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– “..I was right was with the Syrian ‘CW’ attacks/hoaxes.
There’s masses of propaganda around wars and foreign policy. It does get exposed, eg. Craig, but the corporate media basically never cover the exposures.
– “I can’t think offhand where I have been wrong, but I know I have been on occasion”
It’s important to keep a tally so you know which subjects you’re getting right or wrong. The corporate media’s science coverage is worse than dreadful. If you have the same edition of Bad Science as I have and you’re on page 216, you’re right in the middle of How the Media Promote the Public Misunderstanding of Science. You haven’t got to the bit about how Blair and the media concocted the “MMR causes autism” story. No, I’m not kidding; that’s an MSM hoax! Not content with promoting pills, the media undermine even our tools of understanding, and they don’t care how many they kill.
Regarding supplement pills, they’re only needed when diet is deficient. Us in the West have good access to good food, and taking pills really isn’t natural. If these companies really cared they’d be giving away their pills where there’s malnutrition; instead they just sell them to westerners.
We can naturally get everything we need in our diet; that’s obvious whether you accept creation (God put what we need in food) or evolution (we’re adapted to the food that’s available). Pills haven’t been around very long. Very small things for what they cost though, and a factory is needed to make them.
@ Clark
I have a condition where I need to take strong medication to curb stomach acid, which means food doesnt digest as it should, so I lose nutrition from food I eat; also, though I do try to eat healthily, I certainly don’t get a balanced diet. So the supplements will continue, though they are expensive and of questionable efficacy.
Re William Rodriguez, I was very surprised and taken aback when I saw him talking about a ‘rumble’ in your link – every time I heard him he spoke of a ‘boom’, an explosion that pushed him and the others in the room up, as it came from below.
I will have to do some revision and checking before I reply to your points, but it will take some time as it is not a priority with so much else going on at the moment.
(I tried to post this yesterday morning, but must have forgotten to push ‘submit’ or something as it wasn’t here, instead there was a note in red saying ‘are you sure you meant to do that’ or something; maybe I pressed a wrong key somehow).Yes, if you have a medical problem, supplements can be needed. But a decent government would include them with your prescription, of course.
– “instead there was a note in red saying ‘are you sure you meant to do that’”
The site software underwent a routine update a few days ago, probably since you last posted on the forums. The new version of the forum software seems to forget the username (it’s a bug), and you have to fill it in again or you get a message in red. It’s happened to me repeatedly, because it’s partly done from cookies and I have my browser set to clear them.
And they wouldn’t charge for the bloody prescriptions either.
– “every time I heard him he spoke of a ‘boom’, an explosion that pushed him and the others in the room up, as it came from below.”
Yes, he started saying that a few years later. It is just from my memory, but I think some lawyer cottoned onto him, and then Rodriguez’ testimony changed slightly; power of suggestion perhaps?
I think it was Thatcher who said ‘Prescription Charges wont go up’. I believe they were ten pence each at that time and when she was in office, they rose to I believe £2.
I don’t know what they are now, as I don’t pay for prescriptions, but they are certainly high enough for many people to choose not to get them filled.
And of course Big Pharma (and pharmacies if they are not included in that term) rip the NHS off rotten.Clark, I don’t know if that infernal glitch that puts a ‘+’ in the middle of people’s names irritates you as it does me, but could you have a word with the Mods or Craig asking them to put some notices on posts so people know how they can get rid of the ‘+’? I know it is easy, but people seem unaware of how to correct it.
Paul
The current prescription charge is £9.15 per item. That’s quite a lot for some. But there are exemptions of course. They probably still represent a relatively small proportions of the total drug cost in many cases.
Big pharma can be viewed as a necessary evil. Of course they profiteer. But there are two sides to big pharma, the corporate side which has to make big money by any means, and the scientific side which in many cases is essential to modern medicine. These giant corporations also have large overheads and the developmental cost of drugs can be very high and sometimes an investment in a certain drug can lead to large losses when the drugs are not found to be effective or have side effects. But of course we need them especially when they will be able to scale up the vaccine we are all waiting for, for SARS cov2, which I am sure you will be first in the queue for.@ SA April 25, 2020 at 16:23
There is no case for profiteering in medicine or in medical and hospital care (or incarceration) (unless you are a shareholder or part of the industry). Profiteering means people lose their lives because medication is unaffordable; it also means tiny alterations to medications allow these corporations to extend patents on drugs losing their patent protection, thus extending their overpricing.
