DangerousVaccines and Drugs FDA approved- But Dr.Burzynski's antineoplastons languish

[Guest guest]

The following article goes over the data showing that the infectioud diseases that shortened life spans in the early 20th century declined by 95% prior to 1945 and the introduction of vaccines. The vaccine publicists assiduously cultivated the media and opinion makers to accept that VACCINES and DRUGS were responsible. It ain't so!! Recently FDA streamined their drug approval process, to fast track many dangerous drugs financed by the big influential drug companies. Eventually many of these have to be taken off the market, to be replaced with other mediocre drugs, that sometimes have to have original lax standards bent even more to gain approval to get some of those "health care dollars" that are available in good times and bad.

Arnold

dr brewitt speaks

Notes on Vaccines and Pharmaceuticals

Compiled from back issues of the Well Being Journal

VACCINES, DIABETES AND AUTISM.. This excerpt from Health Alert might pique a reader's interestabout vaccines a little more:

“I hope...you tuned in to the hearings on vaccines on Capitol Hill. If you didn't, I'll clue you in—theywere an insult to human intelligence and a testament to special interests and big money. Even the senatorsconducting the hearings couldn't believe what was going on. They couldn't coerce a simple answer fromany of the experts on the side of `more research [money] and vaccines.'... Meanwhile, the parents inattendance whose kids developed autism right after the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine were asfrustrated as the senators trying to get a straight answer to anything....

“The MMR vaccine is given between 12 and 15 months of age. Since the mid-1980s when MMR cameinto wide use, autism rates rose very sharply, with most cases being recognized at 18 months of age. Infact, a study released by an autism research center at the University of California at showed a273% increase in an 11-year period.... Today kids may receive up to 35 various vaccines before enteringthe first grade—with 5 more on the immediate horizon [as suggested preventives] including one for earinfections!

“Autism is not the only theorized vaccine problem. Evidence is strong relating vaccines [as well asprocessed carbohydrate foods, sugars and hydrogenated oils] to the spiraling cases of childhood diabetes.For more information: www.vaccines.net.” (See Health Alert, September, 2000, Vol. 17:9, 5 CourtN., Monterey, CA 93940-5753.)

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VACCINES: TREATMENTS WITH SIDE EFFECTS, NOT WONDER DRUGS. “Although the effectsof vaccines have been grossly understudied, some recent investigations show that certain vaccinationsmay actually be making children sicker.” So notes V. , M.D., in an article about evidencethat autism and other illnesses are caused by the DPT and MMR vaccinations, and the investigations ofHarold E. Buttram, M.D., into those and other controversies surrounding vaccinations. : “It's truethat there may be situations, especially in the medical world, in which extreme measures may be justified,as the lesser of two evils, to preserve life and health. Yes, because of vaccines, polio...and smallpox mayhave been eliminated worldwide. However, vaccine proponents would have us believe that vaccines arewonder drugs and have been largely responsible for controlling virtually all of the epidemics of killerdiseases in the U.S. With the exceptions above, the facts do not show this to be the case.

“According to the records of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., from 1911 to 1935 the four leadingcauses of childhood deaths from infectious diseases in the U.S. were diphtheria, pertussis (whoopingcough), scarlet fever, and measles. However, by 1945 the combined death rates from these causes haddeclined by 95 percent. This [decline happened] before the implementation of mass immunizationprograms. The greatest factors in this decline were not vaccines but better sanitation, improved nutrition,better housing with less crowded conditions, antibiotics, and the weakening of these diseases throughpassage of time and serial passages through human hosts.

“I won't deny that many lives have been saved due to the implementation of vaccinations, but societyshouldn't turn its back on their possible negative side effects just because of historical ideas. It seems thatpeople have blindly accepted [vaccinations] without much question...or safety testing....” (Nutrition & Healing News, V. 7, No. 9, 819 N. St., Baltimore, MD 21201.)

