How Big Pharma Weaves Its Web
I never set out to be an advocate. I wasn’t a doctor, scientist, or policy expert. I was just a regular person who, like so many, blindly trusted that our healthcare system was designed to protect us.
But life has a way of pulling us into the arena when we least expect it.
After the tragic and unexpected loss of my husband Woody to the antidepressant Zoloft he was prescribed for insomnia, I was thrust into a world I never imagined—one where medicine wasn’t solely about healing, but deeply entangled in a system that prioritizes profit over safety, buries harms, and keeps the public in the dark.
For over two decades, I’ve had a front-row seat to how this system truly operates—not the illusion of rigorous oversight we see in medical journals or glossy pharmaceutical ads, but the reality of how industry influence is woven into every stage.
I’ve met with regulators, testified before the FDA and Congress, filed a wrongful death and failure-to-warn lawsuit against Pfizer, and earned a seat on the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee as a consumer representative.
I’ve also spoken at and participated in global conferences like Selling Sickness, Too Much Medicine, and the Harms in Medicine meeting in Erice, Italy—where some of the world’s leading experts acknowledge what few in mainstream medicine dare to say:
Our healthcare system isn’t about health—it’s about business.
And in this business, harm isn’t an accident. It’s built into the system.
The more I uncovered, the more I realized:
We aren’t just patients. We are customers.
And we are all trapped in Big Pharma’s spiderweb of influence.
The Spiderweb of Influence
The more I learned, the more I saw just how deeply embedded the pharmaceutical industry is—not just in drug development and marketing but in every corner of our healthcare system.
That’s why I created the Big Pharma Spider Web of Influence—to visually map out how the system is designed not to prioritize health but to sell sickness while minimizing, downplaying, or outright hiding harms.
From clinical trial design to regulatory approval, from direct-to-consumer advertising to medical education, from controlling medical journals to silencing dissenting voices, the industry has built an intricate and self-reinforcing web—one that traps doctors, patients, and even regulators in a cycle of pharmaceutical dependence.
How the Web Works
- Clinical trials are often designed, funded, and controlled by the very companies that stand to profit. They manipulate data to exaggerate benefits and obscure risks, ensuring that negative results are buried, spun, or never published at all.
- Regulatory agencies like the FDA are deeply entangled with the industry they’re supposed to oversee. More than 50% of the FDA’s budget comes from industry-paid user fees, and a revolving door ensures that many key decision-makers come from—and later return to—pharmaceutical companies.
- Medical journals depend on pharmaceutical funding through advertising, reprint sales, and industry-sponsored studies—severely limiting independent scrutiny of drug safety. Many studies are ghostwritten or crafted by paid “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) who serve as pharma’s trusted messengers.
- Doctors receive education through industry-funded programs, learning “best practices” based on treatment guidelines crafted by the very system that profits from overprescription.
- Patient advocacy groups, once independent grassroots organizations, have been co-opted by industry money, ensuring that the loudest voices often serve pharma’s interests rather than patients’ needs. I call them “astroturf” patient groups—they look like real grassroots organizations, but they’re anything but.
- Screenings and guidelines continuously expand the definitions of disease, turning more people into lifelong customers.
This isn’t about one bad actor or isolated corruption—it’s a systemic issue. The entire structure is designed to push more drugs onto the market, medicalize normal human experiences, and only acknowledge harm when it becomes too big to ignore.
It’s a brilliant business model—but a catastrophic public health strategy.
“To Sell to Everyone:” The Business Model of Medicine
If this sounds like a conspiracy, consider the bold admission made by Henry Gadsden, former CEO of Merck, in a 1976 interview with Fortune Magazine:
“The problem we have had is limiting the potential of drugs to sick people. We could be more like Wrigley’s Gum…it has long been my dream to make drugs for healthy people. To sell to everyone.”
– Former Merck CEO Henry Gadsden
Let that sink in.
This wasn’t about curing disease—it was about expanding markets. Gadsden’s vision wasn’t just to treat illness, but to medicalize everyday life—creating a cradle-to-grave model where every person, healthy or sick, became a customer for life. Just like selling a variety of gum—something for everyone. Juicy Fruit, Big Red, Doublemint, Spearmint, and so on.
And that’s exactly what happened.
Today, we live in a system where:
- Everyday emotions—sadness, worry, shyness—are rebranded as medical conditions requiring treatment.
- Preventive medicine often means lifelong prescriptions, not lifestyle changes.
- Drugs are marketed to the “worried well”, turning normal human experiences into diagnoses.
This isn’t just theory—it’s well documented. In Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients, Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels expose how pharmaceutical companies create diseases, expand diagnostic criteria, and convince the public that normal life experiences require medical intervention.
The goal?
Make medication the default—not the last resort.
Harms Are Always an Afterthought
Harms from medication are not rare, nor are they unexpected.
But in this system, they are treated as acceptable collateral damage—something to be dealt with only after the damage is done, after lives are lost or forever changed.
I’ve sat in FDA Advisory Committee meetings, reviewing new drug applications, and have seen firsthand how safety concerns are often dismissed in favor of “innovation” or “unmet medical need.”
I’ve heard industry representatives and advisory committee members argue that safety signals can be addressed post-market, meaning after a drug is already in circulation and causing harm or a required REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies) program upon approval.
But by the time post-market safety issues are acknowledged, it’s often too late.
We’ve seen this play out over and over:
- Opioids—marketed as “non-addictive” and pushed aggressively onto patients, leading to an epidemic of addiction and death.
- SSRIs and antidepressants—long linked to increased risks of suicide and violence, particularly in young people, yet downplayed or dismissed for decades. Other hidden harms include withdrawal syndromes and Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD), conditions that many patients were never warned about.
- Antipsychotics—widely prescribed for off-label use, leading to severe metabolic and neurological side effects.
- Covid-19 vaccines—an experimental mRNA platform rushed to market, mandated, and imposed on society despite limited long-term safety data and growing concerns over harms.
Every time, the pattern is the same:
The industry sells the benefits while downplaying the risks—until those risks become too big to ignore.
By then, the drug is a blockbuster, billions have been made, and the system moves on to the next new “breakthrough.”
More Than Degrees: The Truth of Lived Experience
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in this fight is that real-world experience matters just as much as credentials.
Over the years, I’ve been invited to speak at medical schools, PhD programs, and universities, thanks to brave academics willing to challenge the narrative. I share my journey as an accidental advocate—someone who didn’t have a medical degree but discovered America’s broken drug system the hard way.
But let’s be honest—the medical world is driven by credentials. Or, as I like to say, the alphabet soup.
At conferences, attendees wear name tags listing their titles—MD, PhD, JD, MPH. It’s a quick way to size someone up, to assess credibility before even speaking. And I’ve seen it happen: people glance at my name tag, see no impressive letters after my name, and walk right by.
Years ago, I was speaking at the Preventing Overdiagnosis Conference and noticed my badge read: Kim Witczak, BA.
I was horrified. Was that really necessary? Did my name tag need to remind everyone that I only had a BA?
Later, I was telling the story to a doctor friend, and he laughed.
“Next time, tell them BA stands for Bad Ass.”
And he was right.
Because real expertise doesn’t always come from an advanced degree—it comes from lived experience, from asking the right questions, from refusing to accept the status quo.
The Counterargument: But Don’t We Need Experts?
Of course, some will argue that only experts with MDs and PhDs should be trusted to shape healthcare policy.
But that assumes that the system they operate in is free from bias, conflicts of interest, or financial incentives.
The reality is that many of those with the most letters after their names are also the ones benefiting from pharma funding—whether through consulting fees, research grants, or advisory roles.
Meanwhile, patients and their families—the ones living with the consequences—are too often ignored.
That needs to change.
Asking Better Questions: Reclaiming Our Power
If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this journey, it’s this: no one is coming to save us. The institutions meant to protect us are too entangled in the web to act with true independence.
My late husband, Woody, used to say: “Follow the money.” And when you do, the truth becomes impossible to ignore. Pharmaceutical profits—not patient well-being—drive the system. That’s why the only way to create real change is through awareness, transparency, and fundamentally shifting how we think about medicine and health.
That starts with asking better questions:
- Who funded this research?
- Does this person or institution have financial ties, intellectual bias, or self-interest that could impact their recommendations?
- Who benefits from this treatment?
- What aren’t we being told?
- What are the long-term consequences of this drug or intervention?
- Are there safer, non-drug alternatives being ignored because they aren’t profitable?
But asking the right questions isn’t enough.
We have to stop outsourcing our health to a system built on financial incentives and guided by corporate interests.
We must demand full transparency, challenge the status quo, and recognize that sometimes the best medicine isn’t a pill but a deeper understanding of what our bodies truly need.
Because once you see the web, you can’t unsee it.
And once you recognize how deeply medicine has been shaped by profit, you’ll realize the most important question isn’t just “What can I take?”—it’s “Who benefits if I do?”
Final Thoughts: Tearing Down the Web
I never wanted to be in this fight, but once you see the web, you can’t unsee it. That’s why I continue to speak out, to challenge the system, and to push for real accountability.
Because the stakes aren’t theoretical. They’re deeply personal.
For me, this fight began over two decades ago with Woody. But for countless others, it begins the moment they or someone they love is caught in the web—trusting a system that was never truly designed to protect them.
It’s time to tear down the web.
And it starts with seeing it for what it really is.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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Author
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Leading global drug safety advocate, Consumer Rep on FDA Advisory Committee, and speaker with over 25 years professional experience in advertising and marketing communications.
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Story at a Glance:
- Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) effectively treats a broad spectrum of conditions, including strokes, pain, tissue injuries, autoimmune inflammation, and cancer.
- DMSO inhibits cancer growth and consistently reverts cancer cells to their normal state.
- DMSO enhances cancer visibility to immune cells, enabling the body to eliminate tumors previously undetected by the immune system.
- DMSO effectively mitigates major challenges in conventional cancer care, such as radiation damage, chemotherapy toxicity, and pain from "incurable" metastatic cancer.
- DMSO markedly boosts the efficacy of many chemotherapy drugs, allowing safer, lower doses to achieve the same results.
- When paired with certain natural therapies, DMSO often produces highly effective cancer treatments, revolutionizing cancer care.
Cancer is one of the most challenging conditions to deal with in medicine, as two seemingly identical cancers can have very different causes. As a result, any standardized (holistic or conventional) protocol will inevitably fail some of the patients it is meant to treat.
Furthermore, since there is so much fear surrounding cancer (e.g., from what the primal fear brings up inside you, from how your social circle reacts to it and from how the medical system uses all of that to push cancer therapies) it is often very difficult to have a clear head about the ordeal or find the right source of advice.
Likewise, since so much money is involved (e.g. 65% of oncologist’s revenues comes from chemotherapy drugs and cancer drugs are by far the most profitable drug market), there is significant pushback (e.g. from medical boards or unhappy relatives) against anyone who attempts alternative cancer therapies making it very difficult to practice unconventional cancer care—particularly since no alternative treatment works all the time.
Note: in a recent article, I highlighted how urologists initially would not touch Lupron (which is now also used as a the puberty blocker) because of how unsafe and ineffective it was, but once they started being paid a lot of money to prescribe it for prostate cancer, it rapidly became their number one drug.
In contrast, while the conventional cancer therapies often have serious issues that make them far worse than any benefit they offer, some conventional cancer therapies are frequently the only available option which can save someone’s life (which has led to me at different times having fights with close friends or relatives either not to do chemotherapy or to get them to start it in cases where I felt it was absolutely necessary).
Given all of this, I presently believe that no “ideal” cancer treatment exists, but if it can be done (e.g., it’s effective for the cancer and feasible to implement), the most ideal to least ideal treatments are as follows:
- Identifying the root cause of a cancer, removing it, and having it quickly and permanently go away on its own (which is sometimes possible).
- Have enough time to rebalance the body so that its terrain no longer supports the cancer and the cancer can fade away on its own (which is often doable but a fairly involved process many have difficulty carrying out).
- Significantly enhance the function of the immune system so that it will eliminate the cancer.
- Find a treatment that is toxic to the cancer but relatively benign to the rest of the body.
- Find a treatment with an acceptable toxicity level and find ways to mitigate its side effects.
- Accept a moderately toxic treatment with significant side effects.
- Focus on living with the cancer rather than curing it and then finding ways to mitigate the symptoms you experience both from it and any existing treatment protocols.
- Use a costly conventional therapy that is unlikely to work and live with all the side effects until your life ends (which in more extreme treatment regimens can be quite severe).
If we take a step back, what’s truly remarkable about DMSO, depending on how it is used, is that it can effectively provide most of the benefits listed above with the least amount of collateral damage (e.g., side-effects, toxicity, etc.).
Dimethyl Sulfoxide (DMSO)
Exactly six months ago, I used this newsletter to bring the public’s attention to DMSO, a simple naturally occurring compound that has a number of immense therapeutic benefits and virtually no toxicity (detailed here). In turn, when it was discovered in the 1960s, it quickly became America’s most desired drug (as it cured many incurable ailments). A lot of the scientific community promptly got behind it and before long, thousands of papers had been published on every conceivable medical application for it. Consider for example this 1980 program 60 Minutes aired on DMSO:
As such, throughout this series, I’ve presented the wealth of evidence that DMSO effectively treats:
Strokes, paralysis, a wide range of neurological disorders (e.g., Down Syndrome and dementia), and many circulatory disorders (e.g., Raynaud’s, varicose veins, hemorrhoids), which I discussed here.
A wide range of tissue injuries, such as sprains, concussions, burns, surgical incisions, and spinal cord injuries (discussed here).
Chronic pain (e.g., from a bad disc, bursitis, arthritis, or complex regional pain syndrome), which I discussed here.
A wide range of autoimmune, protein, and contractile disorders such as scleroderma, amyloidosis, and interstitial cystitis (discussed here).
A variety of head conditions, such as tinnitus, vision loss, dental problems, and sinusitis (discussed here).
A wide range of internal organ diseases such as pancreatitis, infertility, liver cirrhosis, and endometriosis (discussed here).
A wide range of skin conditions such as burns, varicose veins, acne, hair loss, ulcers, skin cancer, and many autoimmune dermatologic diseases (discussed here).
Many challenging infectious conditions, including chronic bacterial infections, herpes, and shingles (discussed here).
In turn, when I published this series (because of both how effective and easily accessible DMSO is) it caught on like wildfire, this publication went from being the ninth to top ranked newsletter in the genre, there was a nationwide DMSO shortage, and I’ve received almost two thousand testimonials from people who benefitted from DMSO (and often had remarkable results—particularly for chronic pain).
That response was quite surprising and in my eyes, a testament not only to how well DMSO works, but more importantly, how effectively DMSO’s story was erased from history (e.g., many long-time enthusiasts of natural health shared that they were blown away they’d never heard of it). This sadly illustrates how effectively the medical industry can bury anything threatening its bottom line (e.g., the FDA—for rather petty reasons—used everything at their disposal to make sure DMSO was forgotten).
In turn, within the DMSO story, I believe one of the least appreciated (or even known) facets of it are the remarkable contributions DMSO makes to the treatment of cancer—which is even more remarkable given that far more research has been done with DMSO and cancer than all the other topics I just listed. Consequently, for months I’ve wanted to publish an article on this (particularly since one incredible natural cancer therapy utilizes DMSO), but simultaneously, it just wasn’t feasible to as there was so much literature to go through.
That’s been weighing on me considerably (e.g. many readers have asked me to prioritize this article over everything else), so over the last three months (and particularly the last three weeks), I shifted my responsibilities to focus on the topic thoroughly. While it took a bit of a toll on me, the article is now done. As such, I greatly hope some of what’s in here can benefit you and I likewise thank each of you who has supported this newsletter and made it possible for me to spend so much time delving into these critical forgotten sides of medicine.
The Forgotten Side of Medicine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. To see how others have benefitted from this newsletter, click here!
Cancer Differentiation
When life begins, the first cell has the potential to turn into anything. Then as it divides, its range of possibilities becomes more finite until each needed type of cell populates its assigned region of the body. This process is known as differentiation, and is a frequent interest in medicine as undifferentiated cells (e.g., stem cells) can replace lost cells by differentiating into them. Cancer is a disease of dedifferentiation where normal cells adopt an ancient survival program, lose their structure, order, and connection to the whole body, and instead voraciously divide through the body and consume it.
As such, an agent that could induce differentiation of cancer cells so they become normal could be immensely helpful in treating cancer. Unfortunately, only one “effective” agent has entered general medical practice, all-trans retinoic acid (a metabolite of vitamin A) for the treatment of promyelocytic leukemia (a relatively rare cancer).
There are now twelve tumor-cell types in the test tube in which DMSO tends to stimulate the tumor cell toward changing into a more normal cell, Dr. Jacob told me. — Morton Walker 1983
Sadly, to quote a 2023 review paper that compiled many studies where DMSO differentiated cancers:
Recently, DMSO has been included in biological cancer treatment and several FDA approved cancer immune therapeutic modalities such as CarT cell therapy and melanoma drug Mekinist (trametinib DMSO). However, besides its recognized biological role as a pharmaceutical solvent and cryoprotectant, there was no mention of DMSO’s possible ability to potentiate therapeutic activity as a component of these cancer treatments.
Note: while there is a general bias in medicine to avoid researching natural cancer therapies, DMSO has been extensively used in cancer research because it effectively facilitates many aspects of it (which had led to the truly curious scenario described above).
This saga began in 1971 when one of the nations top virologists accidentally discovered that if DMSO was given to leukemic cells (specifically erythroblasts—which cause a relatively rare type of cancer), at a 2% concentration, it caused most of them to differentiate back to normal cells (which took up to 5 days), at 3% it stopped their growth, and at 5% it killed them.
Additionally:
•Mice injected with the DMSO-treated cancer cells lived roughly twice as long as those injected with untreated cancer cells (suggesting DMSO made the cancer less aggressive).
•The cancer cells did not evolve resistance to DMSO (although subsequent research sometimes showed a small portion of cancer cells in a tumor were resistant to DMSO1,2). Additionally, for erythroleukemic cells that were resistant to DMSO inducing differentiation, butyrate did induce it (while butyrate and DMSO each antagonize the inducing action of the other).
Eight months later, she published another study that found that within five days, 2% DMSO caused 95% of erythroleukemic cells to differentiate. This was followed by studies that:
•Explored the mechanisms of differentiation, provided detailed descriptions of it, and showed it occurred in a consistent manner.
•Explored how certain steroids blocked (or supported) DMSO’s ability to induce erythroleukemic differentiation.
•Found increasing concentrations of DMSO caused increasing alterations of cancer DNA (which was an initial step in the differentiation process).
• Found the differentiation continued long after DMSO was no longer present and could be irreversible.
•Found the differentiation did not appear to be synchronized with the cell cycle.1,2
Following this, it became generally accepted that DMSO differentiates erythroleukemic cells, and decades of studies corroborated that.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62
Note: DMSO’s ability to differentiate erythroleukemic cells was so well recognized that in 1992, it was selected for a microgravity experiment on the international space station.
Since erythroleukemia is closely related to the more common acute lymphoblastic leukemia (AML), decades of studies also showed DMSO differentiated AML.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95
Additionally, DMSO was also shown to differentiate many other cancers.
Blood Cancers: acute promyelocytic leukemia,1,2 chronic myeloid leukemia,1,2,3 cutaneous erythromyeloleukemia,1 hairy cell leukemia,1 histiocytic lymphoma,1,2,3 non-Hodgkin lymphoma,1 T-cell leukemia,1 T-cell lymphoma1
Organ Cancers: bladder1, brain,1,2,3,4,5,6 breast,1 colon,1 esophageal,1,2 intestinal1,2 kidney,1,2 liver,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 lung,1,2,3,4 prostate,1,2 rectal,1 ovarian,1,2 stomach1, thyroid1
Other Cancers: embryonic carcinoma (into heart cells),1,2,3,4,5,6 fibrosarcoma,1,2 melanoma,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11, nasopharyngeal,1 rhabdomyosarcomas1,2 tumors (in potatoes)1
Collectively, these studies showed:
•DMSO normally differentiated the cancer (it was rare for me to find studies where it did not) and did so in a dose-dependent fashion (e.g., 0.5-2% was often used). At higher concentrations (e.g. 1.5%), those changes were often permanent. However, in some cases, a minority of DMSO resistant cells did form, which then required another differentiating agent.
•Cancer growth, proliferation, and survival in tandem frequently decreased. In parallel, tumor suppressing genes (e.g., P21, PTEN, RB) increased, tumor promoting proteins were suppressed, and the cancer cells were weakened (e.g., with transient DNA strand breaks1,2) or induced into programmed cell death. Conversely, cancer triggers (e.g., C-myc1,2,3, C-myb, nucleolar antigen p145) were suppressed.
•Many metabolic pathways (e.g., JAK–STAT, ERK, NF-kB), histone H2A phosphorylation, and key cellular enzymes were increased during differentiation (e.g., Protein Kinase C,1,2,3 PI 3-kinase, TXA2, and TXB2 synthase, COX-21,2, 5-Lipoxygenase, phospholipase, CYP3A4, cytochrome b5 reductase and drug metabolism, acetylcholinesterase, carbonic anhydrase,1,2 disphosphase, and diaphorase).
•Other proteins and receptors were also increased (e.g., GPI-80, angiotensin II, Desmoplakins and Fibronectin) as were a variety of metabolites and signaling molecules (TNF-α, melanin, diacylglycerol inositol). Intercellular calcium was also increased1,2,3 as was the ion flux in and out of cells (except for potassium), the cellular transport of nucleosides. Finally, there were changes in G-protein signaling, and some cells were sensitive to staphylococcal leukocidin.
•Certain aspects of metabolism decreased (e.g., glucose transport, insulin receptor availability, general protein and transferrin synthesis, diacylglycerol synthesis, glycosaminoglycan synthesis and sulfate incorporation, heme oxygenase-1 activity,1,2) along with a decrease in histone expression and the association of Phosphatidylinositol-Transfer protein with the nucleus.
•Some things increased DMSO’s differentiation (e.g., TNF-α1,2,3, sphinganine, alpha-lipoic-acid, PP2, or suppressing PTEN) while others suppressed it (e.g., asbestos1,2, dexamethasone,1,2 hydrocortisone, hyperthermia, diacylglycerols and phospholipase C, blocking protein kinase C, lithium chloride, Mu IFN-Alpha1). Additionally, low frequency EMFs did not affect it.
Note: other agents also exist that can sometimes induce cell differentiation, but in many cases, DMSO works much better (e.g., oxytocin can turn certain cells into heart cells, but does not fully differentiate them if they are initially only one layer, whereas DMSO does).
•Vitamin D has been repeatedly found to synergistically enhance DMSO’s ability to differentiate AML1,2,3,4 (except in this study) and to commit AML to differentiate into macrophages1,2 while it counteracted DMSO differentiating erythroleukemia.1,2
•Retinoic acid (a vitamin A metabolite) has also shown promise for inducing cancer differentiation, works synergistically with DMSO1,2 and uses a different differentiating pathway than DMSO.1,[2
](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0014482790901554)In addition to these biochemical changes, some other effects of DMSO have been proposed to explain its differentiating activity (e.g., one study proposed that DMSO’s interactions with free radicals allowed it to induce differentiation).
Note: I have strong ethical objections to animal research and it is my sincere hope that since so much of it has already been done that it will not need to be redone to “prove” DMSO works.
Structural Changes
A recent study (which will be discussed later in the article) found that 1% DMSO significantly altered the cytoskeleton of melanoma cells but not normal cells:
DMSO in turn, has been hypothesized to induce differentiation through changing the abnormal cytoskeleton of cancer cells. Other data has also linked DMSO’s differentiating properties to cytoskeletal changes such as:
- An early study found that over four days, DMSO caused a progressive reorganization to melanoma cytoskeletons, which differentiated them and stopped their growth.
- Cytochalasin B disrupts the cytoskeleton and prevents DMSO from differentiating erythroleukemic cells.
- Tumor cells in culture typically grow chaotically, unlike orderly normal cells. Adding 1%–2% DMSO to the culture was found to dramatically reduce this disarray within 3 days, forming organized monolayers resembling noncancerous fibroblasts—a change which may be due to a normalized cytoskeleton.
Note: this study used raman spectroscopy to analyze DMSO induced AML differentiation
DMSO also changes other structural aspects of cancerous cells:
- DMSO was found to shift the cell membrane transition temperature from 33.0° to 36.8° (making it more likely to be in a gel-like state), and this shift appeared to correlate with the differentiation of leukemic cells. A follow-up study found other AML differentiating agents also shared this property.
- A 1969 study found (via electronmicroscopy) that DMSO transformed the thick (gel) quality throughout its cytoplasm and its structures to a homogenous fluid (sol) state. Likewise, in an early study, he noted that DMSO could melt away this fibrous barrier and that many cancer drugs mixed in DMSO (e.g., vinblastine) then cause the structures of cancerous cells to switch to becoming normal (albeit benignly overgrown).
- When erythroleukemia was exposed to DMSO, its cytoplasm became more 0.18 acidic, and its water volume rapidly shrank (12% after 15 minutes and 23% after nine hours).
•DMSO differentiating AML cells significantly decreased their viscosity1,2 and erythroleukemic cells’ negative surface charge and electrophoreic mobility1,2 (attributed to a loss of saliac acid residues).
- To assess if the differentiating effect of DMSO was mediated through changes in the cell membrane, the lipid content of the membranes of two different cancer cell lines was analyzed before and after DMSO exposure. From this, it was determined that DMSO increased the negatively charged phospholipid content and reduced the neutral lipid content (which increases membrane fluidity). Since more external negative charges improve a cell’s zeta potential, and increased membrane fluidity allows more phospholipids to be exposed to the water surrounding a cell, all of this suggests DMSO may enhance the zeta potential of cancer cells (an effect DMSO also has on regular cells).
Note: this study also analyzed the membrane lipid changes resulting from DMSO differentiation.
Collectively, many of these studies touch upon a longstanding observation that the transition to cancer is in part due to the electrical charges and the state of the water within the cells (e.g., it should be in an energy generating liquid crystalline state—something raising the membrane transition temperature promotes), which is a topic I have written more about here.
Note: these changes and cancer formation are also often associated with a loss of cellular energy (due to mitochondrial dysfunction). A few studies have shown that DMSO increases mitochondrial energy production and allows the mitochondria to continue producing energy after their function has been compromised.1,2,3
Polar Solvents
There is also some evidence that DMSO’s anticancer properties are a result of it being a polar solvent as:
•Several research teams have found that polar solvents inhibit the growth of human tumors being grafted onto mice, and some polar compounds can trigger cancer differentiation.
•Polar solvents such as DMSO caused disordered and tightly packed cancer cells to rearrange them themselves into an ordered parallel orientation like that seen in non-cancerous tissues (which was corroborated by a US government report from Sloan-Kettering that also found DMSO changed the surface proteins of cancer cells and caused them to be less tightly packed together and to have a slower growth rate).
•Other polar solvents have been found to induce differentiation (e.g., see this study and this study)
•DMSO’s ability to increase immune recognition of certain cancers may be due to its changing the exposed antigens or receptors on the cell membrane surface.
•Polar solvents allow chemotherapy drugs to penetrate cells they otherwise cannot enter (and likewise to pass through the blood-brain barrier so that otherwise unreachable brain cancers can be exposed to chemotherapy). This is important because often dangerously high doses of the chemotherapy have to be used in these circumstances to ensure some of it can reach the brain.
Pleomorphism
One of the forgotten schools of medicine is that microorganisms can assume different shapes (morphologies) and that particular morphologies can be highly detrimental to health. For example, previous pioneers of forgotten alternative cancer therapies (e.g., Rife and Naessens) believed these hard to detect organisms caused types of cancers, and as I showed in this article, they are linked to many autoimmune conditions.
A 1967 Russian study tested cancer patients for pleomorphic bacteria. While difficult to culture, pleomorphic bacteria were eventually isolated from the blood of some of them, along with being in the blood of some of those who had been around those who had recently died from a prolonged cancer:
There were 59 bleedings in 53 patients because multiple samples had to be obtained from a few patients.
Likewise, 17 tumors were directly sampled, of which 16 yielded cultural specimens, with the negative coming from a granulomatous nodule. Additionally, one tumor had to be sampled twice as the initial specimen did not produce the bacteria. Finally, in some cases, the organisms were found directly within sampled cells.
Note: the morphology of the bacteria is extensively described in the paper, but essentially matches what many other pleomorphic researchers have found over the years.
They tested three different agents on the bacteria: ethambutol (an antibiotic), lysozyme (an enzyme in many mucosal secretions protecting the body from invading organisms), and DMSO. They found that lysozyme did a bit, but DMSO did much more.
They also provided a series of growth curves that were illustrative of the effects of DMSO (one of which I annotated so you can identify what each symbol represents).
Note: when DMSO was added to fresh leukemic blood samples, it completely inhibited the dancing motion of particles free in the blood or attached to the periphery of the crenated red blood cells (another common pleomorphic observation), but did not damage the red blood cells at all.
Given that these microorganisms may induce cancerous changes, DMSO’s ability to eliminate them (as small bacteria without cell walls are the most sensitive to DMSO) could also potentially explain its dedifferentiating properties. Likewise, its ability to eliminate them may explain why DMSO effectively treats so many autoimmune disorders.
Cancer Growth Inhibition
When DMSO differentiated cancer cells, it also frequently observed to slow their growth in cultures or implanted animals (e.g., by 62.6% in ovarian cancer cells after 5 days). In turn, this phenomenon has been observed in various cancers, including AML,1,2,3, breast cancer1 (doing so more effectively than thalidomide), Burkitt’s lymphoma1,2 CML1 colon cancer,1,2 erythroleukemia,1 intestinal cancer,1,2 liver,1,2,3 lung cancer,1,2,3 melanoma,1,2,3,4,5,6 nasopharyngeal,1 potato tumors,1 rectal cancer,1 ovarian cancer,1,2,3 prostate cancer,1,2,3,4 (and to eliminate its resistance to hormone suppression), sarcomas1.
In addition to the changes identified in the previous section, a few others have also been linked to DMSO’s ability to reduce cancer proliferation such as DMSO:
•Reducing c-myc, and ras1,2 by up to 80-90% (genes which are commonly linked to uncontrolled cancer growth), telomerase activity (which cancers need to divide indefinitely), AP-1 (a protein linked to the spread of cancer and a target of anticancer research.
•Upregulating HLJ1 (a tumor suppressing protein1,2,3), transforming mutated p53 (another important tumor suppressor protein) to one which regains functionality, and causing an immortal cell line to stop and synchronize its uncontrolled growth by making it regain contact inhibition and no longer grow when pressed against another cell)
Note: rapamycin enhanced DMSO’s ability to arrest AML’s growth, while dexamethasone inhibited erythroleukemia.
Additionally, when DMSO differentiates cancer cells, it often induces programmed cell death (apoptosis) in them. In turn, DMSO has also been repeatedly shown to augment apoptosis in:
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In differentiated AML cancer cells.1
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EL-4 lymphoma cells (via caspase-9).1
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Histiocytic lymphoma1,2,3,4 (despite their expression of the anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 protein), which was partially attributed to its enhancing mitochondrial membrane depolarization and the activation of a yet unidentified tyrosine kinase.
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Thymic lymphoma by decreasing c-myc expression which then decreased ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) activity.
Note: another drug (an FDA-approved cancer therapy) also decreases ODC activity, inhibiting growth but not triggering apoptosis. -
Cancer like macrophages1 (by reducing their CSF-1R receptor levels).
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Human skin cells (keratinocytes) transformed by the cancer causing virus SV-40 (with 2.5% DMSO) but did not do so for normal keratinocytes.1
Note: one study found Caspase 9, (associated with the intrinsic pathway) showed no significant activation following DMSO, indicating that DMSO induces apoptosis via the extrinsic pathway.
Dose-Dependency
Many studies also show DMSO’s cancer inhibiting properties happen in a dose-dependent fashion. For example:
- DMSO differentiated melanoma cells and inhibited their growth in a dose-dependent manner (e.g., 0.5% DMSO reduced it by 31.4%, while 2.0% reduced it by 88.94%) and if at least 1.5% DMSO was used, it permanently differentiated melanoma and slowed its growth
- In a 2014 study, breast cancer cells were implanted into mice, and then once tumors had grown in the mice, DMSO or saline (NS) were injected into the mice, where DMSO alone was shown to inhibit cancer growth in a dose-dependent manner.
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A 2019 study showed that DMSO decreased the viability of breast and lung cancer cells in a dose-dependent fashion.
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In a 2020 study, researchers found DMSO suppressed the proliferation (up to 69%) of erythroleukemia, AML, liver, and breast cancer (e.g., 5% DMSO downregulated CDK2 and cyclin A). This inhibitory effect was first observed at a 2% DMSO concentration and intensified with increasing doses, reaching a maximum at 10%."
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A 2020 study found 2% (but not 1%) DMSO inhibited the growth of human cancer cells, that this effect increased as the dose was raised to 5-6% and that it also damaged the cancer cells and down regulated CDK2 and cyclin A (both of which are needed for cancer growth).
Note: while DMSO typically causes apoptosis in Burkitt’s lymphoma cells, at a narrow range (1-2%), it suppressed it—something I did not see for any other cancer. Likewise, while a few studies indicated that DMSO increased cancer cells' viability or metastatic potential, almost all of the studies I found showed it had an inhibitory effect. -
A 1967 study repeatedly found that 2% DMSO effectively killed most leukemic white blood cells and that normal (healthy) white blood cells had a much greater tolerance to DMSO, particularly when only exposed to DMSO for a day or less.
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A 2020 study found that DMSO significantly inhibited the proliferation of 4 cancer cell lines and was much more potent than alcohol or methanol.
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Most importantly, a 2021 study found that very low concentrations of DMSO (including the lowest tested, 0.0008%) had significant effects on the biochemical activity of cancer cells, potentially explaining why small doses of DMSO (which spread throughout the body) can affect cancers.
Animal Studies
Many other animal studies also show that DMSO treats cancer in animals:
•A 1989 study of rats with aggressive (implanted) prostate cancers found that 2.5% oral DMSO significantly slowed the cancer’s growth.
•A 1967 study induced breast cancers in mice and found that drinking DMSO caused a small reduction in their rate of occurrence and prevented some of weight loss caused by the cancers.
- A 2008 MRI study evaluated the microvasculature of mice with implanted tumors before and after a week course of DMSO. It found DMSO greatly reduced cancer vascular permeability, which is potentially significant for cancer management as leaky blood vessels can support rapid irregular growth or metastasis and can compress surrounding tissues or cause inflammation and sometimes interfere with the delivery of chemotherapy to those cells.
Note: many holistic schools of medicine have concluded cancers arise from poor blood flow to a tissue or poor lymphatic drainage from it. Given DMSO’s remarkable ability to improve circulation, it is highly possible that this contributes to its ability to prevent cancer. - A 2011 study found that in mice with experimentally induced Dalton’s lymphoma, injected DMSO was shown to regress their tumors and upregulate TNFα and p53 in lymphoma cells, which impaired their metabolic pathways and triggered an apoptotic pathway (whereas normal white blood cells were unaffected).
Additionally, in hamsters, DMSO has been shown to prevent 9,10-dimethyl-1,2-benzanthracene and 3-methylcholanthrene from creating cancers, and two other studies1,2 found that DMSO partially prevented methylcholanthrene from causing skin cancer in mice (particularly malignant cancers).
Note: a 1967 rabbit study found that DMSO does not increase the spread or growth rate of tumor cells implanted into the peritoneal cavity (thereby indicating that topical applications of that manner are safe).
Human Studies
Finally, a few studies have also shown that DMSO alone can significantly improve cancer outcomes:
- A 1992 study conducted by an Iraqi researcher (who’d found DMSO cured a variety of challenging gastrointestinal conditions) conducted a controlled trial of 198 patients who’d had surgery for colon cancer (in the sigmoid) that had spread into the local lymph nodes, and found that the long term administration of oral DMSO after the electrosurgery significantly improved their 5 year survival.
- That researcher also conducted a 1992 controlled trial of 228 patients who’d just had an uneventful surgery to remove two-thirds of their stomachs (due to stomach cancer). Daily oral DMSO significantly increased their survival rates in the 160 patients who could be evaluated at 5 years.
- A 1999 trial of 25 patients found intravesical DMSO treated bladder cancer and that if a one biomarker was then negative following therapy, they were much less likely to have a recurrence.
Immune Activation
Since the body relies upon the immune system to eliminate cancers, many natural and conventional approaches to cancer have tried to support that. Fortunately, while DMSO is highly effective at reducing autoimmunity and inflammation within the body, it does not impair the immune system's response to cancer, and if anything enhances it.
A key reason for this is that DMSO achieves what many conventional cancer immunotherapies aim to do—prevent cancer from evading the immune system, thereby allowing it to be targeted and eliminated.
The earliest application of this was from George Moore, a renowned cancer researcher who had investigated treatments for large oral, genital and rectal HPV-related warts, such as condylomata acuminata (which often required repeated, painful interventions like surgical excision, cautery, or cryotherapy to reduce their size) involving topical dinitrochlorobenzene to solicit a local immune response to the warts. In his 1978 JAMA paper “Condyloma A New Epidemic,” he reported he had successfully treated 22 of 23 patients who had podophyllum resistant warts, while in 1975 he reported to the Lancet::
We have been using dinitrochlorobenzene (D.N.C.B.) for the treatment of cutaneous metastases from various malignancies such as breast melanoma. In such instances penetration of the skin by the antigen is important. The addition of dimethylsulphoxide to D.N.C.B., in a water-soluble base, and the use of an occlusive dressing have been helpful. Caution must be used since some local reactions may be severe especially in the axilla or in skin folds. Solid tumour metastasis can be completely destroyed. The search for and evaluation of antigenic agents for topical immunotherapy must be expanded.
Additionally, an author who corresponded with Moore shared that Moore began treating these warts because he disagreed with the "barbaric treatments" used for them, and that his DMSO D.N.C.B. treatment (which he characterized as a cancer vaccine) was so effective he was rapidly deluged with male patients seeking him out (which he described in language that emphasized the point but is no longer appropriate to put into writing).
Note: as I showed here, topical DMSO can be effective for a variety of skin lesions including warts and cancer.
Much later, a pivotal 2016 study proved it was possible to use DMSO to make a “vaccine against cancer.” It exposed liver cancer cells to 2% DMSO, which temporarily slowed their growth and permanently changed their gene expression. These treated cells were then injected into mice and, unlike untreated cancer cells, did not form tumors. Crucially, the DMSO-treated cells induced an anti-tumor immunity that allowed the mice to completely eliminate untreated liver cancer cells. This treatment also conferred a partial immunity to the mice against certain other cancers, specifically B16-F10 melanoma cells. The study found that DMSO treatment increased the activation of cancer-eliminating immune cells (CD4+, CD8+ T cells, and NK cells). Mice lacking a functional immune system did not respond to this therapy, confirming the importance of the immune response.
Note: given the myriad of issues with the vaccines (e.g., many toxic and autoimmune or microstroke provoking substances typically being added in), I hesitate to use the term vaccine here. However, that does characterize what is happening here (and does not require the toxic substances typically found in vaccines).
In turn, numerous studies have shown that DMSO stops cancer cells from being able to evade the immune system as:
- DMSO increased the differentiation of lung cancer cells and increased the surface expression of H-2K and H-2D antigens at least 100-fold (which aids the immune system in being able to target the cancer). In a follow-up study, the authors showed this H-2 change greatly increased their susceptibility to being eliminated by the immune system (via H-2-restricted immune lysis). Another study found that DMSO increased the expression of H-2 antigens in T-cell lymphoma and increased their sensitivity to immune cells.
•DMSO significantly decreased the metastatic potential of mouse lung cancer cells, which the authors attributed to its increasing the expression of class I antigens (which the immune system uses to target cancerous cells). However, the two other agents that increased class I antigen expression did not reduce mice metastasis
- DMSO increased the ability of the spleen (likely its macrophages) to identify and eliminate cancerous cells.
- DMSO induced surface antigen expression in melanoma cells.
Likewise, DMSO was also shown to increase anticancer immune cells. For example, in a 2014 study, DMSO increased the presence of anti-tumor macrophages and decreased pro-tumor macrophages. In a 1975 study, DMSO potentiated the immune response to specific cellular antigens by increasing T-cell MIF production and possibly also by exposing antigens to T-cells.
Finally, when DMSO differentiated AML cancers into immune cells, those cells were able to mount an effective immune response (which could potentially be helpful in leukemia). Specifically, those cells (which often become neutrophils or macrophages):
- Could effectively mount an immune response (whereas other differentiating agents produced immune cells that did not).
- Were better able to bind carbohydrate antigens (which macrophages need to consume foreign invaders).
•Had a high responsiveness to immune receptors (e.g., TLR2 and TLR4) that trigger an immune response to invading pathogens.
Amyloidosis and Multiple Myeloma
Multiple myeloma (MM) is a type of blood cancer characterized by the uncontrolled growth of malignant plasma cells in the bone marrow, which produce abnormal proteins that can overwhelm the body (which sometimes creates enough issues to need to be removed with plasmapheresis blood filtration).
As I showed in this article, there are over 40 studies demonstrating that DMSO prevents amyloid proteins from clumping together and instead eliminates their deposits from the body (e.g., one study found this after testing 125 Bence Jones proteins)—which represents a massive paradigm shift for this (currently incurable) disease. Since amyloids are seen in 10-15% of cases of MM, case reports have gradually emerged of it helping those MM patients:
- A 1981 case report found (with imaging) that DMSO was an effective treatment for soft tissue MM amyloidosis.
- In a 1987 case report, Japanese researchers used plasma exchange to remove harmful proteins from a patient with Bence-Jones type of MM and one with fulminant hepatitis. It found that DMSO significantly increased the filtration of the unwanted proteins, did not damage the filtration membrane, and caused no side effects (e.g., hemolysis, shock, fever, or liver damage)
- In 1984, a patient with Bence-Jones MM treated their carpal tunnel syndrome (caused by amyloidosis) with a topical DMSO ointment.
- In 2009, an MM patient with pulmonary amyloidosis was successfully treated with DMSO.
- Finally, a 2000 case report discussed using DMSO to cure, rather than just mitigate the symptoms of MM amyloidosis. In a patient with previously undiagnosed MM (which had caused significant issues in the rectal submucosal and lips, along with creating a mass in the submandibular region). He was put on long-term combination chemotherapy (vincristine, doxorubicin, and dexamethasone), IFN-alpha and oral DMSO which resulted in a marked improvement of his amyloidosis symptoms as well as a significant improvement of his MM (e.g., a decrease in the levels of plasma cells in bone marrow and of M-protein and immunoglobulin G in serum).
Cancer Pain
In addition to being potentially lethal, cancer (and cancer treatments) are accompanied by many other debilitating symptoms, one of which is pain—something so severe the general restrictions on opioids are typically lifted for it (e.g., fentanyl is often used to treat advanced cancer pain—but 10-20% of patients their pain is severe enough that even potent opioids can’t address it).
Fortunately, since DMSO has a rather unique mechanism of treating pain, it is often able to treat a wide range of challenging pain conditions nothing else works on (e.g., I’ve now had hundreds of readers share life-changing pain improvements with me from topical DMSO nothing else they’d tried had ever worked on). As such, many over the years have found it provided incredible relief for metastatic cancer pain.
One of the most well known examples was Otis Bowen MD (a popular second term Indiana governor) who “illegally” used topical DMSO to treat his wife’s pain from terminal multiple myeloma and then publicly denounced the FDA’s absurd embargo on it at the AMA’s 1981 national meeting. Remarkably, a few years later, Bowen became Reagan’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Still, even then, with this highly ethical doctor at the helm of the HSS, DMSO was unable to overcome the FDA’s prohibition of it—which helps to highlight the incredible challenge RFK Jr. is now facing (but gradually surmounting).
Likewise, a few studies have shown that DMSO can treat this pain:
- A 1967 study gave two older patients with cancer pain DMSO, one of whom had an excellent response to treatment and one who had a good response.
- A 1967 study found that of 7 patients with metastatic cancer pain, DMSO gave 2 a full remission and 2 a partial remission.
- A 2011 trial gave DMSO and NaHCO₃ to 26 patients with advanced cancers who were experiencing significant pain (even with all the available treatment options). This significantly reduced their pain (to the point that all were able to stop using morphine) and greatly improved their quality of life (e.g., chemotherapy symptoms).
_Note: this paper further discusses DMSO’s ability to treat intractable cancer pain. It highlights that this may be due to DMSO’s ability to address membrane hyper-excitability (e.g., through suppressing NMDA and AMPA induced ion fluxes—which are linked to central pain sensitization and may explain why DMSO effectively treats complex regional pain syndrome)._
Protecting Against Cancer Therapies
One of the primary values of DMSO is its ability to protect cells and tissue from a variety of lethal exposures (e.g., burns, freezing, blood loss, asphyxiation, UV light, and soundwaves) and to greatly accelerate healing from injuries (e.g., sprains or burns).
Since many of the complications from cancer arise from the treatments for it, DMSO hence has value as an adjunctive cancer therapy—particularly since DMSO does not protect cancerous cells from cancer treatments (and rather often makes them more potent). For example:
- One study found that DMSO protected human hematopoietic stem cells from radiation, but did not provide any protection to AML cells.
- Rather than protect them, DMSO triggered cell death in erythroleukemic cells that had been exposed to radiation.
•DMSO caused the AML cells it differentiated to become sensitive to radiation.
Conversely, DMSO has also been shown to protect non-cancerous cells deliberately sensitized to radiation.
_Note: as I showed here, DMSO is also very effective for healing from surgery, and as such can often help the recovery from cancer. For example, in dogs that required a unilateral mastectomy, giving IV DMSO 15 minutes prior to the surgery’s conclusion reduced the post surgical inflammation._
Radiation Therapy
In addition to protecting cells from other sources of injury, as early as 1961, DMSO was also recognized to protect cells and tissues from radiation exposure.
Note: by 1967, it was well recognized that DMSO (even just applied topically to the skin) strongly protected against lethal x-rays and did so in a manner that was much more effective than many other available radioprotective agents.
Since cancer treatment frequently requires radiation therapy (which frequently causes a variety of complications that lack established treatments) and the evidence is quite strong for DMSO’s ability to address those complications (especially if given prior to radiation but also after radiation), I believe this is one of the areas where DMSO provides greatest benefit in the treatment of cancer.
_Note: I have mixed feelings on radiation therapy as while sometimes necessary (particularly if robust alternative treatments are not available), it frequently creates significant side effects (ie. fibrosis of the tissues) that can cause issues for years. I also believe our focus on radiation therapy ultimately resulted from mining magnate James Douglas devising a way to produce cheap radium and then giving a large donation (along with subsequent donations) to America’s premier cancer institute to create a program for developing radiation therapy that spread across the world._
How DMSO Treats Radiation Injuries
Radiation has a variety of mechanisms through which it damages tissue such as:
•Directly breaking chemical bonds (which damages DNA, RNA and proteins) and damaging mitochondrial membranes (which are particularly sensitive to radiation),
•Indirectly creating reactive oxygen species and free radicals (which damage a variety of cellular components).
•Triggering an immune response (e.g., by releasing IL-1, IL-6, TNF-α, and TGF-β), which often leads to chronic inflammation, fibrosis and adhesions.
•Putting cells into senescence (a state of permanent growth arrest).
•Causing normal cells in the vicinity of the affected ones to die as well (e.g., when only 1% of cells are exposed to radiation, approximately 30% of cells will exhibit similar toxic effects from the radiation), a fascinating phenomenon known as the bystander effect which I believe is mediated through mitogenic radiation emissions.
DMSO in turn, counteracts each of these effects. For example, in previous articles, I highlighted the body of evidence that DMSO:
- Treats (and prevents) fibrosis in many different organs.
- Eliminates adhesions.
- Reduces the key inflammatory cytokines (also discussed here).
- Rescues senescent cells trapped in the cell danger response (also discussed here).
- Neutralize free radicals (e.g., through scavenging charged ions and forming protective DMSO radicals), prevent radiation from creating harmful free radicals (also shown in this study) and prevent free radicals (or reactive oxygen species) from damaging DNA. (also shown in this, this, this, and this study).
Note: one study found this protection only occurred for cells in the liquid state (but not frozen ones), while another found DMSO could also protect cells if it was given up to 10 days post irradiation.- To prevent the bystander effect from damaging non-irradiated cells (possibly through preventing the formation of free long lasting free radicals). - Regrow lost hair (a common complication of radiation therapy).
- Reduces chromosome damage from radiation.
- Accelerates the healing of tissues after injuries (e.g. from radiation).
This highlights that DMSO’s protective effect is selective, primarily benefiting healthy tissues while maintaining a reduced impact on cancerous growth.
AML cells differentiated by DMSO were initially more sensitive to radiation, but after 3-5 days (once they had become more differentiated), they became less sensitive to it.
Further studies are warranted to explore this dynamic in greater detail, particularly to determine how DMSO can be strategically applied to balance the protection of healthy tissues and the effective targeting of cancer cells.
Cell Studies
Studies have repeatedly shown that DMSO protects cells (particularly when given prophylactically) from being damaged by (often otherwise fatal) radiation (e.g., DMSO was shown to protect skin cells from dying after exposure to gamma radiation and make hamster cells four times as resistant to radiation).
Note: in one detailed study, when 3% DMSO was given prior to irradiation, the protective effect increased (up to when 15% DMSO was used).
DMSO also:
- Protected the enzymes catalase and lactic acid dehydrogenase from being inactivated by x-rays (with DMSO concentrations as low as 0.28%).
_Note: the protective effect of DMSO on enzymatic activity has also been observed in some of the earliest studies on radiation therapy (e.g., one where it protected catalyze), making it one of the earliest breakthroughs in understanding how DMSO works on a biochemical level. - _Protects lymphocytes and macrophages from DNA damage and death (along with protecting chromatin from gamma rays).
- Protects human kidney cells from freezing and radiation damage, and makes warmer cells (e.g., those at body temperature) as resistant to radiation damage as frozen ones.
- Protects certain bacteria from x-ray exposure (also shown in this and this study) while making another species spores’ more sensitive.
- Most recently, a 2024 study found skin cells (modified to become pluripotent stem cells) found giving DMSO prior to irradiation protected the cells from the genetic damage radiation would otherwise cause.
- Lastly, this study (which used deuterated DMSO) discussed the chemical changes DMSO and water undergo when they absorb radiation.
Plant Studies
Pre-treatment (but not post-treatment) DMSO prevented 52% of the radiation induced chromosome breaks. A subsequent study found similar results for barley, wheat, and triticale seeds, along with DMSO also reducing seedling injury and death. Additionally, another plant study found that ultraviolet radiation and DMSO together increased the productivity of an antimalarial compound.
Animal Studies
These animal studies provide clear evidence of the versatility of DMSO in protecting organisms from radiation damage.
- A 1967 study found that while only 9% of mice survived after a lethal radiation exposure, when they were given intraperitoneal DMSO, most survived (54% of those receiving 50% DMSO, 67% of those receiving 75% DMSO, and 63% of those receiving 90% DMSO).
- When DMSO was given to rats within an hour of an otherwise lethal radiation dose, 70% instead survived. Applying DMSO to newborn rat skin protected them from damage from x-ray exposure.
- DMSO was found to protect newts from lethal x-ray and gamma ray exposures (along with preventing organ and skin damage).
- In fruit flies, DMSO significantly reduced x-ray mortality and mutations of their sperm.
- DMSO protected Golden hamster embryos from gamma rays and (by accelerating DNA repair) prevented X-ray damage to hamster ovary cells.
- Dipping mice tails in DMSO prior to irradiation (but not after) significantly reduced their mortality.
- Mice tail bones treated with DMSO continued growing even after exposure to substantial doses of radiation.
- DMSO given 8 minutes before a 1000 R exposure to the head prevented cataract formation in mouse eyes.
- In mice, to prevent radiation-induced oral mucositis (e.g. ulcers) through facilitating DNA repair of the stem cells there.
- In mice, it protects intestinal crypt cells from radiation (which rapidly divide and hence are significantly more sensitive to radiation). Likewise, this study also used DMSO to protect intestinal cells from radiation.
- In rats, it prevents radiation induced damage (from oxidative stress) to the kidneys.
- A rabbit study found that DMSO protected them from Cobalt-60 radiation (and the inflammatory response to it) without causing any negative changes to the structure of the lungs or the capillaries.
Note: another study showed DMSO also protects cells from other radioactive isotopes. - A 2022 mouse study found DMSO giving DMSO prior to irradiation protected mice testicles (e.g., testicular weight and hormonal function was preserved) and fertility (e.g., spermatozoa remained alive and did not accumulate DNA damage as DMSO facilitated DNA repair).
- A 2020 mice study found that DMSO to some extent prevented radiation fibrosis.
- A study found that even greater protection from radiation occurred when DMSO was combined with levorin (or methylated levorin or isolevorin).
_Note: the authors of that study also published a review that further discusses DMSO’s radioprotective and anticancer effects when given with those compounds._ - Inhaling DMSO vapor was also shown to protect mice from radiation exposure (which was also shown in this study).
- In a mice study, 100% DMSO (but not 80% or any concentration lower than that) was found to increase the sensitivity of mice skin to radiation injuries, which led the authors to suspect the increased blood flow created by 100% DMSO was bringing oxygen to the tissues which could then be turned into harmful free radicals.
- Topical application of 30% DMSO to the skin of 16-day-old nestling rats 20 minutes before x-ray exposure protected them against x-ray-induced damage.
- A rat study found that giving them DMSO post-irradiation increased their ATP, ADP, and AMP levels (whereas no change was seen in non-irradiated rats that received DMSO), suggesting DMSO had augmented a post-radiation regenerative process.
- When unpleasant radiation exposures were used to create a conditioned taste aversion to saccharin (a sweetener) in rats, giving DMSO was found to prevent that negative conditioning from occurring.
Note: this avoidance can also be transferred by injecting brain tissue of the irradiated mice into a non-irradiated one. However, if DMSO is given before irradiation, it prevents any transferability.
Human Data
Earlier in this series, I showed that DMSO has a remarkable ability to protect and heal the skin from injury, and in turn, since 1966, numerous Russian German and Japanese studies (including clinical trials) have demonstrated DMSO’s remarkable ability to protect human skin (along with its collagen and mucopolysaccharides1) from radiation.1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13
These include studies where:
- The irradiation was done by radioactive cobalt.
-Trasylol and epsilon-aminocaproic acid were given in conjunction with DMSO to prevent a subsequent radiation injury or DMSO was used with CoQ10 to modify radiation injuries. - It treated radiation fibrosis,1,2 radiation dermatitis, radiation injuries or other local radiation complications.
Note: while DMSO can treat radiation injuries after the fact, it works much better when given prior to radiation therapy.
DMSO has also been shown to protect other tissues. For example:
-A 1977 study where 80 patients who had developed late local radiation complications (induration, ulcers) from the treatment of breast or genital cancer (or a non-cancerous disease) received DMSO, resulting in both a high efficacy of treatment and no side effects.
- A 1985 Russian study gave 22 patients with cervical cancer topical DMSO prior to internal radiation therapy done with an older device that delivered gamma rays. It found that compared to 59 controls (who only received radiation therapy), DMSO prevented the normally expected radiation burns and other toxic reactions to the treatment (e.g., in the bladder and rectum). Additionally, while it protected normal tissue, DMSO did not protect the cancerous tissue.
- A 2006 study of 807 patients with cervical uterine cancer gave 10% DMSO into the bladders of 113 patients an hour before receiving weekly intracavitary irradiation therapy and to 473 patients who also received metronidazole dissolved in 100% DMSO. In those who received neither, the radiation damage to the rectum and bladder was 19.0% and 8.8%, in those who received only DMSO it was 9.5% and 7.1%, and in those who received DMSO and metronidazole it was 1.7% and 1.7%. Additionally, the study found that larger DMSO doses offered more protection.
- A 1978 American study that used DMSO to treat a variety of inflammatory conditions of the urinary tract included 12 patients with longstanding radiation cystitis (e.g., from prostate cancer therapy), of whom 50% had a positive response to DMSO (3 “excellent,” 2 “good” and 1 “fair”).
_Note: a 1979 Russian study also used DMSO to treat radiation cystitis while anecdotes of DMSO producing dramatic results for radiation cystitis can be read here._
-A Japanese study (by this researcher and summarized here) evaluated 22 breast and cervical cancer patients and found that DMSO protected them against radiation dermatitis (e.g., erosion, blistering, itching, and pain) while also enhancing cancer sensitivity to radiation (as the DMSO treated areas showed skin reddening and exfoliation earlier) and accelerating the regrowth of normal tissues. Additionally, they found that when DMSO was only applied to one side, the non-applied side did worse, that the hyperpigmentation which follows radiation therapy was greater in DMSO treated patients, and that only one of the 22 patients had to stop DMSO (due to having a skin eruption which may have been linked to DMSO). - This author detailed a case of a patient with lung cancer that was treated with three months of radiation therapy but severely damaged her lungs (making her require oxygen and leaving her unsure if she’d survive—but after topical and oral DMSO, she had a rapid recovery. Likewise, he also shared a case of another woman with lung cancer who was expected to have significant lung complications from the treatment (as she required a borderline lethal dose), but took topical DMSO prior to each treatment and instead had no complications and was fully healthy three years later.
