Tag: big pharma

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.”

Keep reading

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. 

Keep reading

Google Censored Vaccine Info Long Before COVID — Could It Have Anything to Do With Parent Company Alphabet’s Deep Pharma Ties?

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Big Tech companies colluded with the government to silence dissent and criticisms of the lockdowns and a coercive mass vaccination campaign by censoring truthful information that did not align with the political agenda.

The Biden administration’s role in the censorship regime was the subject of a May 2024 congressional report titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

Three months after that report was released, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to Congress that Facebook had censored factual information under pressure from the White House.

In September, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, responded to a congressional subpoena with a letter similarly disclosing how the Biden administration had pressured YouTube, owned by Google, to remove videos that didn’t even violate its content policies.

Alphabet called the practice “unacceptable and wrong” while insisting that it withstood the pressure and enforced only its own policies against “misinformation.”

That defense, however, sidesteps the fact that those content guidelines were created in collusion with the same “health authorities” advancing the authoritarian governance — like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO).

The result was that true information was censored while government-sanctioned disinformation was allowed to proliferate unchallenged.

As a United Nations official admitted at a September 2022 World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting, Google was helping government authorities to “own the science” in its internet search results.

In its letter to Congress, Alphabet noted that YouTube’s content policies had since evolved. Tacitly admitting how creators had been silenced for telling the truth, Alphabet promised to restore YouTube channels suspended for content no longer deemed misinformative.

So, Alphabet acknowledged the censorship but tried to absolve itself by blaming the White House and public health authorities.

The truth is that Google’s censorship of health-related content, including inconvenient facts about vaccines, predated COVID-19 and continues to this day. Could that be because Alphabet has its own deep financial ties to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries?

Alphabet’s ties to Big Pharma exist through numerous of its subsidiaries, including Calico, DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Verily Life Sciences. In this article, we will focus on the latter of Google’s sister companies.

Keep reading

Some Kids Getting Double or Triple Vaccinated, California Nurse Says

Babies and children who lack paper vaccination records sometimes receive two or three times the number of vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to experts who spoke with The Defender. Children whose parents immigrated to the U.S. and who don’t speak English are at the greatest risk.

Many medical providers assume that if there’s no record of a vaccination, the best way to ensure that a child receives the recommended vaccine is to readminister it, according to Rena Maculans, a registered nurse in California. “That’s the mentality of the providers,” she said.

Maculans — who spent 10 years as an emergency department (ER) nurse and later processed autism treatment claims — said urgent care and ER staff typically follow protocols that tell them to vaccinate a child if there’s no documentation of a prior vaccination.

Maculans said she followed those protocols before she realized that vaccines can cause harm. “We were all under the impression, well, if you double up on it, it’s a good thing. You have extra protection.”

Now, Maculans, whose daughter was injured by a COVID-19 vaccine, urges people to carry their immunization record with them. “That’s why I tell people, anytime you go to the doctor or urgent care, bring your immunization records with you.”

Maculans said she began piecing things together while processing medical claims for Partnership HealthPlan of California, a healthcare provider that serves over 900,000 Medi-Cal members in Northern California.

Medi-Cal is the state’s Medicaid program that provides free or low-cost health coverage for low-income individuals and families.

Maculans was a “utilization management nurse coordinator,” which meant she processed medical claims for continuation of services, including autism treatment services. It was her job to determine whether a patient should continue receiving autism treatments, including speech therapy visits, or whether the patient no longer needed the treatments.

She noticed that a highly disproportionate number of the claims were submitted by families that spoke only Spanish. In other words, more Spanish-speaking children reported having continued or increased autism symptoms that required treatment, compared to English-speaking or bilingual kids.

Knowing the link between certain vaccine ingredients and increased autism risk, she suspected that Spanish-speaking Medi-Cal families — such as migrant workers — may experience increased vaccinations due to language barriers and not having their children’s immunization records on hand to prove prior vaccination to medical staff.

California has among the highest autism rates in the country — 1 in 12.5 boys, according to the latest available CDC data.