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GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS WHO OWN DRUG STOCK. As far as reform of Medicare, healthcareand costs of drugs go in the coming congress and administration of the U.S. government, here is partiallist of individuals and families to watch regarding legislation (and listed are approximate amounts of dollarsheld in shares of pharmaceutical company stocks): The W. Bush family ($62,000-$234,000);Dick Cheney ($150,000-$350,000); Hadassa Lieberman ($15,000-$50,000); Rep. Robin (over $11million as of 12-31-99); Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (ranking Republican on a judiciary subcommittee “thatoften reviews patent legislation that can deliver windfalls to name-brand drug companies,” $2.2million-$7.1 million in five drug companies); Kerry, wife of Sen. Kerry ($2.1 million-$4.2million in eight drug companies). It should be noted that W. Bush put all his stock into a blindtrust before the election and Dick Cheney, “on leave” during the presidential campaign as a director ofProctor & Gamble, planned to do the same if elected and to relinquish 11,000 options in P & G stock. TheBush senior healthcare advisor, Gail Wilensky, held $10.5 million in shares and stock options inhealthcare companies. McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau reviewed 180 congressmen's latestfinancial disclosure statements and found that 36 members or their families owned drug company stocks.(International Council for Health Freedom Newsletter, Winter 2001, Vol. IV., No. 4, page 49;1-619-702-1282.)

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FDA DRUGS, SAFE? President Clinton once urged the FDA to view the drug industry as their “partners,not adversaries.” Right. Now the cost of this permissive attitude is becoming clear. Seven drugs approvedsince 1993 have been withdrawn from the market after reports of over 1,000 deaths, according to the LosAngeles Times. The FDA disregarded danger signs and blunt warnings from its own specialists. In cancer,dangerous drugs are routinely approved under the perception that they save lives. However, anticancerdrugs only need to show that they shrink tumors, not that they actually increase survival. We must learnto ask hard questions about the safety of all proposed cancer treatments. —Ralph Moss, Ph.D., leadingcancer expert in conventional and complementary alternative cancer treatments, in Townsend Letter forDoctors and Patients, May, 2001 (p. 63, 911 Tyler St., Port Townsend, WA 98368, www.tldp.com).

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IMMUNIZATION DANGERS. ph Mercola, M.D., writing in the American Association of Physiciansand Surgeons journal Medical Sentinel: “Immunizations contribute to the enormous and tragic increase inautism in this country, and it is time physicians take a stand on this issue and defend the patient's right tochoose.”

Currently there are only nineteen states in the U.S. that allow a philosophical exemption to immunizations.All but two, West Virginia and Mississippi, allow a religious exemption.

“It seems imperative,” states Mercola, “that the first step for physicians who have not carefully studiedthis issue is to become informed.” To that end, Mercola publishes a weekly newsletter that is free tosubscribers at http://www.mercola.com. Focus is on the mandates from government and pharmaceuticalcompany alignments that impose vaccines upon citizens. There are over 5,000 pages of articles for reviewto help physicians “get up to speed.” (Medical Sentinel, V. 6, No. 1, Spring, 2001: hfariamindspring. P.O. Box 13648, Macon, GA 31208-3648.)

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ARTICLE BY GREG PALAST, a journalist for the Observer in London and the Guardian, quotes Nobelprize winning economist Joe Stiglitz, a former world bank official, and secret documents from inside theIMF in this article. Here's a sample:

Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO’s intellectual property rights treaty (it goes by the acronymTRIPS, more on that in the next chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has"condemned people to death" by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to pay to pharmaceuticalcompanies for branded medicines. "They don’t care," said the professor of the corporations and bankloans he worked with, "if people live or die." (From www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=78 & row=1)

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LANCET QUESTIONS FDA INTEGRITY, CLAIMING DRUG INDUSTRY INFLUENCE. Patientstaking a controversial new drug for irritable bowel syndrome may have died because the US Food andDrug Administration has become the “servant of the drug industry,” claimed the Editor of The Lancet, theprestigious British medical Journal. (www.medstudents.medscape.com/38029.rhtml?srcmp=meds-051801)

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SAME OLD PRESCRIPTIONS? “You know how physicians in the U.S. are trained: they're taught tofight every illness and medical condition with a prescription drug. What you may not realize is that mostdoctors get their education about new drugs from the drug companies. Maybe you've seen the attractiveyoung men and women in expensive suits who hang out in your doctor's office. What are they there for?They're constantly feeding your physician company literature that highlights the drugs' benefits andobscures the drugs' side effects.

