Tag: big pharma

GLP-1 Weight-Loss Drug Prescriptions for Young Kids Skyrocketing, Study Finds

The number of American children being prescribed GLP-1 weight-loss drugs has surged dramatically over the past few years, fueling debate over whether doctors are medicating childhood obesity instead of preventing it, according to new research.

A recent study led by researchers at NYU Langone Health found prescriptions of Saxenda, Wegovy and Zepbound for children ages 8 to 11 rose 310-fold from 0.03% in 2019 to 9.3% in 2026.

Researchers said 20,282 children in that age group were prescribed the drugs in 7.5 years — still a small fraction of the more than 3.5 million children studied, but a fast-accelerating one.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved GLP-1 drugs for children under 12, but doctors prescribe them off-label for extreme cases.

We ‘need more long-term data in children,’ physician says

Babak J. Orandi, M.D., Ph.D., the study’s lead investigator and an obesity medicine specialist at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, said the research offers the first national look at how GLP-1 drugs are being used in young children amid the broader obesity epidemic.

Roughly 20% of U.S. children are obese, he said, and that underlying trend is what worries him most.

“My biggest concern is upstream of any medication: Nearly 1 in 5 children this age has obesity, and that’s what’s really driving this,” Orandi told The Defender.

He added:

“Medication can help an individual child, but it doesn’t address why so many children are developing severe obesity in the first place. I’d like to see real investment in the food environment kids grow up in, with less reliance on ultra-processed food, better food access and affordability, less screen time and more opportunity for physical activity, and support for families trying to build healthier routines at home.

“Treating more children with medication while leaving that environment unchanged just means we’ll keep producing more children who need treatment.”

Orandi said the drugs can be effective for treating obesity and related health problems, and that forgoing treatment carries its own long-term risks, including a higher chance of developing chronic disease later in life.

Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity physician-scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, agreed.

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FDA relied on broken data mining process to sell COVID vaccines: report

Top officials with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were warned in early 2021 of a critical defect in the country’s vaccine monitoring system yet chose to rely on it anyway while assuring the public of the COVID-19 vaccines’ safety, according to a new report.

On September 16, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a report detailing flaws in the algorithms used to sift through the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to find safety signals with the COVID shots that would require investigation.

One of those algorithms would calculate “proportional reporting ratios” (PRRs), identifying events that were reported at a higher rate than others, along with “empirical bayesian” data mining.

But according to the BMJ’s investigation, the agency’s algorithm was “mathematically compromised by the deluge of covid vaccine adverse event reports – resulting in a near total loss of signal detection sensitivity for the new mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna.” More significantly, top officials were warned early in 2021, yet chose to keep relying on it anyway, and even “cited the absence of signals when assuring clinicians and the public of the vaccines’ safety.”

In February 2021, the Israeli Ministry of Health informed the FDA and CDC of a “a large number of reports of myocarditis, particularly in young people” after vaccination, and followed up five weeks later that two of the 77 had died. The Pentagon Defense Health Agency subsequently reported a “cluster” of myocarditis cases among male soldiers. By May, VAERS had gotten hundreds of such reports, prompting the CDC to begin alerting medical professionals.

Then-FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research director Peter Marks emailed CDC director Rochelle Walensky, expressing concern that “myocarditis and pericarditis have not actually signaled … Can you help me understand why we are doing this when pediatricians and others in the community already seem to be aware?”

As VAERS reports continued to mount, health officials inquired as to why they were not receiving safety signals from the government.

“The problem arose because, in the first year of the rollout, almost all the reports coming into VAERS – more than 90% of 1.1 million – were for the mRNA covid shots, dwarfing vaccines for all other diseases,” BMJ explained. “This meant that analyzing the safety of one vaccine, for example Pfizer’s product, involved comparing it to other vaccines, which were overwhelmingly limited to Moderna’s product. But if both mRNA vaccines elevated the risk of an adverse event like myocarditis in roughly equal amounts, the ‘observed’ frequency and ‘expected’ frequency would be similar, resulting in no automated alert. The statistical phenomenon is known as ‘masking.’”

