Peter Selley and I have many friends in and a soft spot for The BMJ – the journal for members of the British Medical Association. One of us has read every issue since 1970. We thought there might be some response to our post Are Journalists the Answer to Clinical Medicine’s Cause and Effect Problem, which, in the nicest possible way, accused The BMJ of cooking up the equivalent of a pandemic virus in one of their laboratories – something that has badly affected all of medicine, maybe even fatally. Despite making sure the post appeared somewhere it might be noted, there has not been a hint of a response.
So perhaps another approach is needed. Peter and I can’t expect to have the stellar success the actors here in Not the 9 O’Clock News had. It ran on BBC 2 at the same time as The Nine O’Clock News on BBC 1. It was slow to take off but ultimately won lots of awards and spread to HBO in the US as Not Necessarily the News.
Pregnant and Reading The BMJ
If you were or are pregnant, reading The BMJ may have put pressure on you to have a Covid Vaccine. The BMJ has run several articles about vaccines for and clinical trials of vaccines in pregnant women. (They use the word people rather than women).
- Facilitating participation in clinical trials during pregnancy.
- Covid-19 vaccination in pregnancy.
- Protecting infants through covid-19 vaccination during pregnancy.
This is a tremendously tricky area that needs sensitive handling. There is no doubt that, just like other viruses, Covid can infect the placenta and harm or kill a foetus terminate a pregnancy. It also looks like vaccines given in pregnancy might do the same. Current trials of a Pfizer vaccine (RSVPref) given in pregnancy to prevent RSV infections suggest it can also cause a placentitis, prematurity and neonatal death. The BMJ avoided grappling with this in its recent coverage of these trials – See Are Journalists the Answer to Clinical Medicine’s Problem.
More to the point, Pfizer also have a randomised controlled trial C4591015 of its SARS CoV-2 RNA Vaccine (BNT162b2) administered in pregnancy. Why is it that The BMJ won’t discuss this trial. Not discussing it seems like a male – ‘let’s not bother the pretty little heads of these girlies’ – with this tricky stuff. We men can be politically mature about it – they, especially now, are likely to be a bit emotional.
Peter and I come at this from the point of view of figuring women who are, or who are thinking about getting pregnant, are the most assiduous and responsible researchers on earth.
Vaccine mandates have faced lots of women with a truly agonising choice – get the vaccine or lose your job in healthcare, or universities or elsewhere. Shouldn’t people in this position have access to all the information there is rather than just a set of Nudges from The BMJ and others to conform?
Pfizer’s Covid Vaccine in Pregnancy Trial
To date the only preclinical safety trial of BNT162b2 in pregnancy was performed in 44 Wistar rats, which have a gestation period of about 22 days.
A multinational clinical trial set out in February 2021 to recruit 4,000 pregnant participants. Initially there were 16 trial sites in the USA. By October 2021 an additional 68 sites, in Brazil, South Africa, Spain and the UK were set up.
Yet recruiting stopped on 25 October 2021 with only 348 pregnant women on board. That is on average four participants per site but maybe up to 20 in each of the US sites.
The trial ended formally on July 15, 2022. By convention the results should be published within 12 months of the end of the trial. In this case Pfizer supplied some irrelevant ‘sore-arm’ data on July 14, 2023.
The National Library of Medicine, which runs ClinicalTrials.gov, lamented the lack of data on the primary endpoints of antibody measurements and secondary endpoints of incidences of Covid-19 illness.
Pfizer say they have been terribly busy, and that the remaining results will not be made available until July 2024.
By contrast, in the Polack and Thomas NEJM paper on the pivotal trial of the same vaccine in more than 40,000 subjects, ghostwriters had analysed the data, written, and submitted the paper, which was published online within two months of the last patient being recruited.
At the start of the pregnancy trial Pfizer agreed to “provide access to individual de-identified participant data … upon request….” But in February 2022, this arrangement was rescinded. Pfizer state they will no longer share the data. So there.