It is thus quite remarkable that all of this remains unknown. To quote the author of one of the above (2022) study:
Currently, there is no approved agent for the prevention or treatment of radiation-induced testicular injury…In summary, our findings demonstrate the radioprotective efficacy of DMSO on the male reproductive system, which warrants further studies for future application in the preservation of male fertility during conventional radiotherapy and nuclear accidents.
Note: in addition to the higher doses experienced from radiation therapy, diagnostic radiation, specifically CT scans (which expose the body to much higher radiation doses than X-rays) also pose a cancer risk—particularly since the dose of radiation with CT scans can have over a 10-fold variation. In turn, a CT scan was found to make you 17-24% more likely to develop cancer, with the risk increasing the younger you were at the time of the scan and being much higher for certain types of cancers1,2,3,4,5. with a 2009 study estimating 29,000 cancers were caused by the CT scans performed in America in 2007. As such, I try to avoid CT scans I do not feel are essential (particularly since a detailed physical exam frequently provides more actionable information) and it is my sincere hope at some point in the future, DMSO will be given in conjunction with CT scans (but unfortunately their use keeps going up and they are viewed as a highly lucrative growth market).
Chemotherapy Injuries
After shock, cells often enter a defensive state where their functions become impaired or cease, and if not addressed, the cells eventually die. In turn, many (frequently miraculous) regenerative therapies (e.g., Ultraviolet Blood Irradiation) effectively work by restoring the function of these shocked cells. DMSO excels in this regard, and throughout this series, I’ve shown how it produces almost unbelievable results by doing the same for nervous tissue (e.g., after a stroke, brain bleed or paralyzing spinal cord injury) and many of the internal organs.
Since chemotherapy and radiation shock the body, DMSO can also prevent cell death, which follows their application—but like UVBI, it does so in a manner that doesn’t protect the cancer cells (rather, it increases cancer cell elimination). As such, whenever we have patients on conventional cancer regimens, we try to put them on therapies like DMSO as we find it significantly reduces the side effects from chemotherapy (e.g., in a previous article I discussed how effective UVBI is for this).
In turn, one of the areas of the body where this loss of cellular function can most easily be observed is with the sudden onset of hair loss. Since chemotherapy is the most toxic to rapidly dividing cells (which hair has to be so it grows), rapidly hair loss is one of the most common side effects of chemotherapy and in a previous article, I provided the wealth of evidence appropriately applied DMSO is often extremely helpful for hair loss (as are more costly regenerative therapies which rescue frozen hair cells). Because of this, many doctors over the years have reported DMSO has an extraordinary ability to rapidly regrow the hair that is lost after chemotherapy.
Extravasation Injuries
Since the medical field has been extremely reluctant to consider any alternative cancer treatment that could threaten its bottom line (regardless of how much data is behind it), DMSO has essentially not been utilized in the treatment of cancer. However, there is one exception to this rule, as DMSO is able to address a challenging issue encountered with chemotherapy without threatening the existing market.
Since many chemotherapy drugs are quite toxic, they have to be administered in a tightly controlled manner. Unfortunately, in many cases however, the drug gets through the injected vein and leaks into the surrounding tissue.
Note: since extravasations are often not reported, estimates widely vary on how common they are (e.g., 0.1-6% of adults who receive chemotherapy), but one study made a compelling case that it occurs in 39% of patients.
Due to how toxic some of the chemotherapy drugs are (particularly the anthracyclines), when that leakage occurs and the drugs concentrate in one area it can often cause significant damage to the surrounding tissues, and lead to ulceration or necrosis (tissue death). Since the existing treatments don’t always give satisfactory results and DMSO is extremely effective at healing a wide range of tissue injuries, it eventually got used as a treatment for these injuries and quickly caught on.
Note: currently there is only one drug (dexrazoxane, which is a chelating agent derived from EDTA) that is approved for the treatment of anthracycline extravasation. Despite this, a 2014 review on dexrazoxane noted, “the non-invasive combination of DMSO and cooling is the most commonly described therapy [in the scientific literature], particularly in small anthracycline extravasations” and a 2005 review recommended using 99% DMSO to treat them (as did a 1993 article).
Because of this, several animal and human studies (typically with doxorubicin—which used to be called adriamycin) have been conducted over the years, all of which found that DMSO treated these injuries. The animal studies include:
-A 1981 rat study of doxorubicin extravasations showed that daily topical applications of 1 ml 90% DMSO for 2 days produced a small decrease in ulcer diameter, whereas 10% DMSO with 10% α-tocopherol produced a significant reduction in ulcer diameter.
- After testing ten agents to see if they could treat ulcers created by intradermal doxorubicin (in pigs and rats), a 1982 study determined that DMSO was the only one that did. A different study (which used intradermal mitomycin C to create skin ulcers in mice) likewise found DMSO was the only agent that healed the resulting ulcers (and prevented them if given beforehand). Another study in pigs found that DMSO prevented doxorubicin induced ulcers from forming, while a fourth found DMSO healed vinorelbine extravasation injuries in rats.
- A 1984 and 1987 pig study that found DMSO treated extravasation injuries.
- A 1992 and 2013 rat study that found DMSO protected against doxorubicin injuries.
Comparable results have also been seen in humans such as:
- A 1983 case report detailed a striking improvement after DMSO was given for a daunorubicin extravasation (along with another 1983 case report where DMSO was used to treat a doxorubicin extravasation injury).
- A 1989 series of 4 patients with extravasation injuries found that DMSO, ice, and a steroid injection prevented ulcerations and tissue death.
- A 1991 series of two patients showed DMSO was extremely effective for healing the severe skin necrosis caused by the accidental extravasation (leaking out of a blood vessel) of mitomycin C, a rare but serious complication of the drug estimated to occur in 0.01-6% of infusions. Additionally, DMSO was found to work for extravasations that were only detected days after the initial infusion.
- A 1994 case report detailed two cases of DMSO successfully treating extravasation injuries
-A 2001 case report found DMSO healed an extravasation injury (of epirubicin and two other chemotherapy drugs).
Finally, a few human trials have also corroborated these results:
- A 1987 study reported treating eight patients who had an extravasation from either anthracycline or mitomycin C with a topical combination of 10% alpha-tocopherole acetate and 90% DMSO and found in all cases this prevented subsequent tissue necrosis from occurring (suggesting DMSO should be used to prevent the complications which frequently follow anthracycline).
- A 1988 study gave topical DMSO for anthracycline extravasations every 6 hours for 14 days to 20 patients, which prevented all of them from developing ulcerations. In the 14 who were evaluated at 3 months, there was no sign of residual damage in six patients, while a pigmented indurated area remained in ten.
- A 1995 study gave topical DMSO (for 8 hours a day over 7 days) alongside 3 days of intermittent cooling to every patient who experienced an extravasation over a 3.5 year period (which was either from doxorubicin, epirubicin, mitomycin, mitoxantrone, cisplatin, carboplatin, ifosfamide or fluorouracil). Of those 144 patients, 127 could be evaluated, of whom only 1 ultimately developed an ulceration from the extravasation and none experienced side effects from DMSO (beyond temporary skin irritation and a breath odor).
- A 1996 study of ten successive patients who experienced extravasation from chemotherapy were given DMSO and alpha-tocopherol, all of whom avoided ulceration or tissue death.
- A 2004 study of 147 patients with extravasations of anthracyclines (which typically leads to 28% developing ulcerations), found 99% DMSO caused only 1-2% of them to develop ulcers.
- Lastly, a 2007 study explored applying DMSO and α-tocopherol as a gel rather than a liquid solution to treat extravasation injuries (which appeared to hold promise).
Other Injuries
A few other studies have also been conducted on DMSO mitigating the effects of chemotherapy:
- DMSO was found to prevent doxorubicin cardiac toxicity.
- In two cases, DMSO successfully treated palmar-plantar erythrodysesthesia resulting from doxorubicin treatment.
- Doxorubicin is sometimes injected into the eyelid to treat eye spasms. DMSO prevented the skin death often associated with this treatment.
- DMSO was shown to protect against the birth defects caused by hydroxyurea
- DMSO was found to reduce the carcinogenicity of chlorambucil (as this chemotherapy often causes a secondary tumor to form after the initial treatment).
- Bleomycin is well-known for injuring the lungs (e.g., causing pulmonary fibrosis). In a 1985 rat study, DMSO was observed to prevent most of the damage bleomycin caused to the lungs and prevent the weight loss associated with its administration. However, in a follow-up study (that used a different dosing regimen), DMSO was instead found to increase the toxicity of bleomycin.
Note: a third 1987 study also evaluated the effect of bleomycin on pulmonary fibrosis.
Potentiating Medications
One of the major problems with chemotherapy is that since it’s given to the whole body, much of it goes to the wrong target (e.g., healthy cells) particularly when very high doses need to be used (e.g., to overcome the blood-brain barrier). As such, over the years, approaches have been developed to lower the amount of a generally toxic chemotherapy drug that needs to be given as, higher (standard) doses of chemotherapy frequently can be more harmful than the cancer itself.
For example, since cancer cells have more insulin receptors than normal cells (as this allows them to take more sugar out of the blood stream) chemotherapy can be mixed with insulin so that it is disproportionately taken up by cancer cells. As a result, over the decades, many have found this allows them to use much lower (non-toxic) doses of chemotherapy to cure their cancers (e.g., see this website).
DMSO essentially does the same thing (as do a few other natural cancer therapies we utilize). Still, unfortunately, despite an immense amount of promising research on DMSO and cancer, there was minimal follow-up in the decades that followed. Along these lines, the only doctor I know who publicly wrote about it (e.g., see this book) would use DMSO in conjunction with insulin potentiation therapy (e.g., by mixing DMSO right into the chemotherapy infusion syringes or saline bags), and prioritized its use for brain cancers (as DMSO could get the chemotherapy there).
In turn, the rationale for this was that DMSO passes the blood brain barrier and concentrates inside tumors (e.g., this study found a 1.5X increase in brain tumors), and when used as a contrast agent, DMSO has been found to be able to detect brain tumors that cannot be detected with conventional contrast agents (e.g., gadolinium). In contrast, DMSO and 5-FU were not observed to cross the blood-brain barrier (which may have been due to the dose used).
Note: because the standard contrast agent used for MRIs (gadolinium) causes some recipients to develop significant chronic illnesses, I try to avoid unnecessary scans. As such, I’ve patiently waited for an alternative contrast agent to be developed (e.g., there are decades of data showing manganese based contrasts are a safe and effective alternative to gadolinium1,2,3 but despite this, we are still a long way from it being available).
DMSO and Chemotherapy
When the FDA clamped down on all DMSO research, quite a few promising studies had emerged that suggested DMSO could considerably lower the doses of many common chemotherapy agents (thereby making them far less toxic and hence far more survivable). Unfortunately, all of that got swept away and unfortunately, in the many pushes that followed to make DMSO legal again, its uses for cancer were rarely focused upon (and thus became almost completely forgotten).
Note: when reviewing this section, it is important to remember that DMSO can increase the potency of chemotherapy drugs, so in many cases lower doses are needed (which in turn requires working with a doctor who is either familiar in this area or one who wants to read this article and can monitor you during the treatment to determine the correct dose). Additionally, most of the research on DMSO for using DMSO to potentiate chemotherapy drugs was done on the older ones that are less tumor specific, and as a result, may not be as applicable to the newer drugs.
Combination Therapies
- A 1975 study of 65 patients with incurable cancers (most of which had received conventional therapies) were given a low dose of cyclophosphamide mixed in DMSO with GABA, GABOB, and acetylglutamine either intravenously (typically) or intramuscularly (rarer). Objective or subjective remissions were obtained in 57 of the 65 patients (e.g., many went from being in extreme pain to being pain free), and almost all of those with lymphomas or breast cancers had complete recoveries, while about half of those with other incurable cancers recovered.
Note: this study also found patients who could not tolerate cyclophosphamide were able to with DMSO.
- A 1975 rat study found that oral DMSO increased the potency of cyclophosphamide, which in turn required lowering the cyclophosphamide dose to avoid creating toxicity (which the authors felt could potentially create a safer and more effective dosing regimen for cyclophosphamide). They also found DMSO increased the survival times in advanced cancers by potentiating the following drugs 6-mercaptopurine, Methotrexate, Chlorambucil, Vinblastine, Procarbazine, CCNU, MCCNU, BCNU, Daunomycin, Nitrogen mustard, Dianhydrogalactitol, Norbornyl, and Adriamycin. In contrast, no benefit was seen with cytosine arabinoside, vincristine, and 5-fluorouracil (all of which did not have the lowered toxicity threshold observed for cyclophosphamide).
Note: an ambitious follow-up project was made to test various other anticancer drugs. However, just as clinical trials were scheduled to start, they were halted by a jurisdictional dispute within the FDA.
- A follow-up 1983 study then determined that DMSO did not increase the toxicity of any chemotherapy drug but did temporarily increase (for 2-3 hours) its initial levels in the body
In summary, we believe that DMSO modifies the pharmacology of CPA [cyclophosphamide] in the rat by increasing the systemic availability of CPA and enhancing diffusion of the drug across tissue membranes. It likewise accelerates drug efflux from the plasma, which correlates with the observance of little increase in drug toxicity when it was used together with DMSO in the therapeutic studies described above. The ability of DMSO to increase the effectiveness but not the toxicity of certain antineoplastic compounds is probably the result of a rapid pulse of compound through the tumor tissue.
Additionally, that study also found that:
- These changes primarily occurred when oral DMSO was given concurrently with an oral form of the chemotherapy drug.
- Certain tumors had a higher response to DMSO being added in than others.
- DMSO being added reduced the overall growth of the tumors.
- It was unclear if these results also held true for humans, as two small human studies (this one and this one) did not observe them.
- A 1987 study of patients with cervical cancer found that applying metronidazole dissolved in DMSO to the cervix increased the tumor’s regression following radiation therapy.
- A 1988 study provides the most detailed data on how DMSO potentiated chemotherapy agents (particularly against breast cancers) along with shedding light on the innate anticancer activity of DMSO:
Note: a follow-up study by those authors found that 10% DMSO greatly enhanced the potency of a variety of anticancer drugs on ovarian cancer cells.
- In rats treated for bladder cancer with doxorubicin, adding 10% DMSO caused a 7.1 fold increase in bladder concentration (while 50% caused a 12.1 fold increase) and a 9.3-9.6 fold increase in the lymph nodes. Mixing doxorubicin in 5% DMSO reduced the amount of doxorubicin needed to eliminate cancer by 44%.
- A 2021 Ukrainian study of 52 patients with bladder cancer who had it surgically removed found that giving intravesical DMSO in conjunction with chemotherapy significantly reduced the 5 year recurrence, and there were no side effects from doing so.
Cancer Barriers
One of the major issues with treating cancers is that cancer cells can become resistant to chemotherapy. In light of this, the results from a 1969 study are quite insightful.
After observing that cancerous epidemical cells (unlike normal cells) were able to resistant cytotoxic (chemotherapy) drugs entering them by creating a fibrin-like “cytoplasmic barrier,” that study discovered that mixing the drugs with DMSO allowed them to penetrate cancerous cells (a result also found in another 1969 study and a 1971 study).
Furthermore:
•A 1983 study found that cancer cells had a disordered cytoskeleton (which is now well recognized) and an impermeable barrier around the cell that resisted chemotherapy drugs from entering.
When DMSO was given, it allowed drugs to enter the cells. It dramatically increased the potency of cytoskeleton-targeting drugs (e.g., making 1/30th to 1/1000th of their usual dose be needed), disrupting cancer cells by causing their disorganized cytoskeleton to swell. Lastly, the authors reported great success with intravenous DMSO-vinblastin (which caused tumor masses to necrotize rapidly).
Note: vinblastin works by targeting the microtubules.
- A later 2022 study (mentioned earlier in this article) found that 1% DMSO significantly altered the cytoskeleton of melanoma cells (e.g., how they attached to their extracellular surroundings) but not normal cells, and that when DMSO was combined with CaS (which releases ions that can trigger programmed cell death), the there was no noticeable effect on the skeleton of normal cells, but there was heavy disruption to the cytoskeleton of cancerous cells.
Note: it is well known that healthcare workers who routinely administer chemotherapy periodically have accidental exposures to it (e.g., via vapor inhalation), so organizations like the CDC and NIOSH have worker guidelines about it (as these exposures increase the risk for a variety of issues including cancers). Since DMSO will cause chemotherapy drugs it is mixed with to be absorbed through the skin, it is crucial to be extremely cautious when administering it with chemotherapy drugs (particularly when applying it topically).
Cisplatin Studies
One of the most extensively tested DMSO combinations is with cisplatin, a drug that has shown significant promise for pairing with DMSO, but is also a concern as DMSO can bind to platinum containing drugs (cisplatin, carboplatin, and oxaliplatin) and partially inactivates them. As a result, some authors believe DMSO should not be taken concurrently with these drugs, but other data argues against that position. The cisplatin studies are as follows:
- A 2015 mouse study showed DMSO reduced the kidney toxicity of cisplatin, increased its reduction in tumor size and increased the survival time in animals who received it. Likewise, this study found DMSO increased cisplatin’s efficacy and decreased its toxicity.
•A 2019 lung cancer cell study also showed DMSO increased cisplatin’s efficacy..
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Another 2019 study found that DMSO doubled the toxicity of cisplatin to lung cancer cells (thereby making a much lower therapeutic dose needed) and reduced the cancer cell’s resistance to chemotherapy drugs.
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A 1995 study of rats with experimentally induced bladder cancer found combining DMSO with cisplatin decreased the depth of cancer invasion compared to cisplatin alone or to placebo.
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A 2015 study found 0.1-0.3% DMSO reduced the efficacy of Cisplatin against CML.
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A 1991 rat study found that giving DMSO with cisplatin reduced its kidney toxicity (and weight loss) but did not reduce its toxicity to carcinosarcoma.
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A 2008 study found that mixing cisplatin with DMSO reduced both its neurotoxicity and toxicity to cancer cells, with the decrease in neurotoxicity being approximately twice the reduction in cancer cell toxicity. It also significantly decreased cisplatin’s toxicity to the kidneys and slowed its elimination from the body.
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After a 1997 study noticed a delivery system for cisplatin was causing no toxicity in dogs with osteosarcoma, the investigators suspected the DMSO component of the delivery system was responsible. Then they were able to verify that there was reduced anticancer activity for cisplatin when it was mixed with DMSO.
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A 2022 study found DMSO caused a fourfold reduction in cisplatin’s toxicity to E. Coli bacteria (cisplatin is also toxic to bacteria).
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In a 1982 study of dogs with bladder cancer, mixing DMSO with cisplatin caused a threefold increase in how much was absorbed into the bladder muscle (which is similar to what this study found).
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A 2014 rat study found that DMSO did not enhance Cisplatin’s toxicity to the inner ear, while a 2013 zebrafish study found DMSO enhanced cisplatin’s toxicity to the ear’s hair cells.
Other Chemotherapy Studies
DMSO has also been shown to enhance the efficacy of a variety of other cancer drugs:
- A 1975 study found DMSO in conjunction with ifosfamide treated carcinosarcoma in rats.
- A 1981 cell study found that DMSO did not increase cyclophosphamide’s toxicity, but potentially reduced its efficacy against lung cancer.
- A 1986 study found DMSO increased acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) sensitivity to nitrogen mustard in a dose-dependent fashion (the compound cyclophosphamide is derived from).
- A 1989 study found that DMSO enhanced the ability of cisplatin, 5-FU and cyclophosamide to slow aggressive (implanted) prostate cancers.
- A 1994 case report detailed two AIDS patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma who were successfully treated with topical DMSO mixed with bleomycin with no toxicity being observed.
- A 1998 study found that DMSO increased the potency of 5-fluorouracil and doxorubicin.
- A 2001 study found that DMSO induced differentiation in human breast cancer cells and increased their sensitivity to doxorubicin.
Note: a computer modeling study concluded DMSO may counteract Tamoxifen’s anticancer effects. - A 2004 study found that DMSO caused a 71.7% growth inhibition of breast cancer cells at 96 hours and improved the safety and efficacy of the cancer drug gemcitabine.
- A recent study found that DMSO significantly reduced the growth of prostate cancer cells, and this effect increased when it was given concurrently with nelfinavir.
Lastly, DMSO when combined with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) has repeatedly been found to treat skin cancers and warts. For example, this 1967 study found DMSO significantly increased 5-FU’s potency and made 5% able to locally treat keratoacanthoma, superficial basal cell and early stage squamous cell carcinoma without causing any adverse effects and likewise, this study used DMSO to enhance 5-FU’s ability to treat seborrheic keratosis (something which also responds to DMSO alone).
Note: a few studies have found DMSO can sometimes increase the carcinogenicity of a cancer causing substance if given concurrently with it and DMSO worsening or preventing something’s carcinogenicity was highly dependent on how each was applied.1,2,3,4
Photodynamic therapy
Photodynamic therapy works by mixing a photosensitizer (e.g., 5-ALA) in tumors with light so that a reactive chemical is generated, which destroys the cancer. Since DMSO aids in the formation of the reactive agents, it has repeatedly been found to enhance this treatment:
- A 1995 study found that mixing 5-ALA with 2% EDTA and 2% DMSO eliminated 85.4% of BCCs (in 48 patients), 100% of superficial SCCs (in 5 patients), and partially improved 2 ulcerated SCCs. Additionally, using DMSO and EDTA (when compared to not using it) was found to more than double the response to 5-ALA photodynamic therapy.
- Another 1995 study treated 763 BCCs in 122 patients, using either 5-ALA, 5-ALA with DMSO as a pretreatment, or 5-ALA plus DMSO plus EDTA. DMSO plus EDTA was shown to improve significantly 5-ALA penetration depth, doubled ALA-induced porphyrin production (a key part of photodynamic therapy), and in patients with nodulo-ulcerative lesions, the response rate went from 67% to above 90% (for lesions less than 2mm thick) and from 34% to 50% (for lesions more than 2mm thick).
- In a 2009 study, DMSO plus 5-ALA photodynamic therapy was found to entirely eliminate 55 out of 60 basal cell cancers (with a good cosmetic outcome), of which 81% did not recur after 6 years (with 91% not recurring if two rather than one treatment was given).
- In another 2009 study, 19 cases of Bowen's disease (early SCC) and 15 BCCs received a single course of 5-ALA with DMSO and EDTA (activated by a 630nm diode laser). At 3 months, 91.2% of the tumors were gone, while at 60 months, 57.7% of Bowen's disease and 63.3% of BCCs had not recurred.
Note: natural therapies (discussed below) have also been shown to be highly effective skin cancer treatments when combined with DMSO.
Other Pharmaceutical Combinations
Other (less toxic) drugs have also shown promise for cancer when combined with DMSO. For example:
- Since cervical cells can easily be gently scraped off and examined, a team of researchers evaluated how a variety of substances caused them to transform into cancers or caused cancerous cells to differentiate into normal cells. From this, they found that while DMSO alone did very little, if it was combined with a small amount of dexamethasone, within 2-3 weeks, it rapidly transformed the cancerous cells (e.g., carcinomas in situ or metastatic cervical cancers lesions) to normal ones and healed the surrounding tissue (e.g., malignant tissues, typically red, granular, and friable, became smooth, pink, and resilient with diminished bleeding and vascularity), and at the time of publication, reported successfully treating six out of six patients, including one with metastatic cancer.
Note: DMSO in combination with colchamine has also been used to treat skin cancer.
- A 2015 study found that DMSO significantly increased the toxicity of organotin polyethers on various cancer cells.
- One approach to eliminating cancers is using a magnetic molecule that can be heated with a magnetic field. When a 2021 study attached that substance to DMSO, it was found to be an effective treatment for cervical cancer and significantly enhance the potency of the cancer drug carmustine.
- In a 2002 study, animals exposed to cancer-causing nitrosamines and treated with polyene antimycotics combined with DMSO showed significant cancer-fighting effects. After 5 months, 76% of these animals survived, compared to only 35% survival in the untreated control group.
_Note: occasionally research papers emerge on new DMSO containing drugs (e.g., ruthenium based ones) that effectively eliminate cancers (e.g., this 1989 study, this 1994 study and this 2012 study where one selectively targeted metastastic tumors, or this 1995 study, this 1998 study, this 2022 study, this 2022 study and this 2023 study)._
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Natural Combination Therapies
In the same way DMSO potentiates chemotherapy, it can also enhance natural compounds. For example:
- A 1969 study found that DMSO, when combined with heat and vitamin A, selectively targeted cancer cells (and facilitated the release of lysosomal enzymes).
- A 2018 study](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01635581.2019.1598563) found that DMSO and a plant extract selectively arrested cell growth and induced cell death of colon cancer cells.
- A 2023 study found that when fatty acids were isolated from the urine of healthy cows and mixed with DMSO, it was an effective therapy against breast cancer cells, while when this combination was instead tested on Human Gingival Mesenchymal Stem Cells, no toxicity was observed.
In turn, while DMSO shows great promise in many of the approaches thus far highlighted throughout this article, I believe its greatest value is to be combined with a potent natural substance. This is because a few of those substances have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in treating cancer, are much more accessible, and are far safer than the conventional options (particularly considering the risk of DMSO accidentally bringing an unwanted toxin into the body).
In the final part of this article, I will cover the most remarkable natural DMSO combinations for cancer and how they can be used (e.g., for skin cancer), along with guidance for some of the topics mentioned throughout the article (e.g., radiation and CT scan protection, cervical cancer therapeutic combinations and other natural ways to potentiate chemotherapy) along more general instructions for DMSO sourcing and dosing common DMSO applications (e.g., pain or arthritis) and other cancer treatment approaches.
Baking Soda
A recently deceased Italian physician became a prominent proponent for using intravenous sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) to treat cancer (which had limited data to support its use and is offered by a few facilities) under the theory that it treated systemic candida infections that were actually the root cause of cancer.
However, while data is limited for that approach, a 2011 study gave DMSO combined with sodium bicarbonate and given intravenously to patients with metastatic prostate cancer. It found that after 90 days, the patients treated with this mixture showed significant improvement in symptoms (e.g., pain) and no significant side effects from the treatment. Other major improvements were also seen:
Note: this study used either a low dose regimen (25 mL 99.9% DMSO + 250 mL 1.4% NaHCO₃ + 10 mL 1.5% MgSO₄), a medium done one (40 mL 99.9% DMSO + 500 mL 1.4% NaHCO₃ + 10 mL 1.5% MgSO₄) or a high dose one (60 mL 99.9% DMSO + 500 mL 1.4% NaHCO₃), with higher doses being given to more severe cases (along with also taking 1000mg of potassium each day if there were no kidney issues). That protocol is discussed further here.
In a follow up study, nine patients with advanced biliary adenocarcinomas (which are typically fatal) were given continuous infusions (lasting most of the day) 5 days each week that consisted of 25 mL 99.9% DMSO + 500 mL 1.4% NaHCO₃ + 1.5g MgSO₄ + 1.0g KCl) plus 200 mg of S-adenosylmethionine. After two weeks of treatment, the patient’s abdominal pain decreased by over 50%, their quality of life had improved, their biochemistry demonstrated that their disease had stabilized, and there were no significant adverse effects.
Finally, in a 2011 study for 26 patients with severe refractory pain from advanced cancers, IV infusions of 20-60 mL of 99.9% DMSO + 500 mL 1.4% NaHCO₃ were given once a day for 10 days with 2 day breaks from the cycle. This was a safer and more effective method of pain control that also improved the patient’s quality of life, reduced the side effects of chemotherapy, and possibly increased their length of survival.
Ascorbic Acid
Ascorbic acid (vitamin C), particularly when given intravenously, is frequently very helpful in treating cancers. Since it has shown promise in treating skin cancers (e.g., see this topical study and this intravenous study), investigators decided to combine it with DMSO, finding it dramatically enhanced the efficacy of the treatment (e.g., the skin cancers disappeared much faster).
Specifically, in a 2022 randomized trial of 25 patients (with 28 confirmed basal cell cancers), investigators found when 30% ascorbic acid was combined with 95% DMSO and 0.2–0.3 ml was applied topically twice a day (with a cuticle brush), after 8 weeks, 86.7% of the cancers had completely disappeared, whereas in comparison, after 8 weeks of 5% imiquimod (a common topical skin cancer treatment with side effects), only 57.1% had disappeared.
In addition, ascorbic acid had fewer adverse effects than imiquimod. For example, 70% of patients in the imiquinod group showed residual hypopigmentation at 30 months follow up and 6 had to stop for several days due to the irritation they experienced, whereas no residual hypopigmentation occurred in the DMSO ascorbic acid group and no one had to stop the treatment (as at worst, there was a mild stinging sensation for a minute after applying it).
Laetrile
Laetrile (a naturally occurring compound found in certain seeds such as those from apricots) is a controversial cancer therapy that converts into cyanide within cancer cells while leaving other cells unaffected. This therapy demonstrated significant promise when it was in use (e.g. for advanced lung cancer), but sadly, like many other things, the FDA went to great lengths to prevent the public from having access to it.
Note: Ralph Moss was at the National Cancer Institute during the height of the laetrile controversy and provided proof the laetrile trials (in collusion with the FDA) were doctored to show that laetrile “didn’t work” when it did.
Since the 1970’s DMSO has been combined with Laetrile (typically given intravenously), and numerous instances (detailed here) exist of it producing dramatic improvements in a variety of terminal cases that exceed what laetrile alone would have been expected to provide.
Note: William Campbell Douglass, M.D. (a pioneer in the integrative medical field) combined these approaches by giving IV DMSO, amygdalin (laetrile) and vitamin C alongside targeted nutritional deficiencies (for whatever patients were deficient in), and found this was a highly effective in treating cancer symptoms (e.g., pain or poor appetite).
Haematoxylin
Haematoxylin is a dye frequently used in pathology to stain tissues, which through serendipity, an orthopedic surgeon discovered was an extremely effective cancer treatment—including for advanced cancers that would likely soon be fatal.
Note: while still effective (e.g., for cancer symptoms), DMSO Haematoxylin doesn’t always eliminate tumors in patients who’d already received conventional care (e.g., extensive chemotherapy), likely due to the immune suppressing actions of those treatments.
That surgeon then went on to cure a large number of people, but unfortunately, faced significant pushback from his peers (e.g., he was ejected from two hospitals). As a result, he never published any papers after his first one (which is very hard to find and hence attached below):
Haematoxylon Dissolved Ni Dimethylsulfoxide Used In Recurrent Neoplasms
2.39MB ∙ PDF file
Note: there is an immense amount to the haemotoxylin story, so in a few weeks I will publish a much more detailed article about it.Note: there is an immense amount of detail about the haemotoxylin story, so in a few weeks, I will publish a much more detailed article about it as it is a spectacular cancer treatment.
Other Combination Cancer Treatments
Many other cancer treatments have also been combined with DMSO (to the point that it is impossible to list all of them). For example:
•Cesium chloride used to be widely used for alternative cancer care, but since there were some challenges with taking it orally, a few physicians then combined it with DMSO for a topical administration. Some have reported remarkable results from the therapy.
In a case study, one brain cancer patient had a tumor in his brain pressing against one of his optic nerves. When he mixed DMSO with the cesium chloride, he could literally feel the cesium chloride and DMSO getting into his tumor within 15 minutes. He could feel it because his tumor was pressing against an optic nerve.
•As mentioned earlier in this article, if 01% dexamethasone mixed in DMSO 90% (in equal parts) is combined with 2 ml of DMSO 70% gel, and applied topically, it will rapidly cause the cells to normalize and stop being cancerous.
Likewise, other natural combinations (besides insulin and DMSO) have been tried to potentiate chemotherapy, such as hyperthermia—an approach that independently has also promise for treating cancer.
Of these, we’ve found sodium phenylbutyrate (prior to chemo) is one of the most effective options (and while this approach remains relatively unknown, it does have some literature to support its use).
Note: many people have asked me if DMSO can be combined with other alternative cancer treatments like ivermectin or fenbendazole. While I can see the theoretical merits of doing this, no one I know has done it, so I cannot comment on its merits (as far too many times in medicine, due to how complex the body is, something which seems like a good idea doesn’t actually pan out once you try it). For those wishing to know more about our approaches to cancer, they can be reviewed here in an interview I did with Pierre Kory.
Radiation Protection
Ideally, any area which will be irradiated should have topical DMSO applied roughly 30 minutes before the application (or multiple times per day if they are undergoing repeated radiation therapy), or if a stronger radiation dose is being given to a large section of the body, DMSO should be administered intravenously (or if that is not possible, orally)—all of which is detailed at the end of this article. While a variety of options exist (and ultimately anything that gets it onto the skin works), one of the most common recommendations is to apply a 50% aloe vera containing DMSO gel to clean skin. Conversely, if a radiation injury already exists, if it is local, DMSO should be applied topically over the site of the injury (until it recovers) or orally administered if the site of injury is too deep in the body or too systemic to address with topical DMSO therapy.
Note: a good argument can also be made for doing this prior to CT scans or X-rays which will expose sensitive regions of the body to radiation.
Sourcing DMSO:
There are a lot of options when purchasing DMSO. Of them, I’ve long believed these are the three best brands (I’ve included Amazon links to purchase them).
Note: unless you feel confident you can dilute them correctly, get the 70% dilution, since that concentration typically works for people.
•Jacob Lab (e.g., this gel or this liquid)—which is 99.98% pure.
•The DMSO Store (e.g., this gel or this liquid—which can also be bought directly from www.DMSOstore.com)—which is 99.995% pure.
•Nature’s Gift (e.g., this gel or this liquid)—which is 99.9% pure.
Note: dmso.store is a completely different company than dmsostore.com.
When buying liquid DMSO, I believe it should always be sold in a glass container unless the plastic container is DMSO resistant (which many are not—hence why I only recommended buying glass bottles) and likewise have a DMSO resistant cap. If you buy gel, it’s okay if it’s sold in plastic.
Note: many people have used liquid DMSO from plastic containers without issue, but I have personally always avoided doing so because glass DMSO has always been affordable and readily available so less thinking is involved to ensure it’s sold in a DMSO resistant plastic.
The unexpected problem I ran into was that many of the people who ordered glass DMSO from the links I recommended then informed me they had been shipped in plastic (which is likely either because those parties were resellers or because everyone ran out of glass bottles and the DMSO market is currently trying to rebuild that inventory).
Of the currently existing options, I believe the best choice is to either:
•Buy DMSO directly from the DMSO store (DMSOstore.com).
Note: the website DMSO.store is for a completely different company.
•Buy it directly from Jacob lab (which readers have informed me is also shipping DMSO in plastic they claim is DMSO resistant—which it likely is since Stanley Jacob’s son runs the company).
DMSO dosing:
One of the things that’s very challenging about using DMSO is that there is a significant amount of variation in what each individual will best respond to. Because of this, in the first and second parts of this series, I attempted to provide a very detailed explanation that could try to account for each possibility which may have been too complicated (but I would still advise reading).
In short the primary consideration is how strong of a dose you want to use. This is because if you use too high a dose, you risk the chance of having a bad reaction, which will make you not want to use DMSO anymore, whereas if you use too low of a dose, the effect will be much less than desired. In turn, I’ve had many people here who:
•Applied 100% DMSO topically and had trouble believing anyone couldn’t tolerate that.
•Applied 70% DMSO topically, had a bit of irritation but thought it was manageable.
•Applies 30% topically and felt it was too strong.
Similarly with oral dosing, I’ve had people who:
•Thought 1 teaspoon was decent but quickly took more for a greater effect.
•Found a few drops was the optimal dose for them (and greatly benefitted), whereas 1 teaspoon while initially good, ended up feeling like it was too much for them and caused their sensitive system to react.
Because of this, you essentially have two options, and have to decide which is right for you:
•Be patient and start with a low dose you build up.
•Start a strong dose and agree not to hold it against me or DMSO if you don’t tolerate it.
In the previous articles, I’ve advocated for the former. Still, many understandably started with a high dose as they did not want to wait for the results, a few of whom then shared they’d had a skin reaction that made them hesitant to continue using DMSO.
Similarly, when using DMSO, there are two common routes of application, orally and topically. Orally, it is much stronger, but likewise, the GI tract is more sensitive to higher concentrations of DMSO. For this reason, I typically suggest starting with topical DMSO before doing oral DMSO. Likewise, there is a very small risk (1 in 1-2000) of an allergic reaction, so it’s generally advised to begin by patch testing DMSO on the skin before taking it orally.
So, What is Patch Testing?
Patch testing is a method used to determine how the application reacts to a product. It's a smart way to test a small area first before applying the product to larger areas, which helps to identify any adverse reactions.How to Patch Test:
•Select a Small Area: Choose a discreet spot.
•Apply a Tiny Amount: Use a small quantity of the product.
•Wait and Observe: Leave it on for 24 hours unless you notice irritation sooner.
•Proceed if All’s Good: If there’s no reaction, feel confident to use the product as intended!*If in contact with the skin: Some experience itching and tingling sensations, which are normal. If there’s any redness or swelling, wash the area immediately and discontinue use.
That said for general DMSO use (without going into all the nuances and additional details), I advise the following:
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Start with 30-50% DMSO and see how you tolerate it. If applying to the face, make sure all makeup has been washed off (and ideally that you are only using natural cosmetic products).
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If you have no issue, raise it to 70%.
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Only raise it past 70% if you are certain you are one of those people who is fine with 100% or you are using it for a specific application that can justify a higher concentration (e.g., a collagen contracture, a scar, an internal adhesion or an acute stroke).
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Until you are comfortable with topical applications, don’t do oral applications, and only if you think you need them.
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For oral dosing, start with a teaspoon of 70% or 100% DMSO mixed into a glass of water (you may also want juice or milk to eliminate DMSO’s taste), as a heavily diluted solution is best to start with
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If you have issues with that, lower the dose to half a teaspoon and then to a quarter teaspoon.
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Otherwise, stay at a teaspoon for at least three days, and then if you think you need a stronger effect, go to 2 teaspoons.
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More than 3 teaspoons in a glass of water is excessive, and at that point, you are better off dividing the dose throughout the day.
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With both topical and oral DMSO, people generally find that as time goes on, their tolerance to it improves. Conversely, if it’s used too frequently, a tolerance can develop, so it’s generally advised not to take it 1-2 days a week.
Note: more detailed instructions on oral (and IV) DMSO use can be found here, while more detailed instructions on topical uses can be found here.
Regarding the concentrations used, I generally advise buying 70% DMSO because people rarely react to it (e.g., the DMSO felt it was the concentration that had the best balance between safety and efficacy). It doesn’t require any significant calculations to dose appropriately (e.g., you can apply it topically as it is, or mix it with equal parts of purified water to get it to roughly 35%). However, you can also do all of that with 100% DMSO (e.g., dilute it to roughly 50% rather than 35% by mixing it with equal parts of purified water or to roughly 33% by mixing it with two parts of purified water). Finally, certain parts of the body, particularly the face, tend to be more sensitive to higher concentrations of DMSO, so you should start [at lower strengths in those areas
](https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/dmso-is-a-miraculous-therapy-for)If you are putting DMSO on the face, start at 30% and do not start with a stronger one as this can cause significant skin irritation to the face. For example, I had one reader who started with a 70% gel on the face contact me about a reaction they had (although after the surface layer of skin peeled off her face underneath did look much younger).
Additionally, the one tricky thing about dosing DMSO is that it weighs slightly more than water (1ml of DMSO is 1.1004 grams). Since DMSO has a fairly wide range of tolerability, I’ve bypassed that issue by treating it as having the same density as water and suggesting a slightly lower oral dose.
Note: when DMSO is taken by mouth, the total concentration should always be kept to 20% or less, and ideally, it should be taken slowly after eating a meal.
When applying DMSO topically, there are two options. The first is to use a liquid that you directly apply (e.g., I like to use paintbrushes made from natural hairs to dab it on, but sometimes when needed, I just dip my finger in it and then rub it onto the target area, whereas the DMSO field often used sprays for sensitive skin conditions). The second is to use a gel which is rubbed into the skin.
When applying DMSO to the body, it is important to clean the area it will be applied to beforehand, and to ensure DMSO dries before putting anything in contact with it. This is because DMSO will pull things from the surface of the skin into the body, and if a toxic chemical is on the skin, it will hence be dragged into the body. This is very rare, but there are known instances of this happening and harming the individual.
I personally prefer the liquids because it’s easier to control the total dose with them, more gets into the body, and liquid DMSO tends to be less irritating. That said, gels hold the advantage of continually releasing DMSO into the body over a prolonged period and are much easier to apply. Because of this, whichever one you use is largely a question of personal preference.
In most cases, if an area bothers you, you are better off applying DMSO to that area (provided there is no open wound), but if the issue feels systemic, you may also need to take oral DMSO.
Conclusion
One of the things I still have trouble believing about DMSO was how effectively the FDA erased it from America’s history. The cancer part of this story is particularly remarkable as cancer researchers across the globe have had its benefits right in front of them for decades and produced hundreds of studies demonstrating DMSO’s value, yet almost none of them realize DMSO is anything besides a tool for laboratory experiments. This hence speaks to how remarkably effective the medical industrial complex is at both hijacking research and convincing the entire profession to ignore anything which threatens their bottom line.
Fortunately, the incredible greed we witnessed throughout COVID has created a tipping point on this and I am now incredibly hopeful that we have reached a point where we can begin to have an honest examination of the existing evidence that could improve our longstanding medical practices—particularly since many treatments like DMSO don’t even compete with conventional cancer care (rather they simply allow those lucrative treatments to be better tolerated).
It was for that reason that I attempted to compile the best foundation I could here for those interested in pursuing DMSO research in the years to come (shorter articles without all the technical details will come out in the future), and it is my sincere hope this article was helpful for you.
Likewise, because of the immense volume of forgotten information I had to sift through, I am relatively sure I missed many key studies that should have been included (e.g., I read through thousands of studies to write this but skipped other search queries because there was a limit to what I had the time to do) and made a few mistakes in linking the references in this article (e.g., citing the same study twice). For this reason, if you have any suggestions for improving this article, I would greatly welcome them so that DMSO can be given the best opportunity it can to help chronic cancer patients.
That said, I believe the greatest use for DMSO is its combination with other existing cancer therapies, particularly natural ones (e.g., hematoxylin), and it is my sincere hope that we can begin encouraging the scientific community to start exploring them (or at the very least start using DMSO to mitigate the effects of radiation therapy). While this series has been a fairly challenging process to complete, I am immensely grateful it has been able to help so many people and I likewise deeply appreciate your support which makes all of this work possible.
Story at a Glance:
**•DMSO is a remarkably safe substance that effectively treats a variety of conditions (e.g., chronic pain, acute injuries, and strokes) that medicine has struggled with for decades. Many readers here have already experienced profound benefits from using it.
•DMSO is a powerful (but safe) anti-inflammatory agent that is often extremely helpful for autoimmune conditions. For example, it’s frequently used to treat asthma, inflammatory bowel diseases (e.g., ulcerative colitis and irritable bowel syndrome), interstitial cystitis (painful bladder syndrome), ITP, lupus, multiple sclerosis, myasthenia gravis, scleroderma, Sjogren's syndrome, and uveitis.**
•DMSO is also remarkably effective at stabilizing and refolding proteins. This allows it to treat a variety of “untreatable” genetic disorders, and conditions characterized by the abnormal accumulation of misfolded proteins in the body (e.g., amyloidosis) or chronic deposits of excessive contractile collagen (e.g., surgical scars, abdominal adhesions, Dupuytren’s contractures, and Peyronie’s disease). Two of the most dramatic examples of this are scleroderma and fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva—both “untreatable” conditions where DMSO can provide truly lifesaving benefits.
•In this article, I will present the wealth of evidence substantiating each of those uses, share my theory on how the unusual antimicrobial properties of DMSO explain some of these benefits, and present DMSO treatment protocols for many of those disorders. Additionally, since many readers requested it, I put together a simplified guide on how to use DMSO orally or topically.
Note: over the last few days, I switched my focus to preventing an immensely unjust execution in Texas that shed light on how parents are often falsely accused of killing their babies after a vaccine death. Thanks in part to all of you speaking out, a miracle happened, the right people noticed (I can’t disclose what happened behind the scenes but consider this Tweet RFK Jr. put out which referenced a post referencing the article here) and a series of unprecedented actions happened to delay and possibly overturn an execution (which in reality was due to a baby dying from clearcut case of medical malpractice). This case still needs a great deal of support, so if you can contact either the governor (here) or the Texas legislators trying to overturn this (here and here) that would be immensely helpful.
Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is a simple and readily available naturally occurring chemical that rapidly enters the body through the skin and has a variety of remarkable therapeutic properties. When it was discovered, its proponents believed it (much like antibiotics) represented a new therapeutic principle in medicine and once adopted, would completely change how medicine was practiced. Unfortunately, the FDA conducted a reprehensible campaign against it and was able to successfully bury it.
Since there are so many uses for DMSO, to effectively present them, I’ve had to comb through well over ten thousand pages of scientific literature and then order them into a logical sequence (of what will be roughly a nine-part series). For instance, in the first part of this series, I discussed how DMSO completely changed the management of neurological injuries and showed that were it to be adopted, millions would no longer be disabled from the common emergencies we view as insurmountable within the current medical paradigm (e.g., frequent disabilities from stroke and the inevitability of becoming a paraplegic after a spinal cord injury).
Sep 15
In turn, after I posted this, I began to receive testimonials from readers who’d found DMSO treated neurological and circulatory disorders they had always thought could not be treated.
In the second part of this series, I discussed how DMSO is remarkably effective for treating injuries and chronic pain:
In turn, after I published this article (since those conditions are some of the most common things people struggle with), I received a lot of comments from readers who expressed their understandable skepticism something like this could actually exist (which is part of why I began this with the wealth of evidence DMSO was paradigm shifting in neurology). At the same time, many were encouraged to try it, and I received numerous testimonials of the astonishing recovery it facilitated from a significant injury they’d suffered since the article had come out. More importantly however, many readers with chronic pain (or immobility) decided to try it, and were overjoyed to discover that after years they could at last get their lives back.
Taking a step back, the fact that something this effective could exist no one knows about is difficult to believe, which in turn suggests there has to be a reason for why no one knows about it—such as DMSO being extremely toxic. In reality, it is purely politics, and to support that, I compiled a detailed article summarizing everything that is known about the safety and toxicity of DMSO, which in my eyes, made the case that DMSO is one of the safest pharmaceutical products in existence and that the widely used alternatives to it (e.g., NSAIDs) are incredibly dangerous and orders of magnitude more harmful than DMSO.
Note: while publishing this article, I realized there was a human study demonstrating its safety in pregnancy (where DMSO was successfully used to treat infertility) that I forgot to include and have now added to the previous article.
Now that I’ve established there is something truly remarkable to DMSO (e.g.,you can read the hundreds of testimonials I’ve received from readers here), I would like to focus on another area where DMSO upends the existing medical paradigm—autoimmune and severe connective tissue disorders. I believe this is necessary because many individuals suffer from autoimmune and contractile conditions, but more importantly, because some of the conditions DMSO has been shown to treat effectively are otherwise death sentences that for decades the medical community has made almost no progress addressing.
DMSO and Protein Disorders
One of DMSO’s remarkable properties is its ability to function as a chemical chaperone and stabilize the three dimensional structure proteins assemble (fold) themselves into. This is important as many complex illnesses (e.g., many genetic disorders) result from misfolded proteins and presently can only be (ineffectively) managed with expensive drugs that aim to normalize the function of the abnormal proteins.
In turn, a few drugs have been developed to refold misfolded proteins, and to my knowledge, the most helpful ones on the market were the ones developed to treat cystic fibrosis (after the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation gave 150 million to bring these medications to market which currently are priced at roughly 300,000.00 a year). However, unlike the existing pharmaceutical chaperones (which are very specific to the misfolded protein), DMSO’s effect is remarkably universal.
Note: improving the physiologic zeta potential (as explained here) can also stabilize protein folding (while worsening it causes aggregation and misfolding).
Studies have shown DMSO can improve the functionality of the dysfunctional proteins that are seen in genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis,1 hereditary nephrogenic diabetes insipidus,1,2 Machado-Joseph disease,1 Niemann–Pick disease,1,2,3,4,5,6 and a defective protein that causes motor disorders and early death in mice.1 Likewise, it can also treat a variety of complex diseases which result from misfolded proteins damaging surrounding tissue.
For example, amyloidosis is a challenging condition that results from aggregates of insoluble proteins accumulating in the surrounding tissues. In turn, at least 39 studies and case reports have shown that DMSO can treat numerous types of amyloidosis (e.g., by solubilizing the amyloid aggregates and enabling the body to break down and eliminate them).1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37. 38, 39
Likewise, DMSO has also been shown to revert the protein responsible for the devastating neurological prion diseases Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease1 and scrapie1 (which suggests it could also be helpful for mad cow disease).
Note: the previously mentioned studies are discussed in more detail here.
Presently, numerous human studies have shown that DMSO can treat amyloidosis, and one showed that it treated Neiman-Pick’s disease. Additionally, DMSO in this and this animal study and in this human study has been shown to treat Alzheimer’s disease, another condition linked to misfolded proteins (along with another one where adults with a variety of different degenerative brain conditions were treated). Likewise, we’ve clinically observed Parkinson’s (another disease that can be linked to misfolded proteins) responds to treatment with DMSO, and recently, one reader here reported:
I ordered DMSO immediately after your first article appeared. I am now in the 4th week of testing DMSO for Parkinson's disease. [The initial dose I took was too high so I stopped] On the second day of the break my Parkinson's symptoms almost disappeared and I felt better than I had felt for ages. The biggest improvement was in relief from bradykinesia. After being slow for the past years, I suddenly became Mr Speedy. At [a lower] dose I get minor brain fog for about one hour and the benefits of DMSO for the rest of the day.
In terms of symptom response to DMSO, in these first 4 weeks, pain, speed and the range of movement were most improved, followed by stiffness. Tremor seems to take more time to respond but there are already subtle signs of improvement. I and my family have also noted improvements in a whole range of other symptoms: brighter facial expression, eye comfort (more irrigation), stronger voice, more energy, better left/right hand coordination (fewer typing errors when using computer keyboard) and improved handwriting. Most importantly, I have periods of feeling really good which were previously absent. I have no doubt that DMSO is doing something good.
Note: since many cancer causing proteins are misfolded proteins, it is thought that this may partly explain DMSO’s anticancer properties.
While I am very open-minded to unconventional medical ideas and knew DMSO could treat a variety of otherwise incurable neurological diseases (e.g., ALS), there was one thing I always had a bit of difficulty believing. DMSO allegedly had been shown to cure Down Syndrome, demonstrated both in three clinical trials (e.g., this one and this one) and numerous remarkable case reports that were presented by multiple corroborating medical witnesses in Congressional testimony, along with numerous studies showing DMSO improved the cognition and behavior of developmentally delayed children. To explain this impossible benefit, I theorized it was likely due to DMSO’s protein stabilizing benefits, as Down Syndrome is characterized by “the aberrant accumulation of unfolded/misfolded proteins resulting from over-burdened protein quality control systems.”
In turn, one reader recently shared:
We’ve been giving some [DMSO] to our young daughter who has Down Syndrome. We've been giving her extra vitamins based on the treatment protocol of some studies that I found after reading your previous posts on this topic.
Almost immediately we noticed that our little girl was sleeping better through the night, and she's become more verbal. She'll be 2 in less than a week and she suddenly seems like she wants to say words more intentionally now, even if we mostly can't understand them yet. Also, her appetite has improved substantially. She just seems more active, and that's really awesome!
After which I received this comment:
This is such a helpful article! My husband is the one you quoted about using DMSO on our daughter with Down Syndrome...let me tell you, even in the time since he made that comment, we have seen changes in our little girl. The biggest one is that she is now CRAWLING-she had seemed for the longest time like she wasn't even interested, but now she's doing it (she started on her 2nd birthday, in fact!). And her coordination and motor skills are steadily improving as well. She is super close to sitting up on her own, something I was getting really worried about. There have been many other small improvements, and it's almost like she's not even the same kid she was two weeks ago. I write a blog here in Substack about raising a DS kid as naturally as possible, and this is going to give me PLENTY to write about. I am so grateful for your articles about it, and I am so excited to keep learning and seeing what's possible! Thank you so much!
What I find particularly noteworthy about this is that the “untreatability” of genetic disorders (which typically result from a dysfunctional protein) has justified spending incredible amounts of money on both research and treatments for them (e.g., the industry is still in its early stages but 20.4 billion is already spent each year on gene therapies in the United States—which in part explains why there was such a push to bring the unsafe mRNA platform onto the market and open up a massive new drug sector). In contrast, DMSO is virtually free and has been shown to treat many of these disorders we still do not have a good option for.
Collagen Disorders
Irregular depositions of collagen underlie many different diseases (e.g., many rheumatologic disorders and many degenerative results of aging). Fortunately, much in the same way DMSO can address the accumulation of abnormal proteins, it can also address a variety of collagen disorders by “softening” collagen. For example, in a recent article I highlighted how, in addition to DMSO aiding the healing of chronic wounds and surgical scars, it:
•Attenuate excessive MMP-9 activity (which when excessive creates disordered healing and is linked to a variety of fibrotic diseases)_.
_•Decreases experimentally induced intestinal adhesions (a common complication of abdominal surgeries) and eliminates subcutaneous radiation-induced fibrosis (the pathologic deposition of collagen).
•Disrupt the links between collagen fibers and treats keloid scars by flattening and loosening their associated collagen bundles (a result also found in this study of ten patients with keloid scars).
•Strengthens the tensile strength of healing surgical incisions and post-surgical scars and prevents hypertrophic (excessive) post-surgical scar formation.
Beyond all of this being incredibly beneficial for surgical outcomes and preventing (the fairly common) chronic complications of surgery, it (along with DMSO’s previously mentioned ability to eliminate abnormal protein deposits) also indicates DMSO can help with other collagen disorders.
In turn, the earliest study I know of that found a benefit in collagen disorders was this 1965 study, which reported that over three months of treatment, 5 out of 4 patients with scleroderma had an improved range of motion and softening of their skin, while 3 out of 3 patients with a Dupuytren’s contracture had a reduction in plaque size in the palmar fascia and increased finger motion.
Note: many other reports of DMSO benefitting collagen disorders (e.g., this symposium which provided data on 9,521 patients with a variety of conditions such as Dupuytren's contractures) also exists.
DMSO and Contractures
Dupuytren’s contractures occur when the collagen under the palm builds up and abnormally thickens.
A variety of treatment options exist to address this issue (e.g., injecting an enzyme to digest the collagen, breaking the collagen up with a needle, or surgically removing it), but all have downsides (e.g., complications from the procedure or a recurrence of the contracture). In turn, there is still insufficient evidence to build a consensus on the best way to approach this common condition.
Before the FDA shut down DMSO, this is what Merck reported to their clinical investigators (after roughly 4,000 patients had received DMSO for up to 18 months):
Dupuytren’s contracture—Long-term administration has caused some improvement in fibrous scar contractures. 90 percent is recommended.
In addition to the study mentioned above where 3 out of 3 patients with Dupuytren’s contracture improved from DMSO, another study gave DMSO to 29 patients with Dupuytren’s contracture and found 2 had a complete remission, 14 had a partial remission, and 13 had no response (along with a single patient with a Cicatricial contracture who had a partial remission).
In another study, DMSO yielded good results for 6 out of 9 Dupuytren’s contractures (and 1 out of 3 Peyronie's disease).
Conversely, in another trial of 23 patients with Dupuytren’s contractures that had been present for over 5 years, receiving 80% DMSO 3 times a day for a month did not help any of them. This suggests that DMSO works best early in the disease process, that a month is not long enough to get results, and that 90% rather than 80% may be necessary for this application.
Peyronie's disease
Peyronie's disease is a condition in which fibrous scar tissue builds up in the penis, producing extreme pain whenever a patient gets an erection and gradually curves one’s erection.
The exact cause of it is unknown, but it is thought to be due to a disordered wound healing process and, since 1828 has long been recognized to occur in association with Dupuytren’s contractures. Due to the sensitive nature of the condition, men are often reluctant to report it, and estimates vary greatly on how common it is (ranging from 0.3% to 16%).
Note: In addition to us hearing about this from our female patients, I have numerous friends who’ve confided with me they experience chronic discomfort from their husband having a slightly curved penis (which results in uneven pressure being applied to the vaginal wall), so I am inclined to believe a significant number of men are affected by the less severe stages of this disorder. As such, DMSO’s use here is something I really wish more men knew about.
