Government Goes Into the Drug Research and Development Business; Taxpayers Get the Shaft

What's truly galling about this story from our good friends at Natural News is that U.S. taxpayers -- that's you and me, folks -- will now foot the bill for new drug research and development...

...the new drugs will then be turned over to the pharmaceutical companies by the government...

...and the pharmaceutical companies will charge us for the drugs our taxpayer dollars paid to discover and develop for them in the first place.

So the pharma companies will get virtually free research and development, compliments of the U.S. taxpayer. And the taxpayer gets the shaft from Big Pharma afterwards.

Sweet deal, huh?

Could you imagine the hue and cry from Big Pharma were the federal government to announce they're going to fund new research and development designed to bring new nutritional supplements to market?

-- Spencer

The U.S. government has decided to enter the pharmaceutical business.

Apparently, the drug companies aren't coming out with new "breakthrough" drugs quickly enough, and now the U.S. government plans to spend taxpayer dollars conducting research on drugs which will be turned over to Big Pharma.

Those drug companies, in turn, will sell them for a profit.

It's yet another clear case where the government is taking over the health care (sick care) industry and funneling profits into the hands of pharmaceutical corporations.

This is all happening because drug companies say they're scaling back their research funding to find new drugs.

This terrifies the U.S. government, apparently, which doesn't recognize that scaling back drug company R&D is actually a good thing for America given how much economic damage and personal health damage is caused each year by Big Pharma's dangerous drugs.

So instead of letting the failing pharmaceutical market contract on its own, Big Government wants to artificially prop it up with taxpayer dollars in much the same way that the feds bailed out Wall Street's rich banksters with trillions of dollars over the last two years.

The new government drug research center will operate under the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and be called the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, says he hopes Congress will increase funding of the center to at least $1 billion annually.

The NIH, of course, is a revolving door for Big Pharma executives. Dr William Potter, for example, was formerly a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health, after which he became the vice president of translational neuroscience at Merck.

And the government money that goes into these so-called drug "discoveries" will only end up boosting the profits of drug companies rather than fundamentally improving the health of the American people. (More drugs does not equal better health. If anything it's an inverse correlation: More drugs = more degenerative disease!)

The myth of drug research

Of course, the bigger issue here concerns the mythology of drug development.

The idea that every disease can be treated with a patented synthetic chemical is increasingly being revealed as absurd from the outset.

The highly corrupt cancer industry has been promising a "cure" for cancer since the 1960's... if only they could have another few billion dollars in funding. And yet, year after year, their promises turn out to be yet another fundraising hoax. The whole scheme has now devolved into grotesque absurdity with pink products flooding store shelves backed by the ludicrous idea that "we can all cure cancer by going shopping."

At the same time, the chemical "discoveries" made by the drug companies are so dangerous that they must be approved by the FDA with advisory panels stacked with on-the-take "experts" who are paid by the drug companies, then marketed to the public through extremely manipulative and scientifically dishonest drug advertisements that downplay risks and exaggerate drug benefits.

Even the clinical trials conducted in an attempt to prove the safety of drugs are riddled with lies, fraud and outright corruption.

If Big Pharma's drugs actually worked well, they wouldn't need to rely on such dishonest tactics to convince doctors and patients to use them, it would seem.

The truth is that even Big Pharma's "blockbuster" drugs are outright failures from a human health perspective.

Statin drugs, for example, have been overhyped to such an extreme that doctors are actually recommending they be dripped into the water supply. Yet a rational look at the drugs reveals that they cause extremely dangerous and even deadly side effects such as kidney failure, liver dysfunction, extreme muscle weakness (among other disastrous effects).

Instead of putting more money into "miracle" synthetic drug chemicals, the U.S. government would be far wiser to spend money researching and documenting the healing effects of medicinal plants and foods which are readily available without a prescription (and need no FDA approval).

But of course, the U.S. government isn't interests in supporting the health of the American people. If it was, it wouldn't continue to protect Big Pharma with an FDA monopoly that outlaws natural alternatives that work better, safer and more affordably to prevent and even cure degenerative disease.

So get ready for a government-run pharmaceutical company to enter the picture. I've always said that the U.S. government is merely the marketing branch of Big Pharma. Now it is the research arm, too.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031092_government_drug_research.html#ixzz1C0grKLve

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Big Pharma Stands Exposed and Naked to the World

A spate of recent news articles have shown Big Pharma to be the most crooked, deceitful, self-serving, fraudulent money-hungry bunch of lying hypocrites the world has ever seen.

