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New Prescription Drugs: A Major Health Risk With Few Offsetting Advantages

Few people know that new prescription drugs have a 1 in 5 chance of causing serious reactions after they have been approved. That is why expert physicians recommend not taking new drugs for at least five years unless patients have first tried better-established options, and have the need to do so.

Few know that systematic reviews of hospital charts found that even properly prescribed drugs (aside from misprescribing, overdosing, or self-prescribing) cause about 1.9 million hospitalizations a year. Another 840,000 hospitalized patients are given drugs that cause serious adverse reactions for a total of 2.74 million serious adverse drug reactions. About 128,000 people die from drugs prescribed to them. This makes prescription drugs a major health risk, ranking 4th with stroke as a leading cause of death. The European Commission estimates that adverse reactions from prescription drugs cause 200,000 deaths; so together, about 328,000 patients in the U.S. and Europe die from prescription drugs each year. The FDA does not acknowledge these facts and instead gathers a small fraction of the cases.

Perhaps this is “the price of progress”? For example, about 170 million Americans take a prescription drug, and many benefit from the drug. For some, drugs save their life or keep them alive. About 80 percent of them are generic; that is to say, drugs whose benefits and risks are better known. If we suppose they all benefit, then 2.7 million severe reactions is only about 1.5 percent.

But as far as we can tell (very little research is funded on prescription drugs as a health risk compared to less deadly risks like diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease), millions who take new, patented drugs experience only modest benefits over established drugs. Only a small percent of new drugs provide significant advantages for patients to offset these risks of harm. Independent reviews over the past 35 years have found that only 11 to 15 percent of newly approved drugs have significant clinical advantages over existing, better-known drugs. These contribute to the large medicine chest of effective drugs developed over the decades. But the 85 to 89 percent with little or no clinical advantage flood the market. About four-fifths of the additional $70 billion spent on drugs since 2000 in the U.S. (and another $70 billion abroad) have been spent on these minor new variations rather than on the really innovative drugs.

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DOORBELL CAMERAS LIKE RING GIVE EARLY WARNING OF POLICE SEARCHES, FBI WARNED

THE RISE OF the internet-connected home security camera has generally been a boon to police, as owners of these devices can (and frequently do) share footage with cops at the touch of a button. But according to a leaked FBI bulletin, law enforcement has discovered an ironic downside to ubiquitous privatized surveillance: The cameras are alerting residents when police show up to conduct searches.

A November 2019 “technical analysis bulletin” from the FBI provides an overview of “opportunities and challenges” for police from networked security systems like Amazon’s Ring and other “internet of things,” or IoT, devices. Marked unclassified but “law enforcement sensitive” and for official use only, the document was included as part of the BlueLeaks cache of material hacked from the websites of fusion centers and other law enforcement entities.

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Instagram Video Shows Baltimore Man Bash White Man’s Head With Brick in Unprovoked Attack

An Instagram video showing a black smash the back of a white man’s head head was posted to the social media network with the hashtags “#WhiteLivesDoNotMatter” and “#BlackLivesMatter.”

The short clip shows a black man stalk a random white man walking down the street before running up to him and throwing a brick to the back of his head from close range, instantly knocking him out and falling hard to the pavement.

The giggling person filming cheered as a horrific thud was heard as the brick made contact to the man’s skull. Despite the violence content being celebrated, the video remained on the platform for several hours after it was posted.

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Facebook’s purge of left-wing radicals

One of the strangest claims made today about free speech is that it is a ‘right-wing’ talking point. It’s an excuse to spout racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia – you pick the prejudice. Some even claim that there is no crisis of free speech, and anyone who professes their support for this most liberal of values is essentially a useful idiot for the far right.

But Facebook’s latest crackdown makes clear that it is not only the right whose free speech is under threat. Earlier this month, Facebook announced an extension of its ‘Dangerous Individuals and Organisations’ policy. This was the policy it used to ban right-wing controversialists like Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos and Paul Joseph Watson – alongside anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan – who were all accused of promoting ‘violence and hate’.

Now, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests-cum-riots, Facebook has decided to cast its net of censorship wider. ‘We have seen growing movements that, while not directly organising violence, have celebrated violent acts, shown that they have weapons and suggest they will use them, or have individual followers with patterns of violent behaviour’, Facebook said in a recent statement.

This has led to Facebook removing 790 groups, 100 pages and 1,500 ads tied to the crankish, right-wing QAnon conspiracy theory. But it has also led to a purge of so-called ‘Antifa’ groups and other far-left organisations. ‘For militia organisations and those encouraging riots… we have initially removed over 980 groups, 520 pages and 160 ads from Facebook. We have also restricted over 1,400 hashtags related to these groups and organisations on Instagram’, the statement continues.

This is not the first time Antifa groups have been censored by Big Tech. Back in 2018, PayPal started refusing to process payments which were connected to a number of prominent Antifa organisations at the same time as it banned Tommy Robinson, Alex Jones and the Proud Boys.

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