Since the penis is more challenging to modify than the hands, many different approaches are used to address this collagen deposition, most of which have side effects and don’t always lead to satisfactory outcomes (and in most cases, the penis can never be completely straightened). However, DMSO was found to be effective, especially if used early in the disease process and applied for a prolonged period (e.g., a year).
Peyronie’s disease patients at the DMSO clinic in Portland receive topical application of DMSO directly in the penis, and Stanley Jacob reports relief in about 50 percent of the cases he treats. “We're not seeing rapid, significant improvement in curvature but the newer DMSO preparations we are employing are superior to DMSO water.”
Likewise, this is what Merck reported in a bulletin sent to their investigators:
Peyronie's disease—In a few patients so far treated, decreased size of the plaques and straightening of the penis has been noted.
In one of the few studies on DMSO and Peyronie’s disease, two Cleveland urologists, Lester Persky and Bruce H. Stewart, reported that of thirteen men with the condition who applied DMSO for 8-12 weeks, six were improved enough to resume reasonably normal intercourse. One patient showed a complete disappearance of the plaque caused by the disease.
In another study, four patients used 90% DMSO on the affected area several times daily for 2-3 months. Two patients responded with softening or disappearance of plaques and deformity was corrected in one.
While DMSO does not have a 100% cure rate for either of these conditions, it often works and unlike the other options is devoid of side effects. Because DMSO works best when used early and can be applied discreetly at home, it offers a powerful and accessible option for those dealing with these conditions—especially Peyronie's disease.
Lastly, other types of contractures can also be helped. For example, in this study of 20 rheumatoid arthritis patients with flexion contractures in various joints, DMSO (plus hydrocortisone) was found to increase joint flexion by 20-30 degrees, and after 30-40 days of post treatment follow up, there were no contractural relapses.
Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva
One of the most remarkable connective tissue disorders DMSO treats is fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), a rare genetic disorder (affecting 1 in 2 million people) where bone rather than connective tissue is created each time tissue heals, causing these people to gradually turn to human statues
FOP is classically considered to be impossible to cure since the extra bone can’t be removed as healing from the bone removal simply creates even more bone. FOP in short is one of those diseases where I just have always felt really sad thinking about what people who suffer from it go through:
Like Down Syndrome, non-profits have “worked” for decades to find a cure for FOP and come to accept nothing can be done for it but somehow are unaware of what DMSO did:
A man in his thirties had had the disease for twenty years In 1964 Jacob started him on DMSO, and after a few months (of topical application) he had improved. When they had started out, a good deal of his body had calcified—he couldn't move any of his joints; he couldn't lie, or sit other than rigidly; he couldn't bend his neck or move his fingers. His knees, his hips, his ankles—all were rigid. But he could open and close his mouth; so he could eat, and, for the time, survive.
"We concentrated on his shoulders," Jacob told me, ' 'because I felt that if we could get a little motion in the upper part of his body, it would make him less of a vegetable. After a couple of months, he did recover some shoulder motion [and his pain significantly decreased].
Then, gradually, some of the calicifed soft tissue lumps became smaller and smaller.
"When the FDA halted studies in November 1965, the young man had regained much use of his fingers; he wrote, literally, hundreds of letters—to the FDA, the Congressmen, and to the President. The FDA sent him stereotyped letters. The President, who receives a lot of touching appeals every day, overlooked this one.
Additionally, one reader here knew one of those patients:
My Uncle Red (Walter Kummer) took DMSO as part of a study at OHSU [with Stanley Jacob] in the '80s... maybe even late '70s for treatment of FOP - Fibrodysplasia Ossificanas Progressiva....his muscles turned into bone. He was diagnosed when he was 11 or 13 years old and wasn't supposed to live past 15, then 20 and eventually the medical doctors gave up guessing his lifespan. When he started taking DMSO it was first topical then he ingested it. I was very young but I remember dark colored bottles of DMSO being on the counter. Uncle Red must have been in his late 40s or 50s by that time when OHSU had him in the study. I think it helped him live as long as he did. I think he was in his late 60s when he died in the early 90s. I have never forgotten those bottles and Uncle Red.
Scleroderma
Scleroderma is another horrible disorder, that despite decades of work still has a poor prognosis (e.g., patients with it are 3.5 times as likely to die as the general population, and the rheumatologists I know have very few patients with this condition because they eventually die whereas most rheumatologic can be indefinitely managed). While the cause of scleroderma remains unknown, it is characterized by a hardening and thickening of the skin (effectively compressing the body like saran wrap) due to an abnormal growth of connective tissue (e.g., collagen) which is thought to begin in the blood vessels, in time enters the muscles and joints, and eventually gets into the internal organs (which is typically where death occurs). Two of the major complications of this disease are poor peripheral circulation (frequently creating ulcers and often progressing to the point fingers and toes often need to be amputated) and poor mobility due to a stiffening of the body.
From the start, DMSO was observed by many researchers to be immensely helpful in treating scleroderma, and much of the most vocal protest the FDA got on their ban of DMSO came from the fact they refused to approve it for scleroderma despite extensive evidence supporting its use compiled by leading rheumatologists.
•An early study gave six scleroderma patients with ulcers on their fingers DMSO (initially at 50% but gradually raised to 100%). Five significantly improved (four had their ulcers begin to heal in one or two days and were completely healed in two weeks, while the fifth took six weeks). The final patient could not tolerate DMSO and left the study. While DMSO was initially painted on the affected areas, many patients found they had a better response covering large parts of their body with it or immersing their affected fingers in it for one minute every two hours. Additionally, this study determined that the collagen deposition under the skin decreased with DMSO treatment.
Note: this study was initially inspired by the recognition that DMSO is very effective at treating pain, and scleroderma is often quite painful.
A follow up study reported the results of 42 patients with chronic scleroderma who had not responded to any previous treatment and often had significant organ involvement of the disease. DMSO was attempted and given at a dose they could tolerate (which ranged from 30-100% and often could be raised over time) and then either was just given to the affected part of the body, a significant part of it, the entire body, or in some cases by immersing the affected region in DMSO), and then after 2-3 weeks only administered to the hands, forearms, feet and occasionally the face. Additionally, 9 patients with circumscribed and interstitial calcinosis, tendon contractures, and capsular adhesions who had not responded to topical DMSO received 5-10ml of 1-5% DMSO injected subcutaneously once a day for four weeks.
In many cases, 1-2 years of therapy was needed to obtain a significant cutaneous improvement, and of the 42 patients 16 showed fair or poor response (e.g., 6 with late stage scleroderma died from their illness during the study) while 26 showed good or excellent improvement to DMSO. Of the 26 (62%) with a good response, most had to remain on it, but DMSO caused 3 to have a complete remission (and no longer need DMSO), while 9 who thought this had happened but later had to resume DMSO within four weeks because their symptoms (e.g., pain and stiffness) returned. Of the 19 patients with ulcers, the majority healed from topical DMSO, a few required immersion in DMSO, and it is unclear from the study what happened to the rest. There were also 2 patients with interstitial calcinosis that restricted joint motion and disappeared after DMSO.
Additionally, like the previous study, they determined that pathologic collagen deposits under the skin were being broken down and returned to their normal form, with collagen breakdown products increasing by approximately 50% in the urine— (whereas typically in scleroderma and other rheumatologic disorders that does not happen). This, in turn, is similar to how DMSO increases the urinary excretion of amyloid degradation products.
Note: if the FDA were at all reasonable, this study would have gotten approval to use DMSO to treat scleroderma, especially given the professional reputation of the rheumatologist who conducted the study.
In a final study, a Cleveland Clinic rheumatologist gave DMSO to 19 patients with systemic sclerosis and 3 with local sclerosis who’d had it for 1-20 years (averaging roughly 7 years) with a similar but more refined DMSO treatment protocol. This study had the most precise data, showing that DMSO softened the skin, improved joint motion and grip strength, and eliminated ulcers. Additionally, in this study, DMSO was only applied to one hand (so an untreated “control” would exist), but due to DMSO’s systemic absorption, the other hand also improved (although never more than the treated hand). In all cases, the effect of DMSO was temporary, so it had to be continued to sustain its benefits.
Note: a similar 1966 study concluded there was “no benefit” from DMSO because the changes observed in both the treated and untreated hand were similar (as the authors appeared to be unaware of the systemic effects of DMSO). I believe this issue characterizes the small number of other studies that found no benefit from DMSO in scleroderma (but I could not access the articles to confirm this).
Other data includes:
A study of 10 patients with scleroderma showed that their skin had greatly improved from DMSO to the point where the skin became supple and ulcers healed. That author then conducted a subsequent study on 20 patients, noting they “had increased mobility, rapid relief of pain and healing of persistent ulcers, arrest of the spread of cutaneous disease, regrowth of hair, and return of sensation and sweating.”
A study of 29 patients with systemic scleroderma that assessed blood flow (as scleroderma significantly impairs circulation) in the skin and muscles with a radioactive isotope. It found that 50% DMSO slightly improved it, increased it by 1.2 times when given with another agent, and by 6 times when given with 1% nicotinic acid. When the DMSO nicotinic acid combination was given, it also resolved their Raynaud’s syndrome, gross edema and hyperpigmentation of the skin. Additionally, when 50% DMSO was given with another agent, within a month it completely healed the ulcers on the fingers of 6 six patients it was tried on. Finally, the authors noted they’d used DMSO on roughly 2,500 rheumatologic patients (e.g., rheumatoid arthritic, scleroderma, amyloidosis) with excellent results.
Note: another paper detailed how DMSO causes a dilation of the blood vessels in the upper dermis of scleroderma patients. Additionally, in scleroderma, the ESR is elevated (which indicates blood cells are clumping together and disrupting the microcirculation), so since DMSO disperses clumped blood cells, this may also partly explain why it improves circulation in this illness.
A Russian study (I verified by translating) gave 30-90% DMSO 1-2 times a day to 52 women and 6 men with progressive scleroderma (that was often quite severe) for several months to 2 years. Within 1-2 months, significant improvement was observed in the skin and connective tissue, and in time, all ulcers disappeared. DMSO stopped the disease’s progression for all but 2 of them (96.6%), and clinical recovery occurred in 34 of the 40 with plaque scleroderma (while the remaining 6 improved but had to remain on DMSO). Linear scleroderma also responded to DMSO, but took much longer to regress. Of the 8 patients who had generalized scleroderma, 1 had a complete regression after 2 years, while the other 7 at the time of publication (after 2-3 months of treatment) had shown significant improvement in a wide range of areas. All 40 patients who completed the treatment course were monitored for up to 5 years, and no relapses occurred.
[Russian] patients commented on the suddenness with which the ugly old disabilities began to disappear and the rapidity of the healing process.
Many patients in that group have said they were happy to experience washing with DMSO," the scientists said. "It reportedly improved their well-being immediately, and they simply could not imagine life without DMSO. The results we have obtained have proved the high effectiveness of DMSO.
Another study found DMSO yielded good results for 3 out of 4 scleroderma patients.
Finally, when a Congressional Committee (unsuccessfully) pressured the FDA to legalize DMSO, as part of their case, they randomly surveyed 250 rheumatologists, of whom 68% responded, of whom 33% had used DMSO in their practice. Of them, 49% felt DMSO was effective (along with 23 more who did not have direct experience using it). Most of their uses were for musculoskeletal disorders, but many also reported using it for scleroderma. Sadly however, nowadays, it’s exceedingly rare for me to find rheumatologists who know much about DMSO.
Note: there are dozens of testimonials from scleroderma patients (e.g., at the committee hearing which I attached here) who experienced life-saving changes from DMSO and gave many heartfelt pleas to both the FDA and Congress for DMSO to be legalized for this condition.
Other Autoimmune Conditions
In the first two parts of this series (which can be read here and here), I provided numerous studies demonstrating DMSO’s ability to prevent or resolve experimentally induced inflammation (or tissue necrosis) and many others that mapped out its specific anti-inflammatory properties (e.g., it inhibits numerous inflammatory cytokines), and a wealth of data showing it was an effective treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.
Note: in the previous article, I forgot to mention that topical DMSO is often very helpful for insect and animal bites.
DMSO in turn, is well recognized for its anti-inflammatory actions, and some of my colleagues have used it for this purpose for years. Likewise, many authors have discussed its use in a variety of autoimmune disorders (e.g., this author discussed how DMSO can often be quite helpful for idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura). In the section below, I will discuss its use in autoimmune conditions.
Interstitial Cystitis
Interstitial cystitis (also known as painful bladder syndrome) is defined as an unexplained irritation of the bladder wall that frequently is extremely painful (especially as the bladder fills) and often causes the patients to need to frequently urinate (e.g., up to 50 times one day—including at night), frequently causes bloody urine and in time can lead to scarring in the bladder which further reduce its maximum volume (hence making everything even worse).
Note: estimates on how common this disease (which is more common in women) vary, but they generally range from 0.87% - 17.3% as sometimes more or less stringent diagnostic criteria are used to diagnose it.
Remarkably, despite how common and debilitating this condition is (e.g., readers have emailed me about it), there still is no “good” way to deal with it, so various approaches are used that sometimes give varying degrees of symptomatic improvement.
Fortunately, the only medical condition DMSO (at 50%—sold as RIMSO-50) is approved to treat is interstitial cystitis (IC). This it got approved before the FDA decided to stonewall all DMSO approvals (e.g., for scleroderma). DMSO is thought to help IC by doing the following:
•It reduces bladder inflammation and pain (see this study, this study, this study, this study, and the studies I linked to here).
•It relaxes the bladder and pelvic detrusor muscles, and appears to address detrusor fibrosis is found in approximately 53% of IC patients (which are common issues in untreatable IC).
•It reduces bladder scar tissue by preventing collagen buildup inside the bladder.
•It reduces erosion and thinning of the bladder by reducing inflammation (e.g., see this and this study).
To illustrate:
A 38 year old lady in Las Vegas, Nevada, reported to the clinic with severe abdominal pain and blood in her urine. She needed to urinate approximately every 30 minutes, and she told the doctor that she was sure that she would be dead in a few months. She was sure that she had cancer. After a complete examination and tests this lady was informed that she did not have cancer. The problem was interstitial cystitis. She was treated with a bladder instillation of DMSO and told to drink one teaspoonful of DMSO twice a day in cranberry juice. This lady felt better almost immediately. Two months later her symptoms had completely disappeared. She had also complained about depression and aches and pains in various parts of her body. These were also gone, and she said she felt like a new woman.
Similarly, since it is FDA-approved (and hence easy to research), a significant amount of evidence has accumulated over the years showing DMSO helps IC. That includes:
•A 1978 study (which can also be read here) of 213 patients with a variety of inflammatory conditions involving the lower genitourinary tract such as intractable IC, radiation cystitis, chronic prostatitis, and chronic female trigonitis who received intravesical (DMSO applied to the bladder through a catheter), most of whom were women and the majority of whom had a good response to DMSO. This study included 100 women with chronic classic interstitial cystitis (and 14 men with it) along with 31 women with atypical chronic cystitis.
Additionally:
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Of the 31 women with atypical IC, 13 had an excellent response, 10 a good response, 4 a fair response, and 4 a poor response. The visual appearance of the bladder improved in over 90% of the cases, but an improved bladder capacity over at least 100cc was only seen 20% of the time.
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Of the 14 men with IC, 3 had an excellent response, 6 a good response, 4 had a transient improvement but ultimately required surgery, and at the time of publication, it was unclear if the last person would require surgery.
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Of the 12 patients with radiation cystitis (e.g., from prostate cancer therapy) 50% had a positive response to it (3 “excellent,” 2 “good” and 1 “fair”).
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Of the 35 patients with chronic prostatitis, 75% benefited significantly, with 12 having a “excellent” response, 14 a “good” response, and in 90% of cases, inflammation of the prostatic urethra improved.
•A 1978 study of 17 IC patients (including one man) found DMSO treated symptoms in 12 patients (sometimes in a dramatic fashion) while 5 did not respond to it.
•A 1988 study of 33 IC patients (including 3 men), found 53% had a marked improvement after DMSO (compared to 18% of placebo) and 93% had an objective improvement (compared to 35% of placebo).
Additionally, as this 1993 study and this 2012 study show, cases of IC that do not respond to DMSO often respond if another agent (e.g., heparin, corticosteroids, hyaluronic acid or analgesics) is mixed with the DMSO.
Lupus
I occasionally hear of DMSO being used to treat Lupus. For example, this author discusses how it greatly reduces the symptoms of Lupus and is more effective for the condition than steroids (which unlike DMSO are quite damaging if taken for a prolonged period).
The only publication I know of which evaluated DMSO’s effect on Lupus reported on two women with Lupus that was causing (pathologically confirmed) lupus interstitial cystitis and had not responded to prednisone. Both had a complete remission of their interstitial cystitis after intravesical DMSO.
Asthma
Numerous patients have found DMSO is quite helpful for asthma, often reducing the dose of the harmful medications they need to manage the condition, and in some cases eliminating the need for it. Typically, this is done with topical applications that sometimes mix in other agents which are beneficial in asthma. Additionally, DMSO can help with allergies and patients taking DMSO for other issues sometimes notice their allergies disappear.
While many others (e.g., this author) have shared anecdotal reports of DMSO helping asthma, I only know of one study (which was summarized in this book) that directly evaluated this. It gave 153 adults (84 men and 69 women) DMSO mixed with a bronchodilator, a steroid, and an antihistamine all administered by intramuscular injections of whom 43 of whom had frequent asthmatic crises (with asymptomatic periods) and 110 with more intense and frequent crises (despite receiving the standard therapies for asthma). The evaluations included all the standard pulmonary assessments, and it was found that the DMSO solution gave 37 (24.5%) an excellent result, 92 (60%) a good response, while 24 (15.5% had no change).
Note: many have observed DMSO increases the potency of cortisol (thereby allowing many patients who require cortisone for an autoimmune disorder to drop to a lower and less toxic dosage). Similarly, a variety of effective potent topical products that combine DMSO with cortisol have been created.
Multiple Sclerosis
Numerous authors have reported dramatic results in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients. For example, a 29 year patient who was paralyzed from MS and trying to get access to dialysis (when very few units were available) saw Stanley Jacob, who decided to risk giving her DMSO orally (despite her kidney failure).
Her improvement was dramatic—as dramatic as any benefit I have ever seen ," Jacob told me. Her renal problem seemed to come under control. Then—after a few more weeks—she walked again.
"Now, six years after her first DMSO treatment, she still has wobbly knees. But she walks. She drives her car. She takes care of her two children and her husband. But she is going downhill. I wish we could help her again, but we just don't seem able to. Despite this, however, I am not convinced that DMSO alone is useful in multiple sclerosis.
Likewise, another author shared the case of a California woman who was confined to bed, typically was in the fetal position, and was living at a convalescent hospital as she was expected to die within a few months. She was then given DMSO through multiple routes (e.g., injectable, oral and topical).
Shortly after treatment started, this lady complained that the treatment was causing pain in her legs. Prior to treatment she had very little feeling in her legs so even this pain was considered to be positive. Slightly over a year after treatment was started, this lady was able to move her legs. She later was able to feed herself. Improvement continued until this lady was moved to another state to be closer to some members of her family who thought the same treatment would be available in her new location.
The only study I know of that evaluated DMSO for MS was conducted on 34 patients in Russia in 1984. Overall, the investigators felt DMSO had a very positive result for MS, with the best results seen in patients who had remitting MS, while the results were more inconsistent in patients with rapidly progressive MS. The investigators assessed this was due to DMSO causing remyelination, a reduction in edema, and improved communication between nerve cells alongside DMSO having a positive effect on immunity and antiallergic and reparative action on the injured tissues.
Note: there was also a reported case of Stanley Jacob treating a patient with ALS which resulted in “some instant, overnight and slightly delayed wonders of therapy,” and I believe one person sent me a case of a positive report of using DMSO for ALS (but I can’t find it now). In our own experience IV DMSO is one of the only things which can treat ALS (typically it halts the progression of the disease).
Uveitis
One study induced uveitis (inflammation of the middle layer of the eye) in dogs, and found that subsequently giving DMSO decreased intraocular pressure and fibrin production—suggesting DMSO has therapeutic value in this condition.
Inflammatory Bowel Diseases
Quite a few of my colleagues believe the most important use of DMSO is that it is profoundly anti-inflammatory (but safe), and that it is particularly useful for inflammatory bowel disorders—especially when done early in the illness. Likewise, many DMSO authors report the same.
Note: others believe DMSO’s best use is healing brain tissue (e.g., after a stroke).
The only study I know that directly evaluated this question (and can be read here) took patients with recurrent attacks of proctosigmoidal ulcerative colitis that was not prevented by 2mg prophylactic sulfasalazine and then gave them 500mg sulfasalazine and 10 mg of prednisolone four times a day, and a 20mg prednisolone enema at night. After two weeks passed, 45 (51%) were free of symptoms, and 45 were given DMSO while 46 were given allopurinol (in addition to the existing regiment), resulting in 84% being free of symptoms. After two weeks, they were then put on 2mg of sulfasalazine alone each day, or it with either allopurinol or DMSO. After a year, 25% of those on sulfasalazine had a relapse, while 5% of those who also received allopurinol and 5% of those who also received DMSO relapsed. Additionally, the data showed DMSO significantly reduced the ESR over 2 weeks (by 77% compared to 37% with the standard approach), the (high) white blood cell count (by 65% vs. 41%) and raised the low albumin (by 9% vs. 7.8%). While all of that is a bit confusing to follow, it essentially says that DMSO, when compared to standard therapies, improved ulcerative colitis and prevented its recurrence.
Additionally, while not a study, I thought this passage by Pat McGrady should be included:
At 12:50 p.m., February 5, 1968, E. Rottenberg of the Ozothine Laboratories, Hauts-de-Seine, France, [unsuccessfully] applied for a patent for DMSO 'for treatment of all irritating conditions of the alimentary canal.’
He cited as support for his application these examples:
Acute gastritis—Twenty-eight patients unable to work went back to their labors following five to eight days of treatment, rid of such symptoms as nausea, vomiting, pain, gastric heaviness; their stomach secretions became normal and so did their general condition. One year later, twenty-one were still free of symptoms, working and off their diets. During this time about ten had undergone treatment again for about fifteen days.
Chronic gastritis—Thirteen patients on assorted treatments all relapsed on stopping treatment. On DMSO by mouth for one to two months, symptoms cleared up and all of them went back to work. At the end of a year, all of them remained improved, although some had resumed treatment two or three times.
Peptic Ulcer—Five patients were completely cured of recent peptic ulcers with oral DMSO, without recurrence during the following year.
Enterocolitis—Six patients with abdominal pain for several months and with diarrhea, emaciated and asthenic, began to improve after eight days on oral DMSO, and all were back at work in two months, pain-free and in good shape.
Mucomembranous colitis—Three patients were "cured" after three weeks of oral DMSO.
When the DMSO is combined with star anise, the appetite improves, the application stated.
Myasthenia Gravis
In order for skeletal muscles to fire, they need to receive acetylcholine from the nerve that directs them. In myasthenia gravis (MG) the body forms antibodies to the muscle's acetylcholine receptors (AChRs), and as they are destroyed, the muscles need more and more acetylcholine to be sent by the nerves to activate. In turn, MG is managed by various immune suppressing medications, filtering the AChR antibodies out of the blood and acetylcholine esterase inhibitors (which boost acetylcholine levels). Since DMSO both reduces harmful immune activity and is also an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor, there is a rational basis for using it to treat MG.
That possibility was initially discovered (accidentally) in 1980, when two researchers tested a variety of agents for their ability to reduce AChR antibodies, and realized that the DMSO being used as a vehicle for the various agents they were testing was independently reducing those antibodies. They then found giving rats daily intraperitoneal injections of 1 mL DMSO for two weeks resulted in a 52% decrease in AChR antibodies (but not total IgG levels) that were observed for an additional six weeks after treatment was terminated.
Note: after this discovery, the researchers expressed their eagerness to test DMSO in humans with MG (the New York Times even covered it).
A follow-up rat study then found DMSO suppressed anti-AChR antibody levels by an average of 53%–76%, with the effect being similar regardless of whether DMSO was given orally, rectally, or intraperitoneally. Additionally, DMSO treatment was observed to suppress the anti-AChR antibody response in rats to a weak primary antigenic stimulus.
Sadly, no human studies have ever been performed for DMSO with MG. However, patients and integrative healthcare providers sometimes do it and report success from doing so (along with again cautioning that if cortisone is being used, DMSO will significantly increase its effect on the body).
Note: this research inspired a 1982 study to determine if DMSO suppressed thyroid autoantibodies (which were experimentally induced in rats). It did, and also was found to increase the ratio of IgM to IgG plaque forming cells (which suggested a true immunoregulatory effect). In turn, some patients report that DMSO benefits autoimmune thyroiditis.
Sjogren's syndrome
Sjogren's syndrome (autoimmunity of the parotid gland) results in a loss of saliva and the mouth becoming very dry. Since it is a very difficult condition to treat, this table within a larger study caught by eye:
Pleomorphism and Autoimmunity
Over the years, I’ve seen many accepted mechanisms of action for pharmaceutical drugs later be discarded (e.g., the chemical imbalance theory of depression was pseudoscience from the start, and it is now becoming accepted antidepressants don’t work by raising brain serotonin levels—which if anything actually increases the risk of suicide).
One of DMSO’s widely recognized properties is it causes cancerous cells to revert to being normal. In researching that (which will be covered later in this series), I came across a fascinating study that tested cancer patients for pleomorphic bacteria (something many previous pioneers of successful but suppressed alternative cancer therapies like Rife and Naessens also believed caused many cancers) and found those bacteria were present. It then tested all 27 isolated organisms and found that 12.5-25% DMSO caused an almost complete inhibition of their growth (without affecting intact red blood cells).
The pleomorphic model of bacteria (discussed further here) essentially states that bacteria can significantly change their morphology (to the point they are almost unrecognizable from their original form), that these changes are often done in response to their environment, and that some forms are relatively harmless to the body, while others cause disease. In turn, since things that kill bacteria often transform them into ones that are more pathogenic, a longtime belief within certain schools of natural medicine is that the goal should be to change the terrain of the body to encourage a benign morphology of bacteria rather than trying to kill them all off.
Note: some of these schools also believe this applies to viruses and fungi, and that, in some cases, they can transform from one type to another (e.g., a bacteria becoming fungal).
A large group of modern researchers studied this subject for decades (e.g., hundreds of research studies they conducted are summarized in this wonderful textbook by Lida Mattman). Five of their key observations were:
•Antibiotics will often fail to kill every bacteria present and then trigger those that survive to enter a primitive survival state known as a “cell wall deficient” (CWD) form resembling a mycoplasma. This process in turn, was most commonly triggered by antibiotics that attack bacterial cell walls (which characterizes many commonly used antibiotics).
•CWD bacteria are very hard to detect (most standard microbial methods will determine that no organisms are there when CWDs are present).
•When conditions are more optimal for survival, CWD organisms can revert to the active form and cause an infection that had been eliminated with antibiotics to suddenly and inexplicably recur (which, for example, we frequently see with urinary tract infections).
•Once present, CWD bacteria will often enter cells and cause chronic inflammation because the immune system will attack cells with the CWD bacteria.
•Many different unexplained autoimmune disorders (e.g., sarcoidosis) have characteristic CWD bacteria present that can be repeatedly identified from their inflamed tissue (the textbook cites an exhaustive amount of data substantiating this).
•While standard antibiotics are ineffective in treating CWD infections, non-standard ones (e.g., erythromycin or minocycline) often are, but the sensitivity to those antibiotics is highly variable depending on the causative organism.
In practice, we find 10-15% of chronic illnesses (including blood clots and cancers) have a pleomorphic etiology, but rather than try to eliminate those organisms with antibiotics (which always have side effects), we instead give signaling products derived from healthy bacteria that cause the pathologic bacteria to transform into a non-harmful form, which in those applicable cases, frequently yields remarkable results (e.g., this approach is very useful for lupus and many cancers). Likewise, I believe this model explains a longstanding belief within natural medicine that giving antibiotics for an acute infection often transforms it into a chronic illness down the road.
Note: ultraviolet blood irradiation is also quite effective at eliminating these organisms and the diseases they cause. For example, a case report discussed a cohort of 5 family members who had a variety of chronic diseases (e.g., Crohn's disease, asthma, complex regional pain syndrome, hypothyroidism, type 1 diabetes mellitus, and lymphangiomatosis) and found that 4 had a MAP (mycobacterium paratuberculosis) infection. Two patients received antibiotics and UVBI, and then experienced a resolution of their autoimmune symptoms.
As it so happens, many of the most commonly used rheumatologic drugs also function as antibiotics (e.g., see this study, this study, and this study). For example, the most commonly used drug in rheumatology (methotrexate) works by blocking the enzyme that converts folate into the active form which is needed for DNA synthesis, and likewise, two commonly used antibiotics (sulfamethoxazole and trimethoprim—typically sold in the combination bactrim) work by blocking the folate converting enzymes in bacterial cells. In turn, when bactrim is given in conjunction with methotrexate, the combination is often much more toxic to patients than either is alone.
In the case of methotrexate, my suspicion there might be another mechanism at work for the drug began early in my training when I learned that it worked by blocking folic acid production but that “the side effects of methotrexate can be prevented by giving supplemental folic acid” (which essentially defeats the stated point of the drug) and once I learned about the pleomorphic model of autoimmunity, I hence suspected it had antimicrobial effects on those organisms. As the previously mentioned studies show, it does, but it is typically considered to be a poor antibiotic because it has poor bacterial permeability (difficulty entering them). However, unlike normal bacteria, cell-wall deficient bacteria lack a cell well and hence are much more permeable.
Likewise, over the years, many have observed using non-standard antibiotics (particularly minocycline) can provide dramatic improvement for autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis or ALS. Still, since none of them ever worked consistently, they never became standard of care. That said, many forgotten trials exist, such as this Lancet publication showing minocycline frequently helped early-stage scleroderma.
Note: on Sept. 29, 1998, the National Enquirer had an article titled: "Deadly Disease That Turns People To Stone Cured By Simple Antibiotic." I have been trying to find a copy of it (as Mattman referenced it in her Scleroderma chapter, but the title seems to describe fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva).
In the case of both interstitial cystitis and scleroderma, many suspected they might have a bacteria component, but since they could not be isolated with conventional methods, the cause of these illnesses remains “unknown.” However:
•A study of bladder biopsies from interstitial cystitis patients (using methods that can detect CWD organisms) was able to identify a gram-negative organism (not found in controls) they described as “the forms contain nucleic acids and resemble cell wall-deficient bacteria in gross morphology; however, their swirled myelin-like ultrastructure is unusual and suggests a heretofore unclassified microbe.” Later, another study was able to also identify these organisms in the blood of interstitial cystitis patients and determined that it was highly resistant to antimicrobials (e.g., it could replicate in 5% phenol and was not inhibited by chloromycetin or streptomycin).
_Note: numerous studies have shown interstitial cystitis makes someone 2-5 times as likely to develop bladder cancer, a cancer which is often treated with the (live) tuberculosis vaccine. As tuberculosis is a mycoplasma, I have often wondered if this therapy works by stimulating the immune system to eliminate a related CWD in the bladder.
_•In the case of scleroderma, one researcher has consistently found acid-fast pleomorphic organism in the tissues of Scleroderma patients.1,2,3,4,5,6,7 Likewise, Mattman was able to consistently culture a pleomorphic organism from the blood of those patients.
In short, I suspect that beyond DMSO being anti-inflammatory, a key reason why it helps so many autoimmune conditions is because it effectively inhibits the growth of pleomorphic bacteria. Unfortunately, in some conditions (e.g., scleroderma), this also requires it to be consumed for life as rather than eliminate the bacteria it only inhibits their growth.
Note: I also suspect one of the reasons the COVID-19 vaccines cause a variety of autoimmune conditions is because the immune suppression they create allows already existing CWD infections to grow out of control. Likewise, a case can be made the childhood vaccines trigger this process either through immune suppression or by the adjuvants they contain triggering bacteria to change to their CWD forms.
Presently, I feel more comfortable suggesting this model for IC than scleroderma, as we have found two specific therapies aimed at correcting the pleomorphic balance of the bladder are very helpful for IC, whereas scleroderma patients are so much rarer, there hasn’t been the opportunity to adequately explore this hypothesis there. Likewise, one of the only other things that really helps IC is avoiding the dietary triggers for it, and within the terrain theory model, a large focus is always given to eating foods that encourage a healthy morphology of the bacteria present within the body.
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DMSO Protocols
One of the things that’s very challenging about using DMSO is that there is a significant amount of variation in what each individual will best respond to. Because of this, in the first and second parts of this series, I attempted to provide a very detailed explanation that could try to account for each possibility. From the feedback I have gotten, I’ve realized that it is also necessary to make a more straightforward set of instructions for using DMSO that is more accessible.
In the final part of this article, I will share that guidance along with everything else you need to know about DMSO (e.g., where to get it) and more specific approaches for some of the conditions discussed in this article along with the topics I am planning to cover in the rest of this series.
When using DMSO, the major consideration is how strong of a dose you want to use. This is because if you use too high a dose, you risk the chance of having a bad reaction, which will make you not want to use DMSO anymore, whereas if you use too low of a dose, the effect will be much less than desired. In turn, I’ve had many people here who:
•Applied 100% DMSO topically and had trouble believing anyone couldn’t tolerate that.
•Applied 70% DMSO topically, had a bit of irritation but thought it was manageable.
•Applies 30% topically and felt it was too strong.
Because of this, you essentially have two options:
•Be patient and start with a low dose you build up.
•Start a strong dose and agree not to hold it against me or DMSO if you don’t tolerate it.
In the previous articles, I advocated for the former. Still, many understandably started with a high dose, a few of whom then shared they’d had a skin reaction that made them hesitant to continue using DMSO.
Similarly, when using DMSO, there are two common routes of application, orally and topically. Orally, it is much stronger, but likewise, the GI tract is more sensitive to higher concentrations of DMSO. For this reason, I typically suggest starting with topical DMSO before doing oral DMSO. Likewise, there is a very small risk (1 in 1-2000) of an allergic reaction, so it’s generally advised to begin by patch testing DMSO on the skin before taking it orally.
So, What is Patch Testing?
Patch testing is a method used to determine how the application reacts to a product. It's a smart way to test a small area first before applying the product to larger areas, which helps to identify any adverse reactions.How to Patch Test:
•Select a Small Area: Choose a discreet spot.
•Apply a Tiny Amount: Use a small quantity of the product.
•Wait and Observe: Leave it on for 24 hours unless you notice irritation sooner.
•Proceed if All’s Good: If there’s no reaction, feel confident to use the product as intended!*If in contact with the skin: Some experience itching and tingling sensations, which are normal. If there’s any redness or swelling, wash the area immediately and discontinue use.
That said for general DMSO use (without going into all the nuances and additional details), I advise the following:
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Start with 30-50% DMSO and see how you tolerate it.
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If you have no issue, raise it to 70%.
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Only raise it past 70% if you are certain you are one of those people who is fine with 100% or you are using it for a specific application that can justify a higher concentration (e.g., a collagen contracture, a scar, an internal adhesion or an acute stroke).
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Until you are comfortable with topical applications, don’t do oral applications, and only if you think you need them.
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For oral dosing, start with a teaspoon of 70% or 100% DMSO mixed into a glass of water (you may also want juice or milk to eliminate DMSO’s taste).
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If you have issues with that, lower the dose to half a teaspoon.
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Otherwise, stay at a teaspoon for at least three days, and then if you think you need a stronger effect, go to 2 teaspoons.
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More than 3 teaspoons in a glass of water is excessive, and at that point, you are better off dividing the dose throughout the day.
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With both topical and oral DMSO, people generally find that as time goes on, their tolerance to it improves.
Note: more detailed instructions on oral (and IV) DMSO use can be found here, while more detailed instructions on topical uses can be found here.
Regarding the concentrations used, I generally advise buying 70% DMSO because people rarely react to it (e.g., the DMSO felt it was the concentration that had the best balance between safety and efficacy). It doesn’t require any significant calculations to dose appropriately (e.g., you can apply it topically as it is, or mix it with equal parts of purified water to get it to roughly 35%). However, you can also do all of that with 100% DMSO (e.g., dilute it to roughly 50% rather than 35% by mixing it with equal parts of water or to roughly 33% by mixing it with two parts of water).
Additionally, the one tricky thing about dosing DMSO is that it weighs slightly more than water (1ml of DMSO is 1.1004 grams). Since there is a fairly wide range of tolerability to DMSO, I’ve bypassed that issue here by treating it as having the same density as water and suggesting a slightly lower oral dose.
Note: when DMSO is taken by mouth, the total concentration should always be kept to 20% or less, and ideally, it should be taken slowly after eating a meal.
When applying DMSO topically, there are two options. The first is to use a liquid that you directly apply (e.g., I like to use natural hair brushes to dab it on, but sometimes when needed I just dip my finger in it and then rub it onto the target area). The second is to use a gel which is rubbed into the skin.
When applying DMSO to the body, it is important to clean the area it will be applied to beforehand, and to ensure DMSO dries before putting anything in contact with it. This is because DMSO will pulling things on the surface of the skin into the body, and if a toxic chemical is on the skin, it hence will be dragged into the body. This is very rare, but there are known instances of this happening.
I personally prefer the liquids because it’s easier to control the total dose with them, more gets into the body, and liquid DMSO tends to be less irritating. That said, gels hold the advantage of continually releasing DMSO into the body over a prolonged period and are much easier to apply. Because of this, whichever one you use is largely a question of personal preference.
In most cases, if an area bothers you, you are better off applying DMSO to that area (provided there is no open wound), but if the issue feels systemic, you may also need to take oral DMSO.
Note: for many of the conditions described here (e.g., interstitial cystitis) even though DMSO was primarily given through catheters that emptied it into the bladder, many clinicians have found it works just as effectively when taken orally (and did not subject the patient who were already so irritated they could not tolerate a catheter going in).
There are a lot of options when purchasing DMSO. Of them, I believe these are the three best brands (which I’ve included links to purchase them):
•Jacob Lab (e.g., this gel or this liquid)—which is 99.98% pure.
•Nature’s Gift (e.g., this gel or this liquid)—which is 99.9% pure.
•The DMSO Store (e.g., this gel or this liquid)—which is 99.995% pure.
_Note: when buying liquid DMSO, it should always be sold in a glass container. Additionally, unless you feel confident you can dilute them correctly, get the 70% ones.
_Briefly, my thoughts on the brands are as follows:
•I primarily used Nature’s Gift for years, so I am very familiar with it.
•The DMSO Store version recently appeared and is likely the purest one (and like Nature’s Gift is easily available on Amazon). However, unlike Nature’s Gift, the 70% liquid form is not sold on Amazon so you need to make sure you dilute it correctly.
•If you are concerned about purity and authenticity, the Jacob’s lab DMSO is the best product (and the one Stanley Jacob recommended). Unfortunately, it is the most expensive and since it’s not offered on Amazon, and takes the longest to ship.
I am ultimately not sure which brand is best (from my standpoint all three work fine), and I am hoping to get some feedback from readers here on the subtle differences they notice between them.
Specific Conditions:
Generally speaking, the same DMSO protocols which have been discussed throughout this series can also be used for the conditions described throughout the article (e.g., if you are already on a steroid, you may need to have your doctor periodically assess if the current dose you are on needs to be lowered). Likewise, if the condition is systemic, oral consumption is typically done alongside applying DMSO directly over the symptomatic areas.
However, there are some specific nuances to be aware of.
Asthma—can be treated with topical or oral applications. When administered topically, it is normally over the chest, nose and forehead (remember that the face has less tolerance to higher concentrations of DMSO) and in some cases (especially over the chest) mixed with another substance that has anti-asthmatic properties (e.g., small amounts of high purity eucalyptus essential oil). Additionally, if breathing difficulties are occurring at the time of application, a significant improvement in the inability to breathe should occur once DMSO is given.
Duptyren’s contractures and Peyronie’s disease—most of the pertinent information was already mentioned (e.g., the early you start the better outcome you will have). The main thing to keep in mind with these conditions (which should be treated with topical applications of DMSO) is that you will need higher concentrations (e.g., Duptyren’s contractures seems to respond best to at least 90%), so it’s important to figure out what dose you best tolerate and then gradually raise it. Likewise, they often take a long time to fully respond (e.g., months) so you have to be patient with it.
Note: in most cases, as time continues, your tolerance to topical DMSO will increase. However, if DMSO is repeatedly applied to an area, it can lead to drying and scaling of it.
Inflammatory Bowel Diseases—start with a topical application over the irritated area, and then if you have a positive response to that you can either raise the topical dose or begin using oral DMSO. If you use oral DMSO, start slowly (e.g., half a teaspoon and then gradually raise it), with recommended doses typically starting at around 0.05g/kg (and then gradually being raised).
Note: typically in inflammatory bowel diseases, there are other issues as well (e.g., a food sensitivity or intolerance to Roundup sprayed crops) that need to be addressed as well and should not be neglected if DMSO alone seems to be managing the condition.
Interstitial Cystitis—typically, 50% DMSO will be directly administered intravesically into the bladder 1-2 times a week via a catheter either at home by the patient or by the doctor’s office, with the bladder being filled with DMSO. Then it is held there for roughly 15 minutes before being let out. With this application, some patients can’t tolerate 50% DMSO (and hence need lower) and in some cases will be switched to an oral protocol (e.g., 1 teaspoon of DMSO in cranberry juice once or twice a day) that works almost as well (e.g., the relief can be immediate). Likewise some doctors will begin a patient with an intravesical application but then switch them to oral (so it can be done at home) while others will do both (with the oral applications maintaining the benefits in between intravesical applications). If doing the catheter protocol, if at all possible, use a DMSO resistant plastic (detailed near the end of this article).
Note: of the dietary recommendations for interstitial cystitis, we find avoiding coffee and caffeine to be the most helpful.
ITP—the only author I have found who has discussed using DMSO for this condition combined it with chlorine dioxide (MMS), giving DMSO 2-3 times a day and combining it with 2 drops of each MMS ingredient (which was then gradually raised) and then continuing the treatment for a prolonged period. This was done under the theory there was an infectious organism that needed to be eliminated, and I believe the lower does was started with to avoid excessive hemolysis at the start (the weakest and oldest blood cells the spleen will soon break down often will break apart once any oxidative therapy is initiated).
Note: I have not yet discussed chlorine dioxide here because it is a complex topic and many others have already written about it.
Multiple Sclerosis—This often requires both topical applications to the affected areas and oral use (or ideally IV). I have suspected that applying DMSO to the carotids and jugular veins would be very helpful here, but we do not have sufficient clinical experience to affirm or disprove that hypothesis.
Myasthenia Gravis—DMSO is typically taken orally but also applied topically over the weakened muscles.
Conclusion
My primary goal in writing this publication (and why I put so much work into it) is because I’ve really wanted to bring public attention to both the Forgotten Sides of Medicine that would help so many people and the immense logical inconsistencies that exist within the practice of medicine (e.g., DMSO is viewed as incredibly dangerous and hence not acceptable to use for any chronic condition whereas NSAIDs, which are far more dangerous are not, or vaccines always being marketed on the basis of them creating herd immunity and ending a pandemic—even though that almost never ends up being what happens).
As such (especially given that for decades I’d wished the world knew about the DMSO story), I have been incredibly grateful that this series has gained so much traction and that it’s now inspired a lot of people to begin using DMSO (which I sincerely hope can be a wave that keeps building). To give that the best chance of happening, I had to carefully plan out the order in which each aspect of the DMSO story was introduced. In turn, many aspects still have not been covered, such as:
•How DMSO can be used for a variety of head ailments (e.g., eyes, ears, nose, and throat).
•How DMSO can be used for challenging diseases of the skin and the internal organs.
•How DMSO can treat conditions of the reproductive and urinary tract.
•How DMSO transforms the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases.
•The chronology of what the FDA did to DMSO and why those lessons from the past are so pertinent to today.
In the following weeks, those articles will be released, and I sincerely thank each of you for your support of this publication and giving me the voice to do this as it’s something I always wanted—but never imagined would actually be possible.
Prominent Canadian physician Dr. Charles Hoffe has spoken out courageously to warn people of the very serious dangers of the Covid mRNA genetic “vaccines”. He now faces trial from the Canadian health authorities aiming to silence him and effectively destroy his medical practice.
What is most disturbing about this unprecedented case is that, if the prosecution gets its way, all the evidence produced by the State claiming the Covid vaccines are “safe and effective” will be deemed indisputable, irrefutable — and Dr. Hoffe would not be able to defend himself or call expert witnesses!
In other words, a totalitarian show trial designed to intimidate all doctors and patients who value medical freedom of choice, the right to a fair trial, freedom of speech, and medical ethics.
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia, where Dr. Hoffe practices, had scheduled the disciplinary hearing for March 4th through March 15th. But at the last minute, the College pulled a fast one.
“When [the College] saw the mountain of evidence stacked against them, and against the public health narrative, obviously they panicked because I don’t think they realized how vigorous our opposition was going to be,” explains Hoffe in a March 7th interview.[1]
As a countermeasure, the College dumped a massive trove of documents on Dr. Hoffe’s lawyer AND invoked an almost unheard-of legal trick called Judicial Notice, which means the disciplinary Panel would accept all the College’s basic assertions as uncontestably true. Hoffe’s voluminous evidence — both from his own private practice as a family doctor and from the scientific literature — that the Covid mRNA vaccines cause widespread death, neurological problems, micro-clotting, infertility, immune-system damage, and other severe adverse side effects would be inadmissible.
Given this outrageous legal trick, Dr. Hoffe’s lawyer had no choice but to request an adjournment and hire four more attorneys to sift through the College’s eleventh-hour document-dump.
If the Disciplinary Committee implements Judicial Notice, explains Dr. Hoffe,
“I would have no opportunity to testify in my defense, nor would any of [my eight] expert witnesses….It would render this literally a kangaroo court. This is an astonishing act of injustice, where you literally accuse somebody of something and then remove their ability to defend themselves.”[2]
The government’s objective, he says, is “to try to make an example of me and make sure all the other doctors toe the line and keep quiet and just obey.” Dr. Hoffe, who is widely regarded as a heroic truth-teller across much of Canada, comes across as a down-to-earth man of great integrity, honesty and humility. An outspoken advocate for patient safety, medical ethics, and the Hippocratic oath (“First, do no harm”), he is accused by the medical authorities of spreading “misinformation,” putting people at risk, and encouraging “vaccine hesitancy.” After 31 years as an emergency room physician with not a single patient complaint against him, he was fired from his ER position for telling a nurse that somebody who had natural immunity didn’t need to get the Covid jab.
Exposing the Medical Cartel’s Coverup
In a speech delivered at the site of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Vancouver in August 2022, Dr. Hoffe declared:
“What we have seen in the last 18 months since the start of the vaccine rollout is the biggest disaster in medical history. Never before in medical history has any medical treatment killed and maimed so many people….You only have to look at the OpenVAERS.com in the USA. 30,000 people dead, 55,000 permanently disabled, 50,000 cases of myocarditis, and 1.3 million vaccine injuries…This is an utterly failed experiment, and the College of Physicians and Surgeons here in B.C. is the one organization who could have and should have said no.”[3]
OpenVAERS.com is an easy-to-access version of the US Centers for Disease Control’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. VAERS vastly underreports the number of vaccine-induced injuries and deaths, capturing an estimated 1% to 10% of adverse events.
In his March 7, 2024 interview about the upcoming trial, Hoffe notes that OpenVAERS currently reports “almost 70,000 permanently disabled and about 2 million vaccine injuries, and yet Health Canada and the FDA look the other way and continue to tell us it’s safe and effective.” At the time of this writing, OpenVAERS registered 37,231 COVID vaccine reported deaths.
The Covid vaccine manufacturers admit that their poorly tested, highly experimental injections do not prevent infection with Covid and do not stop transmission of the (alleged) SARS-CoV-2 virus.
And yet the charade goes on….in Canada, the United States, most of Europe, Australia and the no-longer “free world.”
Dr. Hoffe has repeatedly pointed out these facts as well as the fact that the more Covid shots you get, the more likely you are to be diagnosed with Covid. This is true of individuals and whole nations. As Hoffe cogently observes, “Every vaccine injury reporting system across the world reports record numbers of deaths and disabilities and vaccine injuries that we’ve never seen the likes of from any medical treatment in history. And yet they completely turn a blind eye and they just carry on recommending that people get vaccinated. It’s absolutely absurd.” [4]
Micro-clots
Dr. Hoffe determined that up to 62% of his patients who got the Covid mRNA vaccine develop micro-blood-clots too small to detect on MRI or CT scan. He was the first medical expert to state publicly that these blood clots are not rare.
According to Hoffe, these micro-clots permeate the capillary network in the vaxxed, resulting in blockage of capillaries (pulmonary arterial hypertension); this condition usually kills people within 3 years, and those who survive may suffer steady deterioration, especially if they take another Covid shot. The only way you can find out if the Covid “vaccine” gave you micro-blood clots is to ask your doctor to give you a D-dimer test, like the one Dr. Hoffe has performed on his patients.[5]
This finding alone should have led to the immediate withdrawal of all the Covid-19 genetic “vaccines.” They are indeed “clot-shots” as the critics have warned repeatedly. But the Pharma-controlled mainstream media lies and assures us that both large and tiny blood clots are “extremely rare,” when the opposite is true.
Most of Dr. Hoffe’s patients developed micro-clots within 7 days after the jab, but others may well experience micro-clotting later on as the genetic cocktail (“vaccine”) wreaks its harmful effects on the body.
Another Canadian doctor, Rochagné Kilian, an emergency medicine specialist in Ontario, sounded the alarm on the astronomical rise in D-dimer levels she observed in patients shortly after they received a Covid-19 vaccine. She links this phenomenon to micro-clotting, disseminated intravascular coagulation, and autoimmune disease in the vaxxed. Dr. Kilian lost her job and had her license to practice medicine suspended for warning the public about the very serious risks of the Covid shots.[6,7]
Support
To voice support for Dr. Charles Hoffe, please write concise, polite, yet strong letters to:
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC
300–669 Howe Street
Vancouver BC V6C 0B4
Canada
You could also fax them at 604-733-3503. FaxZero.com lets anyone send up to five free faxes per day to anywhere in the U.S. or Canada. The FaxZero website is easy to use and has no gimmicks or ads. Again, send polite, concise, powerfully worded faxes. The College’s website also has a Message facility (https://www.cpsbc.ca).
Let’s let the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC know what people think of their outrageous, underhanded ‘lawfare’ tactics and their persecution of an outstanding physician/healer.
The necessity of Dr. Hoffe to hire four additional lawyers will involve significant new legal expenses..
To help Dr. Hoffe with this burden, please go to:
https://www.givesendgo.com/GANZA or
https://www.fundingthefight.ca/donate
*
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Notes
1. Dr. Charles Hoffe Trial Update – March 7, 2024 (video). Interview with Derek Sloan https://rumble.com/v4hvp8x-dr.-charles-hoffe-trial-update-march-7-2024.html
2. Ibid.
3. Covid mRNA Vaccine. Biggest Disaster in Medical History: Dr. Charles Hoffe. Hoffe Gives Riveting Speech In Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-biggest-disaster-medical-history/5790270
4. https://rumble.com/v4hvp8x-dr.-charles-hoffe-trial-update-march-7-2024.html
5. Canadian Doctor: 62% of Patients Vaccinated for COVID Have Permanent Heart Damage. By Brian Shilhavy https://healthimpactnews.com/2021/canadian-doctor-62-of-patients-vaccinated-for-covid-have-permanent-heart-damage
6. Emergency Medicine Doctor shows Micro Blood Clots in D-dimer Tests Following COVID-19 Shots https://www.bitchute.com/video/RwKbDnR8BOzg
7. Government’s Own Data Proves COVID-19 Shots Are Causing Blood Clots, Heart Disease, and DEATH. Brian Shilhavy https://healthimpactnews.com/2021/governments-own-data-proves-covid-19-shots-are-causing-blood-clots-heart-disease-and-death
57 years ago my mother gave birth to her first and only child. As is typical of folks in my family going back generations, my parents have always been generous with their love of children, holding exaggerated ideas of their talents and good nature. My arrival upon this planet through a Cesarean Section was befitting in their view. Why should an Emperor be subject to the trauma of “labor” and birth canals?
When I was older my mother let me know that there was something mysterious about me from the jump. How could her four foot eleven inch frame produced a nearly nine pound infant? Why did her baby nearly never cry? Why was it content to simply sit there and not crawl? Why didn’t it say anything more than “Ma” for nearly two years?
To her profound relief, her happy baby finally stood and started to walk, completely bypassing the whole crawling phase. One day, unprompted, it uttered the word “Thomas”, the name of their next door neighbor. And once infant grew into toddler, the tears started to roll…
My parents are alive, competent and still not completely objective when it comes to their son.
It’s my birthday, and I thought it would be an appropriate time to revisit my first publication on this platform when I had a whopping twelve subscribers. It’s a contemplative piece that examines the mystery of inhaled anesthetic agents which are the oldest class of medications still in use in modern medicine. The mystery is that we still do not know how they work. Why?
A True Story
Twenty years ago I had been in practice for barely a year when a nurse at my facility requested that I care for her friend who was scheduled for a gynecological operation later that week. I was flattered that she wanted me to attend to her and not my partners who had decades more experience.
On the day of surgery, I interviewed her friend who was a medicine woman of a tribe of indigenous peoples from the Finger Lakes region of southern NY. She was accompanied by three other elderly women, adorned in traditional garb. After assessing her medical history and answering questions she asked me for a favor:
“If during the operation you notice anything odd, like smoke leaving my body, would you please notify my sisters immediately?”
I said I would, but why? One of the elders spoke:
“It is a sign that our sister’s spirit is leaving her physical body. We will perform the necessary rituals to see that she returns.”
I promised that I would.
Thirty minutes into an otherwise uneventful operation, the operating room became extremely humid. Condensation appeared on my glasses and on the monitors. We called out to the control room to have someone check the ventilation and filtration systems. The surgeon hastened to finish the procedure. True to my word, I asked that the patient’s friends be notified of what was going on and that their sister was otherwise stable.
The patient woke up at the end of the operation and recovered normally. Her friends thanked me for keeping my promise which, they assured me, saved her life. We shut down that OR for the rest of the day until things could get checked out. We never found out what happened.
Of course things like this do occur rarely, but why did it happen under these circumstances? Was it just a coincidence?
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Coming To
I wasn’t entirely aware of it at the time but I believe that singular experience subtly opened my mind to a more mystical way of regarding the world.
Looking at things openly, why would anyone discount the possibility that the medicine women could know more about spirit and the essence of life than I, an anesthesiologist, who still cannot explain how the anesthetic agent he was using, worked?
Anesthesia, in my view, probes the boundary between the concrete and ineffable, between the physical and metaphysical. Examining what can be known openly leads to the biggest questions about who we are and what happens after we die.
Right now innocent lives are being taken. Though we may profess there is an afterlife in our churches, temples, mosques and synagogues, that is not how we regard the end of life in our world. We view death as an absolute termination of a person’s existence. The loss of innocent lives is tragic, and it is understandable why some would justify the sacrifice of more lives now to prevent the loss of others in the future. Is this sensible?
Before responding I would invite you to consider what follows. Here is the first essay I penned on An Insult to Intuition:
There’s an aphorism in anesthesiology that is often offered to young residents early in their training:
“It takes an internist three days to kill a patient. It takes a surgeon three hours. It only takes an anesthesiologist three minutes…”
Although it may sound like a morbid indictment of physicians’ intentions, it is actually meant as a reminder to the trainee of how easily irreparable harm can ensue if a doctor isn’t paying attention to their own biases in their assessment of a patient’s condition.
How soon will a doctor realize that their choice of therapy is actually doing more harm than good? It depends on the kind of medicine that is being practiced. It can take a few days for a patient’s deteriorating condition to be attributed to poor medical therapy. A patient in a surgeon’s care may bleed to death if the surgeon chooses to delay an operation or cannot find the “bleeder” in the operating room.
Anesthesiologists, on the other hand, are trained to restore oxygenation to the brain and body in times where a person’s airway is compromised or when they are rendered incapable of independent respiration through anesthetics themselves. Three minutes. That’s how long the delicate neurons in our brains can survive without oxygen.
I remember being asked by my mentors to hold my breath until I successfully placed a breathing tube through the larynx of an unconscious patient who was unable to breathe for themselves. This kind of exercise was meant to remind me of how quickly sixty seconds go by when performing a delicate maneuver with full attention. How long was I willing to struggle before looking for other options or making adjustments? The answer becomes quite clear in about a minute or so.
I have often wondered if this kind of training has made me more facile in adapting to circumstances that are rapidly changing or whether it has caused me to second guess myself more often than is necessary.