Microbiologist and immunologist Ana Szarfman, an expert in drug safety data mining who worked with the FDA for decades, emailed Marks directly with concerns about the system. Two weeks later, a video conference was held in which Szarfman’s presentation explained that the PRR analysis “Highlights almost everything,” whereas the FDA’s bayesian approach did not: “You are not getting useful information with such low counts.”

Yet Marks and his team declined to change course and urged Szarfman to “hold off on creating and sending data mining reports and analyses using covid-19 vaccine AE (adverse event) data.”

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Anthrax Attacks Paved Way for COVID-Era ‘Junk Drugs and Vaccines’

The anthrax attacks that followed 9/11 did more than frighten Americans — they helped create the legal, regulatory and biosecurity framework that later enabled the government’s response to COVID-19, according to Dr. Meryl Nass.

Speaking at the Turning the Tide: 9/11 25 Years Later conference last week in New York City, Nass drew a direct line between the anthrax letters of 2001 and the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s worth thinking about the similarities between the COVID experience and the anthrax letters because it seems that both were inside jobs planned by the same cabal for the same purpose,” Nass said.

Nass, an internal medicine physician who has conducted extensive research on biological warfare and anthrax, outlined what she sees as striking parallels between the two events.

“Each had an uncanny, scripted simulation preceding it,” she said, pointing to the Dark Winter tabletop exercise in 2001 and Event 201, a pandemic simulation, in 2019.

“Each was blamed on countries the U.S. government had already targeted,” Nass said. The anthrax attacks were initially blamed on Iraq while COVID-19 was blamed on China.

“A huge, expensive biodefense gravy train resulted after each of them,” she said.

Both events were also accompanied by “a massive amount of false narrative construction and control of the media to project the false narratives.” And neither received a serious investigation into who perpetrated the event, according to Nass.

In addition, both crises “led to a mushrooming of the surveillance state,” Nass said.

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Popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs linked to potentially deadly brain disorder

Researchers are warning about a rare but potentially life-threatening brain condition that may be linked to popular GLP-1 weight-loss medications.

A new study, published in Clinical Nutrition, identified 15 reported cases of Wernicke encephalopathy, a neurological disorder caused by severe vitamin B1 deficiency, in people taking GLP-1 receptor agonists.

Most of the reported cases involved semaglutide, sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, or tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound.

Researchers found 15 cases through the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), published medical literature and their own medical center.

Most patients reported gastrointestinal symptoms or nutritional issues, including weight loss, vomiting, loss of appetite or malnutrition, the study noted.

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Radical Abortion Group With Ties to Biden Officials and Shady Hedge Fund Faces Investigation and Lawsuit for Advertising Illegal Abortion Pills in Plane Stunt

A radical left abortion group founded and led by ex-Biden officials is coming under fire by Kentucky’s top law enforcement official after an “illegal” stunt advertising abortion pills at the state fair. 

New York-based Mayday Health was founded following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade by former Biden White House Traveling Content Director Olivia Raisner, former Biden-Harris campaign speechwriter Sam Koppelman, and Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz.

Last weekend, Mayday Health promoted the trafficking of abortion pills into the state, bypassing an existing law in Kentucky that bans the sale of the deadly drugs, Kentucky Today reports.

The banner, which advertised “Abortion Pills By Mail” with a link to Mayday Health’s webpage, was seen flying over the Kentucky State Fair last weekend.

Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman responded to the incident on X, writing, “It appears abortion activists are flying over Louisville advertising illegal drugs.”

“They are breaking the law,” he added. 

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The Guest List Economy: How Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Real Estate Lock You Out

Who, exactly, manages the U.S. economy? And what happens when the people who run it convert it into their own private club — one that has a guest list that somehow never includes you?

Big Tech giants like Apple decide which apps you’re allowed to see and use. Remember when it shut down Parler? 

One day Parler was up. The next day Parler was gone — just because Apple decided the wrong people were talking too much.  

That’s a very convenient arrangement, don’t you think? 

Big banks and payment processors often play the role of gatekeepers too — deciding which businesses get accounts, which transactions get processed, and, in some cases, who gets access to the financial system at all. Conservatives learned just how much power those institutions wield during the years-long fight over politically motivated “debanking.”

Then there are the pharmacy benefit managers — middlemen who stand between you and the medicine your doctor prescribed. They decide which drugs get covered by insurance, which pharmacies you get to use, and how much you pay.