Maculans acknowledged that she is speculating and that, under HIPAA laws that protect patients’ private health records, she could not take screenshots of the claims that she said would reveal the trends she observed.

Keep reading

Trump’s Weight-loss Drug Deal: Cheaper Shots, But Is It MAHA?

President Donald Trump has unveiled a sweeping action to slash the cost of the nation’s most expensive weight-loss drugs, casting it as a turning point for both healthcare affordability and economic fairness. In what the White House calls a “historic” agreement with pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, the administration announced that prices for popular GLP-1 agonists (weight-loss drugs) such as Ozempic and Wegovy will drop by more than two-thirds under a new initiative known as TrumpRx. The program is a government-backed platform that allows Americans to purchase prescription drugs at discounted rates negotiated by the administration.

The measure, described by officials as one of the largest single reductions in drug prices in U.S. history, aims to make medications long seen as luxury treatments accessible to millions of Americans battling obesity and related conditions.

Applause for the move was far from unanimous. Within the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) camp — the wing of the movement that believes real health starts with prevention rather than prescriptions — the mood was restrained. Critics argue that the deal hands pharmaceutical companies both market dominance and political validation, locking Americans further into a medical model driven by patented injections.

The Deal

The White House framed the deal as a landmark victory for American consumers:

The agreement represents a historic reduction in prices for Americans on the two drugs with the highest annual expenditures in the United States, both of which help adults struggling with diabetes, heart disease (Ozempic and Wegovy only), obesity, and other conditions.

Under the terms of the new arrangement, the monthly cost of Ozempic and Wegovy will fall from about $1,000 and $1,350, respectively, to $350 when purchased through TrumpRx. Prices for Eli Lilly’s Zepbound and Orforglipron, once approved, will be reduced from $1,086 to an average of $346. If — or rather when — the FDA later authorizes the Wegovy pill or similar oral GLP-1 drugs currently in development, “the initial dose of those drugs will be priced at $150 per month” through the portal.

The administration said the new pricing will allow Medicare and Medicaid to cover obesity treatments “at a dramatically lower cost to taxpayers than that proposed by the Biden Administration.” Under the agreement, Medicare will pay just $245 a month for drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound. That is less than half of prior proposals.

According to the fact sheet:

These low prices will enable Medicare to cover Wegovy and Zepbound for patients with obesity and related comorbidities for the first time.

Beneficiaries “will pay a co-pay of just $50 per month.” Plus, “state Medicaid programs will also have access to these medications at these prices.”

The deal also extends to other high-cost medicines. Eli Lilly’s Emgality, a migraine therapy, will now cost $299 per pen, down $443 from its list price. Trulicity, another diabetes treatment, will fall to $389 per month, a reduction of nearly $600. Novo Nordisk’s insulin products NovoLog and Tresiba will be capped at $35 per monthly supply.

Keep reading

More High Blood Pressure Drugs Recalled Due to Potential Carcinogens, FDA Says

The Food and Drug Administration confirmed in several notices that a recall of a type of high blood pressure medication has been expanded due to the presence of a potentially carcinogenic substance.

In three noticesissued this week, the FDA confirmed that 7,198 cartons of prazosin hydrochloride are being recalled nationwide by Ohio-based Amerisource Health Services and classified the recall as Class II.

N-nitroso prazosin, a nitrosamine found in the medication, is above the FDA’s acceptable limits, according to the FDA. Nitrosamines are a type of organic compound that is a potential human carcinogen that can form in food or other substances.

A Class II recall is considered by the FDA to be a serious but less severe product safety recall for a product that may cause temporary or medically reversible adverse health consequences or if there is a remote chance of a serious adverse health consequence associated with the item.