We have other aphorisms too. Sometimes patients ask us what we charge for “putting them to sleep”. You can bet that most of us will respond the same way: “No charge! We only bill you for the waking up part…”
This isn't our way of casually deflecting a reasonable question. It is meant to serve as a gentle reminder to both parties regarding the importance of “coming to.” If we couldn't regain consciousness what would be the point in having the surgery in the first place? Nobody wants to experience pain and fear if it can be avoided. If the only way to avoid the pain of an operation is to temporarily be rendered unconscious, most people will readily and willingly consent to that, as long as we can return to our natural state of being alert and interactive with the world around us. We are awake and aware and that--rather than any particular conception of health--is our most precious gift.
From my point of view, we really shouldn’t charge for “putting someone to sleep”. It’s too easy. With today’s medications, putting someone to sleep, or in more correct terms, inducing general anesthesia, is straightforward. Two hundred milligrams of this and fifty milligrams of that and viola : you have rendered a person completely unconscious and incapable of even breathing independently.
Some of the medications we administer at induction are similar to the lethal injections executioners use. Unlike executioners, we then intervene to reestablish their breathing and compensate for any large changes in blood pressure, and the patient thereby survives until consciousness miraculously returns sometime later.
The Mystery and History of Anesthesia
In addition, those in my field have to contend with the actuality that we really don’t know what we are doing. More precisely, we have very little, if any, understanding of how anesthetic gasses render a person unconscious. After 20 years of practicing anesthesiology I still find the whole process nothing short of pure magic. You see, the exact mechanism of how these agents work is, at present, unknown. Once you understand how a trick works, the magic disappears. With regard to inhaled anesthetic agents, magic abounds.
In 1846 a dentist named William T.G. Morton used ether to allow Dr. Henry J. Bigelow to partially remove a tumor from the neck of a 24 year old patient safely with no outward signs of pain. The surgery took place at Massachusetts General Hospital in front of dozens of physicians. When the patient regained consciousness with no recollection of the event it is said that many of the surgeons in attendance, their careers spent hardening themselves to the agonizing screams of their patients while operating without modern anesthesia, wept openly after witnessing this feat.
At the time no one knew how ether worked. We still don’t. Over the last 174 years, dozens of different anesthetic gasses have been developed, and they all have three basic things in common: they are inhaled, they are all very, very tiny molecules by biological standards and… we don’t know how any of them work.
If you closely consider how our bodies do what they do (move, breathe, grow, pee, reproduce, etc.) the answers may be astounding. It is obvious that the energy required to power biological systems comes from food and air. But how do they use them to do everything? How does it all get coordinated?
These are the fundamental questions that have been asked for millennia, by ancient medicine men to modern pharmaceutical companies. It turns out that the answers are different depending on what sort of perspective and tools we begin with.
In the West, our predecessors in medicine were anatomists. Armed with scalpels, the human form was first subdivided into organ systems. Our knives and eyes improved with the development of microtomes and microscopes giving rise to the field of Histology (the study of tissue). Our path of relentless deconstruction eventually gave rise to Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.
This is where Western medicine stands today. We define “understanding” as a complete description of how the very molecules that comprise our bodies interact with one another. This method and model has served us well. We have designed powerful antibiotics, identified neurotransmitters and mapped our own genome. Why then have we not been able to figure out how a gas like ether works? The answer is two-fold.
First, although we have been able to demonstrate some of the biological processes and structures that are altered by an inhaled anesthetic gas, we cannot pinpoint which ones are responsible for altering levels of awareness because inhaled anesthetic agents affect so many seemingly unrelated things at the same time. It is impossible to identify which are directly related to the “awake” state. It is also entirely possible that all of them are, and if that were the case consciousness would be the single most complex function attributed to a living organism by a very large margin.
The second difficulty we have is even more unwieldy and requires some contemplation. As explained above, western medicine has not been able to isolate which molecular interaction is responsible for a gas like ether’s’ effect on our awareness. It’s reasonable to approach the puzzle from the opposite end and ask instead, “Where is the source of our awareness in our bodies?” and go from there.
We do know that certain neural pathways in the brain are only active in people who are awake, but if we attribute consciousness to those specific pathways then we are necessarily identifying them as the “things” that are awake. To find the source of their “awakeness” we must then look closer at them. With the tools we have and the paradigm we have chosen we will inevitably find more molecules interacting with other molecules. When you go looking for molecules that is all you will find.
Our paradigm has dictated what the nature of the answer would be if we ever found one. Does it seem plausible to think we will find an “awareness molecule” and attribute our vivid, multisensorial experience to the presence of it? If such a molecule existed how would our deconstructive approach ever explain why that molecule was the source of our awareness? Can consciousness ever be represented materially?
I don’t think it can. This is why I believe a more sensible approach would be to consider the activity of these structures in the brains of conscious individuals as evidence of consciousness, not the source of it. In my view, our long search for the mechanism of ether and other inhaled agents has brought us to the boundary where the physical world ends and metaphysics begins.
The mechanistic nature of our model is well suited to most biological processes. However with regard to consciousness, the model not only lends little understanding of what is happening, it also gives rise to a paradigm that is widely and tightly held but in actuality cannot be applied to the full breadth of human experience. We commonly believe that a properly functioning physical body is required for us to be aware. Although this may seem initially incontrovertible, upon closer examination it becomes quite clear that this belief is actually an assumption that has massive implications.
To be more precise, how do we know that consciousness does not continue uninterrupted and only animate our physical bodies intermittently rather than the other way around where the body intermittently gives rise to the awake state? At first this hypothesis may seem absurd, irrelevant and unprovable. Putting absurdity and lack of relevance aside, there isn’t any scientific proof that our consciousness terminates with the death of our bodies either.
We are left with two different paradigms, neither which can be proven by the standards we have available. However the paradigm to which we subscribe is far from irrelevant. Let’s now take a closer look at what we can observe when people have a brush with death or actually “die” by our standards. Is nature providing us any hints?
How do we know a patient is “asleep”?
Patients under anesthesia offer a unique look at the question because they are rendered inanimate, unconscious and as close to death as is possible before they are returned to their normal state.
Let us first consider how anesthetists measure anesthetic depth in the operating room. They continually measure the amount of agent that is circulating in a patient’s system, but as described earlier, there is no measurable “conscious” molecule that can be found. They must assess the behavior of their patients to make that determination. Do they reply to verbal commands? Do they require a tap on the shoulder or a painful stimulus to respond? Do they respond verbally or do they merely shudder or fling an arm into the air? Perhaps they do not even move when the very fibers of their body are literally being dissected.
Here’s where things get interesting. There are many situations when a person will interact normally for a period of time while under the influence of a sedative with amnestic properties and then have absolutely no recollection of that period of time. As far as they know, that period of time never existed. Indeed, this reproducible phenomenon requires a relatively small dose of drug in the benzodiazepine class (e.g. Valium or Xanax).
A patient may have no idea that they were lying on an operating room table for 45 minutes talking about their recent vacation while their surgeon performs a minor procedure with local anesthesia on their wrist, for example. Sometime later they find themselves in the recovery room when to their profound disbelief they notice a neatly placed surgical dressing on their hand. More than once a patient in my care asked me to remove the dressing so that they could see the stitches with their own eyes.
How should we characterize their level of consciousness during the operation? By our own standards they were completely awake. However, because they have no memory of being awake during the experience, they would recount the experience more or less the same way a patient who was rendered completely unresponsive would. This phenomenon is common and easily reproducible. Moreover, it invites us to consider the possibility that awareness continually exists without interruption but we are not always able to access our experiences retrospectively. We then commonly but inaccurately describe these events as “losses of consciousness”.
During some procedures when a surgeon is operating very close to the spinal cord anesthetists will infuse a combination of drugs that render the patient unconscious but allow all of the neural pathways between the brain and the body to continue to function normally so that they can be monitored for their integrity. In other words, the physiology required to feel or move remains intact, yet the patient apparently has no experience of any stimuli, surgical or otherwise, during the operation.
How are we to reconcile the fact that we have a patient with a functioning body but has no ability to experience it? It would not be so wrong to say that that which experiences is not part of the physical body. This raises another philosophical question: Who exactly is the patient in this situation?
Near Death Experiences (NDEs)
If we broadened our examination of human experience to consider more extreme situations, another wrinkle appears in the paradigm. Near Death Experiences (NDEs) are all characterized by lucid awareness that remains continuous during a period of time while outside observers assume the person is unconscious or dead. Sometimes patients who have experienced an NDE in the operating room can accurately recount what was said and done by people attending to them during their state of clinical death. They are able to accurately describe the event from an observer’s perspective, often viewing their own body and those around it from above.
Interestingly, people describe their NDEs in a universally positive way. “Survival” was an option that they were free to choose. Death of their body could be clearly seen as a transcending event in their continuing awareness and not as the termination of their existence. Very often the rest of their lives are profoundly transformed by the experience. No longer living with the fear of mortality, life subsequently opens up into a more vibrant and meaningful experience that can be cherished far more deeply than was possible prior to their brush with death. Those who have had an NDE would have no problem adopting the idea that their awareness exists independently of their body, functioning or not. Fear and anxiety would still probably arise in their life from time to time, but it is the rest of us who carry the seemingly inescapable load of a belief system that ties our existence to a body that will perish. How does this belief serve us?
If you believe that your very existence is tied to a functioning body you would surely live your life differently than if you were certain that whoever you were would continue to exist uninjured after the death of your body. If you believed that your existence ended with your death, how would you live? Hoarding things and experiences and maximizing pleasure would be the most logical thing to do. How likely is it that you will be ever completely satisfied if you knew you only had a limited amount of time to live?
Many schools of religious thought profess the existence of a transcendent soul or spirit that lives after the death of the body, but what kind of world are we living in today? Which paradigm are we actually subscribing to?
When the anesthetic gas is eliminated from the body consciousness returns on its own. Waking someone up simply requires enough space and time for it to occur spontaneously. There is no reversal agent available to speed the return of consciousness. The time required to emerge from anesthesia is directly related to the amount of time the patient has been exposed to the anesthetic. At some point the patient will open their eyes when a threshold has been crossed. Depending on how long the patient has been anesthetized, complete elimination of the agent from the body may not happen until a long while after the patient has “woke”.
By the time the patient arrives in the recovery room, they are safely on a path to their baseline state of awareness. Getting back to a normal state of awareness may take hours or even days. In some cases patients may never get their wits back completely. Neurocognitive testing has demonstrated that repeated exposure to general anesthesia can sometimes have long-lasting or even irreversible effects on the awake state. It may occur for everyone. Perhaps it is a matter of how closely we look.
Is fear keeping us “Anesthetized”?
Interestingly, it is well known that the long term effects of anesthetic exposure are more profound in individuals who have already been demonstrating elements of cognitive decline in their daily life. Indeed, this population of patients require significantly less anesthetic to reach the same depth of unconsciousness during an operation. This poses an intriguing question. Is our understanding of being awake also too simplistic? Is there a continuum of “awakeness” in everyday life just as there is one of unconsciousness when anesthetized? If so, how would we measure it?
Modern psychiatry has been rigorous in defining and categorizing dysfunction. Although there has been recent interest in pushing our understanding of what may be interpreted as a “super-functioning” psyche, western systems are still in their infancy with regard to this idea. In eastern schools of thought, however, this concept has been central for centuries.
In some schools of Eastern philosophy the idea of attaining a “super functioning” awake state is seen as something that also occurs spontaneously when intention and practice are oriented correctly. Ancient yogic scriptures specifically describe super abilities, or Siddhis, that are attained through dedicated practice. These Siddhis include fantastical abilities like levitation, telekinesis, dematerialization, remote-viewing and others. It is admittedly difficult for the Western mind to accept that a human being could ever do such things. We believe that a truly rational person would never entertain such fanciful ideas.
Being able to fly through the air or move material objects with thought aren’t the most potent of abilities available to the true adept in those traditions. In fact, these traditions regard these gifts (if they do exist) as very dangerous because they can easily distract the earnest seeker away from a greater potential. In these schools of thought the most advanced “superpowers” are those that allow a person to remain continuously in a state of joy and fearlessness, ideas that we are interestingly much more likely to accept as possible.
Are we too quick to assume that it is easier to be fearless than to “teleport” at will? Why would those traditions ascribe the most importance to fearlessness? Perhaps it has to do with the challenge of remaining in that state and the benefits of doing so. Note that If such a state were possible, it would be incompatible with the kind of absolute, psychological identification most of us have with our mortal bodies. It may be of no surprise that Eastern medicine subscribes to an entirely different perspective of the body and uses different tools to examine it.
Fear has served our ancestors well, helping us to avoid snakes and lions, but how much fear is necessary these days? Could fear be the barrier that separates us from our highest potential in the awake state just as an anesthetic gas prevents us from waking in the operating room? It is not possible to remain fearless while continuing to identify with a body that is prone to disease and death. Even if one were to drop the assumption that the source of our existence is a finite body, how long would it take to be free from the effects of a lifetime of fearful thinking before an individual outwardly manifests changes that reflect a shift in this paradigm? Is it possible that by continuing to leave this model unchallenged we never feel what it is like to be truly awake?
Putting fantastical abilities aside, can we predict what our world would look like if everyone lived joyfully and fearlessly without the desperate need to maximize pleasure and time? We can postulate that it would be better.
Our failure to identify the mechanism of anesthetic gasses may be a clue that we have been entirely misconceiving who we really are. Moreover, we have testimony from those who have actually died (by our clinical standards) and returned to tell us that we are worrying about the wrong things. Recall that some who have had Near Death Experiences were not simply having a vivid dream borne of random electrical impulses in a brain in the last throes of life; they were able to recount the details of the “failed” resuscitative efforts of those around them. It seems only logical to accept the paradigm that we are more than our bodies and enjoy the individual and societal benefits of this shift. Why are we so reluctant to adopt this perspective? Are we _biased_and if so, why?
The Possibility and Implications of Reincarnation
NDEs are not the only wrinkle in our paradigm of life, death and awareness. NDEs suggest that there could be a small part of us that transcends an event which we all call death, an undeniable and terminal event of a physical existence. In that sense, our physical bodies should be more aptly considered a small and temporary part of our real, transcendent nature. If that were the case, where then do “we” go after our bodies die? The answer may not be as faith-based or speculative as you think.
Let us, for a moment, take a step back from religious doctrine and agnosticism. These two perspectives represent a stark contrast in their approach to the question. One proclaims that the answer is unambiguously dictated in associated “scripture”. The other insists that the answer can not be known, at least for the moment.
Is there physical evidence that points to a different answer? There is not. We are dealing with a potential aspect of reality that transcends materialism, the philosophical doctrine that nothing exists outside matter and its actions upon itself. We may not have the evidence our scientific system demands, but just as with NDEs, there is an awful lot of anecdotal evidence that may not be getting the attention it deserves.
Dr. Ian Stevenson was a physician and professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine for 50 years. He served as the Chair of Psychiatry for ten of them. He is best known for his research into the study of reincarnation. During the course of his career he assiduously compiled over three thousand case studies of individuals who reported living on this planet as a different person prior to their current life.
What is fascinating about these cases is that the subjects are not adults that claim they were Pharaohs or Knights that served King Arthur in a “past” life. The subjects are children who caught the attention of their families when they were very young. They would insist that they had lived rather average lives before, had families of their own and recalled their previous name, details and location of their previous home and occasionally, the circumstances around their death. Often they would go ignored for some time but their dogged refusal to recant their peculiar tales was a matter of some curiosity to their families.
The fascinating part of every case in Stevenson’s data is that the child’s parents or others familiar with their story eventually stumbled across convincing evidence that the person the child claimed to have “embodied” in a previous life actually lived and died before their birth. Dr. Stevenson would attempt to authenticate the child’s account through interviews with the surviving members of the family of the deceased person the child claimed to have been. Sometimes extremely specific details of the previous life were confirmed, such as secrets that were kept between their old self and their spouse or physical details of their previous home that would only be known to those who lived there. When the child was “reunited” with the family of the deceased they could identify many of those in their old family, and pick out the imposters that Stevenson had planted to test the specificity of their recall.
Dr. Stevenson was an author of nearly three hundred papers and 14 books on reincarnation. In 1997 he authored a two volume tome of over two thousand pages titled Reincarnation in Biology that documented the stories of a subset 225 subjects that not only had specific recall of their past identities that matched those of real, deceased individuals but also had birthmarks or physical anomalies that corresponded to the manner of death of their previous “selves”.
For example, a child who recalled dying from a gunshot wound in a previous life was born with birthmarks that corresponded to the entry and exit wound of the bullet that purportedly killed that person. If accepted, this phenomenon can be considered more indirect evidence suggesting that our consciousness, which represents our transcendent nature, gives rise to our physical form and not the other way around. This fits nicely with our observations of patients under anesthesia while confirming that our consciousness is the product of a functioning body is no more than an assumption.
Let us take one of Dr. Stevenson’s more well known cases, that of Swarnlata Mishra who was born in India in 1948. At the age of three she began telling her parents of her previous life as a wife and mother of two in a different town in the same part of India. Her father was curious and accepting of these tales and began to take notes on everything her daughter uttered about her “past life” lived by a woman named Biya Pathak.
She recalled that her family owned an automobile which was quite rare at the time. She remembered the name of the doctor that treated her for what proved to be the cause of her death. She was also able to describe the details and relative location of the house in which she lived, as well as odd details like the fact that she had a few gold teeth. When she was ten, her story caught the attention of a researcher of paranormal studies in the area, professor Sri H.S. Banerjee, who was a colleague of Dr. Stevenson. He was able to locate the family of the girl’s previous life using the notes her father had taken and confirmed the details Swarnlata gave of Biya Pathak.
Swarnlata’s alleged previous family finally came to visit her. The two families did not know each other. She was able to easily identify her family members and detect the imposter that posed as one of her sons. She convinced her husband that she was once married to him by recounting an incident when she discovered he had taken a sum of money from a box that she kept. No other soul was aware of this secret.
Stevenson’s work has been criticized by some who felt his approach to validating these accounts were not rigorous and regarded his work as biased and unscientific. Others in the scientific community have defended his methodology and conclusions. Internationally recognized physicist Dr. Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf has stated that based on his findings it is reasonable to conclude that there is an overwhelming possibility that reincarnation is in fact occurring. His work has been covered by Scientific American[2] and The Washington Post[3].
Why would some scientists dismiss his “evidence” and others defend it? This is where we must be very careful in our own analysis. It is very easy to conclude that because someone has taken issue with his methodology we can shrug our shoulders and dismiss all of his findings en bloc and move on. If we choose to do that, are we being objective or are we protecting a belief system that we refuse to surrender?
It is also just as easy to proclaim there is finally proof of an idea that we hold dear. For the agnostics among us, this controversy is more evidence that the answer is beyond our grasp. Is it possible to be objective about this? Perhaps not. We are dealing with anecdotal evidence, not hard physical proof.
The point here is that it is wiser to acknowledge that certainty is clearly out of reach. Moreover, there is ample anecdotal evidence of exceptions to the tenet that our properly functioning physical bodies are solely responsible for consciousness. We should be able to agree that a rule with exceptions is only a partial explanation of what is really going on.
Will we ever find the Proof we are looking for?
Dr. Stevenson continued to admit that until a mechanism by which reincarnation can be explained could be identified it would remain a matter of speculation. That is a sentiment of a researcher that acknowledges the uncertainty behind his conclusions. Yet it also invites us to ask what sort of mechanism would we be able to identify to explain a phenomenon that transcends materialism. Are we ever going to be able to “prove” that reincarnation is taking place? If not, what are the implications of plodding along assuming that it isn’t?
The discussion of patients under anesthesia does not prove that our consciousness remains intact and continuous (though inaccessible retrospectively), however it does point out that this matter is far from resolved. Specifically it introduces the inescapable fact that we are not going to find the proof we are looking for in places we are looking for it.
Consciousness seems to transcend molecules, the very things we examine when looking for proof.
What are we to make of the results of Dr. Stevenson’s lifetime of investigation? Reincarnation, if it were happening, further supports the theory that death is not “the end”. More importantly it should give us another reason to pause. Not only would it force us to reconsider our understanding of death, it also invites us to once again reassess how we should be living.
Would we change our behavior if we knew we were coming back to this planet for another go at it? What kind of choices would we make if we knew we would suffer the consequences or enjoy the benefits of our decisions made today in another lifetime? What kinds of decisions would we make collectively if we all subscribed to the idea that our actions in this lifetime were tied to the fate of our planet and species long after we “perished”? Given the fact that there is uncertainty surrounding this possible phenomenon, is it wiser to assume that he is wrong or right?
Are we biased?
We are now considering a real dilemma, not one based in hypotheticals or history where “the truth” has been dictated to us or revealed over the years. We basically have two paradigms to choose from. On the one hand there is no proof that our existence doesn’t continue after the death of our bodies. There also is ample indirect evidence that there is more to this life than this material body. We have the accounts of hundreds of people who have died, by our own standards of death, and returned to tell us we have been wrong about the whole thing.
Furthermore the idea that there are others who have died and have been reborn on this planet may not just be a fringe belief or part of Eastern religious doctrines. The evidence, if we were to accept it as such, is not being proclaimed by religious leaders or established scientific institutions. It’s coming “from the mouths of babes” from all over the world.
On the other hand, we are living in a world where just about everybody behaves in a manner that supports the belief that we each have a limited and finite existence. It is true that many humans believe in an after-life, or at least profess that they do, however that is not the way they behave. The point here is that even if you do believe you are a “transcendent” being, how feasible is it to act in that manner while interacting with a society full of people who are trying to out maneuver you for a bigger piece of the pie? From a purely practical standpoint it is more sensible to play their game and protect and maximize what you have today so that you won’t be left with little tomorrow. In this sense, we really don’t have much of a choice in the matter as individuals. We are instead being pressured to assume a competitive posture because of our collective behavior as a society and a species.
Bias, if it does exist in our minds, will emerge when we instead answer the question, “Are we as individuals and a society exaggerating a self-serving and fear-based narrative?”. This line of inquiry leads us to assess the nature of the information we receive on a regular basis. Are we commonly exposed to stories of cooperation, moderation and tolerance? Or are we more often exposed to tragedy, fear and the stories of those whose successes are measured in wealth, fame and youthfulness? How does our media characterize those who eschew the pursuit of material things for internal balance and harmony? Granted, the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders have garnered international recognition for this kind of attitude, but how does that compare to the attention we give to people who have outwitted their fellow human beings and ended up with more?
Before we indict the media and the entertainment industry we would be better served by asking ourselves why we are more interested in these narratives to begin with. After all, if we weren’t intrigued by these kinds of stories there would be little incentive for them to create content along these lines.
I contend that our fascination with this kind of entertainment and news is inextricably tied to our level of understanding of the nature of who we really are. More importantly, the stories we are drawn to reinforce the belief that we have only one shot at happiness and a “winner take all” attitude is not just excusable but necessary. In this sense the adversarial relationship we have with each other as individuals or societies gets perpetuated and simultaneously attributed to immutable “human nature”.
Is this truly our nature or are we missing something very big about ourselves? Moreover, are we constructing this idea of reality ourselves or are we being “nurtured” into doing so? Are we forcibly but insidiously being kept in a different kind of Dark Age? If so, what would be the motive in constructing that kind of reality and who would benefit from this? These are the questions I hope to address in further posts here
When I originally made this Substack, I found myself in a very frustrating position—I had something I felt was essential for the world to know (that we were repeating the disastrous smallpox vaccination campaign, its cruel mandates, and the widespread counterprotests against them by the working class). Still, I had no way to get the message out. I tried to find a way to do so for a while, and eventually, Steve Kirsch generously gave me a platform to do so.
Because of this, I have a considerable degree of empathy with people who find themselves in a similar position to mine. Thus one of my goals in building the subscriber base here has been to make that platform available to those in a similar situation to me, and I periodically publish compelling things readers share with me I believe are accurate (e.g., this citizen’s survey of blood clots amongst the vaccinated).
Recently a longtime reader contacted me to share his story. Based on my previous correspondences with him over the last year, I believe he has accurately represented himself here. I also want to note that his story shares many parallels to the treatment of other doctors attempting to do the right thing throughout COVID-19 (e.g., Paul Marik’s experience).
One of the reasons we lack doctors everyone wants to see is because those who try to do the right thing get pushed out of the system. Because there is so much corporate control of medicine, even doctors who want to do the right thing know they have no recourse if the hospital turns against them. Those doctors thus have to choose between toeing the line and doing their best within those circumstances or leaving the system entirely.
Their leaving thus leaves even fewer physicians that patients would want to see available within the corporate medical system. For many things like emergent hospital care, the patients cannot address the issue by simply opting out of the system. These problems worsened during COVID-19, particularly in the blue states, which has created the unfortunate situation where patients often have to travel out of state for the care they need, which is immensely unfair, especially to those who aren’t somewhat wealthy.
Dr. Miller’s Story
My Covid 19 Cancellation Story April 9, 2023
I am a physician who stood against the false narratives swirling around COVID and for a time, it seemed like I lost.
Before COVID became a public reality, I was working as a successful Trauma Surgeon and Surgical ICU Physician in the hospital that had the first diagnosed COVID case in America. I was working as one of the more senior surgeons of a team of 12 surgeons. The hospital and medical community had already been struggling prior to COVID with various departures from reality with narratives including ‘racism everywhere’ and ‘diversity as long as it supports deviancy,’ but it wasn’t appearing to dramatically affect patient care.
[Dr. Miller’s surgical specialty currently requires 6-7 years of grueling training after completing medical school and thus pays a high salary. Because of the investment required to obtain it, most doctors are reluctant to ever part with it].
In 2018-2019, I stumbled onto a fraud scheme perpetrated by some of the administrative doctors in our hospital that did cause patient harm, so I reported our hospital administration for fraud. I similarly observed and discovered other connected issues that caused patient harm, by various other providers, that I tried to bring to light in our hospital. I was “rewarded” with 12 complaints filed against me over a 2-week period, in retaliation. These complaints accused me of breaches of almost every aspect of professional behavior and ethics. It followed one of the administrators sending out an email asking her colleagues to ‘get rid of Dr. Miller.’ None of these allegations stood (they were all false to begin with), and I continued to do my job to the best of my abilities in this hostile situation, but it became increasingly difficult. Eventually, every single complaint was dismissed as unsubstantiated.
Then, through February and March of 2020, our hospital had a large number of COVID patients including a real upsurge of many sick patients in early March. A couple weeks later, it hit the news, but only AFTER the virus had passed its inflection point in our hospital and AFTER our healthcare system was not in any threat of having inadequate resources. Things then went completely mad with hype and fear- again, this was AFTER the real infectious surge was past.
Suddenly, our hospital outcomes and quality data became hidden and opaque to us. Prior to this, most all data was openly shared and discussed in quality assurance meetings. The hospital forced upon us a narrative that was pure lunacy and contrary to all available observations and previously available data. A chilling example is the following: I was working a shift in the ICU in late April 2020 and had basically nothing to do because greater than half our beds were empty. We were “low censusing” any nurses willing to go home because there were so few sick patients. I was having a cup of coffee, chatting with the staff and another ICU physician, who was in leadership, when the daily newspaper was delivered. Prior to the paper being delivered, we were all relaxed, jocular, and noting how little work we all had. The other ICU physician picked up the local paper where the main headline said, ‘Local ICU Overwhelmed.’ The article was referencing our ICU, as we were the only hospital in the county. He looked at me, started sweating, panicked, and said, “What are we going to do? We may not be able to handle this!” I replied with, “Pour another cup of coffee and laugh at the morons writing the paper.” He became visibly distressed and left to call the hospital administration about the situation, who confirmed they were complicit with the newspaper article. This colleague was one of the medical directors of our ICU. Our hospital and ICU were not overfull at the peak number of infections in March 2020. In fact, the ICU was never overfull, even after the horrible protocols that hurt so many patients were established. I knew we were in serious trouble as a medical community when clinical leaders started believing the words in a newspaper and hospital administrators more than their own eyes and experience.
[Mattias Desmet’s mass formation hypothesis helps explains how people can delude themselves into a reality in stark contrast to the objective evidence in front of them].
Then, I watched as every policy, practice, and quality metric that makes a trauma and surgical program have good patient outcomes be undermined or abandoned by my colleagues and hospital administration. I filed countless complaints to our quality department for disgusting breaches of care that were now becoming commonplace. I could not turn my back on my oaths taken to advocate for patients. Between mid-2020-2021, following a leak of information from the opaque administration, I learned that our unanticipated morbidity and mortality numbers had more than doubled for indexed trauma patients. It was horribly demoralizing to watch.
[This is an excellent example of a society in decline].
After the vaccine was rolled out in late 2020, it became a functional mandate in the broader community, and then definitively mandated by the late summer of 2021. The medical community in the county I was working in (Snohomish, WA) started refusing to care for unvaccinated patients, except in the hospital setting. I couldn’t believe that patients were banned from accessing basic primary care at first, but then I spoke to a man at my church who was denied both refills of his diabetic medications and treatment for a sinus infection by his primary care provider, all because of his COVID vaccination status. This was so inconceivable that I still didn’t believe it! Even when patients did make it to the hospital, I learned that the physicians and staff in the emergency room were directed to provide a lower tier of medicine to this group of patients. It was less than acceptable, and worse, less dignified, than the care given to any other patients pre and post COVID. I had to verify with physician leaders that they approved of this inhumanity. I found out that all the major healthcare systems in the county had agreed to this action, and drove the creation of the policies that demanded physicians act in direct opposition to their oaths. After discovering this, I departed from the medical community in spirit.
[My observation throughout history has been that when a malignant collective ideology takes hold, only 5-10% will be willing to go against it].
Working with my pastor, we turned our church into a free clinic to care for those ostracized from society. I obtained independent malpractice insurance, and we started seeing patients. People were desperate. We didn’t advertise, but there were so many people seeking basic healthcare that we struggled to see everyone. I did my best to see people in their time of need, but it was hard. I was still working in my full-time hospital position. I just didn’t have enough hours in the day. Most of the people I cared for were seen at the church - they were met with maskless smiles, prayer, support, and free medical care. Sometimes, people would be waiting in my driveway for me when I arrived home in the early morning after a night shift or late at night after I finished a day shift. What became obvious as the most important thing about our clinic, is that our patients needed to be treated as valuable people created in God’s image.
Prior to this experience, I was a seasoned/hardened subspecialist with the best reputation one could hope for in the hospitals I worked. When other doctors, health executives, nurses, and local politicians or their families had surgical problems, I was often the one asked to deliver their care even if I wasn’t scheduled to be working. After our health care system abandoned the oaths we took as physicians, I had an identity crisis and pivoted to putting more efforts into the free clinic, caring for the dispossessed patients.
[Throughout my career, I have tried to volunteer in free clinics because I frequently find they are the only place you can focus on helping patients rather than dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s the corporate medical system requires everyone to do].
Eventually, my work at the free clinic treating unvaccinated patients became known, and the hospital administration learned of it. Subsequently, the real pressure against me started. The hospital responded by opening an investigation of me on synthesized charges of ‘micro-aggression.’ There ended up being 2 separate and independent investigations (one by the hospital, one by my physician group leadership who were working in tandem with the hospital) into my conduct. My colleagues, who months earlier asked for my help and guidance about both professional and personal matters, would no longer return my calls, text messages, emails, or speak to me in public, for fear of being labeled as affiliated with me while in my state of political disfavor. The investigations themselves and the repercussions to my reputation were the punishment. I was treated as guilty, even when proven innocent, by the hospital administration and my colleagues. The investigations eventually exonerated me, my behavior, and my healthcare delivery, but left open the possibility for immediate suspension/termination if I committed a ‘micro-aggression’ in the future. Obviously, this was a no-win scenario for me since micro-aggressions are subjective, undefinable, unprovable, and therefore indefensible. I refused to continue working without an independent mediator, so the hospital gladly paid out my contract instead of mediation and restoration.
[One of the things that surprised me about working in hospitals was seeing things I’d previously associated with high school drama transpire inside the facility—something many of my colleagues have also observed].
Separately during this time, I was reported to the State Medical Board by an outpatient pharmacist for prescribing a 2-week course of Fluvoxamine (an anti-depressant) prescription to help a patient recovering after COVID. This prescription had been banned by the Washington State Medical Association as a treatment for COVID or its repercussions. Incidentally, the patient had a positive response and near complete recovery from her illness, but the pharmacist and WSMA didn’t seem to care about that data point but were apparently offended that I violated their protocol.
By March/April of 2022, multiple other clinics in the county began to accept care for most patients, regardless of vaccination status, and so we wound down the free clinic at my church, transitioning people’s care to physicians in established practices who would now agree to deliver appropriate care. As I had been reported to the state (although no formal charges were brought) and I was being pushed out of hospital medicine for practicing ethical medicine, I knew it was time to leave Washington State. The message to me was clear: if I stayed, I would have formal investigations that would prohibit me from obtaining a medical license in another state. My livelihood would be stripped away. So, we sold our homes and boats, liquidated our assets, and moved to South Florida in May 2022. I was, and am, bitter at the establishment of medicine that committed these crimes, so I planned to retire at age 50 with the move and have nothing further to do with the establishment.
[Dr. Miller made the correct decision. Had he not left, he likely would have been permanently barred from practicing medicine in the future. This illustrates a major issue with the current medical board system].
However, after the hurricane came through Florida in the fall of 2022, I started doing volunteer work for hurricane victims. This included some medical relief work. I realized there is still good that can be done in medicine, that people need healthcare providers, and that by nature, I am a healer.
So, in February of 2023, I returned to practicing medicine and started working as a Primary Care Physician at a holistic clinic where no patient is turned away. I discovered that I enjoy being a Family Physician, too. I lost my prestigious career and my social position, but I did not lose my ethics or integrity. I did not violate my oaths of practice. So, ultimately, I have won. And I’m happy.
Conclusion
I applaud Dr. Miller for being willing to share his story publicly. Many physicians over the years have told me that the medical profession's mistake was surrendering too much of each doctor's power to the corporate medical machine. Over the last few years, we have witnessed a direct consequence of this unchecked power grab.
In the future, I believe three concrete steps need to be taken to address this issue:
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The first is that patients living in blue states must create the political will to have their state governments stop pushing these ridiculous actions. Doing so will likely require directly informing the public that most of the laws and policies being enacted are being done to support corporate interests rather than patients—as directly attacking specific violations of medical freedom has been largely unsuccessful thus far due to it being blended into the red vs. blue partisan dichotomy (which is very difficult to shift in either direction) rather than being portrayed as corruption affecting the entire electorate.
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The second is that patients need to financially support services and physicians they believe in and, as much as possible, opt out of ones that don't. We are seeing a miniature version of that with Substack, as the legacy media is rapidly losing viewership (since most of what they publish is garbage). Simultaneously journalists are making more on Substack than they did at their old jobs—both of which are putting pressure on the legacy media to stop publishing garbage and making many journalists want to jump ship to Substack.
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The third is the doctors need to be much more aggressive in taking their power back (they need to band together—potentially with the correct type of union). The corporate medical system cannot function without them, and there is a constant shortage of physicians in the United States, so that position needs to be leveraged to force the corporate medical system to behave rather than perpetuate the current corporate status quo
Most sane people believe that the burden of proving safety should lie on the party conducting a questionable action, rather than their victim. For example, if a criminal shot someone, the prosecution would not be required to prove that the victim’s sudden death after the gunshot wound was not just a spontaneous coincidence, a result of extreme stress from the situation, or due to a pre-existing medical condition.
Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry has been able to establish a special type of privilege within the legal system which has made it very difficult to demonstrate that vaccines (along with many other pharmaceuticals) can ever be at fault for anything. Because of this, we recently had a flood of experimental vaccines mandated upon the population, which were never tested for safety (despite many serious concerns with their design), whose (likely fraudulent) clinical trial data was never made accessible to the public.
We then had, as far as I know, the most aggressive propaganda campaign in history, and I watched the majority of my colleagues lose the ability to recognize any problems related to the vaccines. Instead, they developed an almost surreal religious devotion to the coming salvation of the vaccines becoming available.
Once the vaccines entered the market, a variety of red flags began going off indicating that these vaccines were killing people, and rather than address these concerns, the government—in concert with the media—chose to deny any of this was occurring. Instead they mandated the vaccines upon the entire population. I was understandably worried that the vaccines would cause problems and tried to do my part to head this off in 2020, but I did not expect anything on the scale of what we have encountered since then.
I personally became involved in all of this because soon after the vaccines entered the market, I began to have many friends and patients reach out to ask me if the vaccine could kill as someone they knew had had a tragic sudden death after vaccination. Once the magnitude of the problem dawned on me, I realized that even though my available options were limited, I could at least do my best to document each case sent my way so that someone would bear witness to what had happened. Otherwise, the dead had no voice. Beyond knowing I had a duty to compile this list however, I was not sure what to do with it. Later after someone kindly helped launch this Substack, I decided to post it, it ended up being seen by a lot of people…and that is how I ended up writing here.
Because of how long it took to verify each case, I realized that I had to end it a year in (at which point I knew of 45 individuals who had either critical or fatal injuries of a similar nature in close proximity to vaccination). Since that time, I still continue to hear reports I periodically document and discuss.
For example, a good friend is a nurse in a cardiac unit and has told me many of the patients she sees now with heart failure are much younger than they were a few years ago. I previously advised her against getting the vaccine due to her history of rheumatic fever (a condition where the immune system attacks and damages part of the heart). This was because I had noticed both COVID-19 and especially its vaccine seemed to cause inflammatory flares at previous sites of injuries or inflammation (Lyme is also known for doing this). The vaccine also has a remarkably high rate of exacerbating pre-existing autoimmune conditions—such as the 24.2% rate found in a recent Israeli survey which is comparable to what a few colleagues have observed, and I suspect exacerbation of preexisting inflammation within the circulatory system, like what this study of 566 patients found, is a key mechanism behind vaccine deaths.
A month ago, the nurse informed me that she had decided to vaccinate and had subsequently developed a heart condition. Additionally, she shared that the same had also happened to her mother following vaccination and that her sibling's partner is suffering longterm complication from a large stroke that immediately followed receiving a booster.
Looking back on it, the thing I found the most disappointing about my own documentation project was that once it went viral, it should have triggered the drug regulators evaluating the vaccines to take preventative action. Instead, due to the meticulously planned campaign of mass censorship that we all found ourselves in, more red flags than I can count were ignored by the “very rigorous” vaccination surveillance systems that were allegedly ensuring there were no safety issues with these vaccines.
Because of the immense power behind the medical-industrial complex, those debating this program have been stuck fighting an uphill battle. However, despite the immense degree of corruption, withholding of critical data, and censorship, these vaccines are dangerous enough that more and more evidence is nonetheless emerging of their danger, and the public is beginning to recognize it (e.g., consider how resistant the public has been to get COVID boosters). The previous article here discusses polling that shows this appears to be happening:
We Now Have A Clear Estimate Of The Rate Of Vaccine Injuries
Throughout my entire life, I’ve always found that trying to argue against Big Business is like fighting with one or both hands tied behind your back because large industries can always co-opt and buy out every authoritative source on the subject, and then censor any inconvenient facts that still persist. This is an immensely challenging situation.
Immediately after it was published, I was informed by a reader that possibly the most important dataset over the last two years was released today. For those interested, much of the context for today’s article can be found in the article above.
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German Data
One of the depressing realizations one gains from studying the evidence-based literature is discovering how many issues exist within it and how difficult it is to know which data sources can be trusted. One of my favorite authors, Dr. Malcom Kendrick, devoted a book to addressing this subject and shared a pertinent anecdote for today’s events:
“In truth, the figures on vaccine damage are exceedingly difficult to analyse, because causality is very difficult to prove on a case by case basis. However, when it comes to negative findings I always like to go to Germany. It has been demonstrated many times that the Germans are the most likely to report negative findings accurately. Yes I know, terrible racial stereotyping, but a fact is a fact. What do the Germans have to say on the matter?
“Between 1978 and 1993 approx. 13,500 cases of undesired effects resulting from medications for vaccinations was reported to the Paul Ehrlich-Institute [PEI]…the majority was reported by the pharmaceutical industry. In 40% [5,400] of these cases the complications were severe, 10% [1,350] pertained to fatalities on account of effects.”
Additionally, as I learned from Kendrick, since early 2001, the federal infection protection law has mandated that specific severe vaccine injuries be immediately reported directly to the PEI (Germany’s equivalent of the FDA for vaccines and biologics). The German’s list of reportable injuries is much broader than what I have seen acknowledged by many other countries (e.g., those which are possible to receive compensation for within the United States) and includes the previously discussed complications of DPT along with many of the reactions typically associated with the COVID-19 vaccines. However, while that historical trend exists, Germany has not been one of the best countries for reporting COVID vaccine injuries (which I suspect is due to the political direction their government has moved in).
(The above graph illustrates why many of my German friends are not happy with their government)
Because of their tradition of reporting adverse reactions to vaccination, Germans (or at least some of them) have been more resistant to toeing the party line on concealing the dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines than citizens of many other countries (my friends there are enraged by the egregious concealment of critical safety data by the German government). In turn, some of the most critical vaccine data available comes from the German people as many of them have retained their intellectual integrity throughout the pandemic.
For instance, although autopsies should always be conducted on those who died suspiciously after vaccination, due to the global climate of intimidation against conducting any type of research that challenges the COVID vaccine program, it is rarely done. Instead, almost every autopsy has been performed by a few brave pathologists in Germany, and I have tried to detail the pathologist’s work throughout my postings (e.g., see here).
Some of the most important contributions of these autopsies include:
- Demonstrating that there is highly unusual tissue inflammation in those who died after vaccination. Pathologists had not observed this phenomena before the COVID-19 vaccines, and stated the inflammation they observed would likely be fatal.
- Demonstrating that the COVID spike protein could also be found in the tissues of those who died.
- Demonstrating that another key part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not present, meaning that the only possible source of the spike protein was the vaccine.
The most definitive study on this subject was recently completed. It examined 35 individuals who died within 20 days of vaccination, and after a lengthy examination excluded 10 who had a potential cause of death other than vaccination. Of the remaining 25, most had causes of death that frequently been linked to vaccination, and of those, 5 were found to have myocarditis potentially linked to the vaccine, and in 3 cases the vaccine was determined to be the definitive cause of their myocarditis and death. These results are very important for convicting the vaccines if it can also be proven that a large number of unexpected deaths are occurring following vaccination.
The Religion of Data
Every group needs to have some type of ideology to unite behind. Presently, one of the fixations within the Western world is on more and more data being the solution to everything. In turn, there are many concerns with this approach (e.g., it dehumanizes people, its “necessity” is used to justify violating citizen’s right to privacy while collecting it and it is being used to build an infrastructure that controls every aspect of our lives).
Although data is often claimed to be our salvation, and I will admit sometimes is quite helpful, in many other cases, it fails abysmally to address our problems. A major reason for this failure is that no one wants to critically analyze data this is gathered if that data suggests we should stop supporting an entrenched financial interest.
I am most aware of this in healthcare, as I know of numerous systems which were designed to analyze electronic medical records and either identify which pharmaceutical worked best for a condition, or if a pharmaceutical (or vaccine) was unsafe. Not surprisingly, all of these systems were never adopted, and the endless data we collect in healthcare (e.g., all the diagnostic coding data which medical insurance providers provide as a condition of reimbursement to healthcare providers) is rarely utilized to improve the public good. However, while prevailing biases frequently produces flawed analyses of data, data itself does not lie and has immense potential to expose dangerous health care practices if people are willing to look at it.
The largest insurance provider in Germany, BKK, provides coverage to approximately 10.9 million Germans. A board member, Andreas Schöfbeck, observed some very concerning signs in their data, and unlike everyone else, had the courage to disclose it in a letter to the German government (e.g. he addressed the PEI), after which, he was dismissed from his position. The BKK dataset (discussed by Jessica Rose) was the one which showed 2.05% of vaccine recipients subsequently sought medical care with a healthcare provider (others estimated it demonstrated 3.5% were struggling with persistent vaccine side effects).
This concerning safety signal prompted one German Political Party, the AFD (a controversial right wing party that has gained appeal through opposing the mandates) to file the German equivalent of FOIA for the rest of the insurance data (note: a few friends in Germany who are lifelong liberals joined AFD told me they believe “conservative” is a more appropriate label for AFD). Recently AFD obtained AOK Sachsen-Anhalt’s data, which once analyzed, demonstrated that many of the conditions we associate with COVID-19 injuries noticeably increased when the vaccination campaign initiated. According to this interview and Google translate, the conditions which rose five-fold or more were:
AFD’s FOIA Request
AFD also submitted a FOIA request to KBV, the association which represents all physicians who receive insurance in Germany and thus the largest insurance dataset available. The official response to their FOIA request reads as follows (this was my attempted translation):
”Dear Mr. Sichert,
With an e-mail dated October 27th, 2022 you have submitted an application to the KBV after the Freedom of Information Act (IFG) on access to data of the diagnostic codes by law health-insured patients.
You have asked for the following data packages to be sent by email:
Package 1: Filtering of all insured persons who will have an ICD coding in 2021 had vaccine side effects. You have applied for the codes T88.1, T88.0, U12.9 and Y59.9 apply.
Package 2: You request the transmission of a list of the frequency of all ICD codes of the insured persons from package 1 for the period 2016 to 2021, if proportionately available also for 2022, by quarter. The data query should after your request with V and G.
Package 3: You request the transmission of a listing of the frequency of all ICD codes of all insured persons - without the number of insured persons from package 1 - for the period from 2016 to 2021, if proportionately available also for 2022 quarters. The data query should be done with V and G.
The KBV corresponds to your application and includes a tabular overview as an attachment with the desired information about the frequency of at.
The abbreviations used in the table have the following meaning:
nw= number of patients with “vaccination side effects” (defined according to requested Filtering 1 in 2021)
onws= patient numbers "without vaccination side effects" (defined according to requested Filtering 2 in 2021)Quarters of the reporting period are set as YYYYQ (e.g. 20214=Q4 2021).
The small font size in the printout is again unavoidable, since we want to make it easier to compare wanted to show all quarters of the two comparison groups on one sheet (the pdf document). However, like last time, it can be enlarged.
Today, the AFD hosted a press conference to unveil the data of those 72 million patients (the 90% of Germans with statutory health insurance) AFD had obtained from KBV. This data summarizes the number of times all ICD-10 (an international standard) diagnostic codes were used by German healthcare providers for these patients (outside of hospitals) from the first quarter of 2016 to the first quarter of 2022.
Tom Lausen is a data activist who had previously revealed the PEI and the RKI (the German equivalent of the CDC) were concealing concerning vaccine safety data and was allowed to analyze both BKK and AOK’s data. For this presentation, Lausen was able to provide a preliminary summary of the KBV data a few days after it was released:
A rough translation of this presentation can be found here (additionally YouTube now will translate the subtitles). If this video is deleted it can also be found here.
A few of the points emphasized in this presentation include:
- The [PEI](http://Paul Ehrlich Institute), the RKI and the German government have failed in their duty by federal law to evaluate COVID-19 vaccine injuries. Many of my friends and readers likewise believe they have done an atrocious job by attempting to conceal the vaccine injuries, and these agencies are frequently chastised by the German people for their conduct. Many of the arguments against the validity of this data must be viewed in the context of the fact it would be very easy to the government agencies to access and analyze this data, but despite many requests to over the last two years, they have all adamantly refused to, which is why AFD had to force them to act with its FOIA.
- It is estimated that 90% of the suspicious deaths that occur after vaccination are not reported to the PEI, and approximately 90% of those reported come from the patient themselves or their relative (which again demonstrates that German healthcare providers are failing in their duty to report vaccine injuries).
- The PEI has nonetheless received over 3,000 reports of suspicious deaths following vaccination, but has refused to perform any autopsies on those deaths. The excuse the PEI has used for their inaction is not having the explicit authority to order the autopsies (which is a spurious excuse). Fortunately as noted above, other groups without any official authority to order autopsies have nonetheless taken the initiative to perform them.
For this press conference, a presentation was put together detailing Lausen’s preliminary findings and the correspondences with the regulatory agencies, all of which can be found here. To the best of my ability, I translated and slightly modified the key portions of the presentation so that they could be accessible to English speakers, but I am certain more will be translated in the upcoming days.
The KBV Data
All of the KBV data can be reviewed with a simple search tool here, although it does not seem to work for certain ICD-10 codes. Due to the importance of this data, for data preservation purposes, I am also providing a copy of the raw data the AFD received:
Germany Total Icd 10 Code Submissions 2016 2022 1.87MB ∙ PDF File
This PDF file was supplied in a manner that makes the data quite difficult to analyze. Fortunately, one of my readers was able to move the above file into an easily sortable spreadsheet and thereby address some of the challenges with the PDF:
German Data Sortable Sheet 3.06MB ∙ XLSX File
Finally, the above sheet was sorted by that reader into a smart spreadsheet which allows you to easily observe which codes had the greatest increase in 2021-2022 (e.g. to sort them or create graphs). For those of you who are data inclined, you will likely want to create this sheet yourself, but for everyone else this is an excellent reference to start with). They were also able to use a script to put about one third of the names for the ICD-10 codes, but since there are fifteen thousand of them, it wasn’t practical for us to manually add in the rest and you will frequently need to directly look up the codes themselves (if a group wants to add the other codes in, I will be happy to repost that).
When Lausen presented the data, for each time period (e.g., 2016 quarter 1), he chose to add two different values together (code_20161 and nocode_20161). As best as I can tell from reviewing the FOIA request and the provided data, these categories represent those who also received a vaccine injury code and those who did not (as a result the majority of Germans belong to the “nocode” category).
I believe Lausen’s rationale for presenting the data in this manner was that a large number of vaccine injuries will go unreported and many vaccine injured patients are thus within the “nocode” category. Conversely, the total number of medical conditions observed in the country is not dependent upon accurate recognition of vaccine injuries.
Separating the patients by (the somewhat inaccurately classified) vaccine injury status is nonetheless a helpful means for evaluating vaccine injuries (I saw a variety of interesting trends in my preliminary examination). However, for the reasons outlined in this article, for the initial spreadsheet presented below, those result are combined.
Additionally, some of the extreme outliers exist because new ICD-10 codes are added each year and thus did not exist prior to 2021/2022. Finally, some of the codes you would expect to have large changes may not show in this dataset if they are codes typically used in a hospital setting as this dataset does not include hospital code submissions.
Kbv Data Sorted Into Accessible Excel Sheet - 9.46MB ∙ XLSX File
In the coming days, I know many will use this data to verify our work identifying which codes in 2021-2022 had the greatest increase (you can also do that piece by piece with the already available tool), and then cross reference those to the increases reported in VAERS or other datasets. There is an immense amount to be ascertained here, and I believe it represents the credible evidence we have been looking for since the start of the pandemic to have an objective metric for quantifying the impact of vaccine injury. However, it is also critical we determine which of the observed trends are not due to artifacts within the data.
Lausen’s Presentation of the KBV Data
This is probably the most important graph of Lausen’s presentation. We have all heard stories of individuals dying suddenly after vaccination (I’ve even read a report of an individual who appeared to be in good health making a thump in another room and being found dead shortly after by their spouse).
This issue was recently brought to the public’s attention with Died Suddenly, a documentary that effectively brought attention to this issue, but also had factual errors which were counterproductive for persuading the public that this issue is real. However, while some of the proof that Died Suddenly provided to assert the existence of the sudden death phenomenon could not stand up to outside scrutiny, the same cannot be said of the KBV data.
Additionally, one way that individuals have analyzed the unusual changes in health following the vaccination campaigns has been to assess how far they fall outside of the expected range of variation (this was also done for the final spreadsheet). I did a quick calculation for the above graph and found that 2021’s increase from 2016-2020 was 37.7σ, while 2022’s was 41.0σ. This is quite a big deal (the rarity of an event happening by chance increases exponentially as the σ increases). For context, a 7σ event has a 1/390,632,286,180 chance of spontaneously occurring (it is thought to occur once in a billion years), a 10σ event happens spontaneously once every 5.249e+020 years, and a 25σ event happens by chance every 1.309e+135 years (I was not able to find a reference on the probabilities for the even higher σ events observed here).
Given these numbers, it is very difficult to argue that these events were not caused by something. In this regard, we are also quite fortunate that while the vaccines were rushed to the market over a period of time far too short to establish safety, that process still took a year. Because of this lag, it is possible to refute the reflexively cited counterargument that these changes were due to COVID-19 or the lockdowns, as these only occurred in 2020 (the only possible exception I can think of is that Delta emerged near the end of 2020, but the spike started well before Delta became prevalent in Europe later in 2021).
This is a similar graph to the previous one, but include sudden cardiac death, which as many of you know also “unexpectedly” increased. Many authoritative sources have argued Lausen made a mistake to correlate vaccine injuries with the spike in sudden death because very few vaccines were given at the start of 2021 and thus if a correlation was there, it should have been not emerged until the second quarter.
For context, this was the rate of COVID vaccination in Germany:
As you can see, many vaccines were given in the first quarter of 2021.
COVID-19 is not the only vaccination regularly received. For example in Germany in 2019, it was estimated that 39% of those 65 and older received an influenza vaccination. However, unlike previous vaccines, the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccine caused far more people to require medical care for a vaccine side effect.
Given that Germany has a longstanding practice of evaluating vaccine injuries, this graph makes a very important point. An actual increase in vaccine injuries is occurring and it is not a result of a bias leading to over-reporting; it is a result of the vaccines being dangerous and patients needing medical care for the injuries.
Additionally, an outside team which looked at this data concluded approximately 5% of vaccine recipients subsequently required medical care, which is in line with the 7.7% discovered in V-Safe’s data and required a court order to be released as the CDC understandably did not wish to disclose this information. Note: I believe this discrepancy could be partially explained by the undercounting of vaccine codes highlighted in this article.
The general correlation between these two datasets is important. V-safe monitored 10 million vaccine recipients for a few specific things and was arguably the best surveillance system in place for tracking the side effects of these vaccines as it had a large but defined sample who were provided an easy way to report the chosen side effects. Since one of its key metrics matches the KBV data, this argues that at least some of the KBV data is valid.
Note: I am not sure if this specific dataset is referring to the total number of patients who sought care or the total number of times codes were submitted for vaccine injuries (which would mean a smaller number in total were injured).
Given that there are thousands of ICD codes that I could search the database for (many other increases, such as those of certain cancers, were highlighted in Lausen’s presentation), I had to put some thought into which of those many increases would be the best to show for this article (there were a lot of compelling candidates).
Previously, I proposed a model for the unusual fibrous clots observed in Died Suddenly that revolved around spike proteins causing protein misfolding. In support of this model, I highlighted an observed increase of an extremely rare protein misfolding disease which continues to be reported in VAERS.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease typically develop over years and occurs in approximately one in a million people annually, making its occurrence immediately after vaccination rare to the point that suggests causation (and as Jessica Rose noted, new reports are continuing to arrive in VAERS). The increase I proposed was a key point of contention for those who did not agree with my misfolded clot hypothesis, so I was eager to see if a current dataset could evaluate what was occurring.
This increase is also quite large, and for all practical purposes impossible to have occurred by chance (although I will mention the authors who published the original case series linking COVID vaccination to 26 cases of CJD also determined that Delta appeared to have an increased capacity to trigger protein misfolding but I do not believe that can explain the above trend).
Since this article was published, one reader has now attempted to present a longer analysis of this data which shows multiple interesting trends (e.g., many of the side effects commonly attributed to COVID vaccination appeared to have increased) along with raising additional questions about this data. It is my hope others will also do so!
Finally, the presentation on the KBV data proposes a fatality rate for the COVID vaccines. This chart was compiled by Lausen from the officially reported adverse events to the vaccines and likely are significantly undercounting the vaccine fatality rate.
Is This Data Valid?
Following the AFD’s press conference, the leading medical research institute in Germany, ZI, acted as a third party to present a rebuttal of how AFD interpreted KBV’s data. I did not agree with their argument (that there results were an artifact of AFD also requesting for everyone who specifically died in 2021), but did note that their response acknowledged the authenticity of this data.
The primary argument presented by ZI was that since the FOIA request selected for all patients who were vaccine injured in 2021-2022, the rise in deaths observed in 2021-2022 was simply due to the fact anyone who was vaccinated in 2021-2022 could not have died prior to 2021-2022 and thus the increase in deaths observed in 2021-2022 compared to what occurred prior to this time was due to the cohort effect.
On the surface this seems like a credible way to dismiss anyone who would make such an elementary mistake and believe in this data. However, the German authorities have a long track record of attempting to cover up evidence of COVID vaccine harm (in addition to the points discussed above, the German government has been perpetually delaying releasing the death statistics for 2021), so these arguments require a critical evaluation. In turn, there is a few major issue with it:
First, the “nocode” group should not suffer from the cohort effect and it was this group that comprised the majority of the increase in sudden deaths (review the wording of the FOIA request shown above). If the “code” group were to be removed (which potentially suffers from the cohort effect), an almost identical trend would still be present. Lausen presented his data by merging the code and nocode groups together which invalidated this counterargument, and I cannot see how a “cohort effect” is present in the combined data unless KBV failed to fulfill the FIOA in the manner that was requested (Lausen also subsequently provided an interview addressing the government criticisms of his analysis).
