The Pharmaceutical Industry has had an extremely checkered past in terms of producing many products that have had devastating consequences to those who consumed them. Increasingly, the industry encompasses not only all the patented drugs, but also most of the toxic chemicals that are used to control pests in agriculture. Over the past decade, the pharmaceutical industry and the agrichemical industry have been steadily merging into a behemoth of unimaginable power and wealth. For example, Monsanto is now a subsidiary of Bayer AG. It’s a convenient partnership, because the agrichemicals make us sick and the treatment for the many diseases they cause is a cash cow for Big Pharma.
I am confident that the day will come when glyphosate (the active ingredient in the pervasive weedkiller Roundup) has been taken off the market, and it may even happen in my lifetime – either because a sufficient number of government regulators ban it, or because there are too many lawsuits to make it profitable, or because enough consumers start refusing to buy glyphosate-contaminated foods due to health concerns. Hopefully, other herbicides, insecticides and fungicides will follow a similar trajectory.
The pharmaceutical industry is an altogether different story, and its collapse will probably happen too slowly and too late for me to be alive to witness it. Big Pharma has maintained tight control over medical policy for the past hundred years, heavily promoting highly profitable new patentable drugs, and actively discouraging the use of unpatentable natural plant-based medicinals. I believe this policy is a major factor in the inability of the United States to control the COVID-19 pandemic, where even simple things like sun exposure, organic food, and sufficient dietary vitamins and minerals could make a huge difference in disease severity. But we hear nothing from the media or the medical advisors along these lines. The medical establishment is the world’s largest lobby group, and they wield tremendous power that keeps the system in place that in my view is the wrong approach to health and disease.
Here are some of the most glaring examples of drugs introduced by the pharmaceutical industry over the past several decades that brought in lots of profits but had devastating effects on those who became victims of the drugs’ unanticipated adverse effects.
- Thalidomide
I am old enough to remember the photos of young children in Europe with missing arms, legs and ears in the 1950s during the thalidomide disaster. The makers of the new drug to treat depression and morning sickness during pregnancy had no idea that it had the potential to arrest development in such astonishing ways. The thalidomide scandal was referred to at the time as “biggest manmade medical disaster ever,” and it resulted in more than 10,000 children being born with severe deformities [1].
- Statin drugs (E.g., Lipitor)
Lipitor, a statin drug, is the most profitable drug in the world, raking in over $131 billion in sales before its patent expired. Statin drugs, first introduced in the 1970s, are used to treat high serum cholesterol. They work by blocking a critical early step in the mevalonate pathway in the liver. This interferes with the liver’s ability to synthesize cholesterol, as well as several other metabolites from that critical pathway. Dr. Duane Graveline was a friend of mine before he died of an ALS-like syndrome in September 2016. He called himself “Spacedoc” because he used to be the doctor for people being groomed to be astronauts, and his website, spacedoc.com, still contains a wealth of information about the adverse effects of statin drugs. He wrote several books on statins, the most popular of which was his first book called “Lipitor, Thief of Memory.” He himself experienced transient global amnesia while on a statin drug, and this was the main topic of the book. He believed that statin drugs were a causal factor in his ALS, which ultimately led to his premature death. Shortly before he died, he published a peer-reviewed article describing the long list of debilitating symptoms linked to statin drugs in the FDA’s Medwatch system from 2006 to 2013 [2].
In 2011, I published an essay on the Web titled, “How Statins Really Work Explains Why They Don’t Really Work,” where I developed a possible explanation for why statins cause so much muscle pain, as well as other debilitating symptoms [3]. I included statistics derived from online drug side effect reports showing that statins were much more likely than other drugs taken by people of the same age to cause muscle cramps, muscle weakness, difficulty walking, and loss of muscle mass, as well as many cognitive issues. Even when patients complain to their doctor about side effects they believe were caused by the statin drug, more often than not the doctor denies the relationship [4]. I believe that for many if not most people, the risk of side effects for statin drugs far outweighs the benefits.
- Vioxx
Vioxx was a blockbuster nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) that was very popular for treating the aches and pains associated with arthritis, migraine headaches and menstrual pain. The drug was introduced on the market in 1999. After millions of people had taken the drug, a large placebo-controlled study published in 2005 showed that Vioxx increased the risk to cardiovascular disease in the population being studied by nearly a factor of two. Even a year after the patient had stopped taking the drug, they still had a statistically significant increased risk to heart disease [5]. In response to this study, the manufacturer, Merck, withdrew Vioxx from the market. Its unsuspected ability to cause heart disease is estimated to have caused as many as 140,000 cases of serious heart disease, and an estimated 60,000 deaths [6].
