the game. Stacking the deck. The bigger the lie and the more obvious it is, the harder it is to believe that’s what’s you’re looking at. Until you LOOK.

In my 30 years as a reporter, I’ve come across maybe 100 scandals that could cause a significant sector of the medical cartel to burst into flames and blow away in the wind. This is one of those.

Of course, media, government, and drug corporations make sure such a thing never happens. And when I say media, I’m including publications you’d think would love to watch a really good fire. Turns out they have no stomach for it.

NOTE: In case you’re still a little shaky on this scam, let me lay it out this way:

A drug company has a new drug, Gx, for depression. It’s not on the market yet. For that they need FDA approval, and the approval rests on the results of a clinical trial the company is going to launch.

The company signs up 500 volunteers, all of whom meet mainstream criteria for a diagnosis of clinical depression.

The company brings together the 500 volunteers and administers them a sugar pill (placebo) for 10 days. Everybody knows it’s a sugar pill.

After 10 days, the company discovers which of the 500 people responded well to the pill: placebo effect. Let’s say 80 people did. They feel better. Boom. They’re dumped from further consideration. They’re gone.

Why? Because chances are very good that, were they allowed on to the next phase, those among them who ended up with the sugar pill would have said, “Wow, I feel better. I feel less depressed.”

And THAT means the people who were given the actual drug, Gx, would be “up against stiffer competition” from the group who took the placebo.

After those 80 people were booted from the placebo washout phase, with 420 volunteers left, they were divided into 2 groups of 210 each, and then 210 got the drug, Gx, and 210 got a sugar pill. None of the volunteers knows what they’re getting. This phase of the trial goes on for 6 weeks. At the end of that period, the study is “unblinded,” and everyone knows who got which pill. Now, among the placebo group of 210, it turns out that 60 showed significant improvement, and among the group of 210 who got Gx, 85 showed improvement.

The researchers conclude, “Those on Gx performed significantly better than those on placebo. This drug is good.”

But had those original 80, who were kicked to the side of the road after the placebo washout phase, been included in this later phase, the conclusions of the researchers could have turned out quite badly for the drug and the drug company. Gx could have performed no better than the sugar pill. It could have done worse.

And this is called SCIENCE.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com.

Inventing Medical Reality

by Jon Rappoport

February 20, 2012

NoMoreFakeNews.com

(Note: For part-2 of this article, click here.)

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” —Marcia Angell, MD

“The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” —George Burns

I’ve been asked to reprint this piece. And in light of my recent release of THE MATRIX REVEALED, the information in this piece takes on special meaning. The faking of medical reality is, at bottom, an operation designed to bolster the power of the medical cartel, one of the most important forces on the planet.

What do doctors rely on? What do medical schools rely on? What do medical journals and mainstream medical reporters and drug companies and the FDA rely on?

The sanctity of published clinical trials of drugs. These trials determine whether the drugs are safe and effective. The drugs are tested on human volunteers. The results are tabulated. The trial is described in a paper that is printed by a medical journal.

This is science. This is rationality. This is the rock. Without these studies, the whole field of medical research would fall apart in utter chaos.

Upon this rock, and hence through media, the public becomes aware of the latest breakthrough, the newest medicine. Through doctors in their offices, the public finds out what drugs they should take—and their doctors know because their doctors have read the published reports in the medical journals, the reports that describe the clinical trials. Or if the doctors haven’t actually read the reports, they’ve been told about them.

It all goes back to this rock.

And when mainstream advocates attack so-called alternative or natural health, they tend to mention that their own sacred profession is based on real science, on studies, on clinical trials.

One doctor told me, “The clinical trials and published studies are what keep us from going back to the Stone Age.”

So now let me quote a recent article in the NY Review of Books (May 12, 2011) by Helen Epstein, “Flu Warning: Beware the Drug Companies.”