But as more and more people begin to learn about Big Pharma’s corrupt nature, the medical paradigm crumbles. May it die the ignoble death it so richly deserves…

The orthodox medical model -- based upon fraud, deceit, and the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar at any cost -- is slowly crumbling.

It’s a slow motion disintegration. Nevertheless, as more and more news emerges revealing the true face of the Big Pharma…

…and making people ever-the-more aware that they’re being taken for a deadly ride in one of history’s greatest frauds, and by some of history’s greatest psychopaths…

…the end of the current medical paradigm continues to come more fully into focus. And if you’re anything like me, it’s an end you’ve been waiting to see for a long, long time.

What am I talking about?

Big Pharma Exposed

Let's see, in just the last few weeks alone we've learned in the news:

· Big Pharma has moved the bulk of Its clinical drug trials overseas in order to get potentially dangerous drugs approved easier: (See this link)

· As much as 90% of published research that doctors rely upon for prescribing drugs is horrifically (and in some cases, fatally) flawed: (See this link)

· The number of drug recalls due to potentially deadly side effects has skyrocketed beyond anything seen in history: (See this link)

· Antidepressant drugs – already shown to be largely ineffective – are now known to raise the risk of fatal heart attacks. (See this link)

· Flu vaccines are a complete fraud, as well as Big Pharma’s much-touted theory of “herd immunity.” (See this link)

Isn't that swell? Doesn’t that boost your confidence in Big Pharma?

Here’s one more. It's an oldie, but a goodie:

· Big Pharma exec admits publicly that "most of our drugs don't work for most people." (See this link)

Imagine that. Drugs don’t work.

Voting With Their Wallets

The public is finally catching on to one of the greatest deceptions of modern times.

And that’s why tens of millions of Americans now vote with their wallets by spending billions of dollars every year on safe, effective natural remedies.

Most doctors, of course, go bonkers every time you mention natural remedies. “Unproven! they yell. “Untested!” “Ineffective!” “Dangerous!”

If you didn’t know better, you’d swear they were talking about the very drugs they so cavalierly prescribe.

Learn More About Natural Remedies

You can learn more about some of the most popular and effective natural remedies at the links below…

…escape the insidious grip of Big Pharma’s Prescription Drug and Premature Death Show…

…and help hasten the collapse of the modern drug paradigm.

May it die the ignoble death it so richly deserves -- the sooner, the better!

Do You Prefer Safe, Natural Remedies Intead? Then check these out...

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Meet Steve Barwick

Big Pharma Moves Clinical Trials Overseas In Order to Get Potentially Dangerous Drugs Approved Easier

One big factor in the shift of clinical trials to foreign countries is a loophole in F.D.A. regulations: if studies in the United States suggest that a drug has no benefit, trials from abroad can often be used in their stead to secure F.D.A. approval. There’s even a term for countries that have shown themselves to be especially amenable when drug companies need positive data fast: they’re called “rescue countries.”

Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year.

Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas—on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves?

The authors investigate the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. Government’s failure to rein in a lethal profit machine.

More and more clinical trials for new drugs are being outsourced overseas and conducted by companies for hire. Is oversight even possible?

You wouldn’t think the cities had much in common. Iaşi, with a population of 320,000, lies in the Moldavian region of Romania. Mégrine is a town of 24,000 in northern Tunisia, on the Mediterranean Sea. Tartu, Estonia, with a population of 100,000, is the oldest city in the Baltic States; it is sometimes called “the Athens on the Emajõgi.” Shenyang, in northeastern China, is a major industrial center and transportation hub with a population of 7.2 million.

These places are not on anyone’s Top 10 list of travel destinations. But the advance scouts of the pharmaceutical industry have visited all of them, and scores of similar cities and towns, large and small, in far-flung corners of the planet.

They have gone there to find people willing to undergo clinical trials for new drugs, and thereby help persuade the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to declare the drugs safe and effective for Americans. It’s the next big step in globalization, and there’s good reason to wish that it weren’t.

Once upon a time, the drugs Americans took to treat chronic diseases, clear up infections, improve their state of mind, and enhance their sexual vitality were tested primarily either in the United States (the vast majority of cases) or in Europe.

No longer. As recently as 1990, according to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, a mere 271 trials were being conducted in foreign countries of drugs intended for American use. By 2008, the number had risen to 6,485—an increase of more than 2,000 percent.