Latest Drugs Under Recall

The three items are:

  • Prazosin Hydrochloride capsules USP in 1-milligram doses in 100-capsule (10×10) cartons, which are distributed by American Health Packaging. It has a Carton NDC of 68084-996-01, and it has individual unit doses of NDC 68084-996-11.
  • Prazosin Hydrochloride capsules USP in 2-milligram doses in 100-capsule (10×10) cartons, which are distributed by American Health Packaging. It has a Carton NDC of 68084-997-01, and it has individual unit doses of NDC 68084-997-11.
  • Prazosin Hydrochloride capsules USP in 5-milligram doses in 20-capsule (5×4) cartons, which are distributed by American Health Packaging. It has a Carton NDC of 60687-572-32, and it has individual unit doses of NDC 60687-572-33.

The FDA did not include any other information about the recalled items, including whether people should continue taking them. In numerous previous recalls for products that contain elevated nitrosamine levels, the FDA has generally advised people to continue taking the prescription medication.

Keep reading

FDA’s top drug regulator resigns after federal officials probe ‘serious concerns’

The head of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug center abruptly resigned Sunday after federal officials began reviewing “serious concerns about his personal conduct,” according to a government spokesperson.

Dr. George Tidmarsh, who was named to the FDA post in July, was placed on leave Friday after officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of General Counsel were notified of the issues, HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard said in an email. Tidmarsh then resigned Sunday morning.

“Secretary Kennedy expects the highest ethical standards from all individuals serving under his leadership and remains committed to full transparency,” Hilliard said.

The departure came the same day that a drugmaker connected to one of Tidmarsh’s former business associates filed a lawsuit alleging that he made “false and defamatory statements,” during his time at the FDA.

The lawsuit, brought by Aurinia Pharmaceuticals, alleges that Tidmarsh used his FDA position to pursue a “longstanding personal vendetta” against the chair of the company’s board of directors, Kevin Tang.

Tang previously served as a board member of several drugmakers where Tidmarsh was an executive, including La Jolla Pharmaceutical, and was involved in his ouster from those leadership positions, according to the lawsuit.

Messages placed to Tidmarsh and his lawyer were not immediately returned late Sunday.

Tidmarsh founded and led a series of pharmaceutical companies over several decades working in California’s pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Before joining the FDA, he also served as an adjunct professor at Stanford University. He was recruited to join the agency over the summer after meeting with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary.

Tidmarsh’s ouster is the latest in a string of haphazard leadership changes at the agency, which has been rocked for months by firings, departures and controversial decisions on vaccines, fluoride and other products.

Keep reading

The Trust We Lost: How the DEA Broke Medicine’s Moral Backbone

A Continuation of the Chronic Pain Series

Once upon a time, trust helped define medicine.

When reassurance from your doctor was a hand on your shoulder, not risk; when telling the truth about pain, medication, and the limits of endurance didn’t make you a suspect.

I hate typing this, but those days are gone, and in their place stands a system built on fear, suspicion, and the quiet collapse of compassion.

What you’ll be reading isn’t isolated cries from the dark; these stories are proof of what happens when bureaucracy replaces any judgment from the bedside and when the war on opioids becomes a war on the sick.

Fear Behind the Mask

Incognito, asking to remain anonymous for reasons far too common:

Isn’t that disgusting that we have to live in fear over this? Doctors are suspicious of patients, patients are suspicious of doctors, and pharmacists are suspicious of both. The people who don’t understand will throw “pharma shill” and “junkie” at us for speaking about this very real situation. I have been in this fight for about 10 years, and it keeps getting worse. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but more people need to speak up. 

Incognito’s story stretches back to a childhood illness and a body that betrayed her early, followed by a system that later betrayed her. Nothing major, just pneumonia at six weeks, rheumatic fever at 10, a herniated disc at 14, and years of sciatica after that. She did, through it all, what Americans have been taught to do: work hard, stay tough, and trust that the promise of medicine was solid.

After years of dismissals, she finally received an adhesive arachnoiditis diagnosis, finding herself in the care of one of the few specialists still willing to treat patients targeted by regulators. Even after being hounded for daring to practice compassion, she said, “God sent me an angel.”

The fear she held was vivid.