Do we honestly believe these people have the patients’ best interests at heart?

Of course we don’t.  

Average people lose choices and smaller competitors must follow the rules as written by the powerful and well-connected.

Their latest racket is in housing. 

Giant real estate players are creating preferred networks, where the well-connected get the first look at available homes on the market while regular buyers are left to scour through a public market that no longer always presents everything that’s actually for sale.  

House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee Chair Scott Fitzgerald is asking the right questions. He has demanded answers from Compass — the country’s biggest real estate brokerage — and Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) MLS system about the private listings partnership they have popularized together, which only MRED members can see. Because the MLS controls nearly all the listings that are visible in one particular region, this anti-competitive behavior has real consequences.  

But the American people have many allies in their corner. 

Just like Rep. Fitzgerald and the rest of his colleagues on the congressional antitrust subcommittee, the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have also never been afraid to enforce the competition laws on the books to protect

Populist conservatives should always do antitrust this way — enforcing the law, knocking down the barriers anti-free market actors put up, and giving regular people a fair shot at competing. But then getting the hell out of the way.

The goal should be to protect competition, not to remake the economy to fit a more egalitarian, socialistic model — like how the Biden administration prevented low-cost airlines Spirit Airlines and Jet Blue from merging, leading to Spirit’s bankruptcy earlier this year. That didn’t help consumers. That led to less choices and higher fare costs. 

What helps consumers is a government willing to take down the corporate actors who violate the consumer welfare standard and leave Americans with fewer choices, not more. Right now, the most urgent target for that kind of enforcement is the housing industry.

The hallmarks of a free marketplace are competition, choice, and the promise that an outsider can still knock the people on top off their perch by building a better mousetrap. 

America’s economy is supposed to be a marketplace open to everyone, not a managed economy that has its rules set by the members of a members-only club. The more Congress, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson can do to keep it that way, the better off we’ll all be.

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80-Page Report Reveals New Details About Pharmacy Technicians Involved in Drug Mix-Up That Left Patients Paralyzed at Nashville Hospital

An 80-page report revealed more details about a ‘pharmacy error’ that sent multiple patients into cardiac arrest at a Nashville hospital.

At least two patients are paralyzed, and one was put on a ventilator at Ascension Saint Thomas Midtown Hospital on August 14 after they were given the wrong medication prior to surgery.

The four patients were reportedly given potassium instead of an anesthetic. The dangerous mix-up happened at the hospital’s in-house pharmacy.

Too much potassium administered too quickly can stop a person’s heart, CBS reported.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigations is now involved in the case.

The hospital said they were “sorry” for injecting the patients with too much potassium.

“Our hearts remain entirely with the four patients and families impacted by the recent event at Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital Midtown,” the hospital said. “On behalf of our leadership and care teams, we extend our deepest apologies for the harm caused.”

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Cancer “vaccines”: Don’t let them inject you unless you fully understand what they are injecting

After five years of being bashed on unsafe, ineffective, uncontrollable spike protein-producing (Spikevax, mNEXSPIKE) vaccines, Moderna is solidly back home in the cancer business, and their stock performance couldn’t be any better.

The mRNA Cancer Long Game: Moderna’s Pivot from Pandemic to Personalised Chemotherapy

There’s a narrative that’s taken hold in the financial press and biotechnology cheerleading circles: Moderna, having saved humanity from covid, is now developing “cancer vaccines” that will do for oncology what Operation Warp Speed did for respiratory viruses.

This is marketing, not medicine.

What Moderna is actually doing is using synthetic messenger RNA as a delivery mechanism for personalised neoantigens as a part of toxic combination chemotherapy. Calling these “vaccines” is a linguistic sleight of hand designed to borrow the halo from childhood immunisation while obscuring the reality of what’s being injected into patients’ bodies week after week.

The remainder of this article is behind a paywall.  Click HERE to subscribe to Focal Points and read the full article.  After subscribing, you can claim one free-to-read article.

[Note from The Exposé: A cancer “vaccine” programme is also underway in the UK, with clinical trials currently taking place. “The NHS Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad (CVLP) is a platform that will speed up access to messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) personalised cancer vaccine and other immunotherapy clinical trials for people who have been diagnosed with cancer. It will also accelerate the development of cancer vaccines and other immunotherapies as a form of cancer treatment,” NHS England says.]