“The drug companies are brilliant—they make their fact sheets a lot easier to read than the New EnglandJournal of Medicine! Why should doctors bother reading the actual medical journals? Even if physiciansdo read the journals, they probably don't realize that many of the studies were paid for by the drugcompanies and the articles were written by researchers directly or indirectly being paid by the bigpharmaceutical companies.

“And those well-dressed men and women you see in the waiting room are giving your physician a cartonfull of free drug samples, which the doctors pass on to us, the patients, in order to seem generous.Doctors love to receive and give out free samples.

“The drug companies are taking your doctor out to lunch at four-star restaurants and sending him or herto expensive resorts for `professional seminars.' On what subject? The newest drugs, of course!” —R. Lee, M.D., in his Medical Letter, advising readers about natural solutions to health challenges.Medical Letter, PO Box 84900, Phoenix, AZ 85071, 1-800-528-0559.

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PHYSICIANS CALL FOR VACCINE MORATORIUM. A leading national physician organization iscalling for a moratorium on all government mandated vaccines and has passed a resolution to that end attheir annual meeting. Members of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) votedthis week at their 57th Annual Meeting in St. Louis to pass a resolution calling for an end to mandatorychildhood vaccines. The resolution passed without a single “no” vote. (The resolution and mandatoryvaccine fact sheet are posted at www.aapsonline.org.)

“Our children face the possibility of death or serious long-term adverse effects from mandated vaccinesthat aren't necessary or that have very limited benefits,” said Jane M. Orient, M.D., AAPS ExecutiveDirector. “This is not a vote against vaccines,” said Dr. Orient. “This resolution only attempts to haltblanket vaccine mandates by government agencies and school districts that give no consideration for therights of the parents or the individual medical condition of the child.”

Forty-two states have mandatory vaccine policies, and many children are required to have 22 shots beforefirst grade. On top of that, as a condition for school attendance, many school districts require vaccinationfor diseases such as hepatitis B—primarily an adult disease, usually spread by multiple sex partners, drugabuse or an occupation with exposure to blood. And yet, children under the age of 14 are three timesmore likely to suffer adverse effects— including death—following the hepatitis B vaccine than to catchthe disease itself.

Source: www.rense.com. For more information, contact AAPS: 1601 N. Tucson Blvd. Suite 9, Tucson,AZ 85716; 1-800-635-1196; hotline: 1-800-419-4777; www.aapsonline.org.

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FDA PROTECTS...? “The manufacturers didn't know [what it would do] when they started selling[protease inhibitors]. The FDA didn't require them to show it would cure AIDS and not kill the patientanymore than they required them to show that about AZT [a formerly shelved chemotherapy drug]. Theyonly required that a surrogate goal be met...[namely,] something we [scientists] think may be related tothe disease in question that may be improved by the drug.... The surrogate goal [construct] is anindication that our FDA no longer serves our needs. Or at least it does not serve our needs unless we ownstock in the pharmaceutical industry and don't [care] about health care.” (Kary Mullis, Ph.D., NobelPrize-Winner, Chemistry, from Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, 1998, Pantheon Books, RandomHouse, p. 184.)

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VACCINE MANDATES. “Although we recognize that vaccines, in the past, have prevented manyserious illnesses, it is simply a fact that every insurance policy has a premium. Every medical interventioncarries both risks and potential benefits. The risk:benefit calculation is different for each individual patient,and can only be made by the patient (or the patient's guardian) in consultation with the attendingphysician.”

“It is the right of every patient to refuse a medical intervention, even if recommended by the attendingphysician, and it is the duty of the physician to advise according to his or her own best judgment.Informed consent is a prerequisite for ethical medical treatment (or for research), as is internationallyrecognized in the Nuremberg Code....”

