Tag: big pharma

Lefty ‘Consumer’ Watchdog Group Bought & Paid For By Big Pharma

The National Consumers League is America’s oldest consumer advocacy organization and a group trusted by the left, especially, to stand up for consumers’ interests.

But according to a review of its tax filings by the Washington Examiner, it has also become part of a web of astroturf groups shilling for the corporate interests of PhRMA, the massive drugmaker trade association that operates in Washington, DC, which donated close to $1 million to it just last year.

The organization’s 2024 tax form, which became available a few days ago, shows that the non-profit spent close to $600 million last year advocating for Big Pharma’s financial interests and policy agenda in Washington, DC, and state capitals across the country.

And a key way in which that advocacy was accomplished was through the National Consumers League, also known as NCL.

The Examiner reports that “PhRMA donated roughly $2 million to NCL between 2020 and 2024, including $875,000 in 2024 alone.”

During that time, NCL has hewed closely to PhRMA issue positions on matters including regulation of insurers that negotiate for lower drug prices for Americans (also known as PBMs), and the 340B drug discount program that disproportionately benefits red, rural America.

But a review of content historically featured on NCL’s website indicates that prior to taking PhRMA money, the group never criticized PBMs or 340B.

When asked for comment by the Examiner, NCL did not deny that their criticism of PBMs and 340B was related to the PhRMA funding, and they confirmed “that contributions from PhRMA support [the group’s] ‘healthcare work.’”

The Examiner has previously reported on apparent astroturf, “pay-to-play” advocacy efforts undertaken by PhRMA.

The Wall Street Journal also ran an exposé about PhRMA’s tactics in the nation’s capital, including what critics say looks like a “buying off” of supposed progressive “identity” groups like Black, Gifted & Whole– a group focused on “Black Queer men”– and MANA, A National Latina Organization.

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Exposing the vaccine industry: How corruption, fraud and coercion endanger public health

In a damning exposé, lawyer Aaron Siri’s book “Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines” reveals how the American public has been systematically deceived by institutions they were taught to trust—namely, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and pharmaceutical giants. Through meticulous legal battles, Siri uncovers a web of corruption, scientific misconduct and outright fraud that has allowed unsafe vaccines to flood the market while silencing dissenters.

The dogma of vaccines: Faith over science

Vaccines have been elevated to near-religious status, with proponents demanding blind faith rather than critical scrutiny. As Siri explains, people say they “believe in vaccines” without examining the data—because the data, when scrutinized, often doesn’t support the industry’s claims. Instead, vaccine advocates rely on flawed studies, industry-funded research and outright deception to push their agenda.

One of the most shocking revelations is the lack of placebo-controlled trials for childhood vaccines. Despite claims from figures like Dr. Paul Offit—who insists all vaccines undergo rigorous placebo testing—Siri proves that not a single vaccine on the CDC’s childhood schedule was approved based on such trials. Instead, new vaccines are compared to older ones, masking their true risks. This is akin to declaring cigarettes safe because they’re no worse than cigars.

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ACIP Reveals: The Newborn Hepatitis B Vaccination Policy Was Built on Narrative, Not Science

The vote on whether to continue the universal newborn hepatitis B vaccination policy was postponed, but the discussion at ACIP exposed how, for decades, the blanket directive to vaccinate infants immediately after birth rested on assumptions, theoretical models, and partial data rather than on a solid scientific foundation.

“As a father and a scientist, I do not understand how we have the courage to ask parents to vaccinate a healthy newborn at birth when the child’s risk is so low and the evidence so thin. I honestly do not know where that courage comes from.”

This statement by Prof. Retsef Levi during yesterday’s ACIP meeting captured, with his characteristic clarity and directness, the core theme that emerged from the entire session: significant scientific gaps in a universal vaccination policy that has been in place for more than three decades in the United States.

The committee had been scheduled to vote on what seemed like technical questions: whether to eliminate universal newborn vaccination and administer the hepatitis B shot only to infants whose mothers test positive, and whether to replace the current policy, which does not allow for full informed consent, with a shared decision-making model between parents and physicians regarding vaccination later in infancy.

What surfaced during the session may have been even more important than the vote itself: for the first time, the ACIP’s scientific staff presented, openly and systematically, the profound gap between the institutional narrative and the evidence base, or rather the lack of one, that underpinned an expansive policy for 30 years. They detailed how a major, far-reaching public health directive had been constructed on assumptions, theoretical frameworks, and partial datasets, absent rigorous foundational research.

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Scientists who advised government during Covid did not reveal they had received more than £200m in grants from one of the world’s biggest pharma investors, report says

Scientific advisors to the Government during the Covid pandemic failed to reveal they received over £200million in grants from one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical investors, a report reveals.