An outside analyst also looked at this data and demonstrated that other fatal conditions (which should be vulnerable to same the cohort effect ZI is asserting) did not have the same 2021 spike:
Second, the large σ found for many, (but by no means all) non-fatal conditions in the dataset indicates that something besides artifacts relating to time of death is causing the changes observed. I acknowledge that it is very possible some of the discrepancies present are due to not yet identified artifacts within the data, but at this point in time I have not been able to identify them. I believe that since KBV was focused on debunking the rise in sudden death codes, they did not focus on the rise in other codes for conditions associated with COVID vaccine injuries that were also observed. However, while this was not their focus, this point must nonetheless be considered since it does negate their counterargument.
Additionally, The death argument ZI made was also inconsistent with the death codes in question nonetheless being reported prior to 2021, which they attributed to “coding errors or unaddressed billing fraud.” To some extent this is hand-waving that many others have contested (and something any type of auditing algorithm should have caught years before), but I do not believe it is as important as the first two points.
Conversely, the strongest argument ZI put forward to establish that a cohort effect was occurring for the reported deaths was this spreadsheet. I have not yet been able to discern how the data in it was derived as it does not match the other things I looked at, so I cannot comment on if this is correct (an independent analyst arrived at the same conclusion I did). This spreadsheet is the one source of data that could refute AFD’s argument so I would greatly appreciate any additional thoughts on this one). However, I must also note that if this data is actually correct, it still does not negate the non-fatal complications of vaccination being observed.
A German rebuttal of ZI’s arguments was posted here. AFD also discussed the above rebuttal in a thread here stating:
"Hello all. The death-numbers that we have published are being hotly debated right now. Now the Central Institute for the KBV has joined in has said that the data we presented were quite easy to explain: 'The data is only for people who have accessed a medical service in 2021 and only such people had been billed and therefore would be in the data and everything in the years before are statistical runaways. There are also different causes of death that were significantly higher in the years before such as I46.9 (heart attack without successful reanimation). ' All together 104 000 people have been coded as deaths in the years 2016-2020 of whom the Central Institute of the KBV now says that they were billed medical services in 2021. Now we have a question: If this is really true, we demand an explanation from the Central Institute of the KBV how 104 000 persons that have died in the years 2016-2020 have been billed medical services in 2021.” [Translated courtesy of a reader]
The following was also written in the tweet: “Allegedly, the figures from the KBV are only for patients with health insurance, for whom services were billed in 2021. However, the causes of death were coded for 104,000 patients in previous years. Do we have a data scandal or a billing scandal?”
This table also refutes ZI’s argument that only those who were able to see a doctor and thus were alive in 2021 comprised the cohort of the insurance data.
Many of the German commentators I saw online were also skeptical of the official rebuttals to this data. I was recently sent a detailed summary of the events after the press conference which demonstrated that the rationale for debunking the data changed as time went forward. As best as I can tell, no clear reason was presented for why Lausen’s analysis was flawed given. Instead it was insinuated either that Lausen incorrectly filtered the data (my team and others however arrived at the same results Lausen did) or that there was a data transmission error from the KBV (which is possible but would have had to have been deliberate or inconceivable incompetence).
KBV also issued an astonishing statement refuting AFD’s presentation:
The KBV board clarifies: Based on the billing data transmitted by the KBV to the AfD or. ICD-10 codes cannot be used to establish causal relationships between COVID-19 vaccinations and deaths. From the KBV's point of view, the increase in deaths shown in quarters I-IV 2021 and quarter I 2022 is largely pandemic-related mortality. This once again illustrates the importance of COVID 19 vaccination as an effective measure to prevent serious forms of progress up to deaths. Without the vaccination, mortality would probably have been much higher.
This statement also cited the previously referenced ZI letter and another one which noted:
-
The codes in this database do not include codes entered on death certificates and thus cannot be assigned as the cause of death [however all of these codes cannot be entered unless the patient died; also as the statement above shows KBV is admitting an increase in deaths did occur].
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The codes in this database cannot be correlated with vaccination status because many people received the COVID vaccines in settings that did not result in codes being submitted and coding for COVID vaccination has not yet been included in the dataset due to special regulations [I agree with this point, but it fails to refute this dataset since Lausen chose to combine the code and nocode groups; instead, it simply argues that vaccine injuries are underreported in this dataset].
-
This database was not created for the purpose of conducting medical research and therefore no conclusion can be drawn from it [I don’t believe this is a valid argument; a lot can be inferred from it and it is the best available database we have, so until the government chooses to make a better database available, it is “the evidence.” Additionally, this is a very similar argument to what is said for VAERS, but unlike VAERS there is not an over or underreporting issue present with this dataset].
I do not believe any of the above points refute the sudden increases in submitted billing codes (hypothesized to correlate with vaccine injuries) that occurred a year after the pandemic started at the exact same time the vaccination campaign began. However, I also believe some type of not yet identified artifact could account for at least some of what was observed and I have spent the last week revising this article to account for the additional information I come across. If anyone can provider a stronger refutation of the data presented here (preferably, at the pinned comment), I would greatly appreciate it. We need to help each other stay honest and I will gladly retract this article if a critical mistake was made.
Note: An independent analyst who reviewed the entire dataset found that it showed many other signs of being plausible.
Conclusion
Given the extremely concerning implications of the German data, it is not surprising that governments around the world and healthcare systems or insurance providers have been reluctant to release their own data. It is my sincere hope that this release will open the flood gates to additional disclosures and I am in complete agreement with the conclusion of this presentation:
I wish we had an American political party stating the same. There are signs of hope however; today Ron DeSantis did something incredible and requested a grand jury against Pfizer and Moderna, an essential step a few leaders in our movement have been working to lay the groundwork for over the last two years. I am also hopeful that this grand jury will compel the state of Florida to release similar data that can be used to assess the safety of these vaccines.
I strongly encourage those of you who who are able to begin looking through the KBV dataset and identifying important trends that can be correlated to other observations we have made over the last two years. I believe there are many excellent articles that could be written on them. I sincerely thank all of you for your continued support!
My primary goal is to draw attention to this data so numerous independent parties can objectively analyze it and independently verify if the trends it shows correlate to “controversial” increases observed in other datasets like VAERS. This data is extremely important as it is the only access we have ever been given to observe the changes in illness that follow the COVID vaccination campaigns. I also suspect the most important use of this data **will be to establish causality for specific vaccine injuries.
**This matters because typically when someone suffers a pharmaceutical injury, it is not acknowledged by the the government and the courts because “there is no evidence the product is associated with that injury,” and as you might expect, the pharmaceutical industry work tirelessly to make sure the evidence that could implicate their product never emerges.
At this point I’ve lost track of how many sad instances I’ve seen where this happened to a medically injured patient (in some cases to the point the gaslighted victim gives up and ends their lives), so I greatly support having an independent means to assess causality for vaccine injuries. Those injured by the COVID-19 vaccines are profoundly suffering and they really need help (on the bright side however, recently Senator Johnson and shortly after Governor DeSantis gave a voice to these victims).
Postscript: It appears a similar rise in unexplained deaths is occurring in Canada.
This is a third talk in a series that began with Relationship Based Medicine , continued with Beware of Doctors Bearing Gifts and concludes with this talk, which could called History of a Medical Psychosis, Medical Neoliberalism, Evident versus Evidence Based Medicine, A Lutheran Moment, or Does Objectivity Come from using Chance to Control Bias or Bias to Control Chance?
It is the most important talk I have ever given.
The first lecture was delivered to clinicians in New York with a Q and A afterwards.
The second was delivered to the public in Lethbridge Alberta, thanks to Jennifer Williams and Dan Johnson but owing to tech difficulties at the venue (See In Memory of Dexter Johnson), it was difficult to record the Q and A with the public. Suffice to say though between the technical difficuties, the lecture and the Q and A, we were all there for the better part of 3 hours and the discussion was great.
This third lecture was delivered to Aaron Kesselheim’s PORTAL group – Program on Regulation, Therapeutics and Law. There are two versions. The History of a Medical Psychosis was recorded by Bill James the day before in case of glitches – same day as Putin and Biden gave speeches. The second was recorded by Aaron – Faulty Evidence and Moral Hazard.
There are slight differences between them. The text and slides below add some detail to both talks but the tone of voice and gestures in the talks likely convey things not in the text.
Slide 1: Faulty Evidence and Moral Hazard
Welcome to a very conservative talk – based on a belief in the medical model and in evaluating the drugs we use thoroughly.
Slide 2: These quotes are a precis of key points in the deposition of Ian Hudson, Chief Safety Officer of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in 2000 in the Tobin v SmithKline trial.
Forty-Eight hours after starting Paxil Don Schell shot his wife, daughter and granddaughter and then himself. Hudson is being asked – Can SSRIs cause Suicide?
The jury dismissed Hudson’s Evidence Based Medicine view in favor of Evident Based Medicine and in this Civil trial found GSK guilty of negligence that resulted in the death of this family.
Hudson’s view, however, remains ensconced at the top of Britain’s drugs regulator, of which he was later the CEO – as well as FDA, EMA, TGA, Health Canada, WHO, and Boston institutions like Harvard, MRCT, and Vivli. Joe Biden and the Pope’s advisers will also endorse and tell their bosses to say – Yes RCTs are the Way the Truth and the Light.
Slide 3: Hudson’s views originate 70 years earlier in the work of a strange man – Ronnie Fisher.
Here you see Fisher smoking a pipe. He dismissed the later link between smoking and lung cancer, saying personality types predisposed to both cancer and smoking. Evidence was not Fisher’s strong point.
He had nothing to do with medicine and never ran an RCT. Controlled trials and randomization were there before Fisher and were no big deal but for no clear reason his book the Design of Experiments transformed what came next.
Fisher ran a thought experiment to characterize expert knowledge. He mentioned randomization as a means to control for any trivial unknown unknowns. Randomization later became semi-mystical.
Fisher’s expert knew parachutes worked so if we set up two groups, one with parachutes and the other not, we might randomize in case there was someone with webbed feet who might behave differently when falling. Otherwise, we would expect those wearing parachutes to live and those not to die – unless a chance strong wind lands a person in snow covered trees.
If randomization eliminated webbing as a factor, the only thing that could get in the way of an expert being right was chance and this could be assigned a statistically significant value. If 1 in 20 of those without parachutes lived we wouldn’t say the expert didn’t know what he was talking about. Fisher was characterizing expertise rather than characterizing an exploration of the unknown.
Randomization can’t control for ignorance.
Slide 4: Fisher’s expert is a Robin Hood who 19 times out of 20 can split a prior arrow lodged in the Bull.
Slide 5: But the trials done to license drugs especially antidepressants look more like this. A mismatch on this scale indicates medical RCTs are nothing like what Fisher had in mind.
Slide 6: The first RCT in medicine was a trial of streptomycin for tuberculosis. Tony Hill used randomization as a method of fair allocation – he was not managing mystical confounders. Hill helped put the effects of smoking on the map. He had no time for Fisher. He also knew doctors were not experts. His trial was not a demonstration of expertise.
Hill’s RCT found out less about streptomycin than a prior non-randomized trial in the Mayo Clinic, which showed it can cause deafness and tolerance develops rapidly.
Slide 7: Twenty years later, here is Tony Hill taking stock of controlled trials. In this 1965 lecture, he mentions that it is interesting that the people who are most heavily now promoting controlled trials are pharmaceutical companies.
Hill didn’t think trials had to be randomized. He thought double-blinds could get in the way of doctors evaluating a drug. He was a believer in Evident Based rather than Evidence Based Medicine.
Hill said we needed RCTs around 1950 to work out if anything worked. By 1960 he figured we had lots of things that worked – none of which had been brought on the market through an RCT – and he thought the need was to find out which drug worked best. This is not something RCTs can do – there is no such thing as a best drug. RCTs have instead become a way for companies to get weaker drugs on the market.
He said that RCTs produce average effects which are not much good in telling a doctor what to do for the patient in front of them.
All drugs do 3000 + things – one of which might be useful for treatment purposes. In focusing on one element, by default, Hill is saying RCTs are not a good way to evaluate a drug. All RCTs generate ignorance. But we can bring good out of this harm if we remain on top of what we are doing. Hill never saw RCTs replacing clinical judgement.
Slide 8: This 1960 RCT run by Louis Lasagna makes Hill’s point well. Thalidomide has therapeutic efficacy as a sleeping pill but the trial missed the SSRI-like sexual dysfunction, suicidality, agitation, nausea and peripheral neuropathy it causes.
Two years later, Lasagna was responsible for incorporating RCTs in the 1962 Food and Drugs Act Amendments – in order to minimise the chance of another thalidomide. By doing this, more than anyone else, Lasagna was the man who got us using RCTs
This trial would have licensed thalidomide today. The 1938 Act had no requirement for RCTs.
Slide 9: Many claim RCTs demonstrate cause and effect in a way no other study design can.
The 1950s was a golden age of new drugs that gave us the best antihypertensives, hypoglycemics, antibiotics and psychotropic drugs we have ever had without RCT input into any discoveries.
Imipramine was the first antidepressant. It and other antidepressants beat SSRIs in later RCTs. It can treat melancholia – SSRIs can’t. Melancholia comes with a high risk of suicide.
Imipramine was launched in 1958. At a meeting in 1959, European experts made clear that while it was a wonderful treatment imipramine made some people suicidal. Stop the drug and it clears. Re-introduce and it comes back. This was Evident Based Medicine showing this drug can cause suicide.
Like Fisher, let’s do a thought RCT of imipramine versus placebo in melancholia. The red dots here are suicides or suicide attempts.
Even though it can cause suicide, we would expect it to reduce the number of suicides because it treats this high risk condition. If you didn’t know better, this RCT would look like evidence antidepressants do not cause suicide.
Slide 10: Here is the data on the trials in mild depression that brought the SSRIs to market – mild depression because SSRIs are no use in melancholia. You see an increase of suicidal events compared to placebo in people at little or no risk of suicide.
Slide 11: This is what the data for imipramine look like in the same mild depressions. This is not a thought experiment – it was used as a comparator in SSRI trials. Now it too causes suicides.
RCTs can give us diametrically opposite answers. This is because these are not Drug Trials. They are Treatment Trials and if the condition and treatment produce superficially similar effects, randomized trials cause confounding rather than solve it. This is true for most medical conditions and their treatments.
People evaluating drugs in traditional clinical trials, before RCTs, knew this. When a patient becomes suicidal in a trial you have to use your judgement to work out what is happening but in RCTs clinicians are not supposed to use their judgment. RCTs are more objective than our judgments – supposedly.
Slide 12: Here is what a Drug Trial looks like. In healthy volunteer studies in the 1980s, companies found SSRIs cause volunteers to become suicidal, dependent and sexually dysfunctional. We heard nothing about these problems when the drugs launched in part because Drug Trials enabled companies to engineer Treatment Trials to hide these problems.
Slide 13: If you break a limb and get recruited to an RCT randomly applying casts to one limb – not necessarily the broken one – the trial will show random application beats placebo. Practicing Evidence Based Medicine rather than Evident based Medicine here would clearly be crazy.
Slide 14: Here is a James Webb telescope image. James Webb is marvellously bringing out the infinite individuality of stars.
In addition to randomization, Fisher put a premium on Statistical Significance. By 1980 every leading medical statistician was saying we need to get rid of statistical significance in favor of Confidence Intervals.
Confidence Intervals had been introduced by Gauss around 1810. Because of measurement error, the telescopes in use often failed to establish whether there was one or two stars in a location. Measurement errors should distribute nornally and so constructing confidence intervals could help us distinguish individual stars.
We have moved a long way forward in this respect with the James Webb telescope you see here.
Slide 15: Confidence intervals rushed into medicine in the mid-1980s. All the authorities on the right – many linked to Boston – argued they were much more appropriate than significance testing. They are appropriate for measurement error but are they any more a cure for ignorance than statistical significance?
Slide 16: Confidence intervals we are told allow us to estimate the size of an effect and the precision with which it is known. We have much more precise details on the likelihood of the Red Drug here killing you than we have for the Yellow Drug. The best estimate of the lethal effect for the Yellow Drug however is greater. The standard view is that if we increase the size of the Yellow Drug Trial we will have greater precision and know better what the risks are. As we shall see, this is wrong.
As things stand, if you are asked to take one of these drugs, should you be guided by precision or effect size? Ian Hudson, FDA and WHO say the only dangerous drug here is the Red One. This is because more than 95% of the data, more than 19 out of 20 lie to the right of the line through 1.0 – confidence intervals have defaulted into statistical significance.
I would take the Red rather than the Yellow one. This is not measurement error and we don’t know what confidence intervals represent when they are not representing measurement error.
Slide 17: Faced with claims Prozac causes suicide, Lilly analysed their clinical trials and claimed there is no evidence their drug causes suicide. Confidence Intervals are being spun here as indicating we don’t know Prozac causes suicide as nothing is statistical significant. This is Ian Hudson thinking – at odds with all statistical expertise. It’s wrong. The consistency across young and old, depression and eating disorders strongly suggests in real life there is an excess of suicidal events.
Slide 18: There is an intriguing mystery behind these figures. Here you see a representation of suicidal events that happened in the trials that brought Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft to market around 1990. You’ll note there are events under the word screening here. There is a 2 week washout period before a trial starts where people are whipped off their prior drugs before being put on the new treatment or placebo. This is a highly dangerous phase where people are in withdrawal and very likely to go on to a suicide attempt.
Slide 19: And here you see the moves companies made to avoid having a confidence interval excess of suicidal events on treatment. Companies only moved the events – not the people.
These moves were justified on the basis that people in the run in phase were not on active treatment – which is equivalent to being on placebo – but they often were withdrawing from active treatment which is highly dangerous. Some who stopped treatment at the end of the active phase of the trial committed suicide and were designated placebo too. Some on placebo, put on active treatment in the follow up period, committed suicide and were designated as placebo suicides on an intention to treat basis.
There are two articles from 2006 that bring out this point Did Regulators Fail and The Antidepressant Tale: Figures Signifying Nothing. The Antidepressant Tale gives other examples of confidence interval abuse.
After all these maneuvers, there was still an excess of suicidal events on these SSRIs but the confidence interval was no longer entirely to the right of 1.0. Confidence intervals have degenerated into statistical significance tests because regulators need a Stop-Go mechanism and statistical significance provides this. But doctors don’t need an external Stop-Go mechanism to replace their clinical judgement, so why do they go along with this?
Slide 20: Nobody noticed these maneuvers around 1990, but fourteen years in a crisis about children becoming suicidal on antidepressants, questions began to be asked. GSK and Pfizer responded:.
‘GSK did not intentionally submit any erroneous or misleading information to FDA. The suicide data submitted to FDA explicitly identified when events occurred during the placebo run-in period. FDA had all this information right from the beginning.’
“Pfizer’s 1990 report to FDA plainly shows … that 3 placebo attempts as having occurred during single blind placebo phases… FDA has neither criticized these data or the report as inappropriate, nor required additional analyses”.
These maneuvers breach FDA regulations and FDA staff noted this in memo’s at the time. But not only did FDA ignore these breaches of regulations senior figures, like Tom Laughren, put their name to articles that embraced these breaches of regulation – in one case in the cause of showing it was not unethical to have placebo controls in RCTs, as those on placebo were not at any greater risk than those on treatment.
There was much back and forth between FDA and companies in 1990. Was it criminal? Perhaps. I prefer the idea of strategic ignorance.
What I think we are seeing are events circling around a major crisis in knowledge production. This is not something you can expect FDA to take a lead on – they are not political actors, they are bureaucrats. Companies create knowledge or were creating the appearances of knowledge at this point, but doctors are surely primarily responsible for the creation of medical knowledge and doctors were missing in action around 1991– other than as spokespeople for companies.
Slide 21: The Sacred Mantra is that randomization controls for all possible confounders in all possible universes. The reality is randomization introduces confounders into clinical trials.
The images for the next 3 slides come from a GSK paper prepared in 2006 for submission to FDA. The small print is hard to read – the bold at the bottom gives you the key details.
The data for suicidal events on Paxil in Major Depressive Disorder trials in this first slide show it causes suicidal events. Even Ian Hudson would have to agree and these data were available at the time of the Tobin trials. But randomization is about to come to GSK’s rescue.
Slide 22: Faced with a problem like this, had GSK consulted me I’d have said do a trial in Intermittent Brief Depressive Disorders (IBDD). They might have said but there are trials of SSRIs in IBDD and they don’t work. I’d have said do one. They did and it had to be terminated early, Paxil did so poorly. I’d have said do another. Why – the figures for Paxil still look bad in this group?
Slide 23: But when you add the IBDD data to the MDD data, all of a sudden the figures say Paxil protects against suicidal events.
This scenario can happen every time a condition we are treating is heterogenous – that is dementia, diabetes, parkinson’s disease, breast cancer, back pain, hypertension – pretty well everything in medicine. In these cases randomization will act to hide effects good and bad and leave us able to use a problem a drug causes to hide a problem a drug causes.
Slide 24: Graphically this is what it looks like. The Red Drug here is the MDD curve alone – more than 95% of the data are to the right of the 1.0 line. The traditional wisdom is that adding some more events to the Red Drug above should give us a more precise version of the same estimate
In fact when you add a few more people, about 3%, we have shifted the curve to the opposite side of the 1.0 line. Its far a more precise confidence interval but this is a precision that speaks to our ignorance rather than to better knowledge. No medical statistics book ever hints at this possibility.
We could add 40 suicidal events to the paroxetine IBDD arm before Ian Hudson would have to admit paroxetine causes a problem – on the basis that the results are now statistically significant.
IBDD patients could be admitted to MDD trials – we have no way to distinguish them. Some patients become IBDD by virtue of a poor response to an SSRI.
Randomization in heterogenous conditions will hide effects drugs cause. It allows us to use an adverse effect a drug causes to hide the same adverse effect that drug causes. Confidence intervals do not help us work out what is going on in these cases.
Nor do they help in heterogenous drug responses. Lets take 20 Aarons who are all sedated by a Red Drug and 20 Davids all stimulated by it. The best estimate in the confidence interval in this case will lie on the 1.0 line, showing the drug has no effect. A method to distinguish between one and two stars should not produce an answer that there are no stars here. Algorithmic judgements cannot substitute for a human judgement.
Slide 25: Here is another problem with Confidence Intervals. Young men take Finasteride to restore a thick head of hair. We could count hairs and build confidence intervals around before and after hair follicle numbers.
Finasteride also causes suicide and permanent sexual dysfunction and like most drugs has 3,500 other effects. Confidence intervals for hair numbers before and after is one thing, but applying them to suicidality or sexual function, which were not measured in the trial, and for Merck to then claim on this basis that the science does not support a link between finasteride and suicide on the basis that not all the data lie to the right of the 1.0 line isn’t managing measurement error. It’s a confidence trick – that happens all the time.
Slide 26: There are more dead bodies on antidepressants in trials than on placebo, yet the RCTs as Ian Hudson told you show the drugs work. This is because most RCTs have a surrogate outcome. For antidepressants its the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression.
Fifteen years after its creation, Max Hamilton commented on his scale:
It may be that we are witnessing a change as revolutionary as was the introduction of standardization and mass production in manufacture. Both have their positive and negative sides
Hamilton saw this scale as a checklist of things to ask about in an interview – a mixed blessing.
Slide 27: Checklists are now viewed as more scientific than David Healy in a clinic asking you about your family. They will produce standardized but possibly disastrous interviews.
For instance, on this scale, there is a suicide item. Suicidality can stem from the illness or the drug. This needs a judgement call. If caused by the drug you should rate a Zero. If caused by the illness you might rate 3 or 4. If you just check yes for suicidality, the default is to the illness. Ditto for sex, and for sleep.
In the case of sleep, the illness can produce too much sleep or not enough sleep and each of the medicines can inhibit sleep or heavily sedate. There are 3 sleep questions. A scientific interview has a multitude of options requiring judgement calls.
In the 1980s, we brought problems to doctors needing help to get on with the lives we wanted to live. Since then, for drug companies, rating scales, sometimes left in the waiting room, ensure you do an interview that produces figures for which a company drug might seem an answer. Your interview will help you to help your patient to live the life Pfizer want him to live. Do that and you are no longer practicing medicine.
Slide 28: Many think RCTs are fine if only they were done by angels.
Study 329 was conducted in the very best university centres in North America. It has an authorship line to die for, starting with Marty Keller and including a Canadian Liberal Party Senator – Stan Kutcher. It was published in the Journal with the highest impact factor in child psychiatry. The article claims Paxil works wonderfully well and is safe for depressed teens.
What I am about to tell you applies to all industry trials across medicine.
Slide 29: Three years earlier, in 1998, GSK concluded Paxil didn’t work in Study 329 and was not safe. That could not be published so they were going to pick out the good bits of the data and publish them. The good bits formed the Keller et al 2001 paper.
This 1998 internal SKB document led New York’s Attorney General to file a fraud action against GSK. As part of the resolution of this, GSK agreed to make their Paxil trial data public. A decade later, GSK resolved a Dept of Justice action, which also involved Study 329, for $3 Billion dollars.
Slide 30: These actions gave a team of us an incentive to Restore Study 329 and we now had more raw data from this study than FDA or other regulators had seen for this or any company study.
Slide 31: In contrast to Keller, we found the 8-week acute phase showed no difference between Paxil or placebo. We found the same for the never published 6 month continuation phase – never published till we published it 18 years after the trial ended.
Slide 32: Keller noted 6 emotionally labile events in the trial, some of which might have been suicidality, 4 on paroxetine. But in our hands a fifth of the children on Paxil had a behavioral event mostly suicidality – 18 out of 93 children.
Suicide is not what I want to focus on. It’s the ability of company studies to hide adverse events. Our paper lists 10 ways to hide things. Coding – as in calling suicidality emotional lability, is top of this list – this is the first act of authorship but no reviewer or journal pays any heed to it.
Slide 33: In a Pfizer trial, at the same time, a man on active drug got agitated, poured gasoline/petrol on himself and set fire to it intending to kill himself but he only died from his burns 5 days later. Pfizer coded him as death by burns. Once the coding is done, the paper is all but written.
There is some chance FDA found out about this man because if you have to go to hospital or you die companies had to file a report outlining what happened and did so for this man.
Slide 34: But in Study 329, FDA know nothing about a 15 year old boy, 2 weeks after being put on Paxil, who was out on the street waving a gun, threatening to kill people. He was brought to hospital by the police. There was no report to tell FDA what happened. Thirty years ago companies found a way to legally avoid filing these reports. Companies are still using this trick in trials published this year in all major journals and regulators either don’t spot or are not bothered to close a very obvious loophole. In Study 329, 4 children vanished through this loophole.
Slide 35: The sentences on the right are the 3 sentences with which this article ends – the message is companies have created an impression that RCT articles are like tablets of stone brought down from the mountain top, commanding doctors to prescribe and us to take. But when we have access to RCT data, this raises questions – as science should – rather than issues commands.
In addition to Coding, Grouping is also an act of authorship. If you have 500 events in 93 children on Paxil, rather than list them all, cardiac events are usually grouped in a Cardiac group etc. Behavioral events are usually grouped in a Psychiatric group. GSK grouped all behavioral events under Neurological. This groups emotional lability with headaches and dizziness, which are very common. Grouped this way the behavior problems disappear. Grouped as Psychiatric, the problem is immediately clear.
The Restoring Study 329 article took over a year to get it published. What was fascinating was the BMJ did not contest the data but they were very exercised by the act of interpretation. They appeared to assume that the data had spoken and GSK faithfully transmitted what they had heard. They found it heard to grasp that GSK used a coding dictionary that even FDA had never heard of.
Any scientific analysis inevitably involves an act of authorship or interpretation. But BMJ found it hard to let us author the behavioral events out of the neurological group into a Psychiatry group. There is no such thing as data without an interpretation. Ideally the interpretation should command consensus but for BMJ this appeared to mean that we should adopt what GSK had done without question.
Slide 36: Everyone knows Prozac was approved for children who are depressed but not that Paxil was too. A year after the Keller paper came out, this is part of an FDA approvable letter for Paxil.
It says GSK have told FDA Study 329 is negative. FDA agree its negative – in fact all 3 trials are negative – but FDA will still approve Paxil for kids. FDA also agree with GSK’s suggestion not to mention the negative trials in the label of the drug. Why would FDA agree to this?
Before answering that, let me note FDA also viewed the Prozac trials in teens as negative.
Slide 37: This slide from Erick Turner’s 2008 article shows published adult ‘trials’ on various antidepressants, almost all indicating the drugs work well and are safe. Look at the sertraline column – 3 from the right. It shows two studies – the minimum needed for approval.
Slide 38: Another slide shows the trials as FDA viewed them. 46% of these trials are negative. Many published as positive were negative to add to the unpublished negative trials. Look at the sertraline column – only one positive study.
Why do FDA say nothing about this? Well if FDA said trials are negative – the companies might get sued for fraud or fined – as happened for Study 329.
Slide 39: Here you see the PTSD page of a 30 page document listing Zoloft articles in progress. These papers aim at capturing markets not at informing us on how to use Zoloft safely.
Pfizer did 4 Zoloft PTSD trials. All negative. FDA approved it on the basis of 2 trials with a minimal benefit for women. These good bits plucked out are what’s being published. You see under Status on the right two articles are complete and will be sent to the very best journals. On the left you see TBD – to be determined – when Pfizer decide which names would sell most Zoloft.
You saw a 24 person authorship line for Study 329 but the real author is not there. Across medicine studies of on-patent drugs are ghostwritten.
In the case of children’s antidepressant trials the entire literature was written by ghosts and there is a complete mismatch between the published claims and the data – the greatest mismatch in all of science. On the basis of published claims the use of these drugs is escalating rapidly in teenagers with predictably bad results.
Slide 40: Fifty years ago, Britain joined the EU and ran into trouble. Cadbury’s chocolate, their favorite chocolate, they were told, could not be called chocolate. It didn’t have the right quota of cocoa solids. British consternation over chocolate led to Brexit some decades later.
What FDA do is in their name – they regulate Food and Drugs. Faced with butter or chocolate or drugs, companies must meet an assay standard – so much cocoa solids, animal fats, or so many points on a Depression rating scale in 2 trials. Meet that and FDA let you use the words chocolate, butter, or antidepressant. It’s not FDA’s job to decide if this is good butter, or if chocolate is good for you, or to police the medical literature.
Sllide 41: Since 1990, however, regulators increasingly say they approve drugs on the back of a supposed positive Benefit-Risk ratio. This is Ian Hudson thinking. If there are no proven adverse effects and just a benefit then of course there is a positive Benefit-Risk ratio.
The medical act of bringing good out of the use of a poison is incompatible with all this.
We would all agree there is a positive benefit-risk ratio for parachute approval in terms of lives saved versus lives lost – even though some men might have difficulties making love in the weeks afterwards, owing to harness effects. If things aren’t clear enough for us all to endorse, regulators are de facto getting us to live the lives companies want us to live when they make Benefit-Risk claims.
Unlike parachutes, SSRI RCTs have more dead bodies on SSRIs than placebo. In addition. the commonest effect of an SSRI is to cause genital numbness in close to everyone who takes one within 30 minutes of a first tablet. Almost everyone will have the way they make love changed while on an SSRI and they may later find themselves unable to make love ever again, either because they can’t stop or because the drugs can wipe out sexual function for ever. This may be far more important to a person than any mood benefit.
But the focus on the mood effect, means the sexual effect was missed entirely in the trials regulators scrutinized both because that’s how trials work but also with a little extra gaming from companies.
Some years ago treating a man with OCD, I tried an SSRI – the first line treatment and then more heavy duty drugs when the SSRI didn’t work. All made him worse. One day he came in much better – he had stopped all his drugs but he was cured by going back smoking. He had also googled nicotine and OCD and found studies showing nicotine and related drugs can help OCD.
When I say the Art of Medicine lies in Bringing Good out of the Use of a Poison, people hiss at me but everyone would likely agree this man was bringing good out of the use of a poison. SSRIs however are prescription-only because we expect them to be more dangerous than over the counter alcohol and nicotine.
The important thing is that this man (perhaps with input from me) is the only person in a position to make a meaningful Benefit Risk call. I can’t see what role FDA could have in this. Benefit-Risk calls are an individual matter. Making the claims FDA now make puts them in a role of getting people to live the life Pfizer want them to live.
Am I making all claims on the basis of Citizen Research more than Expert input? No – among the articles this man found about nicotine and OCD was one whose significance passed him by. One of the authors was Arvid Carlsson, who created SSRIs and won a Nobel Prize for Medicine.
But when you have Skin in the Game, Motivation can be worth just as much as Expertise.
Slide 42: As a result of Ian Hudson’s views, as I wrote 25 years ago, everyone who participates in a company trial today puts all the rest of us in a state of Legal Jeopardy. We should boycott trials, until this changes. See Clinical Trials and Legal Jeopardy.
Slide 43: That article was 25 years ago, this is 25 days ago and argues everyone entering a trial now are deceived by consent forms that promise coverage for injuries, unaware that there are no injuries on modern treatment, or no injuries that can be admitted. See The Coverage of Medical Injuries in Compary Trial Informed Consent Forms.
Slide 44: However, since 2010, the US Supreme Court in the Matrixx case made it clear that Ian Hudson’s views do not apply to investors wanting to make up their mind about the Benefits and Risks of investing. We who are investing our lives in these treatments still do not have such rights.
Slide 45: The beating Tell Tale Heart of this talk came with the publication of this article 33 years ago this month, in which 3 Boston clinicians claimed fluoxetine caused 6 people to become suicidal. Analyzing the cases closely and following traditional clinical approaches for determining causality, this article nailed beyond doubt that fluoxetine could cause some people to become suicidal.
Lots of other groups reported similar findings. I published 2 cases of men, who were challenged, dechallenged and rechallenged with an SSRI. There was no other way to explain what happened them except that fluoxetine had caused it. This was Evident Based Medicine .
Slide 46: Almost the same week as my article came out, BMJ published an article in which Lilly claimed an analysis of their clinical trials showed no evidence fluoxetine made people suicidal. The cases being reported, therefore, were sad but anecdotal – and the plural of anecdote is not data. Depression was the problem not fluoxetine. Clinical trials are the science of cause and effect. Doctors, the public, media, and politicians were being asked – are you going to believe the science or the anecdotes?
This was a knowledge creation moment that likely had input from all companies and perhaps FDA. This article created Evidence Based Medicine and just as with RCTs 30 years earlier, the people most commonly exhorting doctors to practice EBM today are Pharma companies.
In fact, the original phrase is the plural of anecdotes is data – otherwise Google wouldn’t work.
The idea the disease is responsible for suicide attempts and suicides in healthy volunteers is hard to believe but companies can wheel out experts to say just that.
My key point is that the Teicher paper is the science – the Lilly data is an artefact. My challenge to you is which are you going to believe the Science or the Artefact?
The Science of Medicine lies in making hard judgement calls. The made by algorithm approach, combined with inappropriate statistics, creates artefacts not science.
You’ve seen earlier how Lilly cooked the books. When you get the trial data, the Evident Based Medicine and Evidence Based Medicine approaches here can be reconciled – as you might expect with real science.
But even there was an incompatability there isn’t a problem. Resolving discrepancies is how we do science.
This points to a deep problems with Lilly’s argument. They are not in the business of being scientific – resolving discrepant observations. Lilly’s argument is a religious one – a dogmatic one – they forbid us to believe the evidence of our own senses.
This is papal infallibility riding again.
Peter Drucker, the doyen of marketing gave us a secular update – the goal of marketing is not to increase the sales of Prozac, its to own the market. This was the moment Pharma took ownership of the market.
This ownership allows companies to dictate what the risks, the benefits and the trade-offs of drugs are. Allows them to force us to live the lives they want us to live rather than engage with the risky and unprofitable business of producing products that will help us to live the lives we want to live. Following this Artefact is profoundly alienating.
Slide 47: This faces us with a what is science question? The usual histories start with the foundation of The Royal Society in 1660, which established the ground rules for Science. Science would deal with matters that could be Settled by Data. Participants could be Xtian, Hindu, Jew, Muslim, or Atheist, but participants were called on to leave these badges at the door and make a consensus based judgement call about the best way to explain the experimental outcome in front of them.
The histories of science emphasize the word Data. Settled is the more important word. Statistics played no part in this science. The experiments were events and didn’t need the descriptions statistics can provide. Science was emphatically not about replacing judgment calls with a statistical artefact. It only became so 33 years ago.
Slide 48: This account of our history overlooks an earlier event. In 1618, Walter Raleigh was executed – for being too close to those pesky Europeans. Raleigh was convicted on the basis of things said about him by people who did not come into court to be cross-examined.
Legal systems worldwide recognized the injustice of this and introduced Rules of Evidence. Hearsay could not be used as evidence. Jurors – a group of 12 people, Xtians, Hindus, Muslims, Atheists and Jews, can only base a verdict on material put in front of them that can be examined and cross-examined. The process of forcing 12 people with very different biases to come to a Verdict about what is in front of them is the essence of science.
Verdicts and diagnoses are provisional – the view that best fits the current facts. This might appear to contrast with the objectivity of science, but scientific views are similarly provisional. Scientists attempt to overturn verdicts with new data.
Let’s say I gave Aaron fluoxetine 33 years ago and he became suicidal. I could examine and cross-examine him, run labs and scans, raise the dose, stop the drug, add an antidote, check with colleagues has anyone else seen anything like this or can they explain it in any other way. Aaron is the data – all of the data. He is the apparatus in which the experiment is taking place.
If Aaron and I conclude fluoxetine made him suicidal and report this to FDA, the first thing FDA does is to remove his name. No-one can now examine or cross-examine him and come to a scientific view about whether there is a link or not. His injury has been made Hearsay – indeed misinformation.
If you are later injured in the same way and see tens of thousands of reports of suicidality on SSRIs on FDA’s adverse event reporting system, you cannot bring this into court because no-one can be brought into court. It’s Hearsay not Evidence.
Company RCTs are equally hearsay and should not be let into Court as evidence. Accessing the data in this case means accessing people – like Aaron or me – and we cannot do that with the people in company trials, who often don’t exist. Except rarely, the authors on the articles have seen none of these people and cannot speak to what happened either.
In contrast, if Aaron and I report his case in he New England Journal or the American Journal of Psychiatry as a Case Report, with our names on it, we can both be brought into Court.
Slide 49: By 1983 the view was emerging that RCTs offered the scientific and sophisticated way to establish if a drug had adverse effects as this quote by Rossi et al indicates:
Spontaneous reporting is “the least sophisticated and scientifically rigorous . . . method of detecting new adverse drug reactions.
A mid-career Lasagna, the man who more than anyone introduced RCTs, responded:
This may be true in the dictionary sense of sophisticated meaning ‘adulterated’ . . . but I submit spontaneous reporting is more ‘worldly-wise, knowing, subtle and intellectually appealing’ than grandiose, expensive RCTs.
Slide 50: Here you have an older Louis Lasagna saying:
In contrast to my role in the 1950s which was trying to convince people to do controlled trials, now I find myself telling people that it’s not the only way to truth.
Evidence Based Medicine has become synonymous with RCTs even though such trials invariably fail to tell the physician what he or she wants to know which is, which drug is best for Mr Jones or Ms Smith – not what happens to a non-existent average person.
Slide 51: Here is James Webb again to remind you that confidence intervals were a step on the way to revealing the individuality of stars. In medicine, statistical approaches operate against individuality.
Using Chance to control Bias does not foster clinical science, especially when we allow a mindless algorithm to replace clinical judgement. Clinical medicine, like law, and the first 300 years of science uses Bias to Control Chance and both medicine and law need to assert the validity of this approach.
Slide 52: Using Bias to control Chance rather than some algorithmic method of controlling Chance is critical when numbers enter the frame. This is our only defense against medical neo-liberalism.
Around 1980 Pharma began treating healthy people. They discovered that numbers for our peak flow rates, bone densities, blood pressure, lipids, or sugar provided opportunities to sell drugs. Up to 1980, we brought our problems to healthcare – seeking help to live the lives we wanted to live. After that health services began to give us problems and the amount of medicines consumed rose dramatically. We began treating numbers rather than people.
Remaining on top of data like this is difficult. Just after weighing scales for people were introduced in the 1860s, we got the first descriptions of anorexia nervosa. In the 1920s, weighing scales in drug stores came with norms for our ideal weight given our height and sex and eating disorders mushroomed. When scales migrated into our homes in the 1960s eating disorders became epidemic – in the countries that had weighing scales. Measurements can make both us and our doctors neurotic.
Slide 53: There is an extra element to the equation. The service industries emerged in the 1950s. Through to 1980, no-one viewed health as a service industry – doctors were professionals who exercised judgement the way a Judge might. But service industries have managers and health got managers. With this the exercise of clinical discretion, the jewel in the crown of Health Care became a problem for those who manage services.
The idea of bringing good out of the use of a poison does not compute for managers, insurers, politicians or increasingly the public.
Before 1980, clinicians mobilized the resources of the organization they worked to handle the risks your condition posed to you. Now instead you can palpably feel the clinicians you meet are managing the risks you pose to the organization we work for.
Slide 54: Managers manage what they can measure. For them figures have a sheen of scientific gold. We are re-running the King Midas story – this gold coating is incompatible with Human Care and Life.
This governance by numbers is the essence of the neoliberalism that began in Chile and Britain – treat the money supply numbers or inflation numbers regardless of what is happening a country. Medicine is the best place to see this and its deleterious effects in action – aggravated by the fact that bowing down before a golden algorithmic idol inhibits anyone from leading us out of this desert in which we now wander.
Slide 55: When the pilot here reports problems, safety systems pay heed because they know she won’t fly if they don’t because of the consequences for her.
Jane Frazer is the CEO of Citibank. Since the financial crisis, bankers have an Early Warning System. Who knows if it helps? The financial crisis was linked to a moral hazard. Bankers were outsourcing risk, knowing that if things crashed you and I would suffer but they would continue to collect their bonuses. This made it hard for them to do the right or brave thing.
If the doctor on the left reports a problem, no-one pays any heed. She too outsources risk putting pills that like mortgages look too good to be true in our mouths. This is morally hazardous. Like a mortgage, if a drug looks too good to be true it probably is. If we blow up, she continues to be well paid. There is no incentive for her to do the right thing.
Slide 56: This moral hazard is leading to a pharmaceutical crisis that maps onto the financial crisis of 15 years ago. Here is a recent New York Times image of Life Expectancy in the US. You’ll see it began dropping in 1980, when we began treating numbers rather than people and converted health into a service industry. This Fall cannot be attribued to COVID. My view is that it is most likely linked to polypharmacy. The UK has similar falling Life Expectancy data – again pre-COVID.
Slide 57: Drugs like guns are techniques – amoral. The morality of their use lies in us. If we stop thinking about what we are doing when we use them, we are highly likely to be diminished.
Like Guns, Drugs create an arms race. The country with the best Medical Techniques and Guns wins wars and both armament and medical developments have been driven forward by military needs – to keep men able to fight in the case of drugs.
There is difference between Guns and Drugs. The chemicals in drugs are always risky. The information that transforms those chemicals into medicines has become increasingly dangerous. At the moment, the Drugs Race is not a better Chemical Race – it’s about creating more effective propaganda. The best propaganda is invisible – in this case it masquerades as science. The greatest concentration of fake literature on earth now centers on the reports of RCTs on the Drugs our doctors give us.
With both Guns and Drugs there is a limit to effectiveness. In the case of the Atom Bomb it is so effective that it cannot be used. It is the same with Drugs, if you are on more than 3, the effectiveness of each falls off as you add more meds into the mix.
To get the most effectiveness you need to be on 3 or less. As of 2016, over 40% of over 45s in the United States were on 3 or more drugs every day of the year – this figure includes the people who never come to see doctors. Over 40% of over 65s are on 5 or more drugs every day of the week. Knowing what is happening teenagers, this can only increase.
We know that reducing medication burdens can increase life expectancy, reduce hospitalizations, and improve quality of life.
Slide 58: Reducing a medication burden is not easy – as this image from the movie The Hurt Locker illustrates. Many of these drugs explode on attempting to withdraw them. This is the primary medical task of our age and there will never be any RCTs to help us out. The best evidence will likely lie in clinical experience of tackling similar situations. Great if I have a walkie-talkie to clinical colleagues but my key partner in this is you – you bring cues from missing doses of some of these drugs, and your sense of what they are doing that I can only access through you. And of course you ultimately dictate which risks we take.
In the 1940s and 1950s, RCTs had a role when we didn’t know if things worked. From the 1960s we had so many good drugs that worked – brought on the market without an RCT in sight – a new role beckoned for RCTs – to work out what worked best. RCTs cannot do this and besides it did not suit company interests. Companies instead created Randomized Controlled Assays which among other things allow weaker and weaker drugs on the market.
The pressing medical need now is to get people off the meds they are on and RCTs and what is called EBM have little or no role to play in helping us with this.
Slide 59: If a doctor tries to modestly reduce medication burdens or recognize that in some cases a treatment might have become a problem, current public health systems will not accommodate her. In the US, it is current culture that will mobilize against this. The doctor will be told this would be a good private practice offer that people can choose, but the public health system expectation is that people want and should get more diagnoses and drugs.
This is because getting treatment to save our lives was once a privilege and wealth and public health systems want everyone to be able to access treatment. They cannot now see that these good intentions are killing people. Now we have to be wealthy to get off medicines to save our lives.
Canada now leads the world in MAiD – Medical Assistance in Dying. In places like Belgium and Holland young women are getting MAiD because they have drug induced treatment resistant depression. While there must be concerns when young women in their 20s get MAID for treatment resistant depression – an antidepressant induced illness – I’m not quibbling about the morality of MAiD – any good doctor will almost certainly have cases where MAiD is the caring thing to do.
What I am quibbling about is the morality of a system that encourages us to have any service we want, including MAiD, but denies us the option of having less services. Denies us a Greener, more sustainable HealthCare. At the moment, not even Green parties have got a handle on this.
Slide 60: This lady comes from an Arthurian Legend. Arthur has been out-fought by a Black Knight who spares his life if he can answer a riddle – What do Women Most Desire. He has a year to find the answer. He and his court hunt desperately for it. The day he is due to die, Arthur and his troop meet this woman who tells him that she has the answer to the riddle but one of his knights must become her husband. Gawain jumps down and offers himself up. Arthur answers the riddle, and a furious Black Knight lets him go.
Slide 61: Gawain gets married. Everyone at the Court is unhappy for him.
Slide 62: In the bedchamber Gawain can’t bear to look at her. She takes control and asks him – do you want me to look like this by night with you and the way I was by day in court or like this by day in court. He has no idea and says – whatever you want. This is the right answer.
The answer to both riddles is she, like us, wants to control her own life. There may be a disease that needs treating – but she doesn’t want us to tell her how to live life, or want her negative emotions eliminated with a pill. She may be doing better at living life than you or I.
The evidence based medicine we now practice creates a False We – a non-existent average person – a fairy tale.
Rather than paying heed to the non-existent average person who comes out of clinical trials, when we relearn that we can learn much more from the person right in front of us, she and others who come to see us will seem more interesting and as they sense that we will be more attractive to them – easier to work with.
A relationship based medicine is the only validly scientific form of clinical practice. If you can’t build up a relationship with people because you and they see a different doctor every time, a relationship in which you are looking closely at and listening attentively to them – perhaps even detecting if there is a change in their smell, you are not doing science. The person in front of you is the apparatus in which the experiment is taking place. The computer screen is not.
Both science and morality depend on collaboration. Collaboration creates a virtuous circle – an Us – that leaves us all better placed to live the life we want to live. It creates Social Capital.
Redesignate Company Trials as Assays
Government of the People by the People has been replaced by governance.
If it is not to perish entirely from the earth…
We need to do…
Footnotes
This may be the most important lecture I have ever given – it’s the longest at least. It has been heavily shaped by Dee Mangin, Peter and Julie Wood and everyone linked to RxISK – Bill James, Johanna Ryan, Peter Selley, Sarah Tilley, Mary Hennessey, Annemarie Kelly and many others who have worked behind the scenes but don’t want to be named and others whose comments on posts are often more illuminating than the posts themselves.
It has been shaped over a 25 year period by Andy Vickery, Cindy Hall, Skip Murgatroyd and Michael Baum who in the legal cases they involved me in brought me face to face with the many issues covered here.
It has been shaped by Jon Jureidini, Melissa Raven, Joanna Le Noury, and Elia Abi-Jaoude, who along with Mickey Nardo and Catalin Tufanaru, both now dead, were the team behind the Restoration of Study 329 – see the final article at Restoring Study 329.
It would not be possible to leave Peter Goetzsche out of the frame and an intense struggle to restore the Prozac trials in adolescents – along with the bravery of Ralph Edwards in publishing this paper. See Flat as Kansas.
Finally to complete a set of Peters, Peter Doshi has been one of the most remarkable people working on all these issues extraordinarily effectively.
There have been any number of fabulous media people like Shelley Jofre and Andy Bell who brought key issues to light, along with Ariane Denoyel and others who have grappled with the issues outlined here.
More recently, Dan Johnson, along with Yoko Motohama and Vincent Schmitt who have lost teenage sons to the drugs mentioned here, triggered the series of lectures noted above of which this is the third in the series. Jon Thompson and his colleagues in the math department in the University of New Brunswick, along with Peter Selley and colleagues in the Devon and Exeter Medical Society allowed me to dress rehearse and improve the talk.
I have stolen ideas from lots of people such as Steve Lanes – too many to acknowledge. As Steve’s example shows, some of the best help has come from people working in industry.
The Q and A after this talk in Boston reveals a tendency we all have to say things would be fine if industry just weren’t involved in trials. This is not my view. Industry don’t help but they are primarily exploiting medical failures to get to grips with the faultlines in RCTs – and a medical willingness to accept a simplistic solution to the problem of objectivity rather than engage with others in establishing what is objective or at least the best provisional version of objectivity.
The following book represents an extraordinary historical achievement in the reporting of events in science and medicine.
It also appears to be a record of a great crime against humanity.
In 2022, the Pfizer documents, a tranche of 55,000 documents, many of them thousands of pages long, were released via a court order. This was due to a successful lawsuit by attorney Aaron Siri. The US Food and Drug Administration had asked the court to keep these documents hidden for 75 years — until after most of us alive now would be dead and gone.
Luckily, the court did not concur.
We at DailyClout.io, a website devoted to civic transparency, realized that the raw documents were impossible to cover in normal journalistic ways. One reason was the massive scope of the documentation. But another reason was that the documents are written for scientists and medical researchers, in language that only specialists in those fields could really understand properly or explain.
We sent out a call for expert volunteers from those fields on our own platforms, and we did so also on the video and podcast platform, War Room Pandemic, hosted by Stephen K. Bannon. A global audience thus recognized how important it was for an informed public — who had been harried, bullied, and “mandated” to receive Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA injections in 2021-2022 — to understand what was really revealed inside of the Pfizer documents.
As a result of our calls for expert help, we received 2000, then 2500, and finally 3500 responses from volunteers, many of whom are experts in their fields. Biostatisticians, lab clinicians, pathologists, anesthesiologists, sports medicine physicians, cardiologists, research scientists, RNs, and many other related disciplines are represented among these decent, highly-skilled people who offered to read through these difficult, technical documents — pro bono, as a service to humanity (and out of respect as well, in many cases, for their own lifelong commitment to real science, real medicine, and truth in general). Many of them were not only published, peer-reviewed academic authors in their fields, but some were peer reviewers themselves. There was no way, with a group this distinguished in science and medicine doing the labor, that the interpretation of these documents could be dismissed as “fringe,” subjective, or as the work of “conspiracy theorists.”
Of course, managing a project in which 3500 highly trained specialists from all over the world work together virtually on unpacking and reporting on such a massive trove of material, would have been impossible for mere mortals.
At first, indeed, we did not know how to organize the thousands of specialists who offered their help.
Enter Amy Kelly, who is also a heroine of this story. She is a talented project manager, and now DailyClout’s COO; and she has a distinguished background in complex organizational projects in various fields.
Ms. Kelly managed, seemingly effortlessly, to organize the volunteers into six working teams, with subcommittees of expert readers. Under her extraordinary leadership, the thousands of specialists around the globe started to communicate with one another, share their findings, and draft their reports. I trained the volunteers in writing for a general audience, and I also trained our DailyClout editors in editing what was often dense medical language, but with extremely important findings, into accessible reports that anyone with any level of education could follow and understand.
For all of us, but mostly for the volunteers and Ms. Kelly, the next year represented a Herculean effort to turn this material, that one of the most powerful companies in the world trusted would never be made public, into fifty readable reports sharing the most urgent headlines of all — the reports that are now in your hands.
You will see that the 46 reports document what may be a massive crime against humanity. You will see that Pfizer knew, as it appears, that the mRNA vaccines did not work. You will see that the ingredients, including lipid nanoparticles, in the mRNA injections bio-distributed throughout the body in a couple of days, accumulating in the liver, adrenals, spleen — and ovaries. You will see that Pfizer and the FDA knew that the injections damaged the hearts of minors — and yet waited months to inform the public. You will see that Pfizer sought to hire over a thousand new staffers simply to manage the flood of “adverse events” reports that they were receiving and that they anticipated receiving. You will see that 61 people died of stroke — half of the stroke adverse events being within a couple of days after injection — and that five people died of liver damage with, again, many of the liver damage adverse events sustained shortly after the injection. You will see neurological events, cardiac events, strokes, brain hemorrhages, and blood clots, lung clots and leg clots at massive scale. You will see that headaches, joint pain, and muscle pain are rampant as adverse events, though these are not disclosed as routine side effect warnings by our agencies.
Most seriously of all, you will see a 360-degree attack on human reproductive capability: with harms to sperm count, testes, sperm motility; harms to ovaries, menstrual cycles, placentas; you will see that over 80 per cent of the pregnancies in one section of the Pfizer documents ended in spontaneous abortion or miscarriage. You will see that 72 per cent of the adverse events in one section of the documents were in women, and that 16 percent of those were “reproductive disorders,” in Pfizer’s own words. You will see a dozen or more names for the ruination of the menstrual cycles of women and teenage girls. You will see that Pfizer defined “exposure” to the mRNA vaccine as including skin contact, inhalation and sexual contact, especially at the point of conception.
History has not yet concluded its assessment of what Pfizer — and the FDA, who were in custody of all of these documents — has done. We are at the very start of that assessment.
But to me it is clear that the following documents, written by impeccably skilled experts, and linked to primary sources, show that a crime has likely been committed against humanity that is unprecedented in its scale.
We owe the War Room/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Research Volunteers — some named, most of them unnamed — who labored for a year, and do so to this day, and for nothing more than the privilege of serving humanity, science, medicine and the actual truth — a tremendous debt. We thank Mr. Bannon and his team for so often supporting our call for experts and for helping us to announce the results in real time, as the reports came in. We thank all of the other news outlets, of all kinds, who risked reprisals from Big Pharma or even from the government — which recent lawsuits have shown allied with Big Pharma — who have also showcased the work of the Volunteers, in an effort truly to inform their viewers.
Please share this document with your loved ones if you also find it to be important.
Everyone by law deserves informed consent when it comes to medical interventions — it is actually a crime to withhold it (really many crimes appear to be represented here, but history will sort that out as well).
It has been a privilege to report on this team’s work, and to do all I can as CEO of DailyClout, to help sustain their, and the remarkable Ms. Kelly’s, work on humanity’s behalf.
Sincerely,
Dr. Naomi Wolf
CEO, DailyClout.io
March 21, 2023
Salem, Massachusetts
Note: This article is primarily a human story. The most important parts of this article are the videos (if you only have time to watch one, watch Maddie’s, below) that were compiled and edited for this article. The written details are just to provide the necessary context for the significance of their testimonies.
In the first part of this series, I discussed how the gross malfeasance observed by many in the COVID-19 vaccine trials did not come out of nowhere. Rather, it is yet one more occurrence in a chronic pattern of egregious conduct by the pharmaceutical industry, which has progressively worsened because there has not been the political will to address the growing corruption within the biomedical establishment.
There, I focused upon the events within the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine trials (and the subsequent red flags which emerged after they entered the market), because many at the time had difficulty believing something like that could even happen and it was possible to sweep the issue under the rug, since the vaccines were only targeted on one segment of the population—women. Now, not only has the exact same thing happened (to a very eerie degree) with the COVID vaccines across the globe, but what is happening now is even worse than what happened less than a decade ago.
The best metaphor I have come up with to describe what I’ve observed in the pharmaceutical clinical trial process is that enrolling in one is akin to entering an abusive relationship. The abuser will initially flatter you and promise you one thing after another in return for your consent to enter their web of deception. Then, once they have you, they will break each promise they made, gradually treating you worse and worse, and gaslight ing you into believing that those issues are not really happening. Finally, once they no longer need you, they will discard you and leave you to pick up the pieces (which is often almost impossible if you have a life-changing medical injury).
