Cause and Effect

THE CRACK THROUGH WHICH THE SCIENCE GETS IN

The Covid Vaccines have introduced us to an issue that everyone on a medical treatment faces – how do we tell when a drug, device, or vaccine has caused a problem?

For harms related to other drugs or devices, most of us could ignore the issue because we weren’t taking the drug, perhaps an SSRI antidepressant, or didn’t have a device, like a vaginal mesh, in us. But with the vaccines, close to all of us are vaccinated and, if we have children, we are faced with decisions about getting them vaccinated.

When mention of harms on vaccines leaks out into the mainstream media, it is quickly branded as misinformation and shut down.

Any previous vaccine program that had a fraction of the numbers of reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting system (VAERS), run by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), as the Covid vaccines have had would have been suspended a month or two into the vaccine roll-out.  But not this one. The reports of harms get written off as anecdotes. “Anyone can report to the VAERS system, you know, are you sure these aren’t just coming from bots?”

This all took on a personal meaning a few months ago when I met Brianne Dressen and others who have been injured by the vaccines.  I got to interview them and review their medical records prior to a meeting organized to bring the question of vaccine harms out of the shadows.

The meeting was organized for November 2, 2021 by Brianne, along with Peter Doshi, Linda Simoni-Wastila and Kim Witczak. Peter and Linda are senior figures in a Pharmacy Department, so not able to be hostile to physical treatments or they’d be out of business. Kim is a patient representative on FDA panels that approve new drugs, with a brief to ensure we get access to effective and safe drugs. Peter is also a Senior Editor for the British Medical Journal (BMJ). While Kim has done a lot to highlight the need to inform people of treatment hazards, neither Peter nor Linda had done so prior to this. Their motivation came from a concern about mandates when we knew so little about the treatments. All four described themselves as true blue (Democrats).

Brianne and Kim’s political links enabled the meeting to be convened in the Capitol. The media were invited. None showed up. Recordings of the proceedings disappeared from almost all online sites soon after hosting, branded as misinformation. The media thinking seemed to be that these injured people might think they had been harmed but we, the media, know better.

There was no question in my mind that the 10 people talking about their injuries at this meeting had been injured in the way they claimed. Maybe they were the only 10 people in the world who had ever been injured by the vaccines (all 4 of the major vaccines) but the idea these injuries were non-existent, co-incidental or all in the minds of these 10 was just wrong – vaccine injuries video-clip.

Equally extraordinary was that before and after this meeting, people I have known for decades, and figured thought much the same way as me, got in touch to tell me I should have nothing to do with this stuff. There might be some element of truth in it but giving ‘these issues’ airtime would do harm.

It wasn’t just friends of long-standing who couldn’t understand what I was doing, Peter, Linda and others couldn’t quite get hold of what I was thinking when I made it clear I didn’t think Facebook or the Mainstream Media were being malicious in making the meeting disappear. The problem doesn’t seem to me to lie in the media – See One Algorithm to Rule us all.

It was clear ‘these issues’ needed airtime. Hence this forum.

This Tape will Self-Destruct

Everyone needs briefing on the rules of this life and death game – how to work out what is happening or what has happened to us?  Should we just trust others to tell us the score?

The briefing begins with 10 injury cases. The point is not the injuries but how we go about establishing if in this case the vaccine, or in other cases a drug, has caused an injury.

Can a drug cause, and Did it cause an injury, are two different questions.  There may be lots of evidence that this drug Can cause that injury and the person was on this drug and has that injury – but the conclusion might be that in this case the drug Didn’t cause the injury.  Equally, there may appear to be no evidence that that vaccine Can cause this injury, but the conclusion might be that it Did in this case.  Some experts are great on Can but lousy on Did and vice versa.

The ten cases are more about Did than Can.

Section 2 NEJM-Gate begins to look at how Can and Did began to get confused, and who has a vested interest in either making sure they remain confused or getting us to stick to Can rather than Did.

Section 3 hinges on your Name. You might think Can and Did are all about finding twisted chemicals to explain the way a drug or vaccine might twist our bodies or brains. Or you might think that running scientific evaluations like controlled trials is critical. What has gone missing here is the fact that the first step in establishing cause and effect is putting your Name in the frame.  Cause and effect gets twisted when your Name is eliminated from the frame.

If there is a doctor involved, their name needs to go in there too. If s/he balks at this, you need to change doctors and maybe tell them they are going out of business unless they get a grip on what should be their birthright – making a judgment call on harms.