Twenty-six members of the influential Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), which helped shape lockdown rules, did not register the research funding from the Wellcome Trust in an apparent conflict of interest.

The report by the campaign group UsForThem analysed research data from The Wellcome Trust, which is largely funded by its investment portfolio and links to the pharmaceutical industry.

It claims the 26 members received at least £210 million in grants from Wellcome between 2018 and 2026 which were not declared on the SAGE register of participants’ interests (Ropi) with £175 million provided during the key Covid years of 2020 and 2021 alone.

Analysis by the Mail on Sunday of publicly-available information shows one grant recipient was Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the biggest advocates for vaccines and whose advice to Prime Minister Boris Johnson led to the UK lockdown in March 2020, and who famously resigned as a government adviser two months later after it emerged he broke rules to meet his married lover.

Prof Ferguson declared in the register that he was involved with a ‘Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium’, but did not mention Wellcome anywhere.

Yet he was either the lead applicant or sponsored other applications for grants worth £5.6million including a £1.25 million grant looking at influenza-like viruses in Vietnam, according to the analysis of Wellcome’s figures.

Of the 149 SAGE members during the Covid crisis 38 applied for funding or supported other applications to the Wellcome Trust, the UK’s biggest charity.

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Pfizer buries data showing mRNA flu vaccine bombed in trial with elderly, not much better under 65

wo years ago, Pfizer anticipated that sales of its rebound-prone COVID-19 oral antiviral Paxlovid and fully approved mRNA COVID vaccine Comirnaty would plummet, but good news appeared on the horizon: The drugmaker’s mRNA flu vaccine did well in phase 3 trials in ages 18-64, and Pfizer expected to release results from the 65-and-up cohort “later this year.”

The results are finally in: Compared to a standard flu shot, the mRNA vaccine was associated with six times as many adverse events as infections prevented in adults under 65, and it outright failed in elderly people, associated with more deaths and both minor and serious injuries, from injection-site swelling to kidney problems.

The company buried the long-delayed elderly results on the government’s clinical trials website this spring, more than a year late and without announcing them to the public or investors, and gave an optimistic take on the under-65 results in the New England Journal of Medicine last week, while admitting the mRNA shot was “associated with more reactogenicity events.”

Australian and American drug industry journalists dug into the two arms of the trial, predicting mRNA jabs for flu would face an uphill climb with Trump administration regulators, who have already canceled nearly $500 million in federal projects and contracts that went toward mRNA vaccine development.

Pfizer used the same testing structure for mRNA flu shots as for its COVID shots and still found only an absolute difference of 0.32% for under-65s, requiring vaccination by 300 people to “prevent a single mild, self-limiting illness,” physician-turned-investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi wrote in an X thread summarizing her deep-dive review.

“Put simply, it’s a manufacturer-funded trial, written largely by Pfizer employees & finds its best efficacy in the endpoint that requires all samples to be shipped to a Pfizer-run central lab for adjudication,” Demasi said.

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Weight-loss jab users are being left with debilitating new side-effect, one of the UK’s leading orthopaedic surgeons warns

Weight-loss jab users are being left with a devastating new side-effect, a top surgeon has warned.

The alarming trend spotted amongst GLP-1 users means some patients cannot lift their limbs due to nerve dysfunction.

One of the UK’s leading orthopaedic surgeons, Tim Sinnett, has said he ‘expects to see more patients presenting these symptoms over time’.

The Foot and Ankle Surgeon, who is part of the prestigious Grosvenor Orthopaedic Partners group, added: ‘In the past six months, I have seen a handful of patients with foot drop related to weight-loss jabs – a phenomenon which has only presented itself this year.

‘The sudden loss of weight, associated with this medication, is what is causing the problem.

‘All nerves have a natural rim of fat around them. Suddenly losing weight, and the fat surrounding nerves, can cause this nerve dysfunction in the foot and ankle.

‘Patients with foot drop can have difficulty lifting the front part of the foot, causing it to drag on the floor.

‘Although losing weight is generally beneficial for the feet and ankles, in terms of reducing the force on the joints, the speed of the weight loss appears to be causing the nerves to malfunction.

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There may not be a safe off-ramp for some taking GLP-1 drugs, study suggests

The popularity of GLP-1 weight-loss medications continues to soar—and their uptake is helping to push down obesity rates on a national scale—but a safe, evidence-based way off the drugs isn’t yet in clear view.

An analysis published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine found that most participants in a clinical trial who were assigned to stop taking tirzepatide (Zepbound from Eli Lilly) not only regained significant amounts of the weight they had lost on the drug, but they also saw their cardiovascular and metabolic improvements slip away. Their blood pressure went back up, as did their cholesterol, hemoglobin A1c (used to assess glucose control levels), and fasting insulin.