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In the previous article , I introduced the concept of two different types of scientific fraud:
- Soft fraud is when the data is presented misleadingly to propose a conclusion that's not supported by the data, or some of the data is intentionally omitted (e.g., you do not publish an incriminating study or you find a way to reclassify an adverse event so it does not show up in the final clinical trial report).
- Hard fraud is when the data itself is just fabricated.
While many are comfortable with committing "soft” fraud, very few will commit “hard” fraud (although this cannot necessarily be said of India or China ). Instead, most of the fraud we encounter is soft fraud (e.g., this characterizes many of the studies used to try to debunk hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19). This, in turn, makes it possible for outside investigators (e.g., this community) to read between the lines, identify what actually happened, and determine what the results of a given study should have been, had it not been twisted to provide the results desired by its sponsor.
Conversely, I believe that the general reluctance to commit hard fraud exists because it crosses a line that even the fairly corrupt academic and legal systems still stand behind. However, we frequently see things that come quite close to that line, such as dishonest researchers altering a trial midway through so it arrives at the needed results. Fauci, for example, did this repeatedly with remdesivir to get it onto the market, and similarly, the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer ended their previously promised long-term placebo groups once they got their emergency-use authorizations (which should have required that long-term follow-up), so the long-term side effects of these vaccines could never be assessed.
Note: Although you can conceal most things by manipulating clinical trials, the one thing that is very difficult to hide is the total number of deaths (as they cannot be reclassified to something else). When Pfizer prematurely ended their trial at 6 months, more people had died in the vaccine group than the placebo group (and I suspect that this would have further worsened with time). The report disclosing this inconvenient fact (which destroyed the entire rationale for vaccine mandates) was released over a year ago .
Much of modern (industry-sponsored) science is designed to conceal things that would create problems for those sponsoring the science. Similarly, an ethos has been installed within our culture to doubt our own observations, and instead defer to the evidence-based scientific consensus, as the former, but not the latter is allegedly highly susceptible to biases that invalidate its conclusions. I disagree with this, and would argue that important things can often only be discerned by perceptive anecdotal observations.
Many organized religions throughout history have sought to control their populations by monopolizing the truth, and modern science is no different, monopolizing the evidence so that only a costly industry narrative can constitute "truth.” All of this is why we repeatedly see situations where someone has an undeniable medical injury, and afterwards, every professional they talk to tells them the injury could not have possibly been linked to the medication because there is “ no evidence ” it could have happened (also known as medical gaslighting ).
With the COVID-19 vaccines, we have seen alarming evidence of their harm across the board. For example, so many people are being harmed that VAERS has received more serious adverse events from the COVID vaccines than all other vaccines in history-- 28% of Americans know someone whom they believe the vaccines killedThe life insurance industry shows an unprecedented spike in deaths amongst working-age Americans following workplace-mandated vaccines being forced upon them. However, all of these safety signals are being ignored and dismissed as erroneous products of cognitive biases because they don’t meet the elusive bar for “evidence.”
Our current society has been conditioned to worship “evidence-based” science, and believes that it should be the sole arbiter of truth. One of the core tenets of evidence-based medicine is that the best available evidence should be used to inform clinical decisions. This is now widely interpreted to mean that large randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or clinical guidelines produced by committees of ( often corrupt ) experts are the “best” forms of evidence, and thus are the only things allowed to inform clinical decisions.
One of my largest disagreements with this dogma occurs when a situation arises where observations suggest something inconvenient to commercial interests, but the question at hand has not been formally assessed by large RCTs. The observations are summarily dismissed because “there is no evidence” for them. In these cases, I believe that the more limited data point (e.g., a series of similar clinical cases) constitutes the best available evidence, and should be treated as such until more comprehensive evidence is arrived at through a clinical study.
Much of my success as a clinician has arisen from utilizing more “limited” forms of evidence to inform my clinical decisions rather than waiting for an RCT (which may take years to be done) to settle the question—unfortunately many doctors become paralyzed and cannot act unless they have something like that to back them up. In contrast, if you read medical journals from earlier eras, physicians regularly made remarkable discoveries utilizing inductive reasoning, which is why I frequently study those ancient documents.
Overall, I believe there are three major issues with relying excessively upon RCTs:
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The first, summarized in this essay by Harvey Risch, is that the value of (perfect) RCTs is heavily over-emphasized. In my eyes, most individuals who fixate on RCTs view an investigation being randomized and controlled as a necessary box to check off, rather than (like Risch) actually understanding what it entails from a statistical perspective.
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Secondly, if the magnitude of an effect is small (e.g., this drug might reduce your risk of a heart attack years down the road by 5%), it takes an elaborate and costly trial to detect that faint effect, and it is very likely that you will have a greater chance of being harmed by a side effect than benefiting from the drug. Conversely, if the effect is large (e.g., shooting someone with a gun typically kills them), you don’t need an elaborate trial to detect the effect; a very small one will suffice to identify it. I subscribe to the belief that many useful medical interventions have a large enough magnitude of effect that it is not necessary to do complex testing to tease out their benefits.
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The third point is that large RCTs are extremely expensive to conduct (meaning that only industry and occasionally vested interests within the government can fund them, which is why many therapies I stand behind have never been able to achieve this gold standard in research performed for them). The rarely considered cost of doing an RCT frequently invalidates the entire RCT model, because study after study has shown that the financial interests of a study’s sponsor heavily influence its conclusion, and that influence is much greater than any benefit that can be obtained through randomization or controlling for the placebo effect.
Because of the “sponsor bias”, large studies need to have a way to arrive at a sponsor’s desired conclusion without committing hard scientific fraud. Over the years, a relatively consistent toolbox has evolved for committing soft scientific fraud, and those familiar with it were able to immediately recognize it being applied throughout the COVID-19 clinical trials
The COVID-19 Vaccine Trials
The essential purpose of the COVID-19 vaccine trials was to do the following:
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Be completed in a much shorter time frame than normal so that the vaccines could make it to the market before the pandemic ended on its own (which is essentially what has happened in Africa where vaccines were never used ).
Note: The FDA also understood the urgency to open this long-term marketplace and waived a variety of oversights that would normally be required using the present “emergency” as the justification for doing so.
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Come up with something that could be used to justify that the vaccines were “effective” so that the medical profession would wholeheartedly support and promote them.
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Conceal any adverse reactions from the vaccines that would make the medical profession reluctant to recommend the vaccines, and, more importantly, ensure doctors would deny any harms they observed in patients during the rollout could be linked to the vaccine (as doctors acknowledging widespread injuries would destroy the public’s willingness to continue vaccinating).
Long before the vaccines entered the market, I started to see the signs that an elaborate publicity campaign was being put together to frame the vaccines as the miraculous “ solution ” to the horrific pandemic situation we were experiencing (which was largely self-inflicted). Once the vaccines became available, that publicity campaign kicked into high gear and became the most aggressive propaganda campaign we had ever witnessed in our lifetimes. I tried to cover some of the most insane examples here:
Not surprisingly, this scheme also led to the vaccine manufacturers having the audacity to use titles like “ Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 [Pfizer] mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine ” for the publications of their trials . Simultaneously, we were hit with the same soundbite over and over “ well we had hoped the vaccines would be effective, but we never imagined they would be this effective .” My colleagues ate that up, and it became nearly impossible to provide any piece of evidence with which to challenge this modern-day miracle.
Problems With Pfizer’s Trials
_Note: I mostly critique Pfizer. This is not because Pfizer is the only bad actor. It’s because I’ve spent the majority of my time reviewing their work (I can’t read everything), and because Pfizer received full approval for their vaccine, it was possible to view many of their regulatory submissions through FOIAs (and their equivalents)_
When I read through the Pfizer trial , a few red flags jumped out at me:
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The vaccines were never tested for preventing transmission, and based on their design and my knowledge of precisely how previous vaccines failed to prevent transmission , I did not believe you could take it on faith that the vaccine's efficacy in reducing symptoms translated to the benefit all my colleagues ultimately cared about (reducing the transmission of COVID-19).
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The actual benefits provided by the vaccine were very small. You had to vaccinate 119 people to prevent one minor case of COVID-19 (e.g., a sore throat + a positive test), 2711 people to prevent one “severe” case of COVID-19, and since no deaths were prevented in the trial, well over 21,720 people needed to be vaccinated (21,720 is the total number who were vaccinated in the trial) to prevent a single death from COVID-19.
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Most of the suspected adverse reactions to these vaccines did not appear to have been amongst the adverse events that were monitored (they were also unlikely to appear in the brief timespan of symptoms being monitored within this trial).
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The adverse events that were reported were much higher than what has typically been reported in trials for other vaccines [e.g., 59% experienced fatigue after Pfizer's vaccine, whereas around 10-15% experience fatigue after an influenza vaccine].
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The actual benefit that the vaccines provided was much less than these adverse events that were acknowledged within the trial report. Arkmedic did an excellent breakdown of it here .
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The noteworthy adverse events about which I remembered reading in the online support groups I had joined in 2020 for vaccine trial participants were not accounted for in any of the trial reports I read (Pfizer included). I had joined these online groups because I was suspicious of the vaccines and felt that doing this would be the only way to find out what the pharmaceutical companies had actually done.
From looking at all of this, my immediate thought was “if this was the best they could do using every possible trick at their disposal to rearrange their data to paint a positive picture of the vaccines, just how bad was the actual trial data ?”
Unfortunately, my physician colleagues (who frequently lectured us on how to skeptically dissect scientific publications) were so enraptured by the “the vaccine is even more safe and effective than we imagined” meme, that all these points fell on deaf ears. Fortunately, some did notice these issues, and Peter Doshi published a series of editorials (summarized here ) in the British Medical Journal (BMJ - considered to be one of the top 5 medical journals in the world ) that explained why the design of the vaccine trials and the evidence for Pfizer’s vaccines was very poor, and could not justify an FDA approval. Sadly, his experience with his colleagues mirrored my own, and his points were almost entirely ignored by the medical profession.
One of Doshi’s many observations was that there were signs in the data that the trial was not blinded, and the entire benefit of the vaccine may have been due to a failure to test vaccinated individuals for COVID-19 (thus creating the illusion that vaccinated individuals were less likely to have laboratory-confirmed COVID-19).
Subsequently, a whistleblower, Brook Jackson , who helped run one of Pfizer’s clinical trials, came forward and testified to the following:
- The COVID-19 vaccine trial she participated in was run in a much more haphazard way than any others she had worked on throughout her career.
•The trial was not blinded, and protocols that should have been followed to ensure blinding were flagrantly violated.
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Vaccinated individuals with COVID-19 were not being tested for COVID-19.
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Adverse reactions in vaccinated individuals were not adequately recorded.
Due to a concern that this conduct would violate the FDA’s requirements for clinical trial sites, Brook alerted her superiors about what was happening so that these issues could be addressed. After her pleas repeatedly fell on deaf ears, she eventually notified the FDA directly. Although the FDA did not investigate her concerns, they appeared to have informed her employer, as Brook was terminated the same day.
Note: As detailed by Doshi , there has been a longstanding issue with the FDA providing insufficient oversight for clinical trial sites, and as a separate investigation into vaccine oversight revealed, it was suspected that their laxity in oversight would dramatically worsen during Operation Warp Speed, which was the partnership between the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Defense(DOD) aimed at helping to accelerate the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.
After these events transpired, Brook submitted her story to the BMJ who corroborated her allegations through documents she provided, and through other employees at the trial site. I would strongly recommend reading the BMJ’s investigation to understand exactly what happened there. Since her termination, Brook filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Pfizer which is presently in the federal courts.
Later, when I reviewed the events with Brook, one of the most interesting things I learned is that most of the data which is collected at clinical trial sites never even makes it to the FDA. Instead the FDA only receive a very small sample of it that is trusted to be representative of everything that occurs. I suspect this is one of the many reasons why the FDA could truthfully claim they had no knowledge any of this happened, although as this article shows they are clearly also culpable since they did not choose to pursue getting the reports for adverse events (like Maddie’s) they knew were happening.
In summary, as you can see from the above information, there was a real risk that soft fraud would occur during the clinical trials. However, unlike the many cases in which this has happened in the past, for the COVID-19 vaccine, we also had the unique opportunity to have numerous whistleblowers come forward and corroborate that this happened for the COVID-19 vaccines.
[
A Midwestern Doctor @MidwesternDoc
Whistleblowers are critical for righting the wrongs in government and healthcare. They always pay a steep price, but still would choose to do it again. Gøtzsche's presentation provides the best explanation I have ever seen on what drives the heroes we need now more than ever.
](https://twitter.com/MidwesternDoc/status/1609225914885476353)
The COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Strategy
Pfizer and Moderna knew quite early on (although exactly how early is a matter of speculation) that there were serious risks involved in using the mRNA spike protein platform for vaccination (this was also most likely the case for AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson with their spike protein vaccine). This left them in a bit of a bind; how could the vaccines they were committed to making for Operation Warp Speed be “safe” enough to win the vaccine race and get the market share they wanted?
As far as I can tell from reading the preclinical documents (e.g., this one ), this was initially accomplished by opting out of much of the safety testing on non-human subjects, which would normally be required before proceeding to human studies (e.g., Pfizer was allowed by regulators to exempt itself from testing for autoimmunity or cancer risks). I took this as a tacit admission that it was known that there were serious issues here (given that there were major concerns with these issues and they have since become some of the most common serious complications of the vaccines). In turn, they concluded that their best option was to never formally test for them so they could plausibly deny knowing that the issue existed (this is a common industry tactic) and claim that there was no evidence that the issue exists.
Once the human trials began, the goal shifted to doing everything possible to minimize the number of inevitable adverse events which occurred. This was essentially accomplished by:
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Making it very difficult for trial subjects to report any complications from the vaccines except for a very narrow subset of symptoms that were not a major publicity issue for the vaccine manufacturers. This characterizes both the limited V-safe data (which was still incriminating enough that a lawsuit was needed to get it from the CDC) and the even more limited list of adverse reactions found within the main section of Pfizer’s clinical trial report [fever, headache, fatigue, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain, joint pain, or use of a fever medication along with pain, redness, or swelling at the vaccination site]. Furthermore, all of these symptoms were only monitored for 7 days post- vaccination (many vaccine injuries do not occur within this brief window, which was a well known fact prior to the COVID-19 vaccines).
_Note: the more severe injuries in Pfizer’s study were reported in an extremely vague manner ( see page 9 ), which made it impossible to determine anything._
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Aggressively reclassifying each serious complication as unrelated to the vaccines (typically by claiming it was in fact due to a pre-existing psychiatric condition or COVID-19).
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Avoiding any type of long-term followup on patients which could provide incriminating safety data, regardless of prior commitments to do so.
Because of this strategy, the vaccine manufacturers could not acknowledge any complications that research participants experienced as being related to the vaccines. Instead, all they could do was gaslight the patients into believing that the injury was unrelated to the vaccine, and have healthcare providers collude to create the narrative that the injury was not related to vaccination.
One of the cruel complications of this approach was that it required reneging on the promises that were given to the trial subjects at the start of the research study—any medical complications they received would be covered (because providing any type of help would require acknowledging that there were potential complications from the vaccine). The one, possibly unanticipated, downside of choosing not to help with medical expenses accrued in the trial is that it could solicit the outrage necessary for trial participants to speak out publicly about what happened to them, and for the public to listen…which to some extent has now happened.
All of these potential issues were why the BMJ has repeatedly called for the raw data for the COVID-19 vaccine trials to be released. It is almost certain that the scant clinical trial data we have been provided by the pharmaceutical companies is highly misleading, and that lack of information makes it completely unethical to mandate the vaccines on the population. This is especially true because the lack of data acknowledging the injuries makes it impossible for those who are injured to receive any type of medical care or support (hence, why many providers are now labeling vaccine injuries as long-covid, because it represents the best shot they have of getting help).
The COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Participants
When you review these cases, it does appear that they were all coordinated as a very similar playbook was used on each participant. However, I believe this was more of an emergent phenomenon because very similar things to the approaches used here have occurred in the past. Much of what follows is déjà vu from Merck’s HPV vaccine trials, and to a lesser extent these examples also match what friends of mine experienced with complications from other pharmaceuticals that were already FDA approved (as doctors are often very resistant to believing drugs they prescribed could cause harm).
For example, many of the adverse events shown below were reclassified as being a complication of pre-existing psychiatric conditions, and this has been the default strategy for gaslighting patients throughout the history of medicine . I believe the new emphasis on reclassifying injuries as COVID-19 resulted from a climate of hysteria, where anything could be labeled as COVID-19 and there is enough of an overlap between spike protein injuries from COVID-19 to the vaccine itself, that it could be rationalized that many vaccine injuries were actually due to the virus.
Maddie’s story
To expand the market for the COVID-19 vaccines, a case needed to be made that they were safe and effective for children (who had for all practical purposes a 0% chance of dying from COVID-19). For this reason, we saw a variety of predatory advertisements such as this one from Pfizer:
An individual who was severely injured in the above trial has dedicated her life to making her story known around the world:
Much of the time that went into this article came from editing Maddie de Garay’s story on the Highwire into a shorter version (as I recognize that while the entire presentation is extremely compelling, far fewer people will watch a full episode—as you’d guess it was extremely challenging to decide which parts to cut out of it).
Because of how important I felt this story was for the world to see, I emailed it to Pierre Kory for him to share it (he has a lot more followers), and I would request that you both watch this and consider sharing it as well, because it has a really powerful message:
[
Pierre Kory, MD MPA @PierreKory
Pfizer's trial only vaccinated 1,131 children so a single serious injury would have made the vaccine too dangerous. Maddie's story shows just how far medicine will go to betray and gaslight patients who threaten its narrative. We may never know who else was swept under the rug.
](https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1613319015178330113)
Most of what is in this video should speak for itself. A few additional things I’d add though:
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Maddie’s attitude is remarkable. I am genuinely amazed that she is not more bitter about her situation, especially given how healthy and active she was before her injury (it is incredibly difficult for people who have serious injuries to come to terms with what has happened to them, and accept that they can no longer do what they had previously been able to do). Instead, she is almost entirely focused on preventing others from also experiencing her nightmare.
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One of the issues highlighted in the Real Anthony Fauci is that Fauci has developed a network of principal investigators (PIs) to conduct questionable research trials for his drugs.
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There is absolutely no question that Maddie’s PI, Dr. Frenck, knew what her injury was the moment it started (as it had previously been reported in many adults), knew what it meant for Pfizer if the injury was acknowledged by the trial (given how few people were in the trial), and that he had enough influence to shape the medical process which Maddie received so that it would not be something that had to go in the clinical trial report. His choice to initiate this coverup resulted in necessary care (which could have prevented her paralysis) being delayed until it was too late, and he is directly responsible for what happened to Maddie.
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The allergist that Maddie worked with who diagnosed her with a faux condition, Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) to conceal the adverse event, according to Open Payments (a required database for pharmaceutical payments to physicians), from 2015-2021, had received $652,650.65 for associated research funding (with the amount increasing year by year).
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FND is an extremely disingenuous disease that is frequently used to gaslight patients who have received severe neurological injuries. I wrote much more about it here , including how neurologists lack the insight to recognize what they are doing when they authoritatively throw this diagnosis around.
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The experience Maddie had at the hospital was awful, and to some extent surreal, but for length considerations, I cut it from the presentation. Amongst other things, Maddie became much worse after she was at the hospital (e.g., she lost her ability to walk), and believes it was due to her MRI. I periodically encounter people with complex issues who get much worse from MRIs (especially the COVID-19 vaccine injuries). I’ve seen a few explanations for this, and of those, the most likely (but not only) explanation is it being due to the MRI’s contrast agent. Gadolinium is quite toxic for some, but this toxicity is rarely considered in medicine.
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Maddie was very fortunate to have a parent who was a nurse. Similar situations are even worse for those who have no direct experience in health care.
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They also provided the information at the end of the episode for Maddie’s lifefunder .
Brianne’s story
[
A Midwestern Doctor @MidwesternDoc
Exactly what happened in the clinical trials is critical to uncover as they are the basis for the lie the vaccines are safe and all other evidence is "anecdotal." Dressen (and others she's found) were erased and left to fend for themselves once their reactions raised red flags.](https://twitter.com/MidwesternDoc/status/1613370463958212608)
Many of the key points that needed to be made are contained within the above clip (I put two different presentations together). The key points I had to edit out to shorten it were:
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Brianne was actively communicating with the National Institute of Health (NIH) as part of a study for treating COVID-19 neurological injuries, which were repeatedly delayed by the NIH for political reasons (but was eventually published). In that study, they eventually settled on using intravenous immunoglobulin to treat the injury (which interestingly, also sometimes helps HPV vaccine injuries, but is also an expensive treatment requiring a large donor pool, and thus has limits to its scalability ). I wrote more about Brianne’s experience with the NIH and their study here .
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Brianne founded an organization dedicated to helping COVID-19 vaccine injury victims. According to their organization (this was in response to Maddie’s story):
In the longer version of the above presentation, she mentions she and three other individuals injured in the clinical trials (each detailed in this article) all had their injuries classified as something innocuous to conceal them (e.g., Maddie’s injury was functional abdominal pain, Olivia’s T-cell lymphoma was lymphadenopathy). If I find out who the other 3 participants were, I will update the article to include them.
Note: The reason I now post tweets with videos throughout these articles is because Substack only allows videos from a few platforms to be embedded in articles (this matters because most people understandably won’t click through to outside videos). Of those platforms, Twitter is the only one that does not censor or delete controversial videos (I thought Vimeo worked as well, but a month and a half ago Vimeo deleted my entire channel).
Olivia’s story
Olivia’s story is the video at the top of this article (presented in that way due to its length) and in the Rumble video below:
Although her story is very similar to the others, there are a few important takeaway points from Olivia’s story which may not be immediately apparent.
First, for a variety of reasons detailed here, it’s often difficult for doctors to recognize subtle medical injuries unless they have been specifically trained to look for them . Instead, doctors tend to rationalize all of them as being due to psychiatric issues . What is unique about Olivia’s situation is that because everything that happened to her was so unusual, and most importantly, could be directly observed visually (so you could not deny it was happening), outside doctors were actually willing to acknowledge her injuries. Despite that, this is how Moderna’s PI treated her (clipped from the above video):
[
A Midwestern Doctor @MidwesternDoc
If you are injured in a vaccine clinical trial, they will deny your injury, not help you as promised, and not report it. This story is remarkable because Olivia had such strong evidence linking her injury to Moderna, outside doctors agreed, but even then, this is what happened](https://twitter.com/MidwesternDoc/status/1612625075022491648)
Nonetheless, despite it being unambiguous that her injury was due to the vaccine, Moderna did not pay for her medical care as promised, and did not report her injury. Additionally, the clinical trial site director said she would only be able to acknowledge that the cancer Olivia had was linked to the vaccine if “ more research emerged in the future linking it ” even though this happened at the trial that was supposed to determine if this could happen ( note: this example illustrates a common deficit in critical thinking that exists throughout my profession ).
Although her shoulder injury is alarming (and like Maddie, the physical therapy Olivia was forced to go through to “address” it should never have been conducted), the cancer she has is much worse. Based on her history, there is a very strong case that it was linked to her vaccination, and had this been presented in Moderna’s trial report, would have had huge implications for the many patients now developing cancers who are told they cannot possibly be related to the vaccine, and thus these victims are denied the support they need.
Unnamed Moderna Trial Participant’s Story
A while back, I was requested to review 865 vaccine injuries that were submitted in a survey to assess the plausibility thatthe deaths described were due to the vaccine. One of the reports caught my eye since it represented a critical incident that was not reported within Moderna’s trial report (see page 40 ), so I reached out to the doctor (who will remain unnamed) who submitted the report and had good reason to be knowledgeable of this patient’s history.
According to the doctor, the gentleman who passed away was part of the clinical trial at Research Atlanta that was paid for by Moderna. He developed atrial fibrillation after the vaccine, and approximately 3 months after vaccination, he was hospitalized (but never vented or sent to the ICU) at Grady Memorial Hospital (which is very close to the CDC).
At the hospital, he received a CT scan, which revealed blood clots in his lungs. At the time, no one was aware that the vaccine could cause blood clots (both Moderna and the CDC had insisted that the vaccine was safe, and had not revealed it was associated with blood clots). The blood clots were then assessed to have been due to metastatic cancer, as there was no other explanation for them, despite the fact that a full cancer workup was conducted which could not detect any signs of cancer in the patient. The doctor I corresponded with (who I deemed competent to assess this question) is certain that the patient did not have metastatic cancer.
The patient was then assessed to be terminally ill, discharged to hospice, and then died in hospice care (which may have been partly due to respiratory difficulties resulting from the opioids he was given for hospice). As you might expect, the clinical trial contacts were notified of what happened to this patient, but they ignored the report.
Augusto’s Story
Augusto was another clinical trial participant who was abused by Pfizer. Fortunately, he was a lawyer and did everything he could to hold them accountable.
The only direct summary I have found of Augusto’s experience can be found within this (shortened) interview (an article was also written documenting his experience here ):
Although Augusto had the same experience as everyone else (e.g., they tried to say his issues were due to psychological problems and his adverse event never ended up in Pfizer’s final clinical trial report), there were also some remarkable aspects of his case:
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His hospitalization was initially documented by a senior specialist as an adverse reaction to a coronavirus vaccine (although as the previous examples have shown, this did not ultimately change the course of things).
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In addition to the team erroneously reporting the hospitalization which Augusto had directly told them about, the PI who was supervising his case fabricated a medical record to claim Augusto had an anxiety disorder. His injury (a pericardial effusion suggestive of pericarditis) was attributed to COVID-19 (even though Augusto had a negative test) and anxiety (even though anxiety cannot to my knowledge cause a pericardial effusion).
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The PI who was supervising his clinical trial site was also the lead author of Pfizer’s New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) study . Augusto’s experience and the documentation he had to support the lead author's misconduct is most likely the strongest argument for NEJM retracting Pfizer’s pivotal vaccine study ( note: in addition to the erroneous COVID-19 studies mentioned here, the NEJM also previously published Merck’s highly questionable HPV vaccine study ).
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Augusto obtained the record of another participant who died from a heart attack at the same hospital to which he was admitted, but was not registered in the final Pfizer clinical trial report.
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Augusto formally complained to the Department of Justice about this clinical trial conduct, but the government decided to avoid addressing it, despite their conduct being unlawful.
Pfizer vs. Moderna
Although many things could be said about these cases (which I suspect also holds true for the other ones I am not yet familiar with), one of the things that stands out to me from these reports is the differences in how Pfizer and Moderna conducted their trials.
In Pfizer’s case, they had a robust apparatus in place to have a team of physicians immediately neutralize any claims that the vaccine could be harmful. However, in Moderna’s case, they just told the doctors involved that the events could not be related to the vaccine and most doctors took those claims at face value (as they did not want to believe the vaccine could be harmful). Moderna, in effect, succeeded through inaction (by not documenting injuries or paying compensation for medical care they were obligated to).
I suspect this difference in strategies was due to Moderna being a fledging pharmaceutical company without an apparatus like the one Pfizer had developed over decades. Fortunately for Moderna, their laid-back approach ended up working out just as well since the FDA just rubber-stamped both of their vaccines.
Regardless of the approach that was followed though, I hope this examination into their mutual research misconduct helps to explain how these “impossible to predict” side effects that were never detected in the “robust” clinical trials could have suddenly emerged once the vaccines entered the market.
Conclusion:
Typically, it is nearly impossible to identify clinical trial participants and attempt to re-create what happened within a clinical trial. Due to the diligent work of leaders in this area like Del Bigtree , Aaron Siri , and a few clinical trial participants being brave enough to speak out publicly, we have been able to establish that serious adverse events occurred in all of the spike protein-producing vaccine trials.
More importantly, it should be apparent by now that the FDA has deliberately ignored this misconduct and tried to sweep the known adverse events under the rug. Based on all of this, I can state with near certainty there are other significant adverse reactions that did not make it to the final clinical trial reports.
Note: The fact that news stories like the above (the HPV vaccine trial malfeasance was the focus of the previous article ) received mainstream coverage (e.g., ABC news ) a mere decade ago goes to show just how rapidly the censorship of the media has increased in recent years. It also highlights how consequential failing to report the adverse events from a clinical trial can be for everyone injured after the fact .
Although exactly what degree of underreporting research fraud has occurred will probably never be known unless a legal investigation interviews each participant, as the examples in this article demonstrate, what is already known demonstrates that the vaccines are both ineffective and too dangerous to have on the market. On a more human level, what was done to these trial participants was appalling and needs to be prosecuted, and in the future may even happen if it becomes necessary to restore the public’s willingness to participate in the clinical trials which our medical system depends upon.
A major challenge of politics is catering a message to different political tribes, as each one will support certain messages and vehemently reject others. Most of the work we have done on the vaccine issue has been targeted to further convince those who already have doubts about the vaccines or sway those in the middle (which now represents a large portion of America ). Very little work however has been directed to those who are already committed to the vaccines (since it is largely a lost cause to try to change their minds).
For a variety of reasons detailed in a recent article , I believe the message that has the best shot at reaching those already committed to the vaccines (and motivating congress and the courts to do something) is to prove that fraud was committed by the manufacturers. This is why I attempted to present some of the best evidence we have currently for that assertion here (that Pfizer did not report what is actually in their vaccines). An even more important part of proving that case is showing exactly what actually happened in the clinical trials.
My sincere hope is that this article will inspire others who participated in the trials to come forward, and it is something that can be cited when people (especially doctors) try to argue that the clinical trials proved that the vaccines were “ safe .” I also faintly hope that awareness of this issue can inspire congressional hearings (which did happen previously with the disastrous anthrax vaccines that were forced on the military ). Although I doubt it would ever happen, I believe that the best solution to all the issues outlined in this article is to give trial participants the legal right to sue pharmaceutical companies for compensation if the severe adverse reactions they experience are not included in the final trial report.
Because of the videos, this article was an enormous amount of work to put together. I sincerely believe these stories need to be heard, so if you take the time to listen to them and share the ones that speak to you with others, many would sincerely appreciate that.
Lastly, on a lighter note, one of the practices I occasionally do to calibrate my medical intuition is to guess which fortune cookie best fits each member of a group I am with and then see how accurate the pairings were once they are opened. Sometimes I also go a step further and guess what specific subject the future fortune will address. The one I got today tested as being directed at the readers of this article:
”A dose of adversity is often as needful as a dose of medicine.”
Multiple people have sent me the same story, on various blogs, in the last 48 hours. Just released medical studies show that mRNA COVID "vaccines" teach the human immune system to ignore and tolerate coronavirus-spike-protein, and also cancer-cells.
We have multiple kinds of immunoglobulins ("antibodies") that we make to help us maintain health.
- IgM is the rapid-response immunoglobulin, like EMS.
- IgG comes in just before 2 weeks, and is the long-term learned antibody response. There are 4 kinds of IgG examined here, IgG1-4.
- IgG 1-3 antibodies bind to foreign proteins, like viral membranes, coat them, prevent them from working, and prepare them to be chewed-up by certain types of white blood cells.
- IgG4 is different, a tolerance-antibody, which tags a thing in the body as "Don't-Destroy".
IgG4 responses are appropriate when the body is repeatedly exposed to non-harmful things like ragweed-pollen, which should not be ferociously attacked, because that causes more harm than ignoring them. When a person gets "Allergy Shots" of small amounts of what they are allergic to over a long time, and slowly increasing the amount, they are training this kind of immune response to ignore the allergen.
The Pfizer/Biontech mRNA product is what has been primarily tested, and it is assumed that the Moderna product, being so very similar, has the same effect of inducing IgG4 antibodies to the spike-protein of SARS-CoV2, as well as IgG3 antibodies, "blocking antibodies" early-on. The graphs show that after the first and second shot, the blocking antibodies increase and predominate, but as the months go by, following the second shot, the IgG3 blocking antibodies wane, and the IgG4 tolerance-antibodies increase.
This is the same time frame that we have seen for the transition from "vaccines" inhibiting the coronavirus initially, but seeming to make infection with the coronavirus more-likely after 5-6 months. The world is now 3 years into this pandemic, and should be over it for the most part, but cases of infection are increasing across the world, notably in the more "vaccinated" countries and cities. The coronavirus levels in city sewage are the highest that they have ever been. in highly-"vaccinated" cities.
After a third "booster" injection of mRNA "vaccine", there is essentially no measurable IgG3, just high levels of IgG4. The immune system has been taught to ignore the SARS-CoV2 spike protein from January 2020. There is more to the virus than the 20% which is the spike-protein. People who caught COVID before getting mRNA "vaccine products" will still have their natural antibodies to the other 80% of the virus, but those who were mRNA "vaccinated" first, will probably have little to no antibodies other than those induced by the injection. Most of the human population has a gaping hole, the very same gaping hole in its immunologic defenses.
The world is therefore extremely susceptible to an infection which will breach that hole in the defenses of the "vaccinated". An engineered military coronavirus could be designed specifically to exploit that vulnerability, but coronaviruses will naturally mutate to whatever works, and exploit it without laboratory assistance. The current strains of coronavirus in circulation are very contagious, especially to the "vaccinated" and "boosted", but not often fatal, since they do not bind to ACE-2 receptors in the lungs and blood-vessels, as the pre-Omicron strains all did. The Omicron and later strains bind to the upper airways, like a "normal cold".
Arkmedic's blog - Two papers have appeared in quick succession that just need to be put together
The same NK-cells ("natural killer cells") that destroy viral-infected-human-cells also destroy mutated cells which become cancers if they multiply unchecked.
The suppression of this cancer-surveillance function leads to rapid growth of existing cancers. This is seen with people who have been undergoing treatment for cancer, and suddenly worsen after "vaccination" and "boosting". It would also allow new cancers to develop from mutated cells, which would take a little longer to notice, but would present as "suddenly developed cancer". This is happening, too. I recently posted this story below.
Academic Medical Oncologist Angus Dalgleish in the UK has been trying to get government agencies to evaluate the sudden rash of cancer recurrences, new diagnoses and deaths among the "vaccinated". Other cancer specialists agree with me about vaccine harm, but the authorities still won't listen
To summarize the timeline of adverse events we can say that some people get severe reactions like anaphylaxis and heart-inflammation quickly, which may kill them within hours to days. Other clotting disorders may kill them from bleeding, perhaps into their brains, within the first 2-4 weeks following the first or second injection. Production of large blood clots that block the lungs, major arteries, coronary arteries, or arteries feeding the brain, eyes or other vital organs may cause severe disability or death. Autoimmune disease, caused by similarities between parts of the spike protein, and normal proteins in the body, can cause chronic inflammation of organs like the liver and heart. Spike-protein in the bloodstream can cross into the brain, and cause it to be inflamed from autoimmune disease.
The function of the mRNA "vaccine products" is to get into human cells and induce them to produce and release January 2020 COVID spike-protein, which process continues for half a year, based upon spike-protein being found in the blood of "fully-vaccinated" 2-shot recipients at 6 months following the second injection. mRNA usually is degraded by enzymes in human cells after a few minutes, but the mRNA in these "vaccine products" has been modified so that it is not ever broken down by those enzymes.
What we see happening is analogous to the person getting "allergy shots" to become tolerant to pollen allergies. There is a long-term presence of January 2020 COVID spike-protein in the bodies of mRNA COVID "vaccine product" recipients.
It stands to reason that this is what induces the IgG4 "tolerance antibody" response by the immune system. That has not yet been "proven", but it is a useful way to look at what has now been revealed, and it fits well with our understanding. It provides a working hypothesis, unless that hypothesis must later be revised for new information about the mechanisms of action of these experimental products in human immune systems.
Regrets:
Professor Shmuel Shapira, who headed the Israel Institute for Biological Research from 2013 to 2021, and led Israel's domestic coronavirus vaccine development program, has castigated the Health Ministry both over its push to impose lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, as well its support for the mass-vaccination campaign beginning in December 2020.
In a series of tweets, Professor Shapira criticized the Health Ministry for deeming Pfizer s mRNA vaccines safe and effective, and lamented having received three doses of the vaccine himself. "I am telling the unpleasant truth out the vaccine that is neither effective nor safe, " Shapira wrote. "I was wrong 3 times: In the first shot, in the second shot, and in the third shot."
Who said that those who are injected do not admit that they were wrong? People keep forgetting Israel was volunteered as the Lab of the World. There was hardly any data but very brief and minimal size clinical studies.
Global Disaster. Govt. Database Shows 10,000% Increase In Cancer Reports Due To Covid Vaccines. The damage caused by the coronavirus and the halting of studies in Israel (second place in the world) reveal a wave of problems in reading comprehension. So we will explain to you slowly and in easy Hebrew. _Hello First Grade: Those who are opponents and victims of injecting what is ineffective and unsafe are not opponents of vaccines, and certainly not vaccine deniers.
Jessica Rose Ph.D. has more on the cover-up of deaths and adverse events from COVID "vaccination". Information, already released, is "disappeared". Unacceptable Jessica - The lost myocarditis, death, neuropathy and pulmonary embolism safety signals as part of the free text purge from the VAERS Foreign data set
Questions about fertility issues, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths began to be raised last winter when Scotland experienced a month of higher infant mortality than at any time over the past three decades. Then in the spring of 2022, roughly nine months after most young adults were jabbed with the COVID shots, COVID data analysts began noticing unusual drops in birth rates. The hope was that these numbers were just short-term aberrations due to some unknown transient cause. But months later, the evidence is growing too strong to ignore, suggesting a much longer-term problem, which bizarrely has garnered little concern from policymakers, governments, the medical establishment, or the media. It ranks alongside died suddenly both in terms of its magnitude to humanity and the shocking degree of silence in response.
In fact, some media outlets were even celebrating the low birth rates without expressing any curiosity as to the sudden cause.
Sweden is a perfect country to study because it never locked down and should not have been affected socially by the lockdowns. Yet not only did the Swedes experience a sharp decline in births nine months after their vaccination program, the numbers are further deteriorating over time.
Furthermore, any hypothesis as to the cause of the plummeting birth rates would also have to logically account for the rise in neonatal deaths. For example, lockdowns would not explain why the babies being born are experiencing more health problems. The spike protein embedded in the babies blood, however, would.
Israeli researcher Josh Guetzkow obtained neonatal death data from Israeli health insurance fund Maccabi, which covers 25% of Israelis. He found a tripling of neonatal deaths in two of the quarters post-vaccination.
What if the world is "sane" but the owners want to quietly kill half of us? In a sane world, the makers of these therapies would be behind bars, but instead they are getting a promotion to concoct even more products with this same dangerous technology.
Typically, failure of a corporate partner is an impetus for a government to break the partnership. In the case of vaccines, however, the more they fail, the more they are elevated, subsidized, and even mandated. Unless their definition of failure is the opposite of how humanity would define it.
A few years ago a group of researchers in Scotland studying learning in apes did some experiments (involving opening boxes to get a piece of candy inside) that showed that chimpanzees learn in a variety of “flexibly adaptive” ways, and that 3 year old children being presented with a similar task most often did it in ways that appear to be less intelligent than the apes. They “suggest that the difference in performance of chimpanzees and children may be due to a greater susceptibility of children to cultural conventions.” (Horner and Whiten, 2005; Whiten, et al., 2004).
In my newsletter on puberty, I described some of the effects of foods and hormones on intelligence. Here, I want to consider the effects of culture on the way people learn and think. Culture, it seems, starts to make us stupid long before the metabolic problems appear.
For many years I described culture as the perceived limits of possibility, but people usually prefer to think of it as the learned rules of conduct in a society. In the late 1950s I was talking with a psychologist about the nature of “mental maps,” and I said that I found my way around campus by reference to mental pictures of the locations of things, and he said that his method was to follow a series of rules, “go out the front door and turn left, turn left at the first corner, walk three blocks and turn right, ....up the stairs, turn right, fourth office on the left.” He had been studying mental processes for about 40 years, so his claim made an impression on me.
I thought this style of thinking might have something to do with the growing technological preference for digital, rather than analog, devices. The complexity and continuity of the real world is made to seem more precise and concrete by turning it into rules and numbers.
Around the same time, I found that some people dream in vivid images, while others describe dreams as “listening to someone tell a story.”
Several years later, a graduate student of “language philosophy” from MIT told me that I was just confused if I believed that I had mental images that I could use in thinking. His attitude was that language, in its forms and in the ways it could convey meaning, was governed by rules. He was part of an effort to define consciousness in terms of rules that could be manipulated formally. This was just a new variation on the doctrine of an “ideal language” that has concerned many philosophers since Leibniz, but now its main use is to convince people that cultural conventions and authority are rooted in the nature of our minds, rather than in particular things that people experience and the ways in which they are treated.
George Orwell, whose novels showed some of the ways language is used to control people, believed that language should be like a clear window between minds, but knew that it was habitually used to distort, mislead, and control. Scientific and medical practices often follow the authority of culture and indoctrination, instead of intelligently confronting the meaning of the evidence, the way chimpanzees are able to do.
Not so many years ago, people believed that traits were “determined by genes,” and that the development of an organism was the result of--was caused by--the sequential expression of genes in the nucleus of the fertilized egg. When B.F. Skinner in the 1970s said “a gestating baby isn't influenced by what happens to its mother,” he was expressing a deeply rooted bio-medical dogma. Physicians insisted that a baby couldn't be harmed by its mother's malnutrition, as long as she lived to give birth. People could be quite vicious when their dogma was challenged, but their actions were systematically vicious when they weren't challenged.
An ovum doesn't just grow from an oocyte according to instructions in its genes, it is constructed, with surrounding nurse cells adding substances to its cytoplasm. Analogously, the fertilized egg doesn't just grow into a human being, it is constructed, by interactions with the mother's physiology. At birth, the environment continues to influence the ways in which cells develop and interact with each other.
Even during adulthood, the ways in which our cells--in the brain, immune system, and other organs--develop and interact are shaped by the environment. When Skinner was writing, many biologists still believed that each synapse of a nerve was directed by a gene, and couldn't be influenced by experience.
Our brain grows into our culture, and the culture lives in our nervous system. If a person grows up without hearing people speak, he will have grown a special kind of brain, making it difficult to learn to speak. (Genie, wolf boy, Kaspar Hauser, for example.)
When we ask a question and find an answer, we are changed. Thinking with learning is a developmental process. But many people learn at an early age not to question. This changes the nature of subsequent learning and brain development.
In the 1960s, many textbooks were published that claimed to use scientific language theory to improve the instruction of English, from grade school level to college level. They didn't work, and at the time they were being published they appeared fraudulent to people who didn't subscribe to the incipient cults of “Generative Grammar” and “Artificial Intelligence” that later developed into “Cognitive Science.”
At the time that Artificial Intelligence was coming to the attention of investors and academicians, Neodarwinism had already cleansed the university biology departments of its opponents who advocated more holistic views, and the idea of a brain that was “hard-wired” according to genetic instructions had entered both neurology and psychology. The field concept was disappearing from developmental biology, as Gestalt psychology was disappearing from the universities and journals.
In the humanities and social sciences, a fad appeared in the 1960s, in which a theory of grammar advocated by Noam Chomsky of MIT was said to explain human thinking and behavior, and specialists in anthropology, psychology, literature, rhetoric, sociology, and other academic fields, claimed that it informed their work in an essential way. The rapid spread of a doctrine for which there was essentially no evidence suggests that it was filling a need for many people in our culture. This doctrine was filling some of the gaps left by the failure of genetic determinism that was starting to be recognized. It gave new support to the doctrine of inborn capacities and limitations, in which formulaic indoctrination can be justified by the brain's natural structure.
Chomsky was committed to an idealistic, “rationalist” doctrine of innate ideas, and to argue for that doctrine, which held that there are transcendent forms (or “deep structures”) that control mind, he disposed of the opposing “empiricist” approach to mind by claiming that children simply learn language so rapidly that it would be impossible to explain on the basis of learning from experience. Separating vocabulary from grammar, he acknowledged that each language is different, and can be learned as easily by the children of immigrants of different ethnicity as by children whose ancestors spoke it, but that all humans have a genetically encoded “universal grammar,” a “language organ.” It is this “inborn grammar” that allows children to learn what he said would be inconceivable to learn so quickly from experience.
The abstract, computational nature of the “inborn” functions of the “language organ” would make a nice program for a translating machine, and the absence of such a useful program, after more than 50 years of trying to devise one, argues against the possibility of such a thing.
Since Plato's time, some people have believed that, behind the changing irregularities of real languages, there is a timeless, context-free language. In the late 1950s, when I was studying language and the “ideal languages” of the philosophers, I realized that George Santayana was right when he pointed out that each time an artificial language is used by real people in real situations, it is altered by the experience that accrues to each component, from the context in which it is used. If real language were the model for mathematics, then the values of numbers would change a little with every calculation.
Adults are usually slower than children at learning a new language, but they can make the process much quicker by memorizing paradigms. With those models, they can begin speaking intelligible sentences when they know only a few words. These basics of grammar are often outlined in just a few pages, but listing irregularities and exceptions can become very detailed and complex. The grammar that children use isn't as subtle as the grammar some adults use, and college freshmen are seldom masters of the grammar of their native language.
There have been various studies that have investigated the number of words understood by children at different ages.
The Virginia Polytechnic Institute website says that
By age 4 a person probably knows 5,600 words
By age 5 a person probably knows 9,600 words
By age 6 a person probably knows 14,700 words
By age 7 a person probably knows 21,200 words
By age 8 a person probably knows 26,300 words
By age 9 a person probably knows 29,300 words
By age 10 a person probably knows 34,300 words
By age 20 a college sophomore probably knows 120,000 words
A dictionary with 14,000 words is a substantial book. The grammar used by a 6 year old person isn't very complex, because at that age a person isn't likely to know all of the subtleties of their language. There is no reason to assume that a mind that can learn thousands of words and concepts in a year can't learn the grammatical patterns of a language--a much smaller number of patterns and relationships--in a few years.
Idioms and clichés are clusters of words that are frequently used together in the same pattern to express a stereotyped meaning. There are thousands of them in English, and some of them have existed for centuries, while others are regional and generational. It is possible to speak or write almost completely in clichés, and they are such an important part of language that their acquisition along with the basic vocabulary deserves more attention than linguists have given it. A mind that can learn so many clichés can certainly learn the relatively few stereotypical rules of phrasing that make up the grammar of a language. In fact, a grammar in some ways resembles a complex cliché.
Recognition of patterns, first of things that are present, then of meaningful sequences, is what we call awareness or consciousness. There is biological evidence, from the level of single cells through many types of organism, both plant and animal, that pattern recognition is a basic biological function. An organism that isn't oriented in space and time isn't an adapted, adapting, organism. Environments change, and the organization of life necessarily has some flexibility.
A traveling bird or dog can see a pattern once, and later, going in the opposite direction, can recognize and find specific places and objects. An ant or bee can see a pattern once, and communicate it to others.
If dogs and birds lived in colonies or cities, as bees and ants do, and carried food home from remote locations, they might have a need to communicate their knowledge. The fact that birds and dogs use their vocal organs and brains to communicate in ways that people have seldom cared to study doesn't imply that their brains differ radically from human brains in lacking a “language organ.”
People whose ideology says that “animals use instinct rather than intelligence,” and that they lack “the language instinct,” refuse to perceive animals that are demonstrating their ability to generalize or to understand language.
Organisms have genes, so a person could say that pattern recognition is genetically determined, but it would be a foolish and empty thing to say. (Nevertheless, people do say it.) The people who believe that there are “genes for grammar” believe that these mind-controlling genes give us the ability to generalize, and therefore say that animals aren't able to generalize, though their “instinctive behaviors” might sometimes seem to involve generalization.
In language, patterns are represented symbolically by patterned sounds, and some of those symbolically represented patterns are made up of other patterns. Different languages have different ways of representing different kinds of patterns.
“Things” are recognizable when they are far or near, moving or still, bright or dark, or upside down, because the recognition of a pattern is an integration involving both spatial and temporal components. The recognition of an object involves both generalization and concreteness.
Things that are very complex are likely to take longer to recognize, but the nature of any pattern is that it is a complex of parts and properties.
A name for “a thing” is a name for a pattern, a set of relationships.
The method of naming or identifying a relationship can make use of any way of patterning sound that can be recognized as making distinctions. Concepts and grammar aren't separable things, “semantics” and “syntax” are just aspects of a particular language's way of handling meaning.
As a child interacts with more and more things, and learns things about them, the patterns of familiar things are compared to the patterns of new things, and differences and similarities are noticed and used to understand relationships. The comparison of patterns is a process of making analogies, or metaphors. Similarities perceived become generalizations, and distinctions allow things to be grouped into categories.
When things are explored analogically, the exploration may first identify objects, and then explore the factors that make up the larger pattern that was first identified, in a kind of analysis, but this analysis is a sort of expansion inward, in which the discovered complexity has the extra meaning of the larger context in which it is found.
When something new is noticed, it excites the brain, and causes attention to be focused, in the “orienting reflex.” The various senses participate in examining the thing, in a physiological way of asking a question. Perception of new patterns and the formation of generalizations expands the ways in which questions are asked. When words are available, questions may be verbalized. The way in which questions are answered verbally may be useful, but it often diverts the questioning process, and provides rules and arbitrary generalizations that may take the place of the normal analogical processes of intelligence. The vocabulary of patterns no longer expands spontaneously, but tends to come to rest in a system of accepted opinions.
A few patterns, formulated in language, are substituted for the processes of exploration through metaphorical thinking. In the first stages of learning, the process is expansive and metaphorical. If a question is closed by an answer in the form of a rule that must be followed, subsequent learning can only be analytical and deductive.
Learning of this sort is always a system of closed compartments, though one system might occasionally be exchanged for another, in a “conversion experience.”
The exploratory analogical mind is able to form broad generalizations and to make deductions from those, but the validity of the generalization is always in a process of being tested. Both the deduction and the generalization are constantly open to revision in accordance with the available evidence.
If there were infallible authorities who set down general rules, language and knowledge could be idealized and made mathematically precise. In their absence, intelligence is necessary, but the authorities who would be infallible devise ways to confine and control intelligence, so that, with the mastery of a language, the growth of intelligence usually stops.
In the 1940s and '50s, W.J.J. Gordon organized a group called Synectics, to investigate the creative process, and to devise ways to teach people to solve problems effectively. It involved several methods for helping people to think analogically and metaphorically, and to avoid stereotyped interpretations. It was a way of teaching people to recover the style of thinking of young children, or of chimps, or other intelligent animals.
When the acquisition of language is burdened by the acceptance of clichés, producing the conventionalism mentioned by Horner and Whiten, with the substitution of deductive reasoning for metaphorical-analogical thinking, the natural pleasures of mental exploration and creation are lost, and a new kind of personality and character has come into existence.
Bob Altemeyer spent his career studying the authoritarian personality, and has identified its defining traits as conventionalism, submission to authority, and aggression, as sanctioned by the authorities. His last book, The Authoritarians (2006) is available on the internet.
Altemeyer found that people who scored high on his scale of authoritarianism tended to have faulty reasoning, with compartmentalized thinking, making it possible to hold contradictory beliefs, and to be dogmatic, hypocritical, and hostile.
Since he is looking at a spectrum, focusing on differences, I think he is likely to have underestimated the degree to which these traits exist in the mainstream, and in groups such as scientists, that have a professional commitment to clear reasoning and objectivity. With careful training, and in a culture that doesn't value creative metaphorical thinking, authoritarianism might be a preferred trait.
Konrad Lorenz (who with Niko Tinbergen got the Nobel Prize in 1973) believed that specific innate structures explained animal communication, and that natural selection had created those structures. Chomsky, who said that our genes create an innate “Language Acquisition Device,” distanced himself slightly from Lorenz's view by saying that it wasn't certain that natural selection was responsible for it. However, despite slightly different names for the hypothetical innate “devices,” their views were extremely similar.
Both Lorenz and Chomsky, and their doctrine of innate rule-based consciousness, have been popular and influential among university professors. When Lorenz wrote a book on degeneration, which was little more than a revised version of the articles he had written for the Nazi party's Office for Race Policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, advocating the extermination of racial “mongrels” such as jews and gypsies, most biologists in the US praised it. Lorenz identified National Socialism with evolution as an agent of racial purification. His lifelong beliefs and activities--the loyalty to a strong leader, advocating the killing of the weak--identified Lorenz as an extreme authoritarian.
When a famous professor went on a lecture tour popularizing and affirming the scientific truth and importance of those publications, and asserting that all human actions and knowledge, language, work, art, and belief, are specified and determined by genes, he and his audience (which, at the University of Oregon, included members of the National Academy of Sciences and Jewish professors who had been refugees from Nazism, who listened approvingly) were outraged when a student mentioned the Nazi origin and intention of the original publications.
They said “you can't say that a man's work has anything to do with his life and political beliefs,” but in fact the lecturer had just finished saying that everything a person does is integral to that person's deepest nature, just as Lorenz said that a goose with a pot belly and odd beak, or a person with non-nordic physical features and behavior and cultural preferences--should be eliminated for the improvement of the species. Not a single professor in the audience questioned the science that had justified Hitler's racial policies, and some of them showed great hostility toward the critic.
In the 1960s, a professor compared graduate students' scores on the Miller Analogies Test, which is a widely used test of analogical thinking ability, to their academic grades. She found that the students who scored close to the average on the test had the highest grades and the greatest academic success, and those who deviated the most from the average on that test, in either direction, had the worst academic grades. If the ability to think analogically is inversely associated with authoritarianism, then her results would indicate that graduate schools select for authoritarianism. (If not, then they simply select for mediocrity.)
Although Bob Altemeyer's scale mainly identified right-wing, conservative authoritarians, he indicated that there could be left-wing authoritarians, too. Noam Chomsky is identified with left-wing political views, but his views of genetic determinism and a “nativist” view of language learning, and his anti-empiricist identification of himself as a philosophical Rationalist, have a great correspondence to the authoritarian character. The “nativist” rule-based nature of “Cognitive Science” is just the modern form of an authoritarian tradition that has been influential since Plato's time.
The first thing a person is likely to notice when looking at Chomsky's work in linguistics is that he offers no evidence to support his extreme assertions. In fact, the main role evidence plays in his basic scheme is negative, that is, his doctrine of “Poverty of the Stimulus” asserts that children aren't exposed to enough examples of language for them to be able to learn grammar--therefore, grammar must be inborn.
I think Chomsky discovered long ago that the people around him were sufficiently authoritarian to accept assertions without evidence if they were presented in a form that looked complexly technical. Several people have published their correspondence with him, showing him to be authoritarian and arrogant, even rude and insulting, if the person questioned his handling of evidence, or the lack of evidence.
For example, people have argued with him about the JFK assassination, US policy in the Vietnam war, the HIV-AIDS issue, and the 9/11 investigation. In each case, he accepts the official position of the government, and insults those who question, for example, the adequacy of the Warren Commission report, or who believe that the pharmaceutical industry would manipulate the evidence regarding AIDS, or who doubt the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission investigation.
He says that investigation of such issues is “diverting people from serious issues,” as if those aren't serious issues. And “even if it's true” that the government was involved in the 9/11 terrorism, “who cares? I mean, it doesn't have any significance. I mean it's a little bit like the huge amount of energy that's put out on trying to figure out who killed John F. Kennedy. I mean, who knows, and who cares…plenty of people get killed all the time. Why does it matter that one of them happens to be John F. Kennedy?"
"If there was some reason to believe that there was a high level conspiracy" in the JFK assassination, "it might be interesting, but the evidence against that is just overwhelming." "And after that it's just a matter of, uh, if it's a jealous husband or the mafia or someone else, what difference does it make?" "It's just taking energy away from serious issues onto ones that don't matter. And I think the same is true here," regarding the events of 9/11. These reactions seem especially significant, considering his reputation as America's leading dissenter.
The speed with which Chomskyism spread through universities in the US in the 1960s convinced me that I was right in viewing the instruction of the humanities and social sciences as indoctrination, rather than objective treatment of knowledge. The reception of the authoritarian ideas of Lorenz and his apologists in biology departments offered me a new perspective on the motivations involved in the uniformity of the orthodox views of biology and medicine.
In being introduced into a profession, any lingering tendency toward analogical-metaphoric thinking is suppressed. I have known perceptive, imaginative people who, after a year or two in medical school, had become rigid rule-followers.
One of the perennial questions people have asked when they learn of the suppression of a therapy, is “if the doctors are doing it to defend the profitable old methods, how can they refuse to use the better method even for themselves and their own family?” The answer seems to be that their minds have been radically affected by their vocational training.
For many years, cancer and inflammation have been known to be closely associated, even to be aspects of a single process. This was obvious to “analog minded” people, but seemed utterly improbable to the essentialist mentality, because of the indoctrination that inflammation is a good thing, that couldn't coexist with a bad thing like cancer.
The philosophy of language might seem remote from politics and practical problems, but Kings and advertisers have understood that words and ideas are powerfully influential in maintaining relationships of power.
Theories of mind and language that justify arbitrary power, power that can't justify itself in terms of evidence, are more dangerous than merely mistaken scientific theories, because any theory that bases its arguments on evidence is capable of being disproved.