Sharing your Name is where you take a first step to create reality. The often-heard phrase the personal is political never had more meaning than here. But the harms of treatment will introduce you to a twist on the phrase you don’t usually imagine or hear.

Section 4 introduces you to the faceless namelessness that at present you trust to give you Can and Did answers. You are likely in the company of our politicians, media, and medical professionals on this one. You are asking these nameless people to be father figures and look after you. This is not the role of the regulators of medicines. Instead, at present, they are the primary creators of misinformation.

Section 5 will tell you all we know at the moment about any tests we have that might help confirm what is happening to you.  It will point to other resources and ways to organize that might help you and others to make a difference.

Section 6 will try to pull these strands together.

Blue, Red, Orange and Green

The battle scene above is Bill James‘ take on the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.  There are things hidden in here, which will be revealed in the Sections to come.

This Battle divided Ireland into Orange and Green. Protestants and Catholics.  For over a century after that, Orange and Green often worked well together to get rid of the English, but for the past 150 years the divisions have been deep and murderous. At present they are bridged tenuously.

Covid has weakened the tenuous bridges across similar divides in the United States, and many other countries, pitting Red against Blue, mandates against common sense, with Blues claiming a direct line to Absolute Truth through Science and Reds countering that there is more to life than fear.

You’ll have to decide for yourself which side is better described as Catholic and which as Protestant.  There is no escaping into Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Atheist. An old Belfast joke has it that a foreigner, mugged in an alley with a knife to his throat is asked ‘are you Catholic or Protestant’.  He responded ‘neither, I’m X (insert Hindu, Muslim, Atheist or Jew to your choosing)’. The comeback was “are you Catholic X or Protestant X’.

The Battle of the Boyne took place right beside Newgrange, a place in Ireland, which can literally be said to be home to the Crack through which the Light gets in. It is a place that makes 300 years of history, and their place in it, seem less important than our leaders might think.  Not even the word sacred captures Newgrange.

This forum would ideally be called The Crack through which the Science Gets In but this is too long for a Tab on the blog. So Cause and Effect it is. The harms of treatment are the Crack through which the Light of Science gets in.  We block this at our peril.

Section 1: CASES

A Fine Balance © Nina Otulakowski February 2022

Brianne Dressen‘s case below is the first of 10 clinical scenarios which will be laid out on Cause and Effect over the next few weeks.  The credentials of those interviewing Bri and others can also be found there, along this week with Maddie De Garay’s case.

The publication of these cases challenges anyone who thinks the vaccines cannot cause a problem to accept that in these instances they have caused problems. If you don’t think they have caused a problem, there is an invitation to interview the people here, in this case Bri, and see if you can spot a more plausible way to explain what has happened. 

To take up this challenge, you must be prepared to have your name and your credentials to undertake an assessment made public along with a recording of your examination and your report.  Names and running the experiment in front of people are key elements of the scientific process.

Clearly there are many ways all cases could be explained,  but cause and effect requires us to make a decision as to the likeliest way a jury would opt to explain what we are seeing.  We may have a personal opinion about a possible explanation (Bri Dressen is an actress hired by Healy for some strange purpose – or vice versa) and we might end up being right but based on the evidence in front of us at this point in time – what do you think most people would likely say.

1 Brianne Dressen  – Injuries in Vaccine Trials

Brianne Dressen was interviewed by David Healy (see credentials) in October 2021 and made her medical records available.  The report done on her comes very close to what is laid out below.  She has been contacted since to update her condition.

2 Augusto Roux – Disappeared in Argentina

Gemma Torrell and Joan-Ramon Laporte interviewed Augusto on January 6 2022. See Credentials below.  Augusto has excellent English but it seemed more sensible to have a Spanish-speaking doctor do the interview. He provided his medical reports and test results done after vaccination and the clinical notes of his follow-up while he was in the trial.

See also Fishy Business in the Rio de la Plata – below.

3 Karunya Venugopalan Karunya Come Home

On January 7, 2022, an extraordinary article in the BMJ by Priyanka Pulla – How Covid-19 vaccines exposed India’s adverse event reporting systems.  This outlined a series of injuries and deaths on Covid vaccines in India but was focused primarily on the Adverse Event Following Immunisation (AEFI) reporting system, which left families unclear on whether the vaccine had caused the death of a loved one.

The article leans towards painting India as worse than elsewhere but my reaction was that nobody who reports to whatever System their country has ever gets a clear answer – other than the vaccines don’t cause problems and yes you should have your next dose.