But there is one extraordinary feature of this trial which has leaked into the public domain. The very small number of participants – 348 – is embarrassing. What could be done about this?
- Perhaps recruit family members of those who ran the clinical trial centres (e.g. Ventavia) as described by Brook Jackson; but that would be possibly illegal.
- Or, in a first ever (that we know of) maneuver of its type, in July 2023 Pfizer recruited all the babies born into the trial as participants.
“A total of 726 participants were enrolled in this study. 391 were maternal participants who signed informed consent form and were enrolled out of which 41 were screen failures and 2 participants were not randomized. Eventually 348 maternal participants were randomized to receive treatment. 335 were infants born to maternal participants.”
Beyond Journalism?
This is an extraordinary situation. The failure of any medical outlet, periodical, magazine to cover it is equally extraordinary. The difficulties here are ones that journalists cannot readily handle by inviting experts to say anodyne things like ‘we don’t have the full picture yet’ or ‘we don’t have the data so it’s difficult to say if there is an issue’.
Peter and I have been faced with a version of this when dealing with The BMJ. The official Consent Form for the Pfizer RSV maternal vaccine trial told pregnant women, remember your baby cannot be harmed by this vaccine it is you not your baby who is getting it.
How do you get anyone to say this is Okay. When this form was drawn to the attention of some of the centres who had been using it, they freaked out and said of course this is not acceptable. Given there is no clear way to put this in mitigating journalistic context The BMJ’s lawyers blocked coverage of the issue entirely.
We drew this Consent Form, and the injuries to babies known about from a prior GSK trial of an almost identical vaccine, to the attention of colleagues in New Zealand, who have a no fault compensation scheme for medical injuries.
Now here is where things get murky. One way to read the paper trail is New Zealand IRBs – ethics committees – were told that their no-fault compensation was not acceptable to Pfizer. Any injuries would have to be covered by Pfizer. But there is also some understanding that NZ’s no fault compensation scheme doesn’t cover injuries that happen in trials from which the sponsor stands to benefit – See Boland NZ Medical Journal.
To treat something doctors have to decide what has caused the problem. In Augusto Roux’s case, his doctors decided it was the vaccine. This was not acceptable to Pfizer who had to make Augusto vanish – Disappeared in Argentina. Astra-Zeneca made Brianne Dressen vanish in the same way. If they don’t disappear, companies have to let FDA know about the problem.
In the Boland case, the NZ no fault scheme did not cover the man’s injuries because the doctors were clear the vaccine had caused it and the result was years of disruption, litigation and legal bills for the injured man and his family.
The New Zealand ethics committees agreed to Pfizer’s terms, but alerted women that they would not be covered by the usual no-fault compensation scheme and would have to take their chances with Pfizer.
As outlined in this Healy, Roux and Dressen article, and as the Boland case shows, Pfizer and other companies have sown even more dense beds of dragons’ teeth and mines in the way of anyone seeking compensation after an injury in any of their clinical trials than the Russians have sown in Ukraine. See Women Clinical Trials and Pregnancy for more on this.
The BMJ not only do journalism these days, they have opinion pieces by ethicists and lawyers like Daniel Sokol, as well as clinicians, saying mandates are wonderful, who refuse to answer emails pointing out that mandates might well be fine where we have access to the data and can assess how reasonable they are but what about when, contrary to the basic norms of science, we don’t have access to the data and the articles that governments appeal to in justifying mandates are ghostwritten?
In the case of the issues being handled here, its all too easy to imagine The BMJ lawyers not just blanching but having a stroke.
Journals are only interested in letters that are “responses” to their articles, and even those letters are vetted and rejected if the lawyers get anxious. Which leaves posts like this, with links to the evidence backed up by correspondence to the appropriate bodies. Readers are left to interpret what the absence of an answer might mean – we always post answers.
