Tag: big pharma

How a Scientific Cartel Protects Fraudsters and Rakes in Billions of Taxpayer Dollars

I was 22 when my grandmother forgot me.

It took her 12 years to die from Alzheimer’s. It started with little things, like where her glasses were or what day it was. Soon she didn’t know who I was. For a while, she addressed me as her son, but then, as the disease ate away more of her mind, she forgot him too. Then I was the young, handsome version of her husband, until he too faded away. After a while, I was just a nice young man who came to visit her.

The rest of the time, she was afraid: waking up in an unfamiliar world, surrounded by people she’d never met, confused that she wasn’t back home in Minnesota, where she’d grown up. It hit my mom the hardest. She did everything she could to take care of her own mother, watching the brilliant, kind woman she knew rot into a husk of her former self.

My grandmother died on Christmas Eve. As sad as it was, it was a blessing for my mom, who was finally freed from her duty of watching the woman she loved the most waste away.

The Alzheimer’s Researcher Who Became a Poster Child for Academic Fraud

Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, published a paper in Nature in 2006 claiming to identify a specific amyloid beta protein assembly as the direct cause of memory impairment in Alzheimer’s. This reinvigorated the amyloid hypothesis at a moment when skepticism about it was ramping up. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) devoted $1.6 billion to projects that mention amyloids in 2022 alone, nearly half of all federal Alzheimer’s funding that year. Lesné was a star.

But there were rumblings. Numerous amyloid drugs made it to trials with billions invested by pharmaceutical companies. They failed repeatedly. A question arose in the pharmaceutical community: How can this be right? How can the trials keep failing if the underlying research is correct? 

In 2022, the Vanderbilt neuroscientist Matthew Schrag uncovered evidence that images in Lesné’s paper had been manipulated. Science magazine found more than 20 suspect papers by Lesné, with over 70 instances of possible image tampering. Nature retracted the paper in June 2024. Every author except Lesné signed the retraction. Lesné himself resigned from his tenured position at the University of Minnesota on March 1, 2025, three years after his fraud was exposed.

More news and details trickled out over time. Charles Piller’s 2025 book Doctored talks about the Amyloid Mafia, a nickname for a network that had prioritized novelty over replication and marginalized dissenters for decades. Anyone questioning the amyloid gospel was pushed out and watched their funding vanish.

When I first picked up that Science article, I hadn’t considered academic fraud as something that was real and widespread. As I thought about it more, I was filled with a deep, bitter hatred. For his own pride, greed, and acclaim, this man had doomed millions of people like my grandmother to slow, horrible deaths and millions more like my mom to agonizing years as caregivers.

Lesné resigned, but was still rich. None of his grant money was clawed back. The system that was supposed to catch this—peer review, university compliance, journal editorial boards—failed repeatedly for years.

Keep reading

Harvard-Trained MD Says ‘Coercive’ Vaccine Push Shattered Trust and Has Harris Voters Questioning the Experts

During an exclusive interview with The Western Journal this week, Dr. Monique Yohanan said Americans have a right to question the country’s vaccine schedule and must learn to advocate for themselves in medical settings.

Yohanan, who is director of the Center for Better Health at Independent Women, has an impeccable academic resume.

She received her medical degree from the Dartmouth/Brown Program and a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins. She did her residency in internal medicine at Harvard and a fellowship in geriatrics at Stanford.

In addition, Yohanan has held faculty appointments while maintaining active licensure and board certification in internal medicine.

Her CV, however, clashes with mainstream media narratives regarding vaccine skepticism. Those who pose questions about vaccinations are typically tagged as uneducated, misinformed, and are told to “trust the science.”

So why would someone with over 20 years of experience in clinical medicine, technology, and health policy speak out like this? Because she believes vaccination has become so politicized and deified that it’s harming patients.

“I feel like there’s a lot of dismissal of MAHA [Make America Healthy Again],” she said. “There’s a lot of dismissal of people who have questions about vaccines. There are people, historically, who framed the vaccine schedule as ‘You’re pro vaccine if you agree to every single vaccine, and that’s that.’ If you get all 27 shots and you shut your mouth and don’t say a word, then you’re a good person.’”

“And God forbid, you might say, ‘Well, I’m OK with my kid getting the shot for measles or for whooping cough, but do I really need the shot for hepatitis B?’”