“Six years ago, John Ioannidis, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, found that nearly half of published articles in scientific journals contained findings that were false, in the sense that independent researchers couldn’t replicate them. The problem is particularly widespread in medical research, where peer-reviewed articles in medical journals can be crucial in influencing multimillion- and sometimes multibillion-dollar spending decisions. It would be surprising if conflicts of interest did not sometimes compromise editorial neutrality, and in the case of medical research, the sources of bias are obvious. Most medical journals receive half or more of their income from pharmaceutical company advertising and reprint orders, and dozens of others [journals] are owned by companies like Wolters Kluwer, a medical publisher that also provides marketing services to the pharmaceutical industry.”

Here’s another quote from the same article:

“The FDA also relies increasingly upon fees and other payments from the pharmaceutical companies whose products the agency is supposed to regulate. This could contribute to the growing number of scandals in which the dangers of widely prescribed drugs have been discovered too late. Last year, GlaxoSmithKline’s diabetes drug Avandia was linked to thousands of heart attacks, and earlier in the decade, the company’s antidepressant Paxil was discovered to exacerbate the risk of suicide in young people. Merck’s painkiller Vioxx was also linked to thousands of heart disease deaths. In each case, the scientific literature gave little hint of these dangers. The companies have agreed to pay settlements in class action lawsuits amounting to far less than the profits the drugs earned on the market. These precedents could be creating incentives for reduced vigilance concerning the side effects of prescription drugs in general.”

Also from the NY Review of Books, here are two quotes from Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, perhaps the most prestigious medical journal in the world. (“Drug Companies and Doctors: A Story of Corruption”)

“Consider the clinical trials by which drugs are tested in human subjects. Before a new drug can enter the market, its manufacturer must sponsor clinical trials to show the Food and Drug Administration that the drug is safe and effective, usually as compared with a placebo or dummy pill. The results of all the trials (there may be many) are submitted to the FDA, and if one or two trials are positive—that is, they show effectiveness without serious risk—the drug is usually approved, even if all the other trials are negative.”

Here is another Angell statement:

“In view of this control and the conflicts of interest that permeate the enterprise, it is not surprising that [drug] industry-sponsored trials published in medical journals consistently favor sponsors’ drugs—largely because negative results are not published, positive results are repeated in slightly different forms, and a positive spin is put on even negative results. A review of seventy-four clinical trials of antidepressants, for example, found that thirty-seven of thirty-eight positive studies were published. But of the thirty-six negative studies, thirty-three were either not published or published in a form that conveyed a positive outcome.”

It turns out that the source of the informational pipeline that feeds the entire perception of pharmaceutical medicine is a rank fraud.

It would be on the order of an intelligence agency discovering that the majority of its operatives were actually working for the other side.

And then continuing on with business as usual.

Sometimes the body is dead even though it keeps on walking. It can smile and nod and perform basic functions—a zombie—but it is doing so only because certain implacable criminals back it up and give it a machine-like force.

“We have the clinical trials of studies on drugs and they are published in top-rank journals. We are the epitome of science.”

Yes, false science. Riddled from top to bottom with lies.

Perhaps this will help the next time a friend, pretending he actually knows anything, tells you pharmaceutical medicine is a resounding success.

If you need more, cite Dr. Barbara Starfield’s famous study, “Is US health really the best in the world?” Journal of the American Medical Association, July 26, 2000. Starfield concludes that 225,000 people are killed by the medical system in the US every year—106,000 by FDA-approved medicines. That latter figure would work out to over a MILLION deaths per decade.

A final note: The august editors of medical journals have a game they can play. Suppose a drug company has just finished writing up the results of a clinical drug trial and has submitted the piece to a journal for publication. The editor knows the company carried out a half-dozen other such trials on the same drug…and they didn’t look good. The drug caused wild fluctuations in blood pressure and blood sugar. There were heart attacks. Strokes. But this ONE study, the one submitted for publication, looks very positive. The editor knows if he prints it and forgets about “ethics,” the drug company will order re-prints of the piece from him and distribute them to doctors all over the world, and to reporters, professors, government officials. The drug company will order and pay for so many re-prints, the medical journal can make $700,000 from publishing THAT ONE STUDY. Let’s see. In one hand, the editor sees: I won’t publish it=no money. In the other hand, he sees: I’ll publish it=$700,000. What to do?

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com.