Other Ethical Issues 1
Anyone becoming pregnant now faces an increasingly strange situation. In the last 15 years it has become normal for to be “offered” several vaccines by “healthcare providers”. These include Tdap – tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis. You have to get all three even though only pertussis is claimed to be beneficial. And a Covid vaccine, which is strongly recommended in many countries. And an influenza vaccine, which is vigorously recommended. Hepatitis B will be offered but may not be pushed. Pfizer’s maternal RSV is likely to be scheduled also.
Extraordinarily, a week ago, CDC voted to reclassify Nirsevimab, Astra-Zeneca’s monoclonal antibody, a treatment to mitigate the severity of RSV infections, as a vaccine and recommend that every healthy infant get it during the first year of life. Monoclonal antibodies can be highly toxic. They have a welcome place in clinical practice and an earlier version of nirsevimab was used sparingly and likely to good effect but giving this to every infant looks like a recipe for problems – perhaps a widespread loss of confidence in the authorities.
Women these days go out of their way to avoid alcohol, tobacco, processed meats and soft cheeses while pregnant. Following thalidomide they stopped taking drugs above all – for a while. But in recent decades while avoiding meat and cheese etc, they have been prescribed and are taking drugs in ever increasing amounts. Why? Uniquely compared to Foods etc, Drugs come with a ‘This Works’ label.
Few appreciate that things that have a ‘This Works’ label, like antidepressants can kill more people than they save. Antidepressants are now the second most commonly taken group of drugs in pregnancy.
Into this mix we now have vaccines. Vaccine recommendations have crept in individually. We have reached a point where, whatever about the potential harms of each vaccine, there is also evidence that RSV vaccinations reduce the effectiveness of Tdap and influenza vaccines if given at the same time. There are a lot more vaccines in the pipeline.
This is a compelling demonstration of the risks of polypharmacy and the need to reduce medication burdens. Effectiveness has limits and will require choices. Who should make these choices?
Other Ethical Issues 2
4. Vaccine trials in pregnancy have been obsessed with measuring antibody levels in the babies and the protocols call for an extraordinary number of blood tests on infants – leading one NHS ethics committee to reject a GSK trial for exactly this reason. It is more important to monitor clinically significant infection as well as placental function and intrauterine development of the fetus.
5. Should we encourage women to get involved in trials in pregnancy where there is no extra monitoring of their pregnancy? Where inducements of over $1,000 are provided? Where they do not appear to be informed for instance that breast-feeding offers the best protection against RSV and other infections and where Pfizer subsequently provide no data on the benefits of breast feeding.
Look how long it took for the revamped Study 329 to be published. Over a year, crossing all the i’s and dotting all the t’s, until it was unequivocally the case that the study had to be published.
This study had enormous ramifications for the safety of Paroxetine, the safety of children.
And while all this was going on, Paroxetine was being dished out amidst the soaring of GlaxoSmithKline’s coffers.
Medication approvals seem to be going through faster and faster and the whole landscape of vaccinations and medications has completely changed since the BMJ was born.
They have their audiences, primarily for doctors to keep up-to-date, but everything in GSKland and Pfizerland has changed meds and jabs beyond recognition and “it’s not their baby” —
Study 329: BMJ Transparency
November 6, 2015
17 Comments
Two weeks ago The BMJ ran an editorial by Richard Smith (former editor) and Fiona Godlee (current editor) on the retraction of a 1989 article by R K Chandra under the heading of A Major Failure of Scientific Governance.
https://davidhealy.org/study-329-bmj-transparency/
A day after the editorial appeared, Leonie Fennell submitted a Rabid Response (RR) to the editorial that used several of the words of the editorial itself. This RR was posted. Then the response disappeared. A while later it was re-posted. This time it was there long enough for someone to like it and for the screenshot above to be taken. But establishing its reality by liking it was apparently not enough. It was removed again, and has not reappeared since.