Yohanan said that in California, “if you don’t get the shot for hepatitis B, your kid can’t go to public school.” And she’s correct. The state doesn’t even allow for religious or personal belief exemptions.

“That’s not a public health policy. To me, that is very coercive,” she added. “With COVID, what we had is so much, to me, of an overstatement of confidence that people started questioning everything, and so that’s where I come from, is that people are willing to have a more nuanced discussion.”

Yohanan also highlighted how California doctors are financially incentivized by Medicaid to get as many people vaccinated as possible.

Keep reading

‘You’ve Got to be Freaking Kidding Me’: U.S. Military Spends Over $700 Million for Ozempic and Other GLP-1 Weight Loss Meds

Military personnel criticize the hundreds of millions spent on weight loss medications as a misguided approach to addressing the obesity crisis in the U.S. Armed Forces.

A report from the American Security Project in 2025 revealed that approximately 68 percent—two out of three—of the military’s Reserve and National Guard forces are classified as overweight.

Subsequent to this report, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth expressed his concern on X, stating, “Completely unacceptable. This is what happens when standards are IGNORED – and this is what we are changing. REAL fitness & weight standards are here. We will be FIT, not FAT.”

Was the solution found in raising the bar for “REAL fitness & weight standards?” Perhaps they were. However, some startling revelations concerning weight loss have emerged, with RealClearInvestigations dubbing this disclosure the “Waste of the Day.”

Since 2021, the military has allocated nearly $726 million for Ozempic and other GLP-1 weight loss medications, with $274.6 million spent in fiscal year 2025, as revealed by spending records acquired by Open the Books.

This expenditure encompasses 102,597 individual purchases, all made through the Defense Logistics Agency for “troop support.” The majority of the funds were directed to the wholesale pharmaceutical company Cencora. Over a dozen varieties of GLP-1 medications were acquired, including Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Trulicity.

Many individuals—and taxpayers alike—who have served in the military are infuriated.

Lt. Ted Macie, a retired Navy Medical Service Corps officer, was appalled. He informed The Gateway Pundit that data obtained from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) indicate that obesity rates have surged in the military over the last decade.

From 2016 to 2019, an average of 13,863 cases of overweight and obesity were documented across all branches of service. This average rose to 21,969 between 2020 and 2023. Remarkably, there was a 190 percent increase during this period, with cases soaring from 12,249 to 35,531.

Keep reading

Psychiatry Won’t Pull Paper on Misleading Safety of PAXIL, Despite Massive Drug Settlement, Consumers Get “Expression of Concern”

A D.C. judge just sided with a long‑discredited Paxil study instead of the kids it was used to sell drugs to. GlaxoSmithKline has already paid $3 billion for fraud that included how it pushed Paxil for children and supported this very study, yet the article still stands in the medical record.  Those who rush to always defend psychiatry as “experts” of the human condition should really look at the bigger picture.

According to the lawsuit, that study falsely claimed Paxil was safe and effective for depressed teens, even though the company’s own trial data did not show real benefit and did show serious safety concerns, including suicidal thoughts and behavior. The case explains why lawyer George Murgatroyd went after the journal and its publisher for continuing to publish and sell the article, how the court’s ruling let psychiatry’s publishing system avoid full accountability once again, and how consumers were left with only a small warning label on the paper instead of the clear retraction many believe is needed.

At the center of this case is attorney George W. Murgatroyd III, a product‑liability lawyer who has represented families whose children died by suicide after taking Paxil. Murgatroyd sued the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the publisher Elsevier, arguing they were still “publishing, distributing, and selling a fraudulent scientific article” that misleads the public and endangers adolescent mental health, while charging readers to access it. He asked the D.C. Superior Court to treat that article as a deceptive practice under the District’s consumer‑protection law and to order a full retraction.

In March 2026, Judge Robert Okun dismissed his case. The judge did not say Study 329 was honest or reliable. Instead, he ruled that Murgatroyd lacked legal standing and that a journal article is not a “consumer good or service” under that particular law, so the court could not use that statute to force a retraction. In practical terms, the decision shields the journal and publisher: they keep the article online, charging for access, under the protection of free‑speech arguments rather than being treated like sellers of a defective product. For an industry already tied to a historic fraud settlement over this very drug and trial, it is another escape.