In the middle ages, the Divine Right of Kings was derived from certain kinds of theological reasoning. It has been replaced by newer ideologies, based on deductions from beliefs about the nature of mind and matter, words and genes, “Computational Grammar,” or numbers and quantized energy, but behind the ideology is the reality of the authoritarian personality.
I think if we understand more about the nature of language and its acquisition we will have a clearer picture of what is happening in our cultures, especially in the culture of science.
REFERENCES
New Yorker, April 16, 2007, “The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?” by John Colapinto. “Dan Everett believes that Pirahã undermines Noam Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar.”
Language & Communication Volume 23, Issue 1, January 2003, Pages 1-43. “Remarks on the origins of morphophonemics in American structuralist linguistics,” E. F. K. Koerner. Chomsky has led the public to believe that he originated things which he borrowed from earlier linguists.
Science. 2008 Feb 1;319(5863):569; author reply 569. Comparing social skills of children and apes. De Waal FB, Boesch C, Horner V, Whiten A. Letter
Curr Biol. 2007 Jun 19;17(12):1038-43. Epub 2007 Jun 7. Transmission of multiple traditions within and between chimpanzee groups. Whiten A, Spiteri A, Horner V, Bonnie KE, Lambeth SP, Schapiro SJ, de Waal FB. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution and Scottish Primate Research Group, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9JP, United Kingdom. A.whiten@st-andrews.ac.uk Field reports provide increasing evidence for local behavioral traditions among fish, birds, and mammals. These findings are significant for evolutionary biology because social learning affords faster adaptation than genetic change and has generated new (cultural) forms of evolution. Orangutan and chimpanzee field studies suggest that like humans, these apes are distinctive among animals in each exhibiting over 30 local traditions. However, direct evidence is lacking in apes and, with the exception of vocal dialects, in animals generally for the intergroup transmission that would allow innovations to spread widely and become evolutionarily significant phenomena. Here, we provide robust experimental evidence that alternative foraging techniques seeded in different groups of chimpanzees spread differentially not only within groups but serially across two further groups with substantial fidelity. Combining these results with those from recent social-diffusion studies in two larger groups offers the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman species can sustain unique local cultures, each constituted by multiple traditions. The convergence of these results with those from the wild implies a richness in chimpanzees' capacity for culture, a richness that parsimony suggests was shared with our common ancestor.
J Comp Psychol. 2007 Feb;121(1):12-21. Learning from others' mistakes? limits on understanding a trap-tube task by young chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Horner V, Whiten A. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, UK. Vhorner@rmy.emory.edu A trap-tube task was used to determine whether chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens) who observed a model's errors and successes could master the task in fewer trials than those who saw only successes. Two- to 7-year-old chimpanzees and 3- to 4-year-old children did not benefit from observing errors and found the task difficult. Two of the 6 chimpanzees developed a successful anticipatory strategy but showed no evidence of representing the core causal relations involved in trapping. Three- to 4-year-old children showed a similar limitation and tended to copy the actions of the demonstrator, irrespective of their causal relevance. Five- to 6-year-old children were able to master the task but did not appear to be influenced by social learning or benefit from observing errors.
Proc Biol Sci. 2007 Feb 7;274(1608):367-72. Spread of arbitrary conventions among chimpanzees: a controlled experiment. Bonnie KE, Horner V, Whiten A, de Waal FB. Living Links, Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Atlanta, GA 30329, USA. Kebonni@emory.edu Wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have a rich cultural repertoire--traditions common in some communities are not present in others. The majority of reports describe functional, material traditions, such as tool use. Arbitrary conventions have received far less attention. In the same way that observations of material culture in wild apes led to experiments to confirm social transmission and identify underlying learning mechanisms, experiments investigating how arbitrary habits or conventions arise and spread within a group are also required. The few relevant experimental studies reported thus far have relied on cross-species (i.e. human-ape) interaction offering limited ecological validity, and no study has successfully generated a tradition not involving tool use in an established group. We seeded one of two rewarded alternative endpoints to a complex sequence of behaviour in each of two chimpanzee groups. Each sequence spread in the group in which it was seeded, with many individuals unambiguously adopting the sequence demonstrated by a group member. In one group, the alternative sequence was discovered by a low ranking female, but was not learned by others. Since the action-sequences lacked meaning before the experiment and had no logical connection with reward, chimpanzees must have extracted both the form and benefits of these sequences through observation of others.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 Sep 12;103(37):13878-83. Faithful replication of foraging techniques along cultural transmission chains by chimpanzees and children. Horner V, Whiten A, Flynn E, de Waal FB. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, Fife KY16 9JP, United Kingdom. Observational studies of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have revealed population-specific differences in behavior, thought to represent cultural variation. Field studies have also reported behaviors indicative of cultural learning, such as close observation of adult skills by infants, and the use of similar foraging techniques within a population over many generations. Although experimental studies have shown that chimpanzees are able to learn complex behaviors by observation, it is unclear how closely these studies simulate the learning environment found in the wild. In the present study we have used a diffusion chain paradigm, whereby a behavior is passed from one individual to the next in a linear sequence in an attempt to simulate intergenerational transmission of a foraging skill. Using a powerful three-group, two-action methodology, we found that alternative methods used to obtain food from a foraging device ("lift door" versus "slide door") were accurately transmitted along two chains of six and five chimpanzees, respectively, such that the last chimpanzee in the chain used the same method as the original trained model. The fidelity of transmission within each chain is remarkable given that several individuals in the no-model control group were able to discover either method by individual exploration. A comparative study with human children revealed similar results. This study is the first to experimentally demonstrate the linear transmission of alternative foraging techniques by non-human primates. Our results show that chimpanzees have a capacity to sustain local traditions across multiple simulated generations.
Nature. 2005 Sep 29;437(7059):737-40. Conformity to cultural norms of tool use in chimpanzees. Whiten A, Horner V, de Waal FB. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9JP, UK. A.whiten@st-and.ac.uk Rich circumstantial evidence suggests that the extensive behavioural diversity recorded in wild great apes reflects a complexity of cultural variation unmatched by species other than our own. However, the capacity for cultural transmission assumed by this interpretation has remained difficult to test rigorously in the field, where the scope for controlled experimentation is limited. Here we show that experimentally introduced technologies will spread within different ape communities. Unobserved by group mates, we first trained a high-ranking female from each of two groups of captive chimpanzees to adopt one of two different tool-use techniques for obtaining food from the same 'Pan-pipe' apparatus, then re-introduced each female to her respective group. All but two of 32 chimpanzees mastered the new technique under the influence of their local expert, whereas none did so in a third population lacking an expert. Most chimpanzees adopted the method seeded in their group, and these traditions continued to diverge over time. A subset of chimpanzees that discovered the alternative method nevertheless went on to match the predominant approach of their companions, showing a conformity bias that is regarded as a hallmark of human culture.
Anim Cogn. 2005 Jul;8(3):164-81. Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Horner V, Whiten A. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, KY16 9JU, UK. Vkh1@st-andrews.ac.uk This study explored whether the tendency of chimpanzees and children to use emulation or imitation to solve a tool-using task was a response to the availability of causal information. Young wild-born chimpanzees from an African sanctuary and 3- to 4-year-old children observed a human demonstrator use a tool to retrieve a reward from a puzzle-box. The demonstration involved both causally relevant and irrelevant actions, and the box was presented in each of two conditions: opaque and clear. In the opaque condition, causal information about the effect of the tool inside the box was not available, and hence it was impossible to differentiate between the relevant and irrelevant parts of the demonstration. However, in the clear condition causal information was available, and subjects could potentially determine which actions were necessary. When chimpanzees were presented with the opaque box, they reproduced both the relevant and irrelevant actions, thus imitating the overall structure of the task. When the box was presented in the clear condition they instead ignored the irrelevant actions in favour of a more efficient, emulative technique. These results suggest that emulation is the favoured strategy of chimpanzees when sufficient causal information is available. However, if such information is not available, chimpanzees are prone to employ a more comprehensive copy of an observed action. In contrast to the chimpanzees, children employed imitation to solve the task in both conditions, at the expense of efficiency. We suggest that the difference in performance of chimpanzees and children may be due to a greater susceptibility of children to cultural conventions, perhaps combined with a differential focus on the results, actions and goals of the demonstrator.
Learn Behav. 2004 Feb;32(1):36-52. How do apes ape? Whiten A, Horner V, Litchfield CA, Marshall-Pescini S. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, Scottish Primate Research Group, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland. A.whiten@st-and.ac.uk In the wake of telling critiques of the foundations on which earlier conclusions were based, the last 15 years have witnessed a renaissance in the study of social learning in apes. As a result, we are able to review 31 experimental studies from this period in which social learning in chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans has been investigated. The principal question framed at the beginning of this era, Do apes ape? has been answered in the affirmative, at least in certain conditions. The more interesting question now is, thus, How do apes ape? Answering this question has engendered richer taxonomies of the range of social-learning processes at work and new methodologies to uncover them. Together, these studies suggest that apes ape by employing a portfolio of alternative social-learning processes in flexibly adaptive ways, in conjunction with nonsocial learning. We conclude by sketching the kind of decision tree that appears to underlie the deployment of these alternatives.
http://www.ucc.vt.edu/stdysk/vocabula.html
© Ray Peat Ph.D. 2009. All Rights Reserved. www.RayPeat.com
Biomedicine (Taipei). 2022; 12(3): 1–4.
- Published online 2022 Sep 1. doi: 10.37796/2211-8039.1371
- PMCID: PMC9629406
- PMID: 36381188
Covid 19 vaccines and the misinterpretation of perceived side effects clarity on the safety of vaccines
Raymond D. Palmer
- Full Spectrum Biologics, South Perth, WA, 6151, Australia
- Full Spectrum Biologics, WA, 6102, Australia
- Find articles by Raymond D. Palmer
- [E-mail address: moc.em@remlap.yar.
- Received 2022 Mar 12; Revised 2022 Apr 20; Accepted 2022 May 4.
- Copyright © the Author(s)
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Abstract
In the era of Covid 19 and mass vaccination programs, the anti-vaccination movement across the world is currently at an all-time high. Much of this anti-vaccination sentiment could be attributed to the alleged side effects that are perpetuated across social media from anti-vaccination groups.
Fear mongering and misinformation being peddled by people with no scientific training to terrorise people into staying unvaccinated is not just causing people to remain susceptible to viral outbreaks, but could also be causing more side effects seen in the vaccination process. This brief review will offer data that may demonstrate that misinformation perpetuated by the anti-vaccination movement may be causing more deaths and side effects from any vaccine.
A mini review of published literature has been conducted and found that mental stress clearly causes vasoconstriction and arterial constriction of the blood vessels. Therefore, if subjects are panicked, concerned, stressed or scared of the vaccination, their arteries will constrict and become smaller in and around the time of receiving the vaccine. This biological mechanism (the constriction of veins, arteries and vessels under mental stress) is the most likely cause for where there has been blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, dizziness, fainting, blurred vision, loss of smell and taste that may have been experienced shortly after vaccine administration. The extreme mental stress of the patient could most likely be attributed to the fear mongering and scare tactics used by various anti-vaccination groups.
This paper does not aim to rule in or out every side effect seen, but it is highly likely that many apparent side effects seen shortly after a subject has received a vaccine could be the result of restricted or congested blood flow from blood vessel or arterial constriction caused by emotional distress or placebo based on fear around vaccines.
Keywords: Covid 19, Vaccines, Side effects, Misinterpretation, Ischemia, Stress, Cardiovascular
Introduction
Vaccines introduced in late 2020 or early 2021 were closely watched, scrutinised, and monitored by the world’s mainstream population due to their fast to market delivery. Subsequent health concerns were quickly made public across social media and news outlets driving further vaccine hesitancy. One of the most common health concerns was that various types of Covid 19 vaccines were causing strokes or blood clots. The science for the vaccines causing blood clots has not been found, but other causes for this cascade from vaccines to blood clotting events may be found in existing medical literature.
Covid 19 vaccines use many of the same ingredients that have been safely used for many years, with the only major difference being the mRNA [1,2]. However, anti-vaccination sentiment and side effects are at an all time high, and this may point to a statistical significance.
Vaccines include antigens that produce an immune response which is adept at providing protection from disease [3]. However, reactogenicity from vaccines is very rare according to Herve et al. and mostly associated with mild irritations or other discomfort at the site of injection. Once vaccine antigens enter the body, they are distinguished as pathogens by the body’s immune system, the pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) or damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs), pattern-recognition receptors (PRRs), including Toll-like receptors (TLR) that are located on peripheral circulating immune cells [3,4].
Even though the likelihood of mental stress causing strokes, heart attacks or blood clots may at first appear unlikely, a brief investigation of current medical literature clearly shows that simple tasks under clinical observing conditions such as public speaking can induce serious adverse outcomes [5]. Krantz et al. demonstrated that subjects with ischemia from mental stress experienced cardiac episodes more frequently than subjects without mental stress ischemia (8 of 34; 23%; p = 0.048).
Mental stress-induced myocardial ischemia (MSIMI) is a condition where blood flow to the heart is restricted due to emotional distress. MSIMI has been found to be more severe in females when peripheral blood vessels are constricted [6]. If MSIMI results in ischemia, it can also double the chance of a heart attack or death in subjects where heart disease is present [7]. Jiang et al. found a significant increase in nonfatal and fatal cardiac events in subjects with MSIMI.
It has been found that the level of microvascular constriction but not the angiographic burden of coronary artery disease (CAD) is correlated with MSIMI [8]. Patients with CAD and exercise induced ischemia (EII) with the existence of MSIMI were highly predicted to undergo a loss of life event [9].
Visceral arteries are also implicated in constriction from mental stress. Notably the renal artery showed decreased blood flow during mental stress testing [10]. The superior mesenteric artery (SMA) did not display any significant difference according to Hayashi et al. The findings of renal artery constriction also may lead into serious downstream kidney events. This data clearly indicates that mental stress can prevent blood flow far beyond the cardiovascular system inducing many other aberrations.
Adverse cardiovascular events that were reported from Covid 19 vaccines have been monitored closely by The World Health Organisation (WHO) [11]. Of those events, palpitations (717(14.74)), increased heart rate (439 (9,03), flushing (592(12.17) and tachycardia (798 (16.41)) were all reported as having the highest rate of incidence. However, Kaur et al. does not find any causality from the vaccines listed. Furthermore, restricted blood flow or blockages caused by MSIMI inducing vasoconstriction could be the smoking gun in all the aforementioned conditions such as palpitations, increased heart rate, flushing and tachycardia [12,13].
Vaccines monitored by Kaur et al. were Comirnaty (BNT162b2), Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine (mRNA1273), COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca (AZD1222); also known as Covishield, Sputnik V, COVID-19 Vaccine Janssen (JNJ-78436735; Ad26.COV2.S), CoronaVac, BBIBP-CorV, Epi-VacCorona, Convidicea (Ad5-nCoV), Covaxin, CoviVac, ZF2001.
Moreover, vasoconstriction could also result in hyperpnea, postural faint, light headedness or dizziness which have all been included as possible side effects from the Covid 19 vaccines [14,15]. Post vaccine smell and taste disorders have also been implicated as side effects of Covid 19 vaccines, however both these disorders may be attributed to blood flow disorders from mental stress induced vasoconstriction [16].
The litany of suspected or perceived side effects discussed here from Covid 19 vaccines correlates firmly with well-established vasoconstriction disorders where blood flow is reduced or blocked completely. MSIMI is found in 70% of people with CAD [17], and it is predicted that approximately 16.3 million Americans above the age of twenty have CAD. Notably The American Heart Association (AHA) reports that approximately 82.6 million people in the United States have some form of cardiovascular disease [18]. When MSIMI is combined with these conditions, it presents a further aggravated risk for mortality.
The data presented herein, poses an interesting question, is the fear mongering around vaccines causing many of these perceived side effects by inducing unnecessary stress in vulnerable people? Is the movement and character of anti-vaccination information that may strike fear into the general population causing anxiety and vascular constriction resulting in pathologies such as dizziness, hypernea, fainting, blood clotting, stroke and heart attack? The science discussed here clearly establishes that anxiety and fear causes vasoconstriction disorders, and that a particular movement that is trying to save people with a profound lack of scientific and medical training (the anti-vaccination movement) from vaccine side effects may actually be the entity causing the majority of side effects.
Sullivan et al. had demonstrated that MSIMI was found to be more dangerous in females when peripheral blood vessels were constricted. When females underwent a tonometry exam the average ratio was associated at 0.11–0.35, just over a threefold ratio [6]. The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) also found that there was approximately between a three and fourfold increase in females reporting adverse side effects than men from the Covid 19 vaccine [19]. The numbers reported from the CDC were 4296 adverse side effects from females, and 1056 from men. The parallel in this data is quite clear, and may profoundly exonerate Covid 19 vaccines as ground zero for the perceived side effects and implicate the well established and studied condition of MSIMI and other blood flow conditions as the smoking gun.
Apart from MSIMI and other cardiac impairments discussed here, the placebo effect is also a strong marker in potential side effects, as the belief in detrimental side effects (the nocebo effect) can cause detrimental side effects [20]. It has also been shown that the placebo effect can be so powerful that it can affect end-organ functions that are controlled by the autonomic nervous system [21]. Both the placebo and nocebo effect are both noted here due to MSIMI being caused by mental stress, that is the connection between mental state and biological disorder which is already well established across the literature. This shows major cause for concern where fear mongering around vaccines is being perpetuated, as those with expectations of getting adverse side effects may increase their risk of experiencing adverse side effects [22].
Obesity may also play a role in poor outcomes for Covid 19 vaccines [23]. Obese subjects also appear to be at higher risk of MSIMI [24] which is consistent with this paper’s findings. An increase in adverse reactions was also found in obese subjects when using the Pfizer vaccine [25]. Obesity or poor arterial health may heighten the chances of a vaccine side effect.
Conclusion
This mini review finds that subjects with a history of heart disease, obesity, poor health combined with extreme stress or fear of vaccines should visit their medical practitioner and discuss the use of therapies or medications such as vaso or arterial dilators or possibly anticoagulants prior to their vaccines, as these measures under professional guidance may assist in maintaining healthy blood flow through a subject’s system and may offer benefits to ensure adverse reactions from underlying health conditions are not confused with adverse reactions from vaccines.
All data or claims of adverse reactions from vaccines should first be weighed against a subject’s health history with a focus on their vascular and arterial systems, cardiologic fitness and propensity for mental stress induced ischemia.
This brief review is not exhaustive but finds that it is highly probable that many adverse reports from recent vaccines are associated with vasoconstriction in conjunction with MSIMI or CAD.
This paper also presents the opportunity for governments to peer back into the claims of adverse vaccine side effects and weigh up the volume of existing health conditions that many of those subjects may have had. If it can be established in a high volume of cases of apparent side effects that CAD, HD, MSIMI or EII were present, then the adverse reactions can be laid against emotional distress or anxiety as opposed to the vaccines. The cause or source of that emotional distress and fear must then be investigated, recognised, and managed for future vaccination programs. Humanity on average has experienced a viral outbreak every two years for the last decade. So, managing this alarmism over perceived vaccine side effects is paramount in delivering fast to market solutions for future vaccination programs.
Limitations of study
This review is limited by primarily focusing on vasoconstriction conditions caused by a stress response, and also by a lack of large-scale clinical trial studies to determine whether using novel combinations of vasodilators or anticoagulants with vaccines could reduce vaccine side effects, which may also assist in clarifying whether side effects were emanating from vaccines or conditions such as MSIMI. Further investigation into whether side effects could be attributed as a stress response is required.
Footnotes
- Dates Written - Monday, 22 November 2021.
- Contributors - Raymond D Palmer.
- Conflict of interest - Raymond D Palmer is Chief Science Officer of Full Spectrum Biologics.
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Articles from BioMedicine are provided here courtesy of China Medical University
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Peter Aaby at the Symposium about Scientific Freedom, Copenhagen, 9 March 2019.
Lecture: "WHO is the brain in the system - The sound of silence? A case study of how public health vaccinology deals with fundamental contradictions of current policy."
Anthropologist, Dr Peter Aaby is credited for the discovery of non-specific effects of vaccines, leading the World Health Organization, WHO, to change its measles vaccine programme in the early 1990s.
For almost 40 years, he has run the Bandim Health Project, a health and demographic surveillance system site that he established in Guinea-Bissau in 1978.
This lecture is part of the Symposium about Scientific Freedom and the inauguration of the Institute for Scientific Freedom, which took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, 9 March 2019.
World renowned Danish scientist Peter C Gøtzsche is the founder of the institute. The Institute’s primary area of focus is healthcare and the institute has three main visions:
- All science should strive to be free from financial conflicts of interest.
- All science should be published as soon as possible, and made freely accessible.
- All scientific data, including study protocols, should be freely accessible, allowing others to do their own analyses.
The Vilification of Healthy People; Especially Children
Throughout the past several years apparently healthy people have been re-defined as being potential asymptomatic spreaders of a disease that can be lethal in high-risk individuals. The disease is known as the novel coronavirus disease that was first identified in 2019 (COVID-19). People around the world have been instilled with near-paralyzing fear that their family member, friend, neighbour and/or colleague who has no signs or symptoms can kill them by spreading severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), which is the causative agent of COVID-19.
This paradigm that a person has no way of knowing who is safe to be around has formed the rationale for mass lockdowns, masking, and mandating ‘vaccines’ for which the initial clinical experiments are still ongoing. This has caused massive fracturing of relationships around the globe. Nobody has been spared. Families have split, best friendships that lasted decades ended abruptly, and colleagues lashed out.
We were told that everyone had to do their part to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. Those who felt healthy could not be trusted. Unbeknown to them they might have a wicked pathogen oozing out of their body. Healthy children who were at a statistical risk equivalent to zero of dying from COVID-19 would almost certainly kill their grandparents if they were not locked down, masked and ‘vaccinated’. Those who resisted lockdowns, masking, and mandating of so-called vaccines that could neither prevent the disease nor transmission of its causative agent have been treated like uncaring villains that are deserving of segregation. Remember this front page of one of Canada’s best-known newspapers that was published on August 26, 2021?…
The Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, has been a classic example of a leader who has vigorously promoted this kind of hatred and division within his own country.
So, how did we get so far off-track with our response to COVID-19?
Why will future history books, if accurate, document this as the most mismanaged crisis of our time?
Most of the blame rests on the scientific and medical community allowing a very elegant scientific test to be chronically misused. This test is known as the ‘reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction’ (RT-PCR).
Did we follow the science?
In court, I have often seen judges puzzled by the apparent contradictions in the scientific evidence being put forward by various experts. These judges often question how scientists can interpret the same data so differently. When it comes to the science underpinning COVID-19, published papers can be placed into two bins:
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Those that are trustworthy because they are based on sound scientific methods.
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Those that are untrustworthy because they are based on flawed scientific methods.
In the past several years science in bin 2 has become voluminous and has contributed excessively to the rationale for the so-called prevailing ‘COVID-19 narrative’. The problem is that the science in bin 2 cannot be properly interpreted because it is built on a fundamentally flawed foundation. Too many scientists failed to critically assess the methods used to generate the early COVID-19 data. This has resulted in this junk science to snowball out of control. The RT-PCR test is at the heart of this problem.
The House Built on Sand Must be Dismantled
If one goes back to the birth of COVID-19 science and critically assesses it, misusing the RT-PCR test jumps out as a key fundamental flaw that caused substantial overestimation of the number of cases of COVID-19 and erroneous labeling of healthy people as asymptomatic spreaders of a deadly disease. The only way to correct course and stop the avalanche of faulty COVID-19 science is to establish which papers can and cannot be trusted. Importantly, editors of scientific journals cannot allow any more COVID-19 ‘facts’ to be published unless the authors unequivocally demonstrate that their data are based on methods that have been implemented properly. Most notably, authors must demonstrate that their research methodologies have been appropriately calibrated such that their conclusions are justified.
Misuse of An Elegant Scientific Technique Has Plagued COVID-19 Science From the Very Beginning
To properly gauge the scope of an outbreak of an infectious disease, one first needs to accurately diagnose it. Diseases are diagnosed primarily based on two things:
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Accurately detecting the presence of a pathogen using a laboratory-based test.
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Detection of signs and/or symptoms consistent with the disease, which is usually done by a physician.
Symptoms are aspects of a disease that a person experiences but cannot be assessed easily by an observer. Examples include general malaise, pain, and a loss of appetite. In contrast, signs of illness can be objectively observed and documented by others, and include coughing, sneezing, or a fever that can measured with a thermometer. Often, symptoms precede the onset of signs of illness.
When it comes to defining what it means to be ‘asymptomatic’, there are three relevant scenarios:
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A person who is not infected with a pathogen will never be at risk of developing the disease associated with that pathogen. These are healthy individuals who are asymptomatic by virtue of not having been infected. They cannot infect others.
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A person can be infected with a potential pathogen but never develop symptoms of a disease because the causative agent fails to cause substantial harm in the body. In many cases, this might be because the immune system can respond rapidly and effectively. There have also been examples of people getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 but never apparently experiencing symptoms nor developing signs of COVID-19. Infection does not always result in disease. For example, billions of microbes, including many bacteria and viruses, live on and in our bodies without causing us harm. They have invaded our bodies but do not cause disease, even though some of them can cause serious disease in other people or even ourselves should they get into an inappropriate physiological location (e.g., some fecal bacteria entering a body via the oral route). Infected but asymptomatic (disease-free) people are also healthy (i.e., there is no impairment to their ability to function in their daily activities).
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People who get infected and then progress to a diseased state always have a period in between when they are ‘asymptomatic’. Technically, these individuals that do eventually get sick are referred to as being ‘pre-symptomatic’. One does not know if a person is truly asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic until the typical incubation period for a pathogen has passed; this is the expected time from infection to the onset of symptoms in a susceptible person. A person who is infected and symptomatic can spread the causative agent of the disease to others.
When people have COVID-19, they experience obvious symptoms and signs also usually become apparent. This is the scenario that has been easy to manage throughout the declared COVID-19 pandemic. People who are sick have been asked to stay home. From a social hygiene perspective, it is my expert opinion that this should be encouraged for all the infectious diseases we live with. This would reduce infectious disease-related morbidities and mortalities.
In the context of COVID-19, most masking, isolation and vaccination policies around the world are predicated on the assumption that transmission of SARS-CoV-2 can be efficiently mediated by asymptomatic people who are transiently infected but never get COVID-19 and/or pre-symptomatic individuals. This is based on the assumption that SARS-CoV-2 can replicate to the point where a person who is not coughing or sneezing can expel a threshold dose required to potentially infect another person. Although this is theoretically possible and likely occurs rarely, it is incorrect to conclude that this is commonplace and a significant driver of the spread of COVID-19. This incorrect concept is based on an array of scientific studies that relied on RT-PCR testing that was inappropriately calibrated.
How to Define a Case of COVID-19
Cases of COVID-19 should only be determined as follows:
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It should be a physician making the diagnosis.
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It should be based on the presence of signs and symptoms that are consistent with the clinical definition of COVID-19.
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The presence of symptoms and/or signs should be supported by laboratory results derived from properly calibrated tests that demonstrate the presence of SARS-CoV-2 virions. A virion is a single virus particle. Virions can be replication-competent; these are the only ones that can potentially infect another person and cause disease. Or they can be replication-incompetent; these ones can never spread to others and cause COVID-19.
Throughout the declared pandemic many so-called ‘cases’ of COVID-19 were incorrectly ‘diagnosed’. Cases, especially early in the declared pandemic, have been defined by individuals other than physicians, assumed based on signs and symptoms only, or exclusively based on a positive laboratory test result. The latter has been extremely common. This contradicts the World Health Organization, which noted that “Most PCR assays are indicated as an aid for diagnosis, therefore, health care providers must consider any result in combination with timing of sampling, specimen type, assay specifics, clinical observations, patient history, confirmed status of any contacts, and epidemiological information”.
The core definition, and all-too-often the sole definition of ‘cases’ of COVID-19 has been based on the use of a laboratory testing method referred to as ‘RT-PCR’. To understand how asymptomatic people were mislabeled as significant sources of transmission of SARS-CoV-2, one must first understand how RT-PCR testing should have been properly calibrated around the world.
A polymerase is a protein that can copy DNA, which is a genetic blueprint. So, the PCR method requires this genetic blueprint known as DNA to be present in order to work. If DNA is in a sample, when a scientist adds a polymerase, a few other ingredients, and then varies the temperature, new copies of tiny portions of the DNA will be made. With each ‘cycle’ that the PCR test is run, more copies of these fragments of the genetic blueprint will be made. Once a threshold number of copies appear in the sample, they can be detected. Think of it like a photocopier. From a great distance, you might not be able to tell if a single copy of a page has been made. However, once you have a stack of five hundred pages sitting on the output tray, you know for sure that the photocopier is churning out copies. In short, PCR is a method that scientists can use to determine whether a particular genetic blueprint is present in a sample.
The genetic blueprint for SARS-CoV-2 is not made of DNA. Instead, it is made of a related structure called ‘RNA’. Therefore, to use the PCR test to determine whether an RNA-based virus is present in a sample requires one additional step at the beginning. Specifically, a ‘reverse transcriptase’ is used to convert the RNA from SARS-CoV-2 into DNA, portions of which can then be detected with the PCR test. This is how the RT-PCR test is used to detect the presence of small pieces of the genetic material from SARS-CoV-2.
The Inappropriate Use of RT-PCR Testing Caused a Disconnect Between Laboratory Studies and ‘Real World’ Data
Laboratory studies suggested that asymptomatic individuals could potentially shed infectious SARS-CoV-2 one to two days before the onset of symptoms of COVID-19. However, the largest ‘real world’ study done to date looked at the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in ~10 million people in Wuhan, China and found no evidence of asymptomatic transmission. This typical disconnect in the results of laboratory-based studies and ‘real world’ data is due to the former types of experiments having relied on the use of uncalibrated or incorrectly calibrated RT-PCR tests. An RT-PCR test can only determine if tiny fragments of the genetic material from a virus is present in a sample. It can never indicate, on its own, whether that material is from virus particles that have the potential to infect and cause disease, or from replication-incompetent virions or even portions thereof that cannot cause disease.
Flawed RT-PCR Testing Caused Over-Diagnosis of COVID-19
On its own, a positive result on a RT-PCR test to detect SARS-CoV-2 is insufficient to diagnose COVID-19, yet this became routine in most parts of the world. In addition to the potential for false positive tests, true positive results can also be obtained from genomes of SARS-CoV-2 particles that are no longer infectious. An example of the latter would be an individual who has mounted an effective immune response and may have remnant replication-incompetent viral particles or partially degraded viral genetic material inside relatively long-lived white blood cells that have killed the virus. These cells are known as ‘phagocytes’ and are part of our immune system. Indeed, following clearance of SARS-CoV-2 from the body, full and/or partial genomes of SARS-CoV-2 can remain for up to several weeks. Phagocytosis (or ‘eating’) of SARS-CoV-2 is a mechanism to kill and remove the virus from the body. These phagocytic cells tend to hang on to these ‘killed’ virions so that they can activate other immunological effector cells, including B cells that produce the antibodies we have heard so much about. As such, these phagocytes can be a source of SARS-CoV-2 genomes that could be amplified by a PCR test. However, these genomes would not have the potential to cause COVID-19. Instead it would evidence that the infection has resolved or is resolving. Persistence of whole or partial genomes that are not associated with infectious particles is well-documented for a variety of other viruses, including measles, Middle East respiratory syndrome-coronavirus, and other coronaviruses. A positive RT-PCR test for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 should never be used, on its own, to define cases of COVID-19; and definitely should not be used to claim that someone has the potential to infect another person.
Building a Rock-Solid Foundation for COVID-19 Science:
The Gold Standard Functional Virology Assay that Should Always be Used to Calibrate RT-PCR Tests
A gold standard test for infectivity of a virus is a cell-based functional assay that determines the potential to replicate and cause cell death. The assay works like this: Cells that are stripped of their anti-viral properties are put into a dish and allowed to adhere to the bottom. The cells would typically cover the entire bottom of the dish. A scientist can look under a microscope to confirm the cells are healthy. A sample then gets added to the cells. If the sample contains replication-competent (i.e., potentially disease-causing) virions, these will infect and kill the cells. A day or two later, the scientist can check the cells under a microscope again. If they see what is called a ‘cytopathic effect’, which means the cells have died, this indicates that replication-competent virions were present. If there was no cytopathic effect, there were no replication-competent virions. Here are pictures from my research team that show how this virology test works…
…the cells on the left were not exposed to a replication-competent (infectious) virus. They remain happily adhered to the bottom of the dish. There was no cytopathic effect. The cells on the right were exposed to a replication-competent virus that infected and killed them. As the cells died, they rounded up and lost their ability to remain stuck to the bottom of the plate. This is a classic example of cytopathic effect. You can see how easy it is to use this test to determine whether a sample contains any infectious virions.
To calibrate a RT-PCR test for SARS-Cov-2, samples from nasopharyngeal swabs of a large array of people would be split into two; one for RT-PCR testing and the other for testing in the gold standard virology assay. Scientists would note the cycle threshold values from the RT-PCR test that are associated with evidence of replication-competent virions from the cellular virology assay versus those that did not cause a cytopathic effect. This allows a cycle threshold cut-off to be determined. Above this threshold, there is no evidence of replication-competent virions in samples from the nasopharyngeal swabs. This is the objective and proper way to calibrate a RT-PCR test when studying transmission of a virus. Without doing this, RT-PCR test results cannot be interpreted in a meaningful way, and they would lead to inappropriate conclusions, like asymptomatic people being spreaders of COVID-19.
Early in the declared COVID-19 pandemic the Public Health Agency of Canada appropriately performed this calibration of their RT-PCR test. For the test they were using, they identified a cycle threshold cut-off of 24 for declaring people to have the potential to infect others. If they had subsequently offered this service to support studies of the spread of COVID-19, only samples yielding a signal at 24 or fewer cycles would be declared to have evidence of potentially infectious SARS-CoV-2. However, with no explanation provided, this initial and appropriate way of calibrating the RT-PCR assay was not required for labs around the world that were studying transmission of SARS-CoV-2. In fact, cycle threshold cut-offs were arbitrarily assigned. As such, RT-PCR data used to determine global cases of COVID-19 have been highly unreliable.
Even so-called ‘fact-checkers’ of people who criticized the inappropriate designation of the RT-PCR as a stand-alone gold standard diagnostic test have had to admit that it cannot possibly distinguish between infectious and non-infectious virions or parts thereof. For example, a ‘fact check’ from Reuters concluded “PCR tests are being used widely in England to show that SARS-CoV-2 viral genetic material is present in the patient”. I bolded the relevant text. Indeed, RT-PCR tests are a valuable tool for determining whether portions of a virus’s genetic material are present in a sample. They cannot determine whether that genetic material is from a replication-competent virion that would have the potential to infect someone.
Positive RT-PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2 in asymptomatic people are almost universally based on high cycle threshold values, which raises the question of whether these individuals harbor infectious viral particles. The absence of a functional cell-based assay to prove infectivity renders results of asymptomatic testing impossible to interpret accurately. Indeed, the World Health Organization, agreeing with many health professionals around the world, has emphasized that spreading of SARS-CoV-2 by asymptomatic individuals is rare and an emphasis should be placed, therefore, on testing people with signs or symptoms of illness, not those who are apparently healthy.
In addition to the Canadian study that identified a cycle threshold of 24 as an appropriate cut-off for declaring samples positive for infectious SARS-CoV-2, other studies reported results of similar calibrations of other RT-PCR assays for SARS-CoV-2. They identified cycle threshold cut-offs of 22-27 and 30. Altogether, this suggests that tests with cycle threshold values above 22-30 are likely not indicative of the presence of replication-competent SARS-CoV-2.
The logical conclusion is that it is erroneous to declare samples with high cycle threshold values, especially those above 30, as being positive for infectious SARS-CoV-2. However, in many countries people were assumed to be infectious when their samples were declared positive using RT-PCR assays with cycle threshold cut-offs as high as 45 cycles. Such an unjustifiably high cut-off would have resulted in a substantial overestimation of cases of COVID-19 and would have led to erroneous labeling of asymptomatic people as potential spreaders of COVID-19.
Failure to Calibrate the RT-PCR Test Shows How a Representative Influential Scientific Study Incorrectly Concluded that Asymptomatic People Might be a Risk for Spreading COVID-19
The figure below shows results of a published study that claimed to depict the frequency at which asymptomatic people tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 relative to that observed for people with symptomatic infections. Specifically, graphs are shown from figure 2 of a paper published in the influential Journal of the American Medical Association - Internal Medicine. The argument being made was that the frequency at which asymptomatic people tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 was like that observed for people with symptomatic infections. However, the authors failed to calibrate their RT-PCR assay.
Following is the description the authors of the study provided in the methods section of their paper. The most important portion of this text is the last sentence, which is bolded.
“Specimen Collection and RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2
The URT specimens were collected from both nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swabs obtained by trained medical staffs (physicians and nurses). For LRT specimens, participants were given instructions the night before to collect a first morning sputum (after gargling) in a specimen cup; RT-PCR assays for SARS-CoV-2 were performed using Allplex 2020-nCoV assay (Seegene, Seoul, ROK) to determine the presence of virus through the identification of 3 genetic markers: envelope (env) gene, RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) gene, and nucleocapsid protein (N) gene. The cycle threshold (Ct) during RT-PCR testing refers to when the detection of viral amplicons occurs, it is inversely correlated with the amount of RNA present. A lower Ct value indicates large quantities of viral RNA. It was considered positive when the Ct values of all genes were less than 40 cycles.”
Remarkably, the authors applied an arbitrary cycle threshold of 40 to define a positive test result. Proper calibration of the test was not performed. I applied a new cycle threshold cut-off of 24, based on the published results of the Canadian study for calibrating a RT-PCR test for SARS-CoV-2. This is shown as a red dotted line on the graphs in the figure above. Symbols appearing in the light red rectangle above this line would be considered negative, in contrast to the positive designation that the authors had assigned. Remarkably, 99.7% of the people the authors declared to be harbouring infectious SARS-CoV-2 likely had no evidence of potentially infectious SARS-CoV-2 virions, had the test been properly calibrated. This represents a fatal flaw in this paper; one that negates its conclusion that “Isolation of asymptomatic patients may be necessary to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2”. It should also precipitate its retraction. Such a paper should never have been allowed to be published in the first place.
This highlights a fatal flaw that has been extremely common in publications throughout the declared pandemic that claimed asymptomatic people could be a significant source of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 that could cause COVID-19 in other people. Every paper making this claim should have the materials and methods section carefully evaluated to determine whether the cycle threshold cut-off for the RT-PCR assay was based on the appropriate calibration method or was selected arbitrarily.
Here is a list of other influential publications of original research studies that erroneously concluded that asymptomatic people might be significant sources of replication-competent SARS-CoV-2 virions. Most are based on fatally flawed RT-PCR testing and the remaining papers fail to disclose how they defined an ‘infection’. All of them should be retracted. None of their conclusions can be trusted…
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Bai, Y. et al. Presumed Asymptomatic Carrier Transmission of COVID-19. Jama 323, 1406-1407 (2020).
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Arons, M.M. et al. Presymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infections and Transmission in a Skilled Nursing Facility. The New England journal of medicine 382, 2081-2090 (2020).
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Stock, A.D. et al. COVID-19 Infection Among Healthcare Workers: Serological Findings Supporting Routine Testing. Front Med (Lausanne) 7, 471 (2020).
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Bi, Q. et al. Epidemiology and transmission of COVID-19 in 391 cases and 1286 of their close contacts in Shenzhen, China: a retrospective cohort study. The Lancet. Infectious diseases 20, 911-919 (2020).
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Böhmer, M.M. et al. Investigation of a COVID-19 outbreak in Germany resulting from a single travel-associated primary case: a case series. The Lancet. Infectious diseases 20, 920-928 (2020).
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Chan, J.F. et al. A familial cluster of pneumonia associated with the 2019 novel coronavirus indicating person-to-person transmission: a study of a family cluster. Lancet (London, England) 395, 514-523 (2020).
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Van Vinh Chau, N. et al. The Natural History and Transmission Potential of Asymptomatic Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Infection. Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America 71, 2679-2687 (2020).
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Chaw, L. et al. Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 Transmission in Different Settings, Brunei. Emerging infectious diseases 26, 2598-2606 (2020).
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Cheng, H.Y. et al. Contact Tracing Assessment of COVID-19 Transmission Dynamics in Taiwan and Risk at Different Exposure Periods Before and After Symptom Onset. JAMA internal medicine 180, 1156-1163 (2020).
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Gao, M. et al. A study on infectivity of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers. Respiratory medicine 169, 106026 (2020).
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Gao, Y. et al. A cluster of the Corona Virus Disease 2019 caused by incubation period transmission in Wuxi, China. The Journal of infection 80, 666-670 (2020).
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Guan, W.J. et al. Clinical Characteristics of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in China. The New England journal of medicine 382, 1708-1720 (2020).
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He, X. et al. Temporal dynamics in viral shedding and transmissibility of COVID-19. Nat Med 26, 672-675 (2020).
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Hodcroft, E.B. Preliminary case report on the SARS-CoV-2 cluster in the UK, France, and Spain. Swiss medical weekly 150 (2020).
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Hoehl, S. et al. Evidence of SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Returning Travelers from Wuhan, China. The New England journal of medicine 382, 1278-1280 (2020).
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Lauer, S.A. et al. The Incubation Period of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) From Publicly Reported Confirmed Cases: Estimation and Application. Annals of internal medicine 172, 577-582 (2020).
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Li, R. et al. Substantial undocumented infection facilitates the rapid dissemination of novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). Science (New York, N.Y.) 368, 489-493 (2020).
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Li, C. et al. Asymptomatic and Human-to-Human Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in a 2-Family Cluster, Xuzhou, China. Emerging infectious diseases 26, 1626-1628 (2020).
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Liu, Y., Funk, S. & Flasche, S. The contribution of pre-symptomatic infection to the transmission dynamics of COVID-2019. Wellcome open research 5, 58 (2020).
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Lu, X. et al. SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Children. The New England journal of medicine 382, 1663-1665 (2020).
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Lu, S. et al. Alert for non-respiratory symptoms of coronavirus disease 2019 patients in epidemic period: A case report of familial cluster with three asymptomatic COVID-19 patients. Journal of medical virology 93, 518-521 (2021).
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Luo, S.H. et al. A confirmed asymptomatic carrier of 2019 novel coronavirus. Chinese medical journal 133, 1123-1125 (2020).
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Mizumoto, K., Kagaya, K., Zarebski, A. & Chowell, G. Estimating the asymptomatic proportion of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, Yokohama, Japan, 2020. Euro surveillance : bulletin Europeen sur les maladies transmissibles = European communicable disease bulletin 25 (2020).
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Sun, K. et al. Transmission heterogeneities, kinetics, and controllability of SARS-CoV-2. Science (New York, N.Y.) 371 (2021).
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Nishiura, H. et al. Estimation of the asymptomatic ratio of novel coronavirus infections (COVID-19). Int J Infect Dis 94, 154-155 (2020).
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Nishiura, H., Linton, N.M. & Akhmetzhanov, A.R. Serial interval of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infections. Int J Infect Dis 93, 284-286 (2020).
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Pan, Y., Zhang, D., Yang, P., Poon, L.L.M. & Wang, Q. Viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in clinical samples. The Lancet. Infectious diseases 20, 411-412 (2020).
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Pan, X. et al. Asymptomatic cases in a family cluster with SARS-CoV-2 infection. The Lancet. Infectious diseases 20, 410-411 (2020).
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Park, S.Y. et al. Coronavirus Disease Outbreak in Call Center, South Korea. Emerging infectious diseases 26, 1666-1670 (2020).
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Payne, D.C. et al. SARS-CoV-2 Infections and Serologic Responses from a Sample of U.S. Navy Service Members - USS Theodore Roosevelt, April 2020. MMWR. Morbidity and mortality weekly report 69, 714-721 (2020).
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Kimball, A. et al. Asymptomatic and Presymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Residents of a Long-Term Care Skilled Nursing Facility - King County, Washington, March 2020. MMWR. Morbidity and mortality weekly report 69, 377-381 (2020).
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Qian, G. et al. COVID-19 Transmission Within a Family Cluster by Presymptomatic Carriers in China. Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America 71, 861-862 (2020).
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Ran, L. et al. Risk Factors of Healthcare Workers With Coronavirus Disease 2019: A Retrospective Cohort Study in a Designated Hospital of Wuhan in China. Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America 71, 2218-2221 (2020).
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Rosenberg, E.S. et al. COVID-19 Testing, Epidemic Features, Hospital Outcomes, and Household Prevalence, New York State-March 2020. Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America 71, 1953-1959 (2020).
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Sakurai, A. et al. Natural History of Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infection. The New England journal of medicine 383, 885-886 (2020).
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Samsami, M., Zebarjadi Bagherpour, J., Nematihonar, B. & Tahmasbi, H. COVID-19 Pneumonia in Asymptomatic Trauma Patients; Report of 8 Cases. Archives of academic emergency medicine 8, e46 (2020).
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Tabata, S. et al. Clinical characteristics of COVID-19 in 104 people with SARS-CoV-2 infection on the Diamond Princess cruise ship: a retrospective analysis. The Lancet. Infectious diseases 20, 1043-1050 (2020).
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Tong, Z.D. et al. Potential Presymptomatic Transmission of SARS-CoV-2, Zhejiang Province, China, 2020. Emerging infectious diseases 26, 1052-1054 (2020).
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Treibel, T.A. et al. COVID-19: PCR screening of asymptomatic health-care workers at London hospital. Lancet (London, England) 395, 1608-1610 (2020).
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Wei, W.E. et al. Presymptomatic Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 - Singapore, January 23-March 16, 2020. MMWR. Morbidity and mortality weekly report 69, 411-415 (2020).
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Xu, J., Li, Y., Gan, F., Du, Y. & Yao, Y. Salivary Glands: Potential Reservoirs for COVID-19 Asymptomatic Infection. Journal of dental research 99, 989 (2020).
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Yang, R., Gui, X. & Xiong, Y. Comparison of Clinical Characteristics of Patients with Asymptomatic vs Symptomatic Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Wuhan, China. JAMA network open 3, e2010182 (2020).
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Yang, N. et al. In-flight transmission cluster of COVID-19: a retrospective case series. Infectious diseases (London, England) 52, 891-901 (2020).
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Ye, F. et al. Delivery of infection from asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 in a familial cluster. International journal of infectious diseases : IJID : official publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases 94, 133-138 (2020).
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Yu, P., Zhu, J., Zhang, Z. & Han, Y. A Familial Cluster of Infection Associated With the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Indicating Possible Person-to-Person Transmission During the Incubation Period. The Journal of infectious diseases 221, 1757-1761 (2020).
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Zhang, J., Tian, S., Lou, J. & Chen, Y. Familial cluster of COVID-19 infection from an asymptomatic. Critical care (London, England) 24, 119 (2020).
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Almadhi, M.A. et al. The high prevalence of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection reveals the silent spread of COVID-19. International journal of infectious diseases : IJID : official publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases 105, 656-661 (2021).
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Choi, A. et al. Symptomatic and Asymptomatic Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in K-12 Schools, British Columbia, Canada April to June 2021. Microbiology spectrum, e0062222 (2022).
…these 48 papers represent most, if not all, of the peer-reviewed scientific evidence that has been used by most public health officials to mislabel asymptomatic people as sources of COVID-19-causing SARS-CoV-2. All of it is fatally flawed.
It was even concluded in a study that patients testing ‘positive’ with cycle threshold values above 33 could likely be discharged from hospitals. Such a recommendation would never be made if there was any evidence that these people harboured SARS-CoV-2 virions with the potential to infect others. So one must wonder why testing labs were allowed to arbitrarily pick cycle thresholds ranging from 38 to 45 as upper limits for defining the presence of infectious SARS-CoV-2.
Exclusive reliance on improperly calibrated RT-PCR testing as an indication of ‘infection’ has also led to the erroneous conclusion that post-symptomatic people may also need to be masked and/or isolated.
I have yet to see appropriate scientific evidence to justify the unusually high cycle threshold values being used in studies that label people as asymptomatic sources of COVID-19. In the absence of such data, there is no justification for masking, isolating or mandating experimental vaccine technologies for asymptomatic people.
Others have also criticized the exclusive use of RT-PCR tests in diagnosing COVID-19 and drawing conclusions about transmission in the absence of infectivity testing.
How RT-PCR Testing Should Have Been Used to Support Diagnoses of COVID-19
All labs should have been required to calibrate their RT-PCR test prior to providing any ‘real world’ data to public health officials that would be used to study the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Use of the gold standard functional virology assay to do this calibration would have provided each lab with a strong objective rationale for their specific cycle threshold cut-off value when determining whether a person could have the potential to infect others. And this should have always been married to a clinical diagnosis rendered by a physician. As mentioned earlier, if this standard is applied retroactively to the COVID-19 scientific literature, it becomes obvious that much of it is untrustworthy.
Much of the Foundational COVID-19 Science is Fundamentally Flawed
RT-PCR testing has generally been misused during the declared COVID-19 pandemic due to failures to calibrate it properly. The result has been mislabeling asymptomatic people as significant potential sources for transmission of COVID-19. This, in turn, has resulted in inappropriate mandating of masking, isolation, and ‘vaccines’ for people who do not represent a genuine health risk to others. It has also taken the diagnostic expertise away from physicians and placed it in the hands of anonymous laboratory technicians.
Now, we are left with a mountain of COVID-19 science that cannot be interpreted properly. Scientists with integrity and the relevant expertise know that a substantial but undefined number of people that tested ‘positive for COVID-19’ never had the potential to spread SARS-CoV-2 to others and many of these also did not actually have the disease known as COVID-19.
Resolving the Apparent Conflicts in Evidence Presented by ‘Experts’
To judges who are puzzled by the differing interpretations of experts in their courts, the explanation is fairly simple. If you remove the fundamentally flawed science from expert reports, you will be left with trustworthy data that generally do not support what has been the prevailing narrative over the past several years. When scientists talk about following the overall weight of the scientific evidence, what we really mean is to follow the weight of the trustworthy scientific evidence. Do not get bedazzled by the numerous reports that have accumulated, often in ‘prestigious’ journals, that were based on flawed scientific methods. Don’t get distracted by the number of health ‘authorities’ that have blindly propagated this flawed science. Truth is not a democracy. It is not defined by a majority vote.
Harm to Public Trust in Science
The global propagation of poorly conducted science over the past several years has caused massive and irreparable harm. Children and teenagers took the brunt of this damage. They were given no choice. They had no voice. They became shields used in a conflict waged by adults who wielded faulty science like it was the gospel truth.
As a scientist with deep expertise in viral immunology, I am incredibly disheartened by the state of my scientific disciplines. My colleagues that sat in their ivory towers allowing junk science to justify crushing constitutional freedoms should be ashamed of themselves. I am proud of the relatively few who stood tall on a foundation of integrity and endured brutal treatment for the past couple of years. I can only hope that the harm done to public trust in the health sciences can be remedied.
Both COVID-19 illness, caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and COVID-19 vaccination, ostensibly to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection and serious COVID-19 morbidity, have been associated with the development of myopericarditis, i.e., inflammation of the heart muscle itself (myocarditis) or its suspending sack (pericarditis). This brief review demonstrates, first, the dubious association between SARS-CoV-2 infection and myopericarditis, and second, the robust association between COVID-19 vaccination, especially with mRNA vaccines, and myopericarditis, including, in particular, the study of fatal cases upon autopsy.
The direct relationship between SARS-CoV-2 infection and myocarditis remains tenuous at best. Recent ecological, controlled retrospective cohort and autopsy data do not support an association. The overall absence of support for a specific ‘SARS-CoV-2 myocarditis syndrome’ from focused autopsy studies of presumed myocarditis deaths is consistent with findings from general necropsy studies of COVID-19 deaths. These investigations have established SARS-CoV-2 infection leading to fatal COVID-19 is indeed, as the name implies, a respiratory illness. Wong et al., for example, described how, “No overt pathological findings attributable to SARS-CoV-2 infection could be recognised outside of the lung… [B]eyond the respiratory tract [SARS-CoV-2 infection] does not induce any major pathology… in fatal cases.”
A systematic review of primarily spontaneously reported data from the U.K., USA and European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA), beginning with vaccine launch through mid-March 2022, found 0.22% (n=30) of 13,571 Covid vaccine-associated myocarditis or pericarditis events were fatal. These data are complemented by a much smaller, but growing autopsy literature. The limited necropsy data characterising COVID-19 vaccine-associated deceased persons with myocarditis and myopericarditis repeatedly affirm heart-related pathologies directly attributable to very recent vaccination. Such findings contrast with the lack of definitive epidemiologic or autopsy evidence for a unique SARS-CoV-2 infection myocarditis, as Caforio et al. note:
Strong evidence for a SARS-CoV-2 role in direct infection of cardiac myocytes leading to virus induced myocarditis in patients is missing… [T]here is not yet definitive EMB [endomyocardial biopsy]/autopsy proof that SARS-CoV-2 causes direct cardiomyocyte damage in association with histological myocarditis.
Tables 1-3 detail the published autopsy findings from six fatal cases of post-Covid mRNA vaccine-associated myocarditis. The etiologies for cases 1 and 2 were most consistent with an epinephrine-mediated ‘toxic myocarditis’, whereas cases 3-6 evidenced hyperinflammatory myocarditis. Ultimately, after extensive investigation, each case was deemed a Covid vaccine-caused fatal myocarditis.
The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most manipulated infectious disease events in history, characterized by official lies in an unending stream lead by government bureaucracies, medical associations, medical boards, the media, and international agencies.[3,6,57] We have witnessed a long list of unprecedented intrusions into medical practice, including attacks on medical experts, destruction of medical careers among doctors refusing to participate in killing their patients and a massive regimentation of health care, led by non-qualified individuals with enormous wealth, power and influence.
For the first time in American history a president, governors, mayors, hospital administrators and federal bureaucrats are determining medical treatments based not on accurate scientifically based or even experience based information, but rather to force the acceptance of special forms of care and “prevention”—including remdesivir, use of respirators and ultimately a series of essentially untested messenger RNA vaccines. For the first time in history medical treatment, protocols are not being formulated based on the experience of the physicians treating the largest number of patients successfully, but rather individuals and bureaucracies that have never treated a single patient—including Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, EcoHealth Alliance, the CDC, WHO, state public health officers and hospital administrators.[23,38]
The media (TV, newspapers, magazines, etc), medical societies, state medical boards and the owners of social media have appointed themselves to be the sole source of information concerning this so-called “pandemic”. Websites have been removed, highly credentialed and experienced clinical doctors and scientific experts in the field of infectious diseases have been demonized, careers have been destroyed and all dissenting information has been labeled “misinformation” and “dangerous lies”, even when sourced from top experts in the fields of virology, infectious diseases, pulmonary critical care, and epidemiology. These blackouts of truth occur even when this information is backed by extensive scientific citations from some of the most qualified medical specialists in the world.[23] Incredibly, even individuals, such as Dr. Michael Yeadon, a retired ex-Chief Scientist, and vice-president for the science division of Pfizer Pharmaceutical company in the UK, who charged the company with making an extremely dangerous vaccine, is ignored and demonized. Further, he, along with other highly qualified scientists have stated that no one should take this vaccine.
Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most cited experts in his field, who has successfully treated over 2000 COVID patients by using a protocol of early treatment (which the so-called experts completely ignored), has been the victim of a particularly vicious assault by those benefiting financially from the vaccines. He has published his results in peer reviewed journals, reporting an 80% reduction in hospitalizations and a 75% reduction in deaths by using early treatment.[44] Despite this, he is under an unrelenting series of attacks by the information controllers, none of which have treated a single patient.
Neither Anthony Fauci, the CDC, WHO nor any medical governmental establishment has ever offered any early treatment other than Tylenol, hydration and call an ambulance once you have difficulty breathing. This is unprecedented in the entire history of medical care as early treatment of infections is critical to saving lives and preventing severe complications. Not only have these medical organizations and federal lapdogs not even suggested early treatment, they attacked anyone who attempted to initiate such treatment with all the weapons at their disposal—loss of license, removal of hospital privileges, shaming, destruction of reputations and even arrest.[2]
A good example of this outrage against freedom of speech and providing informed consent information is the recent suspension by the medical board in Maine of Dr. Meryl Nass’ medical license and the ordering of her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation for prescribing Ivermectin and sharing her expertise in this field.[9,65] I know Dr, Nass personally and can vouch for her integrity, brilliance and dedication to truth. Her scientific credentials are impeccable. This behavior by a medical licensing board is reminiscent of the methodology of the Soviet KGB during the period when dissidents were incarcerated in psychiatric gulags to silence their dissent.