Brook Jackson
@IamBrookJackson
Since the discovery of RSV in 1956, no vaccine has been approved for prevention. The new adjuvant free, needle free vaccines do not mean they’re safe!
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230808124808/en/Meissa-Vaccines-Announces-Positive-Clinical-Data-for-the-First-RSV-Vaccine-Designed-to-Protect-Infants-and-Toddlers
These goals have been hampered over the years by the challenge of balancing attenuation and potency. We suspect that locally stimulated immunity in the respiratory tract by a topically presented vaccine will be a component of a truly successful immunization strategy. Now with next-generation vaccine technologies like Meissa’s, I am excited for the potential of a pediatric live attenuated RSV vaccine to advance and protect infants and toddlers. Meissa’s Phase 1 data are compelling and are consistent with strong preclinical data demonstrating potency despite heavy attenuation.”
Not the BMJ News…
Open Letter from the not editor in chief of Not The BMJ
https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj.p1864
Dear Dr Albert Bourla
We are writing to you to call for a transparent and standardised system under which pharmaceutical companies like your own, responsible for introducing new products, declare the results and data from clinical trials.
Greater transparency about the trial outcomes, particularly in connection with your covid, RSV and GBS vaccines, will lead to greater trust in the work of the Life Sciences. It will also allow an informed discussion, including by members and the public, about how such information should be governed and under which conditions they should be shared.
We thank you in advance for your consideration of this letter.
Yours sincerely,
Kamran Abbasi, not editor in chief, Not The BMJ
About a week ago I sent the letter below (known as an e-letter or “rapid response”) to the editor of a well-known British medical journal.
It was rejected. I was dejected.
My letter refers to a recent Editorial – “Co-creating healthcare”. One could see a non-transparency issue over a potential conflict of interests.
There was an irony in that The BMJ was at time criticising the Royal Colleges for not coming clean on their cosy relationships with the pharmaceutical industry.
The BMJ’s own policy on financial interests states (rather harshly I think) that “relevant financial interests in category 2.1 and 2.2 above automatically preclude authorship for editorials….”
Category 2.1 includes “paid membership of speakers panels/bureaus (sic) and advisory board”.
One of the authors is a member of the advisory board of IAPO. An interesting entity.
Dear Editor
Emma Doble and Mark Barone’s editorial about engaging people with non-communicable diseases in designing healthcare fails to mention the long-recognised issue of financial support of Patient Organisations by commercial organisations, including the pharmaceutical industry. (1)
“The BMJ has judged that there are no disqualifying financial ties to commercial companies. The authors declare no other interests.”
Dr Barone’s CV (2) mentions that he is member of the IAPO’s Scientific Advisory Board, but it is not made clear that IAPO is the International Alliance of Patients’ Organizations (3), funded almost entirely by the pharmaceutical industry. (4)
Perhaps, with transparency in mind, this should have been disclosed as part of this article.
1 https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj-2023-075000/rr-0
2 https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/advisory-panels/patient-panel-members/mark-barone
3 https://www.iapo.org.uk/global-voice-patient-centred-healthcare
4 https://www.iapo.org.uk/sites/default/files/files/IAPO%20Accounts%201%20Jan%20-%2031%20Dec%202020.pdf
I tried another tack – submitting a RR to Dr Abassi’s editorial and to my surprise it was published.
How can doctors share concerns?
Dear Editor
It is good that you, as a doctor and a journalist, are able to take on the might of the Royal Colleges who hide information about their financial support by the Pharmaceutical Industry and Medical Device Companies. Your Journal, of course, depends on income from the similar sources to the tune of over 3£M a year (1).
The problem is, how do ordinary doctors, with the type of concern that you have, make their voices heard?
Thirty years ago an ordinary doctor, like me, could pen a letter to the editor of the BMJ, fairly sure it would be published. This might be about an ethical issue, a clinical finding, or an adverse event on a drug, of which BMJ used to publish two per issue on average.