And it means profits come before patients lives and health and safety.
Look at vaccines, where the corporations cannot be sued, so have far less reason to ensure the safety of vaccines, all arranged by Big Pharma’s mob of lobbyists and bribers, and corrupt politicians.
Medicine should be Nationalised, in all it’s functions. The vast sums of taxpayers’ money governments pay to these corporations could be used instead to fund public facilities, which would attract the scientists presently employed by the corporations.
I think you are British, so you should know how privatisation has been an expensive flop in Britain, with prices rising, plus bailouts and subsidies to the lucky profiteers, sometimes foreign based.
Privatisation is just a snazzy way of transferring more wealth from the many to the few. Massive infrastructure, built up by decades of taxpayers money, sold off for a fraction of it’s worth to the Capitalist cronies of the politicians, with the inevitable bungs.
By all means have private TV makers, TV’s are not a life-saving product, but meds often are.
Why you defend these crooks beats me.
‘..SARS cov2, which I am sure you will be first in the queue for…’
Wanna bet? They can stick their vaccines where the sun don’t shine.Actually, I wrongly stated Thatcher said she would not increase prescription charges; what she said was she had no intention of putting them up (but a few weeks later did just that).
SA, 16:23 #52512 – ” there are two sides to big pharma, the corporate side which has to make big money by any means, and the scientific side which in many cases is essential to modern medicine.”
SA, have you read Goldacre’s second book, Bad Pharma?
Intellectually, it is simply terrifying. We literally do not know what many of the drugs do! I’m not exaggerating, especially about newer drugs.
It is questionable to what extent the research of the pharmaceutical companies can be called “science”. It’s definitely research, but an essential aspect of science is that it be open to scrutiny. Goldacre goes through scores, if not hundreds of ways that Big, Bad Pharma hide the results of their research, releasing only those parts that show their products in a good light. The word ‘occult’ simply means ‘hidden’, and much if not most drug development and testing would be better described as occult rather than science.
Non-Disclosure Agreements figure prominently in this. The scientists work under conditions of what I call meta-secrecy, in that the non-disclosure agreements in their contracts forbid them revealing the non-disclosure agreement itself. This should be a crime, it is damaging to the scientists’ mental health. Compare with employees under the UK Official Secrets Act; if interviewed and asked a question to which the answer is restricted, they can at least say “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that as I am bound by the Official Secrets Act”. Not so for the hapless scientists working under most NDAs; they have to obfuscate and fudge to avoid revealing the NDA itself. This is an intolerable strain for anyone; they are effectively forced to anticipate problematic questions such that they never stray towards it being asked in the first place.
Then there is the complicity of the industry regulators; in all of the US, UK and EU, the “revolving door” between industry and regulators leads to industry capture of the regulators, and the rules favour the industry in the first place.
Then we have unethical practices, such as tiny subsidiary companies scattered all across the Third World testing experimental drugs on impoverished people because there are hardly any regulations or enforcement there.
A whole 400+ pages of it; I could go on and on. It truly is a horror show.
Paul Barbara, 19:11 #52518 – “Look at vaccines, where the corporations cannot be sued, so have far less reason to ensure the safety of vaccines,”
That’s not what’s going on there Paul. The government mandate the vaccine programme, so it’s the government that’s liable for vaccine injury compensation payouts in the vaccine court. If a vaccine batch is contaminated or not up to specification, the government compensates the parents, and the vaccine manufacturers have to compensate the government.
That’s all as it should be, but there are a load of lawyers and legal companies who’d make a great deal more money if parents had to sue the vaccine manufacturers directly on a case-by-case basis. These are the money behind the anti-vax propaganda in the US, and why the anti-vax arguments come predominantly from the US right-wing.