Murgatroyd’s work still produced one real gain for the public. After he filed his complaint, JAACAP finally attached an “expression of concern” to Study 329 in 2025, warning readers that serious issues have been raised about the article and that further review is underway. That warning label stays with the paper and marks it as disputed rather than trustworthy, a change that likely would not have happened without Murgatroyd pushing. In a landscape where a flawed study helped justify giving a risky drug to teens, naming him and his effort matters: he forced at least a small, visible sign of truth into the official record, even as the larger fight for justice and a full retraction continues.

Keep reading

COVID Vaccine Hearing Exposes Deliberate Blind Eye to ‘Overwhelming Evidence of Harm’

For four years, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has wondered how US health officials could ignore “overwhelming evidence of harm” from the COVID vaccine.

“Now I know,” he says.

The truth is, health officials didn’t “ignore” safety signals. They buried them instead.

And now we have the receipts:

The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations investigated what federal health officials knew and when they knew it—and dug out a timeline that would make any American furious.

This is not a fringe “conspiracy theory.” It was revealed by the government’s own investigation—and it’s a story they don’t want you to read.

According to VAERS, the US’s vaccine adverse event reporting system, more adverse events and deaths have been reported following COVID vaccines than from all other vaccines combined over the system’s 30+ year history.

More dangerous than ivermectin. More dangerous than hydroxychloroquine (which turned out not to be so dangerous after all).

It was 55 times more deadly than the flu vaccine (0.46 deaths vs 25.5 deaths per million doses).

And even more dangerous than Remdesivir, which earned the nickname “Run Death Is Near” after it wreaked havoc on the kidneys and livers of tens of thousands of COVID patients in the hospital.

But still the question remains. How did US health officials miss a safety signal this big?

Keep reading

MHRA study on covid vaccine injuries: The numbers buried inside it deserved rather more attention

One in seven. That is the proportion of people in the MHRA’s own actively recruited surveillance cohort who reported a medically serious adverse reaction following covid vaccination. Over half reported at least one reaction of any kind. The data were collected between 2020 and 2022. They were not published until September 2025, and only then because Cheryl Grainger, through a Freedom of Information  (“FoI”) request and subsequent Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) appeal, forced it out.

The paper that eventually appeared, in the journal Drug Safety, was not written as a safety paper. It was written as a description of the digital platform used to collect the data – a methods paper published five months after Dame June Raine left as chief executive, nearly three years after the data were locked. The actual adverse reaction rates are reported but not analysed. The one stratification that could determine whether those rates are real was not performed.

The numbers buried inside it deserved rather more attention.

What the Data Show

The Yellow Card Vaccine Monitor (“YCVM”) was the MHRA’s premium data source. It was one of four pillars of its covid vaccine safety surveillance strategy. Unlike the passive Yellow Card scheme, where people report voluntarily and sporadically, the YCVM actively recruited people and followed them up at set intervals. The MHRA itself described it as a tool to “rapidly detect, confirm, characterise and quantify new risks.”

Of the 30,281 individuals who reported receiving a vaccination, 15,764 (52.1%) reported at least one adverse reaction. 4,134 (13.7%) reported a reaction classified as medically serious under the MedDRA system. This is a regulatory classification that includes events deemed medically significant by an internal MHRA panel and is broader than the lay meaning of “serious,” but not a trivial threshold. It encompasses hospitalisation, disability, life-threatening outcomes and death, but also other events judged clinically important.

However, the 13.7% might include people who volunteered for the monitor becausethey had been injured. The MHRA did not exclude people signing up afterthey had their vaccine.

The key question is how representative this cohort was. Any voluntary cohort, even an actively recruited one, may over-represent people who experienced problems. Other active surveillance systems internationally have reported lower rates, though none has been free of similar methodological limitations. The true rate is unknown – which is precisely the problem.

The YCVM was meant to be designed to quantify risk in a way passive surveillance could not because of reporting bias. However, the key simple analysis to enable interpretation was not done. The question is not whether 13.7% is the true rate of serious harm. The question is why the MHRA did not do the work to find out what the true rate is.

The Cohort It Did Not Analyse

The paper reports 35.6% registered before vaccination and 47.5% after. A further group registered on the same day, but the paper does not quantify it. Even allowing for this, the categories as presented account for only 83.1% of the cohort, leaving 16.9%, over 5,000 people, unclassified. The paper does not explain the gap.