The cases outlined were compelling but the story of Venugopalan Govindan and his daughter Karunya stood out. I contacted Venu.  He was most concerned about the vaccine propaganda that led his daughter to rush into getting treated and left her family and the medical system unaware of what might be happening when things started to go wrong and as a result slow to intervene in ways that might have saved her.

4 Nina Otulakowski 007

5 B The Spy who came in from the Cold

6 William and Kate: Thinking Fast and Slow

& Strangers in the Room: Vaccine Mandates

7 Suzanna Newell: Suzanna Takes you Down

8 Cody Flint: Cody’s Comirnaty Crash Landing

9 Shane’s Jaundiced view of Modern(a) Vaccines

10 Frances: PEG and Vaccine Exemptions

11 Anette: Post Covid Vaccine Neuropathic Arm

Summary

The Harmed Throw Down a Gauntlet

Credentials of Interviewers

1). Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring is board-certified psychiatrist who specializes in the accurate identification of adverse drug reactions. Dr. Witt-Doerring has served as a Medical Officer within the Division of Psychiatry at the Food and Drug Administration, where he analyzed emergent safety issues for psychiatric drugs and proposed strategies to mitigate risk. Before that, he completed a fellowship in Psychiatric Drug Development at Janssen Research & Development.

Dr. Witt-Doerring has focused on the scientific process for determining causal relationships between psychiatric interventions and adverse reactions. He has given presentations on these issues at national meetings and within the pharmaceutical and regulatory settings. His experience working in pharmaceutical, regulatory, and clinical settings has given him a broad hands-on understanding on the scientific process to correctly identify the adverse reactions.

2).  David Healy qualified as a physician and did a psychopharmacology doctorate on the serotonin system. He did post-doctoral research in Cambridge UK, became Secretary to the British Association for Psychopharmacology, and then a Professor of Psychiatry at Cardiff, Bangor and McMaster Universities.

He had a number of patients who became suicidal on SSRIs, which led to a role as an expert witness in treatment induced suicide and homicide cases and an interest in adverse events and establishing causality. This made him aware that clinical trial data for drugs and vaccines is sequestered and the medical literature is ghostwritten.

Chasing these options led to the creation of DataBasedMedicine, which set up a RxISK.org website for patient adverse event reports.  RxISK.org has possibly had more patient adverse event reports across a wide range of drugs than any other site apart from FDA.  All of these reports go through Healy’s hands, who accordingly has had more exposure to assessing adverse events than anyone else.

These assessments have led to campaigns to achieve recognition for problems like Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD) along with establishing Prizes and Research Funds to incentivize the discovery of solutions.

3). Dr. Mary Lynch is Professor of Anesthesia, Pain Management and Perioperative Medicine, Psychiatry and Pharmacology, Dalhousie University and a Founder of Pain Medicine at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Canada.  She has 30 years of experience assisting patients living with chronic pain conditions and is a two-time recipient of the Dr. Helen Hayes award recognizing excellence in pain care.

She has been a strong advocate for improving access to better care for people with chronic pain in her role as President of the Canadian Pain Society (2009-2011) and as a leader of the Canadian Pain Strategy, a precursor of the Canadian Pain Task Force. Her research program has been dedicated to finding new treatments for pain and more recently to nutritional approaches to promote healing and health.

4). Gemma Torrell and Joan-Ramon Laporte.  Dr Torrell is a Primary Care Physician, with a master’s degree in International Health and Cooperation. She works in Barcelona.  She is a member of an ethical group of the Catalan Primary Care Physicians Society and of an activist platform to defend Primary Care (FoCAP –  Fòrum Català d’Atenció Primària). She is also a member of NoGracias, a Spanish organization corresponding to No Free Lunch.

Professor Laporte is from Barcelona. He was a professor of pharmacology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and is now Emeritus. He was ​​head of the pharmacology service at Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron Hospital, as well as ​​director of the Catalan Institute of Pharmacology, a collaborating center of the World Health Organization (WHO).  See Medications Compromising Covid Infections and Covid and the Market in Research.  And he recently presented the Spanish Parliament with His View on what lessons we need to learn from the pandemic,

Section 2: NEJM-GATE

NEJM Piper © Nina Otulakowski March 2022

The New England Journal of Misinformation 

New England Journal of Medicine: Baden et al

Eric Rubin Boston Strangler

Fishy Business in the Rio de la Plata

The Lights all went out in Massachusetts

So Long and Thanks for all the Fish

Mark and Barb and Eric and Carole

Harmatology