Vaccine development for SARS-CoV-2 is looking very challenging. The problem is that the antibodies that the body naturally produces against SARS-CoV-2 have a pretty high chance of triggering worse effects in the body than the virus itself does. Those are your own, natural antibodies; they can kill you by triggering cytokine storm. It seems that SARS-CoV-2 is a bloody clever virus.
The problem for vaccine development is that vaccines work by inducing the immune system to produce antibodies against the virus, but if such antibodies can kill you anyway, then the vaccine could too.
But if a decent vaccine is eventually developed, I’d much rather have the vaccine than CoVID-19.
Regarding my 21:24 comment #52522, I’m not saying there’s no corruption; I’m sure there’s as much skulduggery as surrounds the rest of the pharmaceutical industry. But it’s important to get the big picture right before trying to fix things; no use firing your weaponry at decoys.
Ben Goldacre, 2013:
– So, to be clear, this whole book is about meticulously defending every assertion in the paragraph that follows.
– Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that tend to favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that the companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to withhold them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug’s life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all. These are ongoing problems, and although people have claimed to fix many of them, for the most part they have failed; so all these problems persist, but worse than ever, because now people can pretend that everything is fine after all.
Clark
I have read bad pharma. But I have also personal experience of the sharp practices. Two drugs that have been used for many years and had been available generically for tens of years, thalidomide and hydroxyurea were found to have other uses years after they had been invented and used. The developmental work for the new uses, in multiple myeloma for thalidomide, and hydroxycarbamide for sickle cell anaemia were Done by many outside pharma but then appropriated by pharmaceutical companies and licensed for them to use for these indications On rather tenuous grounds. It’s a long story but this device enabled the companies to be able to charge 6 times the price of generically available drugs on the basis that their products were licensed and generic ones were not. The nhs then was forced to use the expensive drugs. I don’t know that this has ever been openly discussed.
But for both of Clark and Paul, I stated that pharma profiteers, not as condoning big pharma, just stating that this is a fact of life according to the system we live in, corporate capitalism. In fact this was the original definition of fascism, but nowadays the term is more likely to be used to mean right wing totalitarianism.@ Clark
‘..Those are your own, natural antibodies; they can kill you by triggering cytokine storm. It seems that SARS-CoV-2 is a bloody clever virus..’
Have you considered that there may have been some ‘bloody clever’ scientists somewhere who created it, and that it was spread deliberately?
Del Bigtree said the same about the cytokine storm. Here he exposes ‘Open Mike’ incident:
‘THE REAL HOAX: REPORTER CAUGHT ON TAPE’ Del Bigtree (Just search – I haven’t got round to learning how to post url’s the way you told me, and I just got ticked off by the mods on the vaxx site for putting the full url in).“Have you considered that there may have been some ‘bloody clever’ scientists somewhere who created it, and that it was spread deliberately?”
Paul, this has been thoroughly debunked so many times it is not worth answering any more because it just shows you are unwilling to considere any evidence except what comes from your trusted conspiracy websites. Good luck.I think it’s possible that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab, but not spread deliberately because everyone is equally vulnerable, so who would spread it? It’s no use as a weapon because it can’t be targetted.
Biolab security is a joke. A very bad one. Lots of people are trying to blame China, but biolabs are run just the same the world over. They should be in isolated places with staff working three months resident at the facility; six weeks work then six weeks quarantine before leaving. But instead they’re nine to five jobs in major city centres. Madness, but much cheaper, of course.
@ Clark April 26, 2020 at 00:30
Obviously I agree with him there, but that is why I take the advice of alternative doctors and scientists re vaccines and the like. Of course there are some charlatans and snake-oil salesmen out there, but I would rather trust my judgement on who to believe, than to believe known downright sociopathic crooks.SA, that speculation still has considerable expert support. Minority opinion, but not ruled out so far as I know. Just because SARS-CoV-2 came through bats doesn’t mean the bats weren’t in a lab.
– “I would rather trust my judgement on who to believe”
There is lots of evidence, and good techniques for assessing it. By helping each other we can do much better than our individual judgement.
eg. look at the “covid-19 is just like seasonal flu” claim. That can be disproved by the sudden surge in the overall mortality rate. Thus we can eliminate that claim by logic, making judgement that much easier.