The pre-vaccination and same-day registrants are the key group. They signed up before or at the point of vaccination, not in response to a bad reaction. Their data is substantially less vulnerable to post-event selection bias, which is the main challenge to the headline figures. The criticism that people with bad reactions were more motivated to register does not apply to them. They were already in the system.

The obvious analytical step is to separate these registrants and compare their Adverse Drug Reaction (“ADR”) rates to those who registered afterwards. If the prospective cohort shows substantially lower rates, the selection bias interpretation is supported and you would want to say so. If the rates are similar, the overall figures are validated and you would want to say that too. If the rates are lower, then that is the rate that is of interest and should be published. In any case, the comparison is critical and should have been presented.

The MHRA did not present the comparison. In a 21-page paper with 13 tables, this stratification – the single most important analysis for interpreting the headline findings – does not appear. I have submitted an FoI request for this data.

Keep reading

RFK Jr. Torches Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren During Hearing on TrumpRx Drug Price Cuts

HHS Secretary RFK Jr. appeared on Capitol Hill for two hearings on Wednesday.

RFK Jr. first testified before the Senate Finance Committee on his agency’s budget and the deals that the Trump Administration struck with drug companies to lower prices.

Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren tried to go after RFK Jr. over TrumpRx’s price cuts, but he shut her down.

In February, President Trump launched ‘TrumpRx’ to lower drug prices.

“Today, President Donald J. Trump announced the launch of TrumpRx.gov. Through the website, patients will be able to access large discounts on many of the most popular and highest-priced medicines in the country, paying prices in line with the lowest paid by other developed nations (known as the most-favored-nation, or MFN, price),” the White House announced in February.

“Today’s launch features drugs made by the first five manufacturers to reach MFN pricing deals with the Trump Administration: AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, EMD Serono, Novo Nordisk, and Pfizer,” the White House said.

“Additional drugs from other companies that have signed MFN pricing deals will be made available through TrumpRx.gov in the coming months,” they said.

TrumpRx lowers prices for popular weight loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, inhalers, fertility drugs, and insulin.

Elizabeth Warren, a corrupt and worthless Democrat who has spent decades enriching herself by lying about being a Native American, tried to come at RFK Jr. about TrumpRx.

“If these pharma deals are so good, show them!” Warren said to RFK Jr.

“You had the power to make this deal yourself! Why didn’t you do that? We did this because you refuse to do it!” RFK Jr. said.

“You have a lot more power to negotiate than we do! We got the lowest prices in history,” he said.

Elizabeth Warren hit back and claimed TrumpRx is making things worse for the American people.

“Millions of people who are using Trump Rx disagree with you!” RFK Jr. said.

Keep reading

FOIA Data Reveal Adverse Event Patterns in New RNA Dog Vaccine

Details from a FOIA request to the USDA have revealed severe adverse events following injection of the Nobivac NXT canine flu H3N2 vaccine, the first self-amplifying RNA (saRNA) vaccine widely used in the US for pets. The aftermarket reports received by The HighWire show the first 1,012 pages of 1,888 total pages of adverse events from September 2024 through July 2025. There were 296 cases involving the Nobivac RNA vaccine as a suspect product: 152 were adverse reactions, and 76 were listed as cases of lack of efficacy, meaning the dogs developed respiratory illness or cough after receiving the vaccine.

The dataset shows that there were four canine deaths and one feline death following vaccine administration, but two of the dog cases had significant confounding factors. The other two cases involve dogs that collapsed shortly after receiving the vaccination. In addition, three dogs were euthanized following the vaccine.

-41 cases involved neurological issues

-30 cases of anaphylaxis or hypersensitivity

-52 cases involved vomiting

-19 cases had an injection-site mass/lump/panniculitis/fibrosis/surgery

-26 cases of diarrhea

-5 cases of collapse/shock-type presentations

-4 cases of bloody diarrhea

A 4-year-old golden retriever collapsed 10 minutes after the vaccination, before going into complete cardiac arrest and dying. Merck added anaphylaxis to the report later. A 7-year-old Yorkshire Terrier collapsed 70 minutes after receiving the vaccine, and life-saving care was attempted, but the dog passed away. Diphenhydramine and dexamethasone sodium phosphate were given to the terrier because of previous unspecified vaccine reactions. In addition to the Nobivac flu shot, the 7.33-pound terrier received the Nobivac Canine 1-DAPPvL4 and Nobivac Intra-Trac3 vaccines.