In an accompanying editorial, two medical experts at the University of Pittsburgh, Elizabeth Oczypok and Timothy Anderson, suggest that this new class of drugs should be rebranded from “weight loss” drugs to “weight management” drugs, which people may need to take indefinitely.

Some studies have found that about half of people who start taking a GLP-1 drug for weight loss stop taking it within a year—for various reasons—and many people think they can stop taking anti-obesity drugs once they’ve reached a desired weight, Oczypok and Anderson write. But that’s not in line with the data.

“It may be helpful to compare them to other chronic disease medications; patients do not stop their anti-hypertensive medications when their blood pressure is at goal,” they write.

In the trial, researchers—led by Eli Lilly scientists—followed 670 participants with obesity or overweight (but without diabetes) who were treated with tirzepatide for 36 weeks. Then the participants were split into either continuing with the drug for another 52 weeks (88 weeks total) or getting a placebo for that period of time. Both groups were told to continue a reduced-calorie diet and an exercise plan.

In all, 335 participants were randomized to switch to a placebo, and the researchers monitored changes in their weight and cardiovascular health metrics after the switch. Not everyone in the first phase of the trial lost significant amounts of weight on the drug. So, the researchers only closely tracked the 308 of the 335 who lost at least 10 percent of their body weight on the drug.

Of the 308 who benefited from tirzepatide, 254 (82 percent) regained at least 25 percent of the weight they had lost on the drug by week 88. Further, 177 (57 percent) regained at least 50 percent, and 74 (24 percent) regained at least 75 percent. Generally, the more weight people regained, the more their cardiovascular and metabolic health improvements reversed.

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The No‑Exit Mental Health System: The Federal Government Puts You on Psychiatric Drugs and Never Lets You Off

The Federal Government is the largest funder of mental health services and psychiatric drugs, yet these same federal agencies that provide mental health services do not provide any information for safely getting off the drugs. AbleChild believes that as the largest supplier of psychiatric drugs, the federal government should also provide an “Exit plan” for deprescribing psychiatric drugs.

Medicaid and Medicare Part D treat psychiatric drugs as “must-cover” commodities: federal rules require drug plans to cover all or nearly all antidepressants and antipsychotics as protected classes, ensuring easy access and steady revenue for manufacturers. With Medicaid alone, antipsychotics generated more than 73 million prescription claims and  more than 6 billion dollars in one year, accounting for roughly 9% of all Medicaid drug spending and 10% of prescriptions.

This federal psychiatric drug infrastructure is one-way: it is built to initiate and maintain long-term drug exposure. There is no parallel requirement that any prescriber, clinic, or health plan design a personalized Exit plan before starting any psychiatric medications, and no federal benefit category that funds slow, labor-intensive taper support the way it funds prescription refills.

Regulators acknowledge serious risks associated with too many of the psychiatric drugs. For example, the Food and Drug Administration’s, (FDA) black-box warnings on antidepressants note increased suicidality risk in children, teens, and young adults, and require close monitoring when treatment is started or doses are changed. Large reviews of antidepressant withdrawal find that discontinuation symptoms are common—An alarming body of meta-analyses and large-scale surveys consistently demonstrates that between one-third and nearly one-half of patients prescribed psychiatric drugs experience withdrawal effects, with a significant portion enduring severe and drawn-out symptoms. For many, these reactions are far more than discomfort—they include incapacitating dizziness, unrelenting nausea, jarring electric-shock sensations, agitation, and relentless insomnia, often rivaling or overwhelming the original condition that led to treatment.

Beyond these physical and psychological torments, the risks escalate further. Withdrawal can trigger waves of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, with evidence linking severe discontinuation—particularly of antidepressants and opioids—to suicide attempts and completed suicides. Research documents the strong association between withdrawal and heightened aggression or violence, whether due to direct drug effects, physical desperation, or drug-seeking behavior fueled by protracted suffering. These dangers are not rare complications—they are consequences faced by a non-trivial share of those attempting to discontinue psychiatric drugs, and their impact on patient safety, public health, and the justice system is profound and underacknowledged.

Yet despite clear evidence that stopping psychiatric drugs can be medically complex and dangerous, U.S. law does not guarantee access to slow tapers, compounding, or close follow-up, when patients want to come off the drugs. A few specialty guidelines now outline careful benzodiazepine tapers and warn against abrupt cessation, but they are advisory documents, not enforceable rights. In practice, patients are routinely placed on medications with known withdrawal syndromes, while being left to navigate the exit alone or with minimal support when they try to stop.

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Mastermind Behind ‘Disinformation Dozen’ List Took Money From Foundation Linked to Soros

An organization linked to George Soros helped fund the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — the group that wrote the 2021 “Disinformation Dozen” list targeting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other prominent vaccine critics.