- Fluoroquinolones (E.G., Cipro)
Antibiotics are considered to be one of the great medical advances of the 20th century, but many are seeing an end to the era of antibiotics, because of the appearance of more and more dangerous pathogens that have developed multiple antibiotic resistance. Doctors are being forced to prescribe antibiotics that are more effective than penicillin for some difficult-to-treat infections, but these antibiotics can have severe side effects that in many cases are worse than the disease they were prescribed to treat. A new term has been invented to describe the debilitating long-term side effects that can occur in response to a class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones. Patients suffering from these symptoms are called “floxies,” and they refer to themselves as having been “floxed,” because the official names of these drugs, such as “ciprofloxin,” and “levofloxin” often end in the word “floxin.” These drugs can cause long lasting or even permanent severe symptoms, such as tendon rupture, nerve damage and joint pain.
- Antidepressants (E.g., SSRI Inhibitors)
It is now clear that the United States is experiencing an epidemic in the kind of violent behavior that most people find unthinkable. Few can understand what would inspire someone to randomly shoot to kill a group of strangers in a crowd. Although the media rarely mention this, many of these so-called “school shooters” are on antidepressant medication, most especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). While, in the case of psychopharmacology, it is difficult to separate out the underlying disease from the side effects of the drugs, large placebo-controlled trials have shown a statistically significant increased risk of violent behavior in the treated group compared to the placebo group. The authors of an article published in the British Medical Journal described many of these peer-reviewed clinical trials and concluded: “It can no longer be doubted that antidepressants are dangerous and can cause suicide and homicide at any age.” [7].
- Opioid drugs (E.g., Oxycontin)
In the late 1990s, Purdue Pharma started promoting its new synthetic opioid drug Oxycontin as a powerful pain killer that was not addictive. This turned out to be false advertising, and the consequences became apparent when we witnessed an epidemic in deaths from synthetic opioid drug overdoses in the following two decades [8]. This problem is still not under control – there were over 63 thousand overdose deaths in the United States just in 2016, and this number was over 20% higher than the number of deaths in the previous year [9]. In 2016, nearly two thirds of the drug overdose deaths in the U.S. involved opioid drugs.
COVID-19 Vaccines
I am astonished at the degree to which Big Pharma has been able to pull off a marketing blitz to gain tremendous worldwide buy-in for a suite of vaccines that are all based on brand new unproven biotechnology involving potentially very dangerous genetic engineering techniques. One reason for the wide acceptance of these unproven experimental drugs is the strong censorship of those who speak out about the potential harms. We are being led to believe that these vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic, but they may actually make the pandemic even worse than it would be without the vaccines. There’s an astonishing lack of knowledge about potential lasting effects of these new drugs because they were rushed to market with no long-term evaluations of either protection or safety.
Already it is clear that the side effects to the messenger RNA based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and the DNA viral vector-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are considerably more frequent and more severe than side effects to the flu vaccine. But what is most worrisome to me is the potential for unimaginable long-term consequences that will make the thalidomide babies and the Vioxx heart attacks pale in comparison.
J. Bart Classen, an American immunologist, has expressed his urgent concern over the possibility of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines causing prion diseases – severe neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, ALS, Parkinson’s disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob, caused by misfolded proteins [10]. In a peer-reviewed paper, he pointed out that the messenger RNA for the spike protein has an abundance of sequence patterns that are known to bind to and activate certain proteins that cause prion diseases through their misfolding [11]. This is especially troubling in view of the fact that the RNA has been artificially manipulated by replacing all of its uridines with methylpseudouridines, to resist degradation so that it can produce enough spike protein to assure an immune response [12]. Classen states that we have no clue how these modified nucleotides will impact the effect on the prion proteins. He wrote in the abstract: “The enclosed finding as well as additional potential risks leads the author to believe that regulatory approval of the RNA based vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 was premature and that the vaccine may cause much more harm than benefit.” [11]
An expert German virologist named Geert Van Bossche worries that a massive vaccination campaign in the middle of a pandemic will lead to the rapid evolution of variants that are insensitive to the antibodies produced by the vaccines [13]. This phenomenon is called viral immune escape, and it seems plausible to me that vaccinated immune-compromised people, such as cancer patients on chemotherapy, will be breeding grounds for rapidly evolving variants that will be resistant to the antibodies generated by the vaccine. This type of phenomenon has already been observed in a cancer patient administered serum from recovered patients containing antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 [14]. The vaccines force the immune-compromised patient to produce their own antibodies that don’t work to clear the disease, but the net consequence is the same. Bossche is urging that we immediately cancel all ongoing mass vaccination campaigns against COVID-19.