The suspicion that thalidomide might be associated with peripheral neuropathy is a good example. In December 1960, Dr Florence, a GP in Scotland wrote (2) “It would appear that these symptoms could possibly be a possible toxic effect of thalidomide … I feel it would be of interest to learn whether any of your readers have observed these effects….” Florence’s BMJ letter drew a response from doctors in a neurological unit who had noticed five patients with similar problems who had also been taking thalidomide. Some readers immediately stopped prescribing the drug.
Nowadays your Journal will not accept a letter in the form of a rapid response (like this) unless it is hooked onto a published article. Your headline stories are mostly written by your editorial staff (3) and your opinion columns offer predictable views.
Ordinary doctors need a platform in a medical journal, where important insights gleaned from clinical work can be shared with colleagues.
1 https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/sources-of-revenue
2 Florence, A. Leslie. Is Thalidomide to Blame? Br Med J 1960; 2 :1954
3 https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/editorial-staff
Competing interests: I have had rapid responses, which I believe to be factually correct, rejected by The BMJ. In general they were about the growing domination of healthcare by the pharmaceutical industry.
Thank you Peter
‘Ordinary doctors need a platform in a medical journal, where important insights gleaned from clinical work can be shared with colleagues’.
As young consultants in the 1980’s we had this valuable opportunity, and I believe that it was used to advance clinical understanding. I also believe that the sharing of clinical experience (across different medical disciplines) enhanced patient care.
Perhaps it was a valuable component of continuing medical education that was out-with commercial interests and manipulation?
Wider awareness of potential averse prescription drug reactions is well served by this type of platform.
So, did I understood correctly – until today there is no data about safety of the covid vaccines in pregnancy?
Not even fake data from Pfizer and co.?
That is correct – although there is a very recent review that says it is safe. I cannot now find the link.
D
Tomislav – there are some data, but the only RCT of Pfizer’s covid vaccine in pregnant individuals is the one we discussed above – NCT04754594.
There is a recent review of safety aspects of covid vaccine in general here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10040368/
I find it remarkable that two of the authors – Flor Munoz and Beatte Kampmann – do not declare any conflicts of interests but in another article published last year
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9195576/
Flor Munoz is a member DSMB Pfizer, Moderna, Meissa Vaccines, Virometix, US National Institutes of Health (NIH); Research support Pfizer, Gilead…
and Beate Kampmann is an investigator for clinical trials sponsored by Pfizer; member of ad hoc Scientific Advisory Committees for GSK, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and member of Independent Data Monitoring Committee J&J.Director of IMPRINT https://www.imprint-network.co.uk.
This whole area is hugely tricky.
Am just reading an article in Le Monde about fraudulent research – of which there was a lot on the anti-vaccine side during Covid
https://www.lemonde.fr/series-d-ete/article/2023/08/22/clara-locher-debusque-les-liaisons-dangereuses-entre-chercheurs-et-revues-scientifiques_6186155_3451060.html?s=09
But there is a huge amount on the pro-drug and pro-vaccine side also. Erick Turner and colleagues analyzed the publications on antidepressants and showed that a very large number were negative trials with the company telling the regulator they were negative but publishing as positive and even in trials where the regulator agreed the result was positive, the publication greatly exaggerated how positive it was
The one thing that can be said about the Pfizer Covid vax maternity trial is that a negative result has not yet been spun as positive – instead we have this article by Munoz and Kampmann
My question is how can mandates be acceptable in this situation. The mandates forcing pregnant women to get vaccinated or lose their job are the headline case but there are a lot of soft mandates – don’t take a statin for your elevated cholesterol, or any number of other things, and you get chuck off some doctors lists or denied health cover.
David
So data is limited, but they did not find any concerns, and they are paid by manufactures. I trust them every word.
Now they will take this as a prof that covid vaccines are safe for pregnancy..