The addiction industry and the mass tort lawyers, with the help of some NGOs and others, have made torturing us their favorite gig. I was terrified of becoming addicted. I asked my husband to tell me if I showed signs… that never happened.

She did one thing wrong, something that hasn’t even been considered—not once—a crime of trust. That trust, once sacred between doctor and patient, was turned against her.

Keep reading

Lawsuit Targeting Decades-Old Journal Article Triggers Renewed Scrutiny of Fraudulent Scientific Studies

A lawsuit demanding the retraction of a decades-old peer-reviewed article that claimed the antidepressant paroxetine, sold as Paxil, is safe and effective has put the issue of fraud in scientific and medical journals back in the spotlight, Paul D. Thacker wrote today in The Disinformation Chronicle.

The lawsuit, filed last month against the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and its publisher, Elsevier, demands the retraction of a 2001 article in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP).

The article was based on Study 329, which the suit claims distorted data to claim Paxil was effective.

The complaint alleges that JAACAP editors and Elsevier refused to retract the article “in an apparent attempt to shield at least five of the … authors who are prominent members of the AACAP from possible ramifications of retraction.”

Study 329 was ghostwritten by Paxil manufacturer GSK — which Thacker discussed in a 2011 report he republished today.

Several of the journal article’s co-authors worked for GSK or went on to hold key positions within the AACAP.

According to Thacker, one of the co-authors, Stan Kutcher, is now a member of the Canadian Senate and co-founded “Science Up First,” an initiative that purportedly targets scientific “misinformation.”

During a roundtable discussion on the weaponization of science that the MAHA Institute organized last week, Thacker cited Study 329 as an example of fraud in scientific and medical publishing.

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, spoke at the roundtable. He said the discussion, in which “panelists described horror stories of their own scientific research under attack through targeted retractions of papers, denial of research funding, and disciplinary actions,” was “stunning.” He added:

“There is a huge cost in falling out of line with established institutions in science and medicine, whether corporate, university or private organizations. And these highly credentialed panelists paid a huge cost for ‘doing the right thing’ in exposing malfeasance and bad science.”

Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., also participated in the roundtable. He said it “explored how science-like activities have been systematically re-engineered to serve political and corporate interests rather than truth.” He said:

“Study 329 exemplifies the collapse of accountability that follows when industry, regulators and journals form a closed feedback loop of self-validation. What’s marketed as ‘misinformation control’ today is often a continuation of that same pattern — protecting narratives, not people.”

‘One of the best documented case studies of corruption in modern biomedicine’

Study 329, completed in 1998 and funded by GSK, revealed serious safety risks — including suicidal behavior — associated with Paxil. Later studies confirmed those risks.

However, the study showed a few minor positive results that suggested possible efficacy, as it met 15% of the outcomes the researchers had initially said would prove Paxil’s effectiveness.

Keep reading

Blood Pressure Medication Recalled Due to Possible Carcinogens

More than 580,000 bottles of blood pressure medication are being recalled across the United States due to possible carcinogenic substances, according to a notice from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The recall involves three separate lots of prazosin hydrochloride, a type of alpha-blocking medication, that were distributed by New Jersey-based Teva Pharmaceuticals, because a test result for N-nitroso Prazosin impurity C found that the substance’s levels are above the “acceptable intake limit” under a type of test for carcinogens.

The recall encompasses three dosages for prazosin hydrochloride capsules, according to the notice. They include 181,659 bottles of 1-milligram doses of the drug, 291,512 bottles of 2-milligram doses, and 107,673 bottles of 5-milligram doses.

It means that the medication contained higher than acceptable levels of nitrosamines, which are carcinogenic compounds that can increase the risk of cancer when taken at high doses over long periods.

The FDA classified the recall on Oct. 24 as Class II, which the agency says is a scenario where a product, drug, or food “may cause temporary or medically reversible adverse health consequences” or it includes “an outcome where the probability of serious adverse health consequences is remote.”

The medication bottles were distributed nationwide, it said. The recall, which was initiated voluntarily by Teva Pharmaceuticals, started on Oct. 7.

Keep reading