The Washington Free Beacon first uncovered the $250,000 grant for fiscal year 2024 in a report published Monday. The Open Society Foundations — which lists the grant on its website as providing “general support” — was founded and funded by Soros and is now led by his son, Alex Soros.

The disclosure offers a rare look into CCDH’s finances. The nongovernmental organization, which has long kept its funding sources out of public view, “does not voluntarily disclose its donors,” the Free Beacon reported.

On Substack, Sayer Ji, chairman of the Global Wellness Forum and founder of GreenMedInfo, said the Soros-linked grant represents only a small part of “a web of 20+ funders, pass-throughs, hidden trusts, foreign billionaires, and U.S.-U.K. political operatives” backing CCDH.

After CCDH published its “Disinformation Dozen” list in 2021, mainstream media outlets repeatedly cited it to discredit those named — including Kennedy, then chairman of Children’s Health Defense, which he founded. Some outlets have since issued corrections.

Last year, a whistleblower leaked internal documents revealing that CCDH planned to “kill Musk’s Twitter” — now X — and launch “black ops” against Kennedy. “Black ops” refers to secret operations carried out by governments or other organizations that hide their involvement.

Jim Hoft, founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit — which CCDH and its CEO, Imran Ahmed, attempted to demonetize in 2021 — said CCDH’s link to Soros did not surprise him. Hoft said he is “thrilled that this is finally exposed,” arguing that Soros has supported “numerous anti-American protests and movements.”

Ji, who appeared on the “Disinformation Dozen” list, told The Defender that CCDH’s ties to Soros represent “far more than a simple financial disclosure — it’s the moment the curtain gets pulled back on an elaborate theater of manipulation that has been operating in plain sight, yet hidden behind layers of institutional camouflage.”

Ji said the revelations confirm that CCDH “has never operated as an authentic civil society organization.” Instead, CCDH “functions as a sophisticated influence weapon, deployed with surgical precision against those who dare challenge pharmaceutical orthodoxy and the broader control narratives of our time.”

Pediatrician Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, also named one of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” said, “Soros’ money seems to be in everything destructive to liberty and democracy.”

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How CDC and FDA Defrauded the American Public about Serious Vaccine Harms

n a fascinating book released in September, Vaccines, Amen. The Religion of Vaccines, lawyer Aaron Siri explains how the American public was systematically misled by the very institutions they are supposed to trust. 

Via numerous lawsuits, Aaron brought many deeply buried, politically inconvenient facts to light, and he is very factual, which is uncommon for vaccine books. They are usually emotional and far too critical of vaccines, or far too positive, with little in-between, which is where the truth is.

The value of lawyers cannot be overestimated. Nothing hurts like the truth about healthcare, which is why we badly need lawyers to dig it out. When drug policy researcher Alan Cassels reviewed my 2025 book, How Merck and Drug Regulators Hid Serious Harms of the HPV Vaccines, he concluded that “If you want the real truth about drugs, don’t ask doctors – ask lawyers.”  

Another quote on my book cover is from Martin Kulldorff, the current chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): “Drugs and vaccines can heal and save lives, but also harm. That puts our lives in the hands of pharmaceutical companies. Can we trust them? In this well-documented book, the clear answer is: NO.”

It is essential to understand this. We know very little about the harms of vaccines because most of the data come from substandard and flawed trials performed by drug companies, which leave out important adverse events from their publications and avoid, with virtually no exceptions, to compare their vaccines with a placebo. 

As an expert witness in a lawsuit against Merck, I read 112,452 pages of confidential study reports and uncovered multiple instances of scientific misconduct in which the drug agencies were complicit. It turned out that Gardasil, an HPV vaccine, causes serious and persistent neurological harms, which drug regulators have denied. 

Aaron explains right from the start why vaccines are sacrosanct. People never say they believe in cars but many say they believe in vaccines, without having the data needed to provide an informed opinion. I found the same when I analysed BMJ articles about Kennedy’s much-needed vaccine reforms; it was all about faith, not about science. 

Aaron has used lawsuits to demonstrate that vaccinologists have a self-reinforcing belief system whose dogmas do not stand up to scrutiny in court. His takedown of Stanley Plotkin, the “high priest” of vaccines, during a deposition is a masterpiece in exposing that the emperor has no clothes when claiming that childhood vaccines are safe and have been carefully tested. 

Plotkin was unable to understand why his earnings of hundreds of millions of dollars from royalties and his close alignment with the interests of the industry could influence his views on vaccines. He didn’t know that safety monitoring in certain trials only lasted 4-5 days after vaccination, which is way too short to capture autoimmune adverse events. Worst of all, Plotkin stated that certain vaccines don’t cause certain harms, or he stated that they were rare, without having any evidence in support of his wishful thinking. 

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