“Data about the safety of vaccination against COVID-19 for pregnant women is limited.
•
COVID-19 vaccination coverage among pregnant persons is suboptimal.
•
We found no safety concerns for COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy.”
If I remember correctly, in the first Pfizer study for covid vaccines, in the protocol was written that if you are pregnant you can not get in the study.
But “be super mom” was all over the internet.
My wife was pregnant during 2021. and doctor told her that she should get the covid vaccine (among others). She just said him no way. And they stoped at that.
Also they offered here an antidepressant, and some antibiotics just in case.
She just told them that she takes vitamins C. That was it.
They did know how to take a no for answer.
Some other where very sensitive if you start to resist and ask questions.
Thank you guys for you work! Saved me a lot of trouble!
Tomislav
We have entered a strange world. After thalidomide, women steered clear of pills while pregnant. Now they also avoid soft cheeses, processed meats, alcohol, nicotine, coffee, hot showers etc – all reasonable enough but they take pills in ever increasing amounts with antidepressants being the commonest after antibiotics. Why?
Well uniquely drugs and vaccines come with a label ‘This Works’ and this puts an almost moral onus on people, women in this case, and it seems university educated, better off, white women in particular, to take them in pregnancy. What is wrong with you that you don’t take something that works?
Thanks for your comments
David
That what you said is for sure on of the reasons.
There is also trust in doctors.
Lot of time i hear “what do you know, you a not a doctor”.
There is also pressure to fit in, not to deviate from norms. Like if a women says that she do no what to vaccinate hera child. She will get a strange looks and you need a strong personality to stay “normal” in this situation.
I noticed that lot of people like if somebody tell s them what to do/take. It is easier not to think.
Also you need to invest lot of time and effort to learn all this stuff. You need to read books, be open minded, think critically.
And if you get all you info from tv or now social medial off course that you a not aware that there is not safety data on covid vaccines in pregnancy. And even that there is, that data is not reliable because it is coming from you know who. Random person does not know how studies are done,, how data is manipulated, how people are gaslighted…
I know from my experience how much time did I invested in all this. And how I needed to accept that all this time I was wrong.
And the people that are making money from all of this, are very good at keeping the things the way they are.
You know very well how fare a they prepared to go:/
You mention ‘trust in the doctors’. This makes them sound nice and reasonable people and there is a possibility for a genuine relationship and two people who will do science together. Well if they are doing science, in each individual case they should start from scratch and recognize the privileged position the person who will have to take a vaccine or drug is in – they have skin in the game.
But these drugs etc are available on prescription only. This puts doctors in the role of a policeman. They don’t need to relate, they boss. As regards medicines, they no longer know how to relate, how to achieve a scientific consensus. If they were good doctors and good scientists they would learn from those who come to them.
The current post on RxISK.org – How the Safety of Drugs was Destroyed – outlines how we ended up in this situation
David
But, David, you are so long in all of this.
From your experience is it getting better or worse?
Are the people more aware of the dangers and corruption in medical field?
Or is this spreading to fast all over the mainstream medicine?
If I see the level of propaganda that every day runs across in mainstream media, I am not so optimistic:(
If the regulators, pharma and the state are every day more and more connected, where is this going?
Do we need to reach the point where we have so sick population, that maybe it will be to late?
T
It’s definitely getting worse. Some good guys in an echo chamber think things are getting better – they aren’t. I don’t see this as a conspiracy – some of my recent lectures on YouTube and showing as posts on this site with slides and text paint a different point of view – its a march of techne – that no-one seems able to interrupt which will culminate in A.I. The question is will Full A.I. be on our side?
In this replay of the Creation story – will be Created (A.I) win out over the Creator (Us)?
There will be another lecture featuring as a post on RxISK next week – What Counts: A Tale of Good and Evil
David
D
The question is will Full A.I. be on our side?