A database being compiled by the National Institutes of Health has identified 58,788 such trials in 173 countries outside the United States since 2000. In 2008 alone, according to the inspector general’s report, 80 percent of the applications submitted to the F.D.A. for new drugs contained data from foreign clinical trials. Increasingly, companies are doing 100 percent of their testing offshore.

The inspector general found that the 20 largest U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies now conducted “one-third of their clinical trials exclusively at foreign sites.” All of this is taking place when more drugs than ever—some 2,900 different drugs for some 4,600 different conditions—are undergoing clinical testing and vying to come to market.

Some medical researchers question whether the results of clinical trials conducted in certain other countries are relevant to Americans in the first place. They point out that people in impoverished parts of the world, for a variety of reasons, may metabolize drugs differently from the way Americans do. They note that the prevailing diseases in other countries, such as malaria and tuberculosis, can skew the outcome of clinical trials.

But from the point of view of the drug companies, it’s easy to see why moving clinical trials overseas is so appealing. For one thing, it’s cheaper to run trials in places where the local population survives on only a few dollars a day. It’s also easier to recruit patients, who often believe they are being treated for a disease rather than, as may be the case, just getting a placebo as part of an experiment.

And it’s easier to find what the industry calls “drug-naïve” patients: people who are not being treated for any disease and are not currently taking any drugs, and indeed may never have taken any—the sort of people who will almost certainly yield better test results. (For some subjects overseas, participation in a clinical trial may be their first significant exposure to a doctor.)

Regulations in many foreign countries are also less stringent, if there are any regulations at all. The risk of litigation is negligible, in some places nonexistent. Ethical concerns are a figure of speech. Finally—a significant plus for the drug companies—the F.D.A. does so little monitoring that the companies can pretty much do and say what they want.

Consent by Thumbprint

Many of today’s trials still take place in developed countries, such as Britain, Italy, and Japan. But thousands are taking place in countries with large concentrations of poor, often illiterate people, who in some cases sign consent forms with a thumbprint, or scratch an “X.”

Bangladesh has been home to 76 clinical trials. There have been clinical trials in Malawi (61), the Russian Federation (1,513), Romania (876), Thailand (786), Ukraine (589), Kazakhstan (15), Peru (494), Iran (292), Turkey (716), and Uganda (132). Throw a dart at a world map and you are unlikely to hit a spot that has escaped the attention of those who scout out locations for the pharmaceutical industry.

The two destinations that one day will eclipse all the others, including Europe and the United States, are China (with 1,861 trials) and India (with 1,457). A few years ago, India was home to more American drug trials than China was, thanks in part to its large English-speaking population. But that has changed. English is now mandatory in China’s elementary schools, and, owing to its population edge, China now has more people who speak English than India does.

While Americans may be unfamiliar with the names of foreign cities where clinical trials have been conducted, many of the drugs being tested are staples of their medicine cabinets. One example is Celebrex, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that has been aggressively promoted in television commercials for a decade. Its manufacturer, Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, has spent more than a billion dollars promoting its use as a pain remedy for arthritis and other conditions, including menstrual cramps.

The National Institutes of Health maintains a record of most—but by no means all—drug trials inside and outside the United States. The database counts 290 studies involving Celebrex. Companies are not required to report—and do not report—all studies conducted overseas. According to the database, of the 290 trials for Celebrex, 183 took place in the United States, meaning, one would assume, that 107 took place in other countries.

But an informal, country-by-country accounting by VANITY FAIR turned up no fewer than 207 Celebrex trials in at least 36 other countries. They ranged from 1 each in Estonia, Croatia, and Lithuania to 6 each in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Russia, to 8 in Mexico, 9 in China, and 10 in Brazil. But even these numbers understate the extent of the foreign trials. For example, the database lists five Celebrex trials in Ukraine, but just “one” of those trials involved studies in 11 different Ukrainian cities.

The Celebrex story does not have a happy ending. First, it was disclosed that patients taking the drug were more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes than those who took older and cheaper painkillers. Then it was alleged that Pfizer had suppressed a study calling attention to these very problems. (The company denied that the study was undisclosed and insisted that it “acted responsibly in sharing this information in a timely manner with the F.D.A.”)

Soon afterward the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine reported an array of additional negative findings. Meanwhile, Pfizer was promoting Celebrex for use with Alzheimer’s patients, holding out the possibility that the drug would slow the progression of dementia. It didn’t. Sales of Celebrex reached $3.3 billion in 2004, and then began to quickly drop.