OTHER UNPRECEDENTED ATTACKS
Another unprecedented tactic is to remove dissenting doctors from their positions as journal editors, reviewers and retracting of their scientific papers from journals, even after these papers have been in print. Until this pandemic event, I have never seen so many journal papers being retracted— the vast majority promoting alternatives to official dogma, especially if the papers question vaccine safety. Normally a submitted paper or study is reviewed by experts in the field, called peer review. These reviews can be quite intense and nit picking in detail, insisting that all errors within the paper be corrected before publication. So, unless fraud or some other major hidden problem is discovered after the paper is in print, the paper remains in the scientific literature.
We are now witnessing a growing number of excellent scientific papers, written by top experts in the field, being retracted from major medical and scientific journals weeks, months and even years after publication. A careful review indicates that in far too many instances the authors dared question accepted dogma by the controllers of scientific publications—especially concerning the safety, alternative treatments or efficacy of vaccines.[12,63] These journals rely on extensive adverting by pharmaceutical companies for their revenue. Several instances have occurred where powerful pharmaceutical companies exerted their influence on owners of these journals to remove articles that in any way question these companies’ products.[13,34,35]
Worse still is the actual designing of medical articles for promoting drugs and pharmaceutical products that involve fake studies, so-called ghostwritten articles.[49,64] Richard Horton is quoted by the Guardian as saying “journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”[13,63] Proven fraudulent “ghostwritten” articles sponsored by pharmaceutical giants have appeared regularly in top clinical journals, such as JAMA, and New England Journal of Medicine—never to be removed despite proven scientific abuse and manipulation of data.[49,63]
Ghostwritten articles involve using planning companies whose job it is to design articles containing manipulated data to support a pharmaceutical product and then have these articles accepted by high-impact clinical journals, that is, the journals most likely to affect clinical decision making of doctors. Further, they supply doctors in clinical practice with free reprints of these manipulated articles. The Guardian found 250 companies engaged in this ghostwriting business. The final step in designing these articles for publication in the most prestigious journals is to recruit well recognized medical experts from prestigious institutions, to add their name to these articles. These recruited medical authors are either paid upon agreeing to add their name to these pre- written articles or they do so for the prestige of having their name on an article in a prestigious medical journal.[11]
Of vital importance is the observation by experts in the field of medical publishing that nothing has been done to stop this abuse. Medical ethicists have lamented that because of this widespread practice “you can’t trust anything.” While some journals insist on disclosure information, most doctors reading these articles ignore this information or excuse it and several journals make disclosure more difficult by requiring the reader to find the disclosure statements at another location. Many journals do not police such statements and omissions by authors are common and without punishment.
As concerns the information made available to the public, virtually all the media is under the control of these pharmaceutical giants or others who are benefitting from this “pandemic”. Their stories are all the same, both in content and even wording. Orchestrated coverups occur daily and massive data exposing the lies being generated by these information controllers are hidden from the public. All data coming over the national media (TV, newspaper and magazines), as well as the local news you watch every day, comes only from “official” sources—most of which are lies, distortions or completely manufactured out of whole cloth—all aimed to deceive the public.
Television media receives the majority of its advertising budget from the international pharmaceutical companies—this creates an irresistible influence to report all concocted studies supporting their vaccines and other so-called treatments.[14] In 2020 alone the pharmaceutical industries spent 6.56 billion dollars on such advertising.[13,14] Pharma TV advertising amounted to 4.58 billion, an incredible 75% of their budget. That buys a lot of influence and control over the media. World famous experts within all fields of infectious diseases are excluded from media exposure and from social media should they in any way deviate against the concocted lies and distortions by the makers of these vaccines. In addition, these pharmaceutical companies spend tens of millions on social media advertising, with Pfizer leading the pack with $55 million in 2020.[14]
While these attacks on free speech are terrifying enough, even worse is the virtually universal control hospital administrators have exercised over the details of medical care in hospitals. These hirelings are now instructing doctors which treatment protocols they will adhere to and which treatments they will not use, no matter how harmful the “approved” treatments are or how beneficial the “unapproved” treatments are.[33,57]
Never in the history of American medicine have hospital administrators dictated to its physicians how they will practice medicine and what medications they can use. The CDC has no authority to dictate to hospitals or doctors concerning medical treatments. Yet, most physicians complied without the slightest resistance.
The federal Care Act encouraged this human disaster by offering all US hospitals up to 39,000 dollars for each ICU patient they put on respirators, despite the fact that early on it was obvious that the respirators were a major cause of death among these unsuspecting, trusting patients. In addition, the hospitals received 12,000 dollars for each patient that was admitted to the ICU—explaining, in my opinion and others, why all federal medical bureaucracies (CDC, FDA, NIAID, NIH, etc) did all in their power to prevent life- saving early treatments.[46] Letting patients deteriorate to the point they needed hospitalization, meant big money for all hospitals. A growing number of hospitals are in danger of bankruptcy, and many have closed their doors, even before this “pandemic”.[50] Most of these hospitals are now owned by national or international corporations, including teaching hospitals.[10]
It is also interesting to note that with the arrival of this “pandemic” we have witnessed a surge in hospital corporate chains buying up a number of these financially at-risk hospitals.[1,54] It has been noted that billions in Federal Covid aid is being used by these hospital giants to acquire these financially endangered hospitals, further increasing the power of corporate medicine over physician independence. Physicians expelled from their hospitals are finding it difficult to find other hospitals staffs to join since they too may be owned by the same corporate giant. As a result, vaccine mandate policies include far larger numbers of hospital employees. For example, Mayo Clinic fired 700 employees for exercising their right to refuse a dangerous, essentially untested experimental vaccine.[51,57] Mayo Clinic did this despite the fact that many of these employees worked during the worst of the epidemic and are being fired when the Omicron variant is the dominant strain of the virus, has the pathogenicity of a common cold for most and the vaccines are ineffective in preventing the infection.
In addition, it has been proven that the vaccinated asymptomatic person has a nasopharyngeal titer of the virus as high as an infected unvaccinated person. If the purpose of the vaccine mandate is to prevent viral spread among the hospital staff and patients, then it is the vaccinated who present the greatest risk of transmission, not the unvaccinated. The difference is that a sick unvaccinated person would not go to work, the asymptomatic vaccinated spreader will.
What we do know is that major medical centers, such as Mayo Clinic, receive tens of millions of dollars in NIH grants each year as well as monies from the pharmaceutical makers of these experimental “vaccines”. In my view, that is the real consideration driving these policies. If this could be proven in a court of law the administrators making these mandates should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and sued by all injured parties.
The hospital bankruptcy problem has grown increasingly acute due to hospitals vaccine mandates and resulting large number of hospitals staff, especially nurses, refusing to be forcibly vaccinated.[17,51] This is all unprecedented in the history of medical care. Doctors within hospitals are responsible for the treatment of their individual patients and work directly with these patients and their families to initiate these treatments. Outside organizations, such as the CDC, have no authority to intervene in these treatments and to do so exposes the patients to grave errors by an organization that has never treated a single COVID-19 patient.
When this pandemic started, hospitals were ordered by the CDC to follow a treatment protocol that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of patients, most of whom would have recovered had proper treatments been allowed.[43,44] The majority of these deaths could have been prevented had doctors been allowed to use early treatment with such products as Ivermectin, hydroxy-chloroquine and a number of other safe drugs and natural compounds. It has been estimated, based on results by physicians treating the most covid patients successfully, that of the 800,000 people that we are told died from Covid, 640,000 could have not only been saved, but could have, in many cases, returned to their pre-infection health status had mandated early treatment with these proven methods been used. This neglect of early treatment constitutes mass murder. That means 160,000 would have actually died, far less than the number dying at the hands of bureaucracies, medical associations and medical boards that refused to stand up for their patients. According to studies of early treatment of thousands of patients by brave, caring doctors, seventy-five to eighty percent of the deaths could have been prevented.[43,44]
Incredibly, these knowledgeable doctors were prevented from saving these Covid-19 infected people. It should be an embarrassment to the medical profession that so many doctors mindlessly followed the deadly protocols established by the controllers of medicine.
One must also keep in mind that this event never satisfied the criteria for a pandemic. The World Health Organization changed the criteria to make this a pandemic. To qualify for a pandemic status the virus must have a high mortality rate for the vast majority of people, which it didn’t (with a 99.98% survival rate), and it must have no known existing treatments—which this virus had—in fact, a growing number of very successful treatments.
The draconian measures established to contain this contrived “pandemic” have never been shown to be successful, such as masking the public, lockdowns, and social distancing. A number of carefully done studies during previous flu seasons demonstrated that masks, of any kind, had never prevented the spread of the virus among the public.[60]
In fact, some very good studies suggested that the masks actually spread the virus by giving people a false sense of security and other factors, such as the observation that people were constantly breaking sterile technique by touching their mask, improper removal and by leakage of infectious aerosols around the edges of the mask. In addition masks were being disposed of in parking lots, walking trails, laid on tabletops in restaurants and placed in pockets and purses.
Within a few minutes of putting on the mask, a number of pathogenic bacteria can be cultured from the masks, putting the immune suppressed person at a high risk of bacterial pneumonia and children at a higher risk of meningitis.[16] A study by researchers at the University of Florida cultured over 11 pathogenic bacteria from the inside of the mask worn by children in schools.[40]
It was also known that children were at essentially no risk of either getting sick from the virus or transmitting it.
In addition, it was also known that wearing a mask for over 4 hours (as occurs in all schools) results in significant hypoxia (low blood oxygen levels) and hypercapnia (high CO2 levels), which have a number of deleterious effects on health, including impairing the development of the child’s brain.[4,72,52]
We have known that brain development continues long after the grade school years. A recent study found that children born during the “pandemic” have significantly lower IQs—yet school boards, school principals and other educational bureaucrats are obviously unconcerned.[18]
TOOLS OF THE INDOCTRINATION TRADE
The designers of this pandemic anticipated a pushback by the public and that major embarrassing questions would be asked. To prevent this, the controllers fed the media a number of tactics, one of the most commonly used was and is the “fact check” scam. With each confrontation with carefully documented evidence, the media “fact checkers” countered with the charge of “misinformation”, and an unfounded “conspiracy theory” charge that was, in their lexicon, “debunked”. Never were we told who the fact checkers were or the source of their “debunking” information—we were just to believe the “fact checkers”. A recent court case established under oath that facebook “fact checkers” used their own staff opinion and not real experts to check “facts”.[59] When sources are in fact revealed they are invariably the corrupt CDC, WHO or Anthony Fauci or just their opinion. Here is a list of things that were labeled as “myths” and “misinformation” that were later proven to be true.
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The asymptomatic vaccinated are spreading the virus equally as with unvaccinated symptomatic infected.
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The vaccines cannot protect adequately against new variants, such as Delta and Omicron.
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Natural immunity is far superior to vaccine immunity and is most likely lifelong.
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Vaccine immunity not only wanes after several months, but all immune cells are impaired for prolonged periods, putting the vaccinated at a high risk of all infections and cancer.
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COVID vaccines can cause a significant incidence of blood clots and other serious side effects
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The vaccine proponents will demand numerous boosters as each variant appears on the scene.
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Fauci will insist on the covid vaccine for small children and even babies.
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Vaccine passports will be required to enter a business, fly in a plane, and use public transportation
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There will be internment camps for the unvaccinated (as in Australia, Austria and Canada)
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The unvaccinated will be denied employment.
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There are secret agreements between the government, elitist institutions, and vaccine makers
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Many hospitals were either empty or had low occupancy during the pandemic.
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The spike protein from the vaccine enters the nucleus of the cell, altering cell DNA repair function.
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Hundreds of thousands have been killed by the vaccines and many times more have been permanently damaged.
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Early treatment could have saved the lives of most of the 700,000 who died.
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Vaccine-induced myocarditis (which was denied initially) is a significant problem and clears over a short period.
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Special deadly lots (batches) of these vaccines are mixed with the mass of other Covid-19 vaccines
Several of these claims by those opposing these vaccines now appear on the CDC website—most still identified as “myths”. Today, extensive evidence has confirmed that each of these so-called “myths” were in fact true. Many are even admitted by the “saint of vaccines”, Anthony Fauci. For example, we were told, even by our cognitively impaired President, that once the vaccine was released all the vaccinated people could take off their masks. Oops! We were told shortly afterward— the vaccinated have high concentrations (titers) of the virus in their noses and mouths (nasopharynx) and can transmit the virus to others in which they come into contact—especially their own family members. On go the masks once again— in fact double masking is recommended. The vaccinated are now known to be the main superspreaders of the virus and hospitals are filled with the sick vaccinated and people suffering from serious vaccine complications.[27,42,45]
Another tactic by the vaccine proponents is to demonize those who reject being vaccinated for a variety of reasons. The media refers to these critically thinking individuals as “anti-vaxxers”, “vaccine deniers”, “Vaccine resisters”, “murders”, “enemies of the greater good” and as being the ones prolonging the pandemic. I have been appalled by the vicious, often heartless attacks by some of the people on social media when a parent or loved one relates a story of the terrible suffering and eventual death, they or their loved one suffered as a result of the vaccines. Some psychopaths tweet that they are glad that the loved one died or that the dead vaccinated person was an enemy of good for telling of the event and should be banned. This is hard to conceptualize. This level of cruelty is terrifying, and signifies the collapse of a moral, decent, and compassionate society.
It is bad enough for the public to sink this low, but the media, political leaders, hospital administrators, medical associations and medical licensing boards are acting in a similar morally dysfunctional and cruel way.
LOGIC, REASONING, AND SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE HAS DISAPPEARED IN THIS EVENT
Has scientific evidence, carefully done studies, clinical experience and medical logic had any effect on stopping these ineffective and dangerous vaccines? Absolutely not! The draconian efforts to vaccinate everyone on the planet continues (except the elite, postal workers, members of Congress and other insiders).[31,62]
In the case of all other drugs and previous conventional vaccines under review by the FDA, the otherwise unexplained deaths of 50 or less individuals would result in a halt in further distribution of the product, as happened on 1976 with the swine flu vaccine. With over 18,000 deaths being reported by the VAERS system for the period December 14, 2020 and December 31st, 2021 as well as 139,126 serious injuries (including deaths) for the same period there is still no interest in stopping this deadly vaccine program.[61] Worse, there is no serious investigation by any government agency to determine why these people are dying and being seriously and permanently injured by these vaccines.[15,67] What we do see is a continuous series of coverups and evasions by the vaccine makers and their promoters.
The war against effective cheap and very safe repurposed drugs and natural compounds, that have proven beyond all doubt to have saved millions of lives all over the world, has not only continued but has stepped up in intensity.[32,34,43]
Doctors are told they cannot provide these life-saving compounds for their patients and if they do, they will be removed from the hospital, have their medical license removed or be punished in many other ways. A great many pharmacies have refused to fill prescriptions for lvermectin or hydroxy- chloroquine, despite the fact that millions of people have taken these drugs safely for over 60 years in the case of hydroxy chloroquine and decades for Ivermectin.[33,36] This refusal to fill prescriptions is unprecedented and has been engineered by those wanting to prevent alternative methods of treatment, all based on protecting vaccine expansion to all. Several companies that make hydroxy chloroquine agreed to empty their stocks of the drug by donating them to the Strategic National Stockpile, making this drug far more difficult to get.[33] Why would the government do that when over 30 well-done studies have shown that this drug reduced deaths anywhere from 66% to 92% in other countries, such as India, Egypt, Argentina, France, Nigeria, Spain, Peru, Mexico, and others?[23]
The critics of these two life-saving drugs are most often funded by Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci, both of which are making millions from these vaccines.[48,15]
To further stop the use of these drugs, the pharmaceutical industry and Bill Gates/Anthony Fauci funded fake research to make the case that hydroxy chloroquine was a dangerous drug and could damage the heart.[34] To make this fraudulent case the researchers administered the sickest of covid patients a near lethal dose of the drug, in a dose far higher than used on any covid patient by Dr. Kory, McCullough and other “real”, and compassionate doctors, physicians who were actually treating covid patients.[23]
The controlled, lap-dog media, of course, hammered the public with stories of the deadly effect of hydroxy- chloroquine, all with a terrified look of fake panic. All these stories of ivermectin dangers were shown to be untrue and some of the stories were incredibly preposterous.[37,43]
The attack on Ivermectin was even more vicious than against hydroxy-chloroquine. All of this, and a great deal more is meticulously chronicled in Robert Kennedy, Jr’s excellent new book—The Real Anthony Fauci. Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.[32] If you are truly concerned with the truth and with all that has occurred since this atrocity started, you must not only read, but study this book carefully. It is fully referenced and covers all topics in great detail. This is a designed human tragedy of Biblical proportions by some of the most vile, heartless, psychopaths in history.
Millions have been deliberately killed and crippled, not only by this engineered virus, but by the vaccine itself and by the draconian measures used by these governments to “control the pandemic spread”. We must not ignore the “deaths by despair” caused by these draconian measures, which can exceed hundreds of thousands. Millions have starved in third world countries as a result. In the United States alone, of the 800,000 who died, claimed by the medical bureaucracies, well over 600,000 of these deaths were the result of the purposeful neglect of early treatment, blocking the use of highly effective and safe repurposed drugs, such as hydroxy-chloroquine and Ivermectin, and the forced use of deadly treatments such as remdesivir and use of ventilators. This does not count the deaths of despair and neglected medical care caused by the lockdown and hospital measures forced on healthcare systems.
To compound all this, because of vaccine mandates among all hospital personnel, thousands of nurses and other hospital workers have resigned or been fired.[17,30,51] This has resulted in critical shortages of these vital healthcare workers and dangerous reductions of ICU beds in many hospitals. In addition, as occurred in the Lewis County Healthcare System, a specialty-hospital system in Lowville, N.Y., closed its maternity unit following the resignation of 30 hospital staff over the state’s disastrous vaccine mandate orders. The irony in all these cases of resignations is that the administrators unhesitatingly accepted these mass staffing losses despite rantings about suffering from short staffing during a “crisis”. This is especially puzzling when we learned that the vaccines did not prevent viral transmission and the present predominant variant is of extremely low pathogenicity.
DANGERS OF THE VACCINES ARE INCREASINGLY REVEALED BY SCIENCE
While most researchers, virologists, infectious disease researchers and epidemiologists have been intimidated into silence, a growing number of high integrity individuals with tremendous expertise have come forward to tell the truth—that is, that these vaccines are deadly.
Most new vaccines must go through extensive safety testing for years before they are approved. New technologies, such as the mRNA and DNA vaccines, require a minimum of 10 years of careful testing and extensive follow-up. These new so-called vaccines were “tested” for only 2 months and then the results of these safety test were and continue to be kept secret. Testimony before Senator Ron Johnson by several who participated in the 2 months study indicates that virtually no follow-up of the participants of the pre-release study was ever done.[67] Complains of complications were ignored and despite promises by Pfizer that all medical expenses caused by the “vaccines” would be paid by Pfizer, these individuals stated that none were paid.[66] Some medical expenses exceed 100,000 dollars.
As an example of the deception by Pfizer, and the other makers of mRNA vaccines, is the case of 12-year-old Maddie de Garay, who participated in the Pfizer vaccine pre-release safety study. At Sen. Johnson’s presentation with the families of the vaccine injured, her mother told of her child’s recurrent seizures, that she is now confined to a wheelchair, must be tube fed and suffers permanent brain damage. On the Pfizer safety evaluation submitted to the FDA her only side effect is listed as having a “stomachache”. Each person submitted similar horrifying stories.
The Japanese resorted to a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) lawsuit to force Pfizer to release its secret biodistribution study. The reason Pfizer wanted it kept secret is that it demonstrated that Pfizer lied to the public and the regulatory agencies about the fate of the injected vaccine contents (the mRNA enclosed nano-lipid carrier). They claimed that it remained at the site of the injection (the shoulder), when in fact their own study found that it rapidly spread throughout the entire body by the bloodstream within 48 hours.
The study also found that these deadly nano-lipid carriers collected in very high concentrations in several organs, including the reproductive organs of males and females, the heart, the liver, the bone marrow, and the spleen (a major immune organ). The highest concentration was in the ovaries and the bone marrow. These nano-lipid carriers also were deposited in the brain.
Dr. Ryan Cole, a pathologist from Idaho reported a dramatic spike in highly aggressive cancers among vaccinated individuals, (not reported in the Media). He found a frighteningly high incidence of highly aggressive cancers in vaccinated individuals, especially highly invasive melanomas in young people and uterine cancers in women.[26] Other reports of activation of previously controlled cancers are also appearing among vaccinated cancer patients.[47] Thus far, no studies have been done to confirm these reports, but it is unlikely such studies will be done, at least studies funded by grants from the NIH.
The high concentration of spike proteins found in the ovaries in the biodistribution study could very well impair fertility in young women, alter menstruation, and could put them at an increased risk of ovarian cancer. The high concentration in the bone marrow, could also put the vaccinated at a high risk of leukemia and lymphoma. The leukemia risk is very worrisome now that they have started vaccinating children as young as 5 years of age. No long-term studies have been conducted by any of these makers of Covid-19 vaccines, especially as regards the risk of cancer induction. Chronic inflammation is intimately linked to cancer induction, growth and invasion and vaccines stimulate inflammation.
Cancer patients are being told they should get vaccinated with these deadly vaccines. This, in my opinion, is insane. Newer studies have shown that this type of vaccine inserts the spike protein within the nucleus of the immune cells (and most likely many cell types) and once there, inhibits two very important DNA repair enzymes, BRCA1 and 53BP1, whose duty it is to repair damage to the cell’s DNA.[29] Unrepaired DNA damage plays a major role in cancer.
There is a hereditary disease called xeroderma pigmentosum in which the DNA repair enzymes are defective. These ill-fated individuals develop multiple skin cancers and a very high incidence of organ cancer as a result. Here we have a vaccine that does the same thing, but to a less extensive degree.
One of the defective repair enzymes caused by these vaccines is called BRCA1, which is associated with a significantly higher incidence of breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men.
It should be noted that no studies were ever done on several critical aspects of this type of vaccine.
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They have never been tested for long term effects
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They have never been tested for induction of autoimmunity
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They have never been properly tested for safety during any stage of pregnancy
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No follow-up studies have been done on the babies of vaccinated women
-
There are no long-term studies on the children of vaccinated pregnant women after their birth (Especially as neurodevelopmental milestone occur).
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It has never been tested for effects on a long list of medical conditions:
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Diabetes
-
Heart disease
-
Atherosclerosis
-
Neurodegenerative diseases
-
Neuropsychiatric effects
-
Induction of autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia
-
Long term immune function
-
Vertical transmission of defects and disorders
-
Cancer
-
Autoimmune disorders
-
Previous experience with the flu vaccines clearly demonstrates that the safety studies done by researchers and clinical doctors with ties to pharmaceutical companies were essentially all either poorly done or purposefully designed to falsely show safety and coverup side effects and complications. This was dramatically demonstrated with the previously mentioned phony studies designed to indicate that hydroxy Chloroquine and Ivermectin were ineffective and too dangerous to use.[34,36,37] These fake studies resulted in millions of deaths and severe health disasters worldwide. As stated, 80% of all deaths were unnecessary and could have been prevented with inexpensive, safe repurposed medications with a very long safety history among millions who have taken them for decades or even a lifetime.[43,44]
It is beyond ironic that those claiming that they are responsible for protecting our health approved a poorly tested set of vaccines that has resulted in more deaths in less than a year of use than all the other vaccines combined given over the past 30 years. Their excuse when confronted was—“we had to overlook some safety measures because this was a deadly pandemic”.[28,46]
In 1986 President Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which gave blanket protection to pharmaceutical makers of vaccines against injury litigation by families of vaccine injured individuals. The Supreme Court, in a 57-page opinion, ruled in favor of the vaccine companies, effectively allowing vaccine makers to manufacture and distribute dangerous, often ineffective vaccines to the population without fear of legal consequences. The court did insist on a vaccine injury compensation system which has paid out only a very small number of rewards to a large number of severely injured individuals. It is known that it is very difficult to receive these awards. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, since 1988 the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has agreed to pay 3,597 awards among 19,098 vaccine injured individuals applying amounting to a total sum of $3.8 billion. This was prior to the introduction of the Covid-19 vaccines, in which the deaths alone exceed all deaths related to all the vaccines combined over a thirty-year period.
In 2018 President Trump signed into law the “right-to-try” law which allowed the use of experimental drugs and all unconventional treatments to be used in cases of extreme medical conditions. As we have seen with the refusal of many hospitals and even blanket refusal by states to allow Ivermectin, hydroxy-chloroquine or any other unapproved “official” methods to treat even terminal Covid-19 cases, these nefarious individuals have ignored this law.
Strangely, they did not use this same logic or the law when it came to Ivermectin and Hydroxy Chloroquine, both of which had undergone extensive safety testing by over 30 clinical studies of a high quality and given glowing reports on both efficacy and safety in numerous countries. In addition, we had a record of use for up to 60 years by millions of people, using these drugs worldwide, with an excellent safety record. It was obvious that a group of very powerful people in conjunction with pharmaceutical conglomerates didn’t want the pandemic to end and wanted vaccines as the only treatment option. Kennedy’s book makes this case using extensive evidence and citations.[14,32]
Dr. James Thorpe, an expert in maternal-fetal medicine, demonstrates that these covoid-19 vaccines given during pregnancy have resulted in a 50-fold higher incidence of miscarriage than reported with all other vaccines combined.[28] When we examine his graph on fetal malformations there was a 144-fold higher incidence of fetal malformation with the Covid-19 vaccines given during pregnancy as compared to all other vaccines combined. Yet, the American Academy of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology endorse the safety of these vaccines for all stages of pregnancy and among women breast feeding their babies.
It is noteworthy that these medical specialty groups have received significant funding from Pfizer pharmaceutical company. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, just in the 4th quarter of 2010, received a total of $11,000 from Pfizer Pharmaceutical company alone.[70] Funding from NIH grants are much higher.[20] The best way to lose these grants is to criticize the source of the funds, their products or pet programs. Peter Duesberg, because of his daring to question Fauci’s pet theory of AIDS caused by HIV virus, was no longer awarded any of the 30 grant applications he submitted after going public. Prior to this episode, as the leading authority on retroviruses in the world, he had never been turned down for an NIH grant.[39] This is how the “corrupted” system works, even though much of the grant money comes from our taxes.
HOT LOTS—DEADLY BATCHES OF THE VACCINES
A new study has now surfaced, the results of which are terrifying.[25] A researcher at Kingston University in London, has completed an extensive analysis of the VAERs data (a subdepartment of the CDC which collects voluntary vaccine complication data), in which he grouped reported deaths following the vaccines according to the manufacturer’s lot numbers of the vaccines. Vaccines are manufactured in large batches called lots. What he discovered was that the vaccines are divided into over 20,000 lots and that one out of every 200 of these batches (lots) is demonstrably deadly to anyone who receives a vaccine from that lot, which includes thousands of vaccine doses.
He examined all manufactured vaccines—Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson (Janssen), etc. He found that among every 200 batches of the vaccine from Pfizer and other makers, one batch of the 200 was found to be over 50x more deadly than vaccines batches from other lots. The other vaccine lots (batches) were also causing deaths and disabilities, but nowhere near to this extent. These deadly batches should have appeared randomly among all “vaccines” if it was an unintentional event. However, he found that 5% of the vaccines were responsible for 90% of the serious adverse events, including deaths. The incidence of deaths and serious complications among these “hot lots” varied from over 1000% to several thousand percent higher than comparable safer lots. If you think this was by accident—think again. This is not the first time “hot lots” were, in my opinion, purposefully manufactured and sent across the nation—usually vaccines designed for children. In one such scandal, “hot lots” of a vaccine ended up all in one state and the damage immediately became evident. What was the manufacture’s response? It wasn’t to remove the deadly batches of the vaccine. He ordered his company to scatter the hot lots across the nation so that authorities would not see the obvious deadly effect.
All lots of a vaccine are numbered—for example Modera labels them with such codes as 013M20A. It was noted that the batch numbers ended in either 20A or 21A. Batches ending in 20A were much more toxic than the ones ending in 21A. The batches ending in 20A had about 1700 adverse events, versus a few hundred to twenty or thirty events for the 21A batches. This example explains why some people had few or no adverse events after taking the vaccine while others are either killed or severely and permanently harmed. To see the researcher’s explanation, go to https://www.bitchute.com/video/6xIYPZBkydsu/ In my opinion these examples strongly suggest an intentional alteration of the production of the “vaccine” to include deadly batches.
I have met and worked with a number of people concerned with vaccine safety and I can tell you they are not the evil anti-vaxxers you are told they are. They are highly principled, moral, compassionate people, many of which are top researchers and people who have studied the issue extensively. Robert Kennedy, Jr, Barbara Lou Fisher, Dr. Meryl Nass, Professor Christopher Shaw, Megan Redshaw, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, Dr. Joseph Mercola, Neil Z. Miller, Dr. Lucija Tomjinovic, Dr. Stephanie Seneff, Dr. Steve Kirsch and Dr. Peter McCullough just to name a few. These people have nothing to gain and a lot to lose. They are attacked viciously by the media, government agencies, and elite billionaires who think they should control the world and everyone in it.
WHY DID FAUCI WANT NO AUTOPSIES OF THOSE WHO DIED AFTER VACCINATION?
There are many things about this “pandemic” that are unprecedented in medical history. One of the most startling is that at the height of the pandemic so few autopsies, especially total autopsies, were being done. A mysterious virus was rapidly spreading around the world, a selected group of people with weakened immune systems were getting seriously ill and many were dying and the one way we could rapidly gain the most knowledge about this virus—an autopsy, was being discouraged.
Guerriero noted that by the end of April, 2020 approximately 150,000 people had died, yet there were only 16 autopsies performed and reported in the medical literature.[24] Among these, only seven were complete autopsies, the remaining 9 being partial or by needle biopsy or incisional biopsy. Only after 170,000 deaths by Covid-19 and four months into the pandemic were the first series of autopsies actually done, that is, more than ten. And only after 280,000 deaths and another month, were the first large series of autopsies performed, some 80 in number.[22] Sperhake, in a call for autopsies to be done without question, noted that the first full autopsy reported in the literature along with photomicrographs appeared in a medico-legal journal from China in February 2020.[41,68] Sperhake expressed confusion as to why there was a reluctance to perform autopsies during the crisis, but he knew it was not coming from the pathologists. The medical literature was littered with appeals by pathologist for more autopsies to be performed.[58] Sperhake further noted that the Robert Koch Institute (The German health monitoring system) at least initially advised against doing autopsies. He also knew that at the time 200 participating autopsy institutions in the United States had done at least 225 autopsies among 14 states.
Some have claimed that this dearth of autopsies was based on the government’s fear of infection among the pathologists, but a study of 225 autopsies on Covid-19 cases demonstrated only one case of infection among the pathologist and this was concluded to have been an infection contracted elsewhere.[19] Guerriero ends his article calling for more autopsies with this observation: “Shoulder to shoulder, clinical and forensic pathologists overcame the obstructions of autopsy studies in Covid-19 victims and hereby generated valuable knowledge on the pathophysiology of the interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 and the human body, thus contributing to our understanding of the disease.”[24]
Suspicion concerning the worldwide reluctance of nations to allow full post mortem studies of Covid-19 victims may be based on the idea that it was more than by chance. There are at least two possibilities that stand out. First, those leading the progression of this “non-pandemic” event into a perceived worldwide “deadly pandemic”, were hiding an important secret that autopsies could document. Namely, just how many of the deaths were actually caused by the virus? To implement draconian measures, such as mandated mask wearing, lockdowns, destruction of businesses, and eventually mandated forced vaccination, they needed very large numbers of covid-19 infected dead. Fear would be the driving force for all these destructive pandemic control programs.
Elder et al in his study classified the autopsy findings into four groups.[22]
- Certain Covid-19 death
- Probably Covid-19 death
- Possible Covid-19 death
- Not associated with Covid-19, despite the positive test.
What possibly concerned or even terrified the engineers of this pandemic was that autopsies just might, and did, show that a number of these so-called Covid-19 deaths in truth died of their comorbid diseases. In the vast majority of autopsy studies reported, pathologists noted multiple comorbid conditions, most of which at the extremes of life could alone be fatal. Previously it was known that common cold viruses had an 8% mortality in nursing homes.
In addition, valuable evidence could be obtained from the autopsies that would improve clinical treatments and could possibly demonstrate the deadly effect of the CDC mandated protocols all hospitals were required to follow, such as the use of respirators and the deadly, kidney-destroying drug remdesivir. The autopsies also demonstrated accumulating medical errors and poor-quality care, as the shielding of doctors in intensive care units from the eyes of family members inevitably leads to poorer quality care as reported by several nurses working in these areas.[53-55]
As bad as all this was, the very same thing is being done in the case of Covid vaccine deaths—very few complete autopsies have been done to understand why these people died, that is, until recently. Two highly qualified researchers, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi a microbiologist and highly qualified expert in infectious disease and Dr. Arne Burkhardt, a pathologist who is a widely published authority having been a professor of pathology at several prestigious institutions, recently performed autopsies on 15 people having died after vaccination. What they found explains why so many are dying and experiencing organ damage and deadly blood clots.[5]
They determined that 14 of the fifteen people died as a result of the vaccines and not of other causes. Dr. Burkhardt, the pathologist, observed widespread evidence of an immune attack on the autopsied individuals’ organs and tissues— especially their heart. This evidence included extensive invasion of small blood vessels with massive numbers of lymphocytes, which cause extensive cell destruction when unleashed. Other organs, such as the lungs and liver, were observed to have extensive damage as well. These findings indicate the vaccines were causing the body to attack itself with deadly consequences. One can easily see why Anthony Fauci, as well as public health officers and all who are heavily promoting these vaccines, publicly discouraged autopsies on the vaccinated who subsequently died. One can also see that in the case of vaccines, that were essentially untested prior to being approved for the general public, at least the regulatory agencies should have been required to carefully monitor and analyze all serious complications, and certainly deaths, linked to these vaccines. The best way to do that is with complete autopsies.
While we learned important information from these autopsies what is really needed are special studies of the tissues of those who have died after vaccination for the presence of spike protein infiltration throughout the organs and tissues. This would be critical information, as such infiltration would result in severe damage to all tissues and organs involved—especially the heart, the brain, and the immune system. Animal studies have demonstrated this. In these vaccinated individuals the source of these spike proteins would be the injected nanolipid carriers of the spike protein producing mRNA. It is obvious that the government health authorities and pharmaceutical manufacturers of these “vaccines” do not want these critical studies done as the public would be outraged and demand an end to the vaccination program and prosecution of the involved individuals who covered this up.
CONCLUSIONS
We are all living through one of the most drastic changes in our culture, economic system, as well as political system in our nation’s history as well as the rest of the world. We have been told that we will never return to “normal” and that a great reset has been designed to create a “new world order”. This has all been outlined by Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, in his book on the “Great Reset”.[66] This book gives a great deal of insight as to the thinking of the utopians who are proud to claim this pandemic “crisis” as their way to usher in a new world. This new world order has been on the drawing boards of the elite manipulators for over a century.[73,74] In this paper I have concentrated on the devastating effects this has had on the medical care system in the United States, but also includes much of the Western world. In past papers I have discussed the slow erosion of traditional medical care in the United States and how this system has become increasingly bureaucratized and regimented.[7,8] This process was rapidly accelerating, but the appearance of this, in my opinion, manufactured “pandemic” has transformed our health care system over night.
As you have seen, an unprecedented series of events have taken place within this system. Hospital administrators, for example, assumed the position of medical dictators, ordering doctors to follow protocols derived not from those having extensive experience in treating this virus, but rather from a medical bureaucracy that has never treated a single COVID-19 patient. The mandated use of respirators on ICU Covid-19 patients, for example, was imposed in all medical systems and dissenting physicians were rapidly removed from their positions as caregivers, despite their demonstration of markedly improved treatment methods. Further, doctors were told to use the drug remdesivir despite its proven toxicity, lack of effectiveness and high complication rate. They were told to use drugs that impaired respiration and mask every patient, despite the patient’s impaired breathing. In each case, those who refused to abuse their patients were removed from the hospital and even faced a loss of license—or worse.
For the first time in modern medical history, early medical treatment of these infected patients was ignored nationwide. Studies have shown that early medical treatment was saving 80% of higher number of these infected people when initiated by independent doctors.[43,44] Early treatment could have saved over 640,000 lives over the course of this “pandemic”. Despite the demonstration of the power of these early treatments, the forces controlling medical care continued this destructive policy.
Families were not allowed to see their loved ones, forcing these very sick individuals in the hospitals to face their deaths alone. To add insult to injury, funerals were limited to a few grieving family members, who were not allowed to even sit together. All the while large stores, such as Walmart and Cosco were allowed to operate with minimal restrictions. Nursing home patients were also not allowed to have family visitations, again being forced to die a lonely death. All the while, in a number of states, the most transparent being in New York state, infected elderly were purposefully transferred from hospitals into nursing homes, resulting in a very high death rates of these nursing home residents. At the beginning of this “pandemic” over 50% of all death were occurring in nursing homes.
Throughout this “pandemic” we have been fed an unending series of lies, distortions and disinformation by the media, the public health officials, medical bureaucracies (CDC, FDA and WHO) and medical associations. Physicians, scientists, and experts in infectious treatments who formed associations designed to develop more effective and safer treatments, were regularly demonized, harassed, shamed, humiliated, and experience a loss of licensure, loss of hospital privileges and, in at least one case, ordered to have a psychiatric examination.[2,65,71]
Anthony Fauci was given essentially absolute control of all forms of medical care during this event, including insisting that drugs he profited from be used by all treating physicians. He ordered the use of masks, despite at first laughing at the use of masks to filter a virus. Governors, mayors, and many businesses followed his orders without question.
The draconian measures being used, masking, lockdowns, testing of the uninfected, use of the inaccurate PCR test, social distancing, and contact tracing had been shown previously to be of little or no use during previous pandemics, yet all attempts to reject these methods were to no avail. Some states ignored these draconian orders and had either the same or fewer cases, as well as deaths, as the states with the most strictly enforced measures. Again, no amount of evidence or obvious demonstration along these lines had any effect on ending these socially destructive measures. Even when entire countries, such as Sweden, which avoided all these measures, demonstrated equal rates of infections and hospitalization as nations with the strictest, very draconian measures, no policy change by the controlling institutions occurred. No amount of evidence changed anything.
Experts in the psychology of destructive events, such as economic collapses, major disasters and previous pandemics demonstrated that draconian measures come with an enormous cost in the form of “deaths of despair” and in a dramatic increase in serious psychological disorders. The effects of these pandemic measures on children’s neurodevelopment is catastrophic and to a large extent irreversible.
Over time tens of thousands could die as a result of this damage. Even when these predictions began to appear, the controllers of this “pandemic” continued full steam ahead. Drastic increases in suicides, a rise in obesity, a rise in drug and alcohol use, a worsening of many health measures and a terrifying rise in psychiatric disorders, especially depression and anxiety, were ignored by the officials controlling this event.
We eventually learned that many of the deaths were a result of medical neglect. Individuals with chronic medical conditions, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and neurological diseases were no longer being followed properly in their clinics and doctor’s offices. Non-emergency surgeries were put on hold. Many of these patients chose to die at home rather than risk going to the hospitals and many considered hospitals “death houses”.
Records of deaths have shown that there was a rise in deaths among those aged 75 and older, mostly explained by Covid-19 infections, but for those between the ages of 65 to 74, deaths had been increasing well before the pandemic onset.[69] Between ages of 18 and aged 65 years, records demonstrate a shocking hike in non-Covid-19 deaths. Some of these deaths were explained by a dramatic increase in drug-related deaths, some 20,000 more than 2019. Alcohol related deaths also increased substantially, and homicides increased almost 30% in the 18 to 65-year group.
The head of the insurance company OneAmerica stated that their data indicated that the death rate for individuals aged 18 to 64 had increased 40% over the pre-pandemic period.[21] Scott Davidson, the company’s CEO, stated that this represented the highest death rate in the history of insurance records, which does extensive data collections on death rates each year. Davidson also noted that this high of a death rate increase has never been seen in the history of death data collection. Previous catastrophes of monumental extent increased death rates no more than 10 percent, 40% is unprecedented.
Dr. Lindsay Weaver, Indiana’s chief medical officer, stated that hospitalizations in Indiana are higher than at any point in the past five years. This is of critical importance since the vaccines were supposed to significantly reduce deaths, but the opposite has happened. Hospitals are being flooded with vaccine complications and people in critical condition from medical neglect caused by the lockdowns and other pandemic measures.[46,56]
A dramatic number of these people are now dying, with the spike occurring after the vaccines were introduced. The lies flowing from those who have appointed themselves as medical dictators are endless. First, we were told that the lockdown would last only two weeks, they lasted over a year. Then we were told that masks were ineffective and did not need to be worn. Quickly that was reversed. Then we were told the cloth mask was very effective, now it’s not and everyone should be wearing an N95 mask and before that that they should double mask. We were told there was a severe shortage of respirators, then we discover they are sitting unused in warehouses and in city dumps, still in their packing crates. We were informed that the hospitals were filled mostly with the unvaccinated and later found the exact opposite was true the world over. We were told that the vaccine was 95% effective, only to learn that in fact the vaccines cause a progressive erosion of innate immunity.
Upon release of the vaccines, women were told the vaccines were safe during all states of pregnancy, only to find out no studies had been done on safety during pregnancy during the “safety tests” prior to release of the vaccine. We were told that careful testing on volunteers before the EUA approval for public use demonstrated extreme safety of the vaccines, only to learn that these unfortunate subjects were not followed, medical complications caused by the vaccines were not paid for and the media covered this all up.[67] We also learned that the pharmaceutical makers of the vaccines were told by the FDA that further animal testing was unnecessary (the general public would be the Guinea pigs.) Incredibly, we were told that the Pfizer’s new mRNA vaccines had been approved by the FDA, which was a cleaver deception, in that another vaccine had approval (comirnaty) and not the one being used, the BioNTech vaccine. The approved comirnaty vaccine was not available in the United States. The national media told the public that the Pfizer vaccine had been approved and was no longer classed as experimental, a blatant lie. These deadly lies continue. It is time to stop this insanity and bring these people to justice.
Footnotes
How to cite this article: Blaylock RL. COVID UPDATE: What is the truth? Surg Neurol Int 2022;13:167.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Journal or its management.
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Articles from Surgical Neurology International are provided here courtesy of Scientific Scholar
Highlights
- mRNA vaccines promote sustained synthesis of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
- The spike protein is neurotoxic, and it impairs DNA repair mechanisms.
- Suppression of type I interferon responses results in impaired innate immunity.
- The mRNA vaccines potentially cause increased risk to infectious diseases and cancer.
- Codon optimization results in G-rich mRNA that has unpredictable complex effects.
Abstract
The mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were brought to market in response to the public health crises of Covid-19. The utilization of mRNA vaccines in the context of infectious disease has no precedent. The many alterations in the vaccine mRNA hide the mRNA from cellular defenses and promote a longer biological half-life and high production of spike protein. However, the immune response to the vaccine is very different from that to a SARS-CoV-2 infection. In this paper, we present evidence that vaccination induces a profound impairment in type I interferon signaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health. Immune cells that have taken up the vaccine nanoparticles release into circulation large numbers of exosomes containing spike protein along with critical microRNAs that induce a signaling response in recipient cells at distant sites. We also identify potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance. These disturbances potentially have a causal link to neurodegenerative disease, myocarditis, immune thrombocytopenia, Bell's palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, impaired DNA damage response and tumorigenesis. We show evidence from the VAERS database supporting our hypothesis. We believe a comprehensive risk/benefit assessment of the mRNA vaccines questions them as positive contributors to public health.
Graphical abstract
In the early-to-mid 1900s, the rates of stroke & heart attacks were on the rise.
Smoking was a known contributor to this phenomenon. It is a dense source of oxidative stress. When you take your first puff of cigarette smoke, it feels like your chest is on fire. In more ways than one, it is.
Oxidation reactions there needs fuel. So, if smoking is providing oxidative stress...then what is the fuel?
Unfortunately for us, there was a second culprit blamed for the rise of cardiovascular disease - saturated fats. That is the topic of this article.
Fire & Mitochondria
Before we continue with the danger to the circulatory system, we need to take a brief detour to discuss the relationship between fire and metabolism.
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Read the whole article
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The evidence is overwhelming (experimental and clinical) that oxidation of PUFAs play a role in every step of atherosclerosis, including fatty streak formation, atheromatous lesion, plaque instability and rupture. Instability & rupture causes strokes in the brain, heart attacks, and infarctions in every organ that has limited blood supply. The liver and skin are less impacted - they have a lot of redundant blood supply, and usually the other critical organs fail first (e.g brain, heart, kidneys).
The above diagrammed chain reaction is the reason why PUFAs are so dangerous.
Recall the description of combustion:
The combustion of fuel occurs in the absence of enzymes, and relies on a chain reaction to propagate itself until the fuel or oxygen has been consumed.
Lipid peroxidation chain reactions will continue until one radical encounters another radical, neutralizing one another.
Now, imagine that the cells which line your blood vessel (endothelium) have PUFAs in their membranes. The red blood cell membranes also have PUFAs. The balls of cholesterol floating in your blood stream have PUFAs. They are all waiting for an oxidation event.
Oxidation-reduction reactions are the norm throughout the body. But in the presence of PUFAs, this can lead to chain reactions that can propagate uncontrolled. Whether it's the inner wall of the blood vessel, or a ball of cholesterol rushing towards your brain.
The endothelium (blood vessel lining) is a very sensitive single-layer membrane that comes in direct contact with the contents of blood. Even a microsecond of a PUFA oxidation event can damage it, exposing the layers underneath. Once these layers are exposed, one of two things can happen which are potentially devastating:
- Other reactive fatty acids (more PUFAs, for example) can bind to it. This results in fatty streak formation, and eventual atherosclerosis.
- Platelets can start binding and aggregating to exposed basement membrane proteins. This can lead to clot formation ⇨ infarcts
This is why ulcerated atherosclerotic plaques are predictive of impending stroke, heart attack, or dissection. In my estimation, this mechanism also plays a role in aneurysm rupture.
Death by a Thousand Cuts
If the damage caused by these PUFAs was a brief episode, you probably wouldn't suffer long-term illness.
But, many people who consume PUFAs do so for years and decades, if not their whole life. You can hardly blame them - seed oils are in almost everything we consume. In fact, people who try to avoid seed oils often have a hard time both in restaurants and the grocery store. It is so widespread, it has likely contributed to the recent trend of extreme elimination diets.
These elimination diets have a point.
Lipid peroxidation and highly inflammatory states contribute to almost everything that's causing illness in the modern world:
- Cardiovascular disease (leading cause of death and disability)
- Cancer
- Dementia
- Kidney Failure
- Autoimmunity
- Even Osteoporosis ⇨ fractures, which is often categorized as traumatic
As a little experiment, go to a search engine and query:
"Lipid peroxidation" and "any chronic illness"
Every tissue needs blood perfusion. By slowly destroying the blood supply, you develop micro-infarcts that accumulate across time. And, by delivering highly reactive PUFAs to an organ, you are actively oxidizing it. It's lose-lose.
Brain MRI demonstrating grade of 'microvascular ischemia' - tiny infarcts that manifest as confluent loss of white matter across time
Connection to COVID
There are two connections to COVID, actually.
The first is reasonably well encapsulated in this tweet:
I believe the abnormally high rates of illness this past 2 years is due to:
1. Lockdowns/restrictions and the downstream health consequences
2. Inflation causing people to shift towards more affordable food (seed oil, cheap carbs)
3. Global-scale clinical trialNo one virus.
— Remnant | MD (@RemnantMd) April 17, 2022
When the lockdown and restrictions started to get really heavy-handed, reasonable people were concerned with the behavioral changes that would be harmful:
- More sedentary life
- Ordering food (for many reasons, including supporting local businesses)
- Increased alcohol and drug use
This is one connection to the "COVID era," and we are now seeing the consequences of these behaviors. I know some people want to blame the differences in rates of illness to the vaccines, but I think that is only one of three contributing factors.
Revisiting Oxidation
The second connection is directly related to oxidative stress.
Our lungs help bring oxygen into the bloodstream, so that it can be circulated to our organs. Oxygen is just one oxidant in the air. There's also ozone, amongst others. Our lungs are constantly exposed to oxidative stress - especially if you are a smoker.
You would think that our lungs have evolved mechanisms to resist oxidants - and they have! For example, surfactant (the fluid that keeps your lungs open) has a protein which binds to and neutralizes oxidants. But, even the lungs have their limit. At some point, they will give in. What happens when the lungs fail?
The lungs provide a boundary that allows your blood to engage with the air without letting free air into your blood stream, or fluid moving into your lungs. So when the lung fails...fluid tends to accumulate in the lungs.
Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome
ARDS is a type of respiratory failure characterized by rapid onset of widespread inflammation in the lungs - leading to fluid build-up.
Obesity is a risk factor for ARDS. It also happens to be a major risk factor for severe COVID-19. One mechanism accounting for this is that people who are obese tend to have a diet high in PUFAs. PUFAs stored in fat can be oxidized as part of a chain reaction, which will lead to a higher severity/amplitude of inflammation.
In the early days of COVID, people were admitted left and right with what looked like ARDS. Our central medical authorities decided this was 'severe COVID.'
But, if you take an unhealthy person, with an unhealthy diet...expose them to an infection...then refuse to treat them for 10 days...a large proportion of them will get ARDS. In this setting any infection is potentially fatal. If you are old, obese, or have high baseline oxidative stress...any infection can get real bad, real fast.
What is the Crime?
In the 1950s Ancel Keys was trying to make a name for himself. He saw an opportunity with heart disease. He had (stole) a hypothesis - and he ran with it.
But, how did he make it so far? Who were his benefactors? One group was Proctor & Gamble.
In the early 1900s, P&G were in the business of making wax and soap - from animal fat. At some point, animal fat got expensive. So, P&G collaborated with a German who had developed the process of hydrogenation. Here they saw an opportunity to mill cottonseed into oil, and hydrogenate it into something that was 'fatty.' This became a substitute for their wax & soap production, which allowed them to scale.
Eventually, electricity made candle-light obsolete. Which meant that P&G were stuck with a cheap way of making "oil," but no product to put it in. That is until unsaturated fatty acids were hailed (by Ancel et al) as a healthy alternative. P&G repurposed the cottonseed oil into Crisco vegetable oil - without telling people what was in it.
For some people in certain positions (e.g. P&G executives), the idea that their product might cause mass harm and suffering does not even cross their mind.
And, why should it?
The WHO & AHA have promoted PUFAs for decades, and to some extent still do.
This article is written for all readers, Year 9 students through elder adults. Methods and reasoning herein are pedestrian. Doctors and scientists may opt to skip to “BEGIN HERE TO VIEW DATA”. If you really want to cheat, skip to the bottom and look for yellow highlighted cells in spreadsheets. Understand what they represent. They represent significant, proven, excess death in the circulatory system matching what the pharmaceutical companies and governments call “rare”, another word seemingly redefined in 2021.
The official Massachusetts database of death certificates contains proof that C19 “vaccines” killed thousands of people in Massachusetts in 2021.
This article details a forensic journey in a one-of-a-kind, brute-force, pedestrian, forensic analysis of the official Massachusetts government data to discover what happened and is happening in a population of ~ 6.9 million people at the fore of C19 “science.” Massachusetts is a leading medical and pharmaceutical technology exporter to the world. Some leaders say it is a model for C19 response planning. The truth is that Massachusetts is a model for fraud on the people.
As demonstrated in particularity below, there was a short pandemic of respiratory deaths in 2020. Then, in the year of injections en masse, deaths switched to mainly circulatory system deaths. Something is attacking the circulatory systems of citizens of Massachusetts.
Three main events are initially depicted: a pandemic, an extremely attenuated second wave of disease no longer a pandemic, and a nearly steady-state excess death anomaly in the second half of 2021 (likely began around February 2021, but was obscured by lower than normal deaths of 85+yo’s due to culling from C19 in spring 2020).
Investigation of the anomaly indicates that excess deaths are circulatory system involved, also known and documented in the C19 vaccine trial data. Though myocarditis gets the most notoriety, the entire circulatory system is under attack.
Hereinafter, the C19 “vaccine” will be called “gene modification” because it is a more accurate descriptor of the biological injectable product. Industry and government chose “vaccine” because it is more psychologically acceptable to consumers. “Vaccine” has product-class recognition and reputation. Ergo, the definition of “vaccine” was changed in 2020 to accommodate the inclusion of C19 gene modification into this product-class. Lawsuits based on this issue of “definition” are pending.
EUA WARNING
It is an undeniable fact that the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the C19 gene modification circumvented the normal course of years-long clinical trials that ensure safety and effectiveness of oral and injectable biological and pharmaceutical products.
Through the EUA, which granted immunity from tort to the manufacturers, the burden of precautions (clinical trials) was shifted from the least cost avoider (the manufacturer) to the most cost avoider (the consumer). Though the burden of precautions is pecuniary to the manufacturer, it entails loss of life to the consumer. Id est, pharmaceutical manufacturers avoid costs and increase profits, while consumers die or are maimed after assuming the burden of precautions as lab rats.
INTRODUCTION
Scientists disagree whether the C19 gene modification's spike protein or its lipid nanoparticle is the root cause of injury or death in a minority of people (a death lottery). Either or both theories are in harmony with this article’s conclusion.
To preemptively assuage decriers of “correlation does not equal causation,” this poignant allegory is offered. If five strong swimmers died in one month in a busy lake, would you: A) close the lake to swimmers pending results of investigation, or B) leave the lake open as a small percentage of swimmers continue to die during investigation? Regarding C19 gene modification, governments chose “B”.
While others start at the lowest level of abstraction (cellular & molecular) and then look upward to localized and systemic injuries in an effort to establish a causal chain, this article starts at the highest level of abstraction (all-cause deaths), then investigates downward into anomalies. 1) Is there an anomaly in all-cause deaths? If so, 2) Whom did the anomaly affect, and when? 3) How did the anomaly manifest in immediate and underlying causes? 4) Are the underlying causes traced to the C19 gene modification as a root cause?
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Read the whole article
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CONCLUSION
Three of the four questions posed have been answered:
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There is an anomaly in all-cause deaths beyond the obvious 8 to 10-week spring 2020 pandemic. The anomaly lasted nearly all of 2021, but manifests visually only from July 2021 through the end of the year and continues into 2022. The first half of 2021, the anomaly was negated by the lack of 85+yo deaths evident by the vertical light blue stripe on the right of the 2021 heat map
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The people affected in 2021 may be considered old, but they are younger on average than in the 2020 C19 pandemic as seen in the vertical pink alley in 2021 heat map.
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In order to achieve an all-cause excess mortality of 10% to 20% during 2021, any single or few multiple cause increase would have to be higher in order to affect the all-cause full population denominator. Indeed circulatory system issues are much higher and account for many excess deaths in the order of thousands, but are likely masked by the numerous bleeds and deposits of clots yielding a smattering of different “I” and “D” and “R” codes.
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No effort is made in this article to tie the C19 gene modification biological injectable product to a mechanism for the circulatory system deaths. Any doctor, scientist, or pedestrian reader can make that inference from the overwhelming correlative data herein. There are tens of thousands of life years lost in 2021 in excess of what was expected by any mathematical formula. These are not from C19. The math does not work out.
Again, the official Massachusetts database of death certificates contains proof that C19 gene modification biological injectable products killed thousands of people in Massachusetts in 2021.
Pandemics do not switch from respiratory to circulatory causes of death in one year. [add sarcasm now] Perhaps it can be done this way. Take the deadly part of the virus and change the mode of entry from aerosols entering lungs to direct injection into the blood stream [lottery win if it gets into a blood vessel].
NOTES
There is a table of eight (8) deaths mentioning “vaccin” or “immuniz” as string searches. Of the 8, only one has ICD-10 codes referring to the injection as a possible cause. The omission of ICD-10 codes is civilly negligent at the very least, and is likely a criminal act of intentional omission leading to fraud on a public record. This will be addressed in the next article. Massachusetts is rife with fraud throughout the entire medical establishment. They do not see it as fraud or as a crime. They see it as the normal course of business for the biggest industry in their little state of 6.9 million people. To those who are injecting children and pushing these death lottery shots, how can you get through another day knowing you were, are, or will be responsible for taking the lives of young children? Or leaving families without a mother or father?
Oh, let this article finally end. Please notice the two tables at the very end. Notice the change in average age by year for both “I” and “J” codes, but more importantly for all-cause total deaths each year in Massachusetts. The average age was lower in 2021 than any of the prior 6 years. That might be expected after a pandemic year that took the old people. However, the total deaths are 3,000 to 4,000 higher in 2021 than any other year except 2020. The average ages of those excess 3,000 to 4,000 who died in 2021 had to have been much younger to change the average as much as they did.
URGENT PLEA
There is not another dataset out there like that one that definitely proves prolonged excess death in causes specific to the circulatory system and in numbers in the thousands of lives and in younger people than expected. C19 was over in Massachusetts in June 2020. What has happened since then has been a hidden disaster of biological injectable product madness.
God bless you all and thank you for reading.