An 8-year-old Shih Tzu was lethargic and vomiting shortly after receiving the vaccination. She was diagnosed with renal failure six days later and euthanized. The event narrative explains that she had received several vaccinations before, including non-Nobivac flu vaccines, but had never received the Nobivac NXT canine influenza vaccine, which is the first approved saRNA vaccine in the country. Merck evaluated this case and said the vaccine was unlikely to be the cause.

saRNA vaccines have limited long-term safety data, much as mRNA vaccines did before they were rolled out to the general public in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These vaccines are marketed as “innovative, adjuvant-free, non-live vaccines” by Merck.

The first vaccine of its kind was approved by the USDA in 2024 and received limited coverage, but Nicolas Hulscher, MPH of the McCullough Foundation, criticized the lack of safety testing and the manufacturer’s level of transparency.

“It appears that Merck is attempting to camouflage the fact that this product is self-amplifying,” Hulscher wrote. “The primary product description only indicates that it uses ‘revolutionary RNA particle technology.’ However, the novel platform works by RNA particles targeting dendritic cells, where they self-replicate and result in sustained antigen production.“

Keep reading

Alzheimer’s Drugs Have No ‘Meaningful Effect’ on Cognitive Decline: Review

A class of Alzheimer’s drugs that have only been available for several years did not appear to have any “clinically meaningful effects,” according to a new review of clinical trial data.

Monoclonal antibodies that target plaque called amyloid beta in the brain showed little impact across 17 trials, Francesco Nonino, a neurologist and epidemiologist who directs the Unit of Epidemiology and Statistics at the IRCCS Institute of Neurological Sciences of Bologna, Italy, and co-authors wrote in the review.

“The effect of amyloid‐beta‐targeting monoclonal antibodies on cognitive function and dementia severity at 18 months in people with mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease is trivial, while on functional ability, it is small at best,” they said.

“Successful removal of amyloid from the brain does not seem to be associated with clinically meaningful effects in people with mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. Future research on disease‐modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease should focus on other mechanisms of action,” they added later.

The review covered 17 studies involving 20,342 participants. The drugs were typically compared with placebos in the trials, which were all funded by pharmaceutical companies.

The monoclonal antibodies in question were first approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2021. They include Lecanemab, which is available in the United States and other countries and is produced by Eisai and Biogen, and Eli Lilly’s Donanemab.

Keep reading

FDA Calls On Drug Companies to Release Missing Clinical Trial Data

The Food and Drug Administration is urging pharmaceutical companies to make public data from clinical trials.

About three in 10 studies deemed highly likely to fall under mandatory reporting requirements have no results filed with the government’s clinical trial website, the FDA said on April 13. That is in line with historical estimates.

The FDA sent more than 2,200 companies and researchers messages in late March that reminded them of the requirements, the agency said on April 13.

“Far too often, companies are suppressing unfavorable clinical trial results and keeping them secret from patients and the scientific community. Those sponsoring clinical trials have an ethical obligation to make results public regardless of the data’s influence on the company’s share price,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary said in a statement.

“Too many clinical trial sponsors and researchers are failing to report their results, leaving important information unavailable to clinicians and other researchers. If you are a doctor deciding whether or not to prescribe a medication to a patient, you deserve to have the best data about clinical studies on that medication.”

Sponsors of many clinical trials, and researchers involved with them, are required by federal law to report at least a summary of results within one year of completion. Phase 1 trials are among those excluded from the requirements.

The FDA can initiate a process when the people responsible for submitting the information fail to do so, which can lead to fines of up to $10,000. The process includes sending notices of noncompliance.

Only two such notices were sent in 2025, and the agency is declining to issue any, at least for now.

“The messages issued on March 30, 2026, represent an extra step the agency is taking to provide the relevant responsible parties with the opportunity to comply with federal law before the agency considers whether to take further regulatory action,” the FDA stated.

The agency, under Makary, has favored pressing companies to voluntarily meet its demands, including the removal of synthetic dyes from food.

“I fully support this new initiative to increase the prompt publication—as required by law—of results information from interventional studies of the medical products we regulate,” Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement.

“We hope that the thousands of messages sent to sponsors and investigators reminding them to publicly report their findings will improve patient safety and keep researchers and the public better informed of benefits and risks of new and investigational products.”

Keep reading