“Rescue Countries”

One big factor in the shift of clinical trials to foreign countries is a loophole in F.D.A. regulations: if studies in the United States suggest that a drug has no benefit, trials from abroad can often be used in their stead to secure F.D.A. approval.

There’s even a term for countries that have shown themselves to be especially amenable when drug companies need positive data fast: they’re called “rescue countries.”

Read more, here: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/deadly-medicine-201101

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Is the Coverup of Vaccine Dangers Finally Coming Unraveled?

How Big Pharma Profits From Fear

How Big Pharma Profits From Fear

By WC Douglass, MD

1-8-10

With Big Pharma raking in billions off swine flu fears, the last thing they need is a government handout.

Yet Uncle Sam is busy playing Daddy Warbucks with YOUR lunch money, helping Swiss drugmaker Novartis open a new vaccine plant in North Carolina. You've generously contributed around $700 million to help Novartis build their shiny new drug factory -- $220 million three years ago, and $486 million this year.

And I'll bet you didn't even get a thank-you card.

In return for this bad investment in a foreign company, the U.S. government gets the right to PURCHASE vaccine for 17 years. Not only that, but these vaccines will be created using a new and unproven biotech method that relies on dog kidneys instead of chicken eggs.

In other words, this plan really is a dog.

I'm a doctor, not an economist. But if this is someone's idea of stimulus, you do the math: The plant now employs 191 people making an average of $50,000 per year. At that rate, it would take around 75 years for the government money put into this joint to make its way back into our own economy.

Slice off a few years if you believe them when they say they'll ultimately employ 350 people when the plant is fully operational in 2013 -- in any case, it'll be decades before Americans ever see that cash again.

But don't worry -- I'm sure somewhere, a poor Swiss ski resort is hosting a group of free-spending Novartis executives.

Maybe they'll be joined by their yodeling friends at the World Health Organization. A report at World Net Daily says at least three of the WHO's top flu "experts" have financial ties to vaccine makers.

That sure explains a lot.

Meanwhile, anyone who doubts that money is the real driving force behind swine flu fears only needs to check out Business Week magazine.

A recent headline there tells whole story by itself: "How Big Pharma Profits from Swine Flu."

Careful there, Business Week. That kind of thinking would have gotten you branded a radical conspiracy theorist just a few months ago!

Just check out these big paydays off swine flu vaccine sales:

$1.7 billion for GlaxoSmithKline

$700 million for Novartis

$500 million for Sanofi-Aventis

Those figures are for the fourth quarter of 2009 alone -- analysts expect them to grab similar piles of cash for the first quarter of 2010 as everyone from President Obama to Santa Claus push these needless vaccines on you and your children.

Business Week also notes that vaccine sales are booming just in time: Patents on prescription drugs worth a combined $135 billion in annual sales are about to expire... with no new meds ready to replace them.

And that means you can expect another phony swine flu scare any moment now.

That's not the only sickening swindle. Keep reading for the latest on Tamiflu...

Hide and seek with Big Pharma

Get ready for some more flu funny business -- except you won't be laughing when you hear about this one.

Drug giant Roche is being accused of hiding key data from eight unpublished studies on its flu drug, Tamiflu... and, as a result, researchers now say there's no evidence that the drug can reduce the risk of flu complications such as pneumonia.

What are they hiding? Who knows -- but you don't lock the smartest and most attractive kids in the attic.

The Cochrane Collaboration tried to update their earlier review of the research -- but the company demanded a confidentiality agreement in exchange for access to those eight shady studies.

I'm thrilled to say the researchers told Roche where to stick that agreement. Too bad that kind of integrity is all too rare.

In an editorial that accompanied the new review in the British Medical Journal, editor Fiona Godlee tore into the company. She wrote that the studies originally used to back Tamiflu were written by Roche employees and consultants, and that one researcher named in a study even claimed no involvement in the project.

Shady? You bet. Surprising? Not at all.

It's par for the course when it comes to Big Pharma.

So here's about all those researchers can say about Tamiflu now: It could reduce flu symptoms by about a day.

And here's what I can tell you about this dangerous drug: Its side effects include nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea. Some patients experience severe allergic reactions, confusion, bizarre behavior, hallucinations, seizures, fever, sore throat and more.

Some of these reactions are far more common than anyone wants to admit -- especially in children, as I've warned you before.

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Worth it? You decide -- but I think you're better off investing in another box of tissues and that extra day of rest.

Never feeding the flu fears,

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.

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