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Medication-Induced Psychosis and the Case for Safer Psychiatric Care

Board-certified psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Witt-Doerring discusses his specialized focus on adverse reactions to psychiatric medications and safe de-prescribing, using the high-profile Lindsay Clancy case as a timely illustration. Witt-Doerring, who has worked in clinical practice, for Johnson & Johnson, and at the FDA, argues that conventional psychiatry often oversimplifies mental distress as chemical imbalances requiring indefinite drug treatment. His approach emphasizes common-sense interventions—gradual medication reduction, accountability for diet, physical activity, and lifestyle—helping many patients regain energy and motivation that long-term drugs can suppress.

Witt-Doerring reports that for roughly 80 percent of cases involving anxiety, depression, or insomnia, patients can discontinue medications without major issues. More complex conditions such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia present greater challenges, and some individuals elect to remain on treatment. He notes a growing network of clinicians, including Mark Horowitz in the UK and participants in deprescribing mentorship programs, who share this holistic orientation.

The conversation centered on Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother charged with killing her three young children in early 2023. Initially, many viewed the act as pure evil warranting imprisonment. Witt-Doerring contends the medical record supports a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity due to medication-induced psychosis. After her third child, Clancy experienced postpartum depression and life stresses. Telemedicine providers prescribed Zoloft, an SSRI; she developed severe insomnia, the dose was doubled, symptoms worsened, and it was stopped. She was later placed on Prozac, then Seroquel, and eventually amitriptyline, with the dose increased the day before the tragedy. In a short period she was exposed to approximately 11 medications.

Drug labels explicitly warn that antidepressants can precipitate mania and psychosis. Clancy later reported command auditory hallucinations. Collateral evidence includes text messages in which she described the drugs damaging her brain and making her feel worse, disclosure of intrusive homicidal thoughts to family weeks earlier, and forensic analysis of her computer searches for medication side effects. Family, friends, colleagues, and her nanny described her as a loving mother with no history of violence, substance abuse, or relational breakdown—the typical motives in filicide cases. The prosecution’s theories of psychopathy or “altruistic filicide” appear inconsistent with this background. Witt-Doerring highlights parallel malpractice concerns over continued antidepressant prescribing despite clear worsening.

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Pharmacists sound alarm over popular drugs used for weight loss: Users ‘look like chemo patients’

Drugs prescribed for diabetes and chronic obesity such as Ozempic are increasingly sought after for quick, cosmetic weight loss, a life choice pharmacists warn can lead to serious health risks. 

“We have seen thin people try to come in and get it,” Dr. Carrie Leske, a licensed pharmacist in Minnesota, recently told Just the News. “As pharmacists we are supposed to use our judgment and, if need be, call the physician and try to understand what’s going on, because it’s supposed to only be used for obese people.”

Such prescription medications, known under such popular brand names as Ozempic and Wegovy, are a class of drugs known as Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (or GLP-1s) that mimic a natural hormone to lower blood sugar and reduce appetite. Two types of GLP-1s – semaglutide and tirzepatide – are found in such medications. 

However, they were not created for weight loss in people already at healthy weights. So taking it off-label brings such serious medical risks as severe dehydration, muscle loss and pancreatitis.

“Some of the people using [these] just look so unhealthy,” Leske, also told Just the News. “They look like chemo patients to me.”

Dr. Nairi Kasparian, a clinical pharmacist in Omaha, told Just the News that while GLP-1s can be “very effective,” they are designed for continual, indefinite use as long-term weight management – not necessarily as a temporary weight loss pill.

“They are FDA-approved as chronic weight-management treatments, meaning the goal is generally to continue them as long as they are providing benefit and are tolerated,” she said. 

“The biggest issue is when people stop taking the drug,” said Kasparian, while also pointing out “current obesity-treatment guidance notes that stopping semaglutide or tirzepatide abruptly can result in regaining roughly half to two-thirds of the weight lost within a year” – particularly if the individual has not maintained a strict diet.

Nevertheless, the efficacy of the medications in curbing appetite and delivering speedy results has gained the attention of otherwise healthy individuals seeking short-term, cosmetic weight loss.

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