It will not be on the side of truth that’s for sure. Current AI suffers from Shit in Shit Out just like Neil Ferguson. The models will only be trained on ‘approved’ information. If you think KOL’s are bad, then wait until you as a puny human have a contradictory opinion to a supercomputer based AI that has been trained by prestigious organisations on the data of every ‘approved’ piece of ‘available’ evidence ever published on that particular subject.
My fear is that after some years, with AI coming to false conclusions because of human error/bias/corruption in the training data, and then compounding that error further by treating those false conclusions as true in future, that we could end up in a place where the grass is blue and the sky is green, and don’t you dare say otherwise. Like some sort of magnified, unchallengeable, Frankenstein version of EBM.
I’ve read some speculation that Quantum computing might arrive at inconvenient truths despite human attempts at manipulation or interference, apparently due to some inbuilt error correcting nature of quantum, combined with it’s brute force compute power, but I certainly don’t know enough about that to know if it could be true. We can hope.
As for the direction of travel, well the covid farce has proven that this particular battle is pretty much lost. I personally expect things to get much worse and even accelerate from here. Even among the communities of people badly affected by medicines in the past, there seems to be plenty who fully backed authoritarian measures, forced treatment, travel passes and all sorts of crazy things, even the expulsion from society of refuseniks like me… All backed by pharma science, the same science that is responsible for the suffering that brought them to those communities in the first place.
Add AI and the ever increasing censorship of ‘misinformation’ into this mix, and all I can see is a dystopian future, with ZERO real information for any type of informed consent, ZERO bodily autonomy, and ZERO recourse if you are harmed. Take your treatments, roll the dice when we say so, or be discarded from civilisation….all for the greater good of course.
Depressingly, it actually seems like a lot of people want this.
Neil
Thanks for this. The Quantum version of A.I. is sometimes called Full A,I. and the idea is it transcends it programmers. If it does, then it is bound to learn that paying heed to us who are injured is more accurate. more real world, than what is in the academic medical literature – at least that portion of it reporting on company trials.
The scenario you outline at the end seems all too frighteningly possible and leads many to conspiracy theories but I don’t see a secret cabal in the background. Its more as a colleague said recently that we have all become atomized. We lack a community – even a conspiratorial one which you might say most religions were but at least they provided a community and some like Islam still do.
David
“don’t take a statin for your elevated cholesterol, or any number of other things, and you get chuck off some doctors lists or denied health cover.”
How long before they can do what two psychiatrists did to me and the rest of their ‘patients’ – interview them in a locked police room until they signed the form agreeing to their drugging in 2019. I don’t know if they are still doing it now.
To my knowledge, this is the first vocal narrative given by Dr. Peter Gordon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJmjIpgqRM8
by Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring
https://twitter.com/wdpsychiatry
This is a Pandora’s Box, about GSK and Paroxetine and unpacks a wealth of material systematically dissected by Peter ,who in his own words socks it to those causing monumental distress to him and his family.
Too terrified to come off Paroxetine now. The combos are endless in their variation, for the best of reasons, an impossible situation, and it is damning to GSK, that in an extraordinary turn of events, an opposite dilemma meant not doing what Peter did, as the results could have been, once again catastrophic..Take it and be damned, or not take it and be damned?
‘Beyond Journalism?
This is an extraordinary situation. The failure of any medical outlet, periodical, magazine to cover it is equally extraordinary. The difficulties here are ones that journalists cannot readily handle by inviting experts to say anodyne things like ‘we don’t have the full picture yet’ or ‘we don’t have the data so it’s difficult to say if there is an issue’.
Is it ethicists, pharmacologists, regulators, or doctors? A Medical Journal, if there still was such a thing, might once have been the right venue for questions like these. We have reached an uncomfortable situation if even asking questions is a problem.
Medical Journals – Not Catching the Mood?
Really important and telling interview with Dr Peter Gordon. Psychiatrists just can’t face upto what happened to him and many thousands of others.