Others have looked at the possibility that the spike protein could produce antibodies that would become autoantibodies and attack human proteins, potentially causing a long list of debilitating autoimmune diseases. In a paper specifically looking at the potential for antibodies to the spike protein to bind to human antigens, the authors wrote: “[W]e found that the strongest reactions were with transglutaminase 3 (tTG3), transglutaminase 2 (tTG2), ENA [extractable nuclear antigen], myelin basic protein (MBP), mitochondria, nuclear antigen (NA), α-myosin, thyroid peroxidase (TPO), collagen, claudin 5+6, and S100B.” This is a laundry list of proteins linked to multiple autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, multiple sclerosis, celiac disease, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren’s syndrome and others. The version of the spike protein in the mRNA vaccines has been tweaked through genetic engineering to have a pair of adjacent proline residues that maintain the protein in a “prefusion” shape [15]. This tweak has been demonstrated to stabilize the protein in a conformation that increases antibody production [16], but this could backfire into autoimmune disease.
It will take months and in some cases years before we determine whether the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are causing all these problems. What we may see in the future is an alarming rise in autoimmune diseases and neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CKD), along with the need for a fresh round of vaccines every few months where the mRNA repertoire is expanded to code for an ever growing list of emergent variants. Is this what we want for our children’s future?
References
[1] Wikipedia. Thalidomide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
[2] Duane Graveline. Adverse Effects of Statin Drugs: A Physician Patient’s Perspective. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 2015; 20(1): 1-11.
[3] Stephanie Seneff. How Statins Really Work Explains Why They Don’t Really Work. March 11, 2011. https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/why_statins_dont_really_work.html
[4] Beatrice A Golomb et al. Physician Response to Patient Reports of Adverse Drug Effects. Drug Safety 2007; 30 (8): 669-675.
[5] Robert S. Bresalier et al. Cardiovascular Events Associated with Rofecoxib in a Colorectal Adenoma Chemoprevention Trial. N Engl J Med 2005; 352:1092-1102.
[6] Vioxx. Drugwatch. https://www.drugwatch.com/vioxx/
[7] Peter C Gøtzsche. Antidepressants and Murder: Case not Closed. BMJ 2017; 358: j3697
[8] Art Van Zee. The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy. Am J Public Health. 2009 February; 99(2): 221-227.
[9] Lawrence Scholl et al. Drug and Opioid-Involved Overdose Deaths – United States, 2013-2017. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2019; 67(51-52): 1419-1427.
[10] Are Prions behind All Neurodegenerative Diseases? Scientific American November 1, 2015. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-prions-behind-all-neurodegenerative-diseases1/
[11] J Bart Classen. COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease. Microbiology & Infectious Diseases 2021; 5(1): 1-3.
[12] Katalin Karik et al. Incorporation of Pseudouridine Into mRNA Yields Superior Non- immunogenic Vector With Increased Translational Capacity and Biological Stability. Mol Ther 2008 Nov;16(11):1833-40.
[13] Alliance for Natural Health International. Interview With Vanden Bossche: Should Mass COVID Vaccinations Be Stopped? March 25, 2021. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/interview-rob-verkerk-vanden-bossche-mass-covid-vaccinations/
[14] S. A. Kemp et al. Neutralising Antibodies Drive Spike Mediated SARS-CoV-2 Evasion. medRxiv preprint 2020. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.05.20241927.
[15] Daniel Wrapp et al. Cryo-EM structure of the 2019-nCoV spike in the prefusion conformation. Science 2020; 367(6483): 1260-1263.
[16] RN Kirchdoerfer, et al. Stabilized coronavirus spikes are resistant to conformational changes induced by receptor recognition or proteolysis. Scientific Reports 2018; 8: 15701.