The above excerpts are from a letter that was sent by the American Association of Physicians andSurgeons (AAPS) to Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala in July. The AAPS also wroteto Harold Margolis, M.D., Chief, Hepatitis Branch, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), requesting detailsconcerning the initial safety testing in children and ongoing studies on possible neurological and othercomplications of hepatitis B vaccine.

Reason: Methods used to implement universal hepatitis B vaccine in newborns are questionable. BurtonWaisbren, M.D., states that vigorous peer review may have been circumvented by publishing of “invited”articles from drug company-sponsored seminars in journal supplements. He also notes that CDC officialsmake personal visits to state boards of health.

One potential method of persuasion is to tie federal welfare funding to immunization compliance.

All Kids Count, a Wood Foundation project set up to establish immunization registries inevery state, conceivably might play a role. The program emphasizes enrolling newborns, and hepatitis B isthe only vaccine administered to newborns. “People really are seeing [registries] as the way toinstitutionalize immunizing our real young kids,” stated Watkins, executive director of theDecatur-based All Kids Count organization.

The AAPS testimony has sparked numerous inquiries (including many by newspapers and radio stationsin Connecticut, and school district officials in Philadelphia). And policy is beginning to change. All but twoof Connecticut's birthing hospitals have suspended routine hepatitis B vaccines. A Virginia parent (whowas notified of the vaccines his child received only after the fact) told AAPS that his state has alsosuspended hepatitis B vaccines in newborns of uninfected mothers. In a surprise statement by theSurgeon General—almost as a footnote in a larger announcement on halting the use of thimerosal as avaccine preservative—federal policy now deems the vaccine appropriate at birth only if the mother isinfected or of unknown status. “Federal officials did not acknowledge that recent criticism from Congress,parents, and doctors played any role in the policy change,” wrote Hanchette of Gannett NewsService.

See www.house.gov/refor/hearings for testimony from the Aug. 3 hearing before the House Committeeon Government Reform and Oversight, and www.aapsonline.org for the AAPS written statementdistributed at the hearing. (AAPS News, 9/99, 1601 N. Tucson Blvd., Ste. 9, Tucson, AZ 85716.)

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PHYSICIANS CONCERN about vaccinations. In a recent study almost one-third of physicians fear thereis a risk of serious adverse reaction to the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine, and 13 percent thought thesame about the measles vaccine. Many are concerned about litigation from parents. Many said they wereunlikely to recommend a third dose of the DTP (diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis) vaccine. Findings werebased on a survey of 1,236 doctors in the U.S.” (Arch Ped & Adolesc Med, 1998; 152: 12-19.) Forup-to-date information subscribe to the Vaccine News, 251 W Ridgeway Dr., Dayton, OH 45459,937-435-4750.

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UNSAFE DRUGS APPROVED. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) removed three approveddrugs from the market in 1998—more than in any other year. Redux caused heart valve defects; Posicor,serious drug interactions and fatal heart problems; and Duract, sometimes-fatal liver damage. Why werethese drugs ever approved? According to Public Citizen's Health Research Group, Congress—on thebehalf of sponsors in the drug industry—has been systematically weakening the U.S. drug approvalprocess. In 1992 Congress passed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), authorizing drugcompanies to pay user fees to the FDA for the hiring of additional medical officers to review new drugs.Then, in 1997, the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act (FDAMA) expanded the use of“accelerated approval” mechanisms for drugs for life-threatening conditions, included mechanisms forspeeding FDA review, and allowed new drugs to be approved on the basis of one clinical trial, instead oftwo. In September, 1998, Lurie, M.D., and Sidney M. Wolfe, M.D., of Public Citizen's HealthResearch Group surveyed the FDA's medical officers to find out what was going on inside the agency.Among their findings: Of the 53 medical officers who responded, 19 mentioned 27 drugs that wereapproved in the past three years over the opposition of the reviewing medical officer. Eight reported 14instances in which they had been instructed not to present their own opinions or data to an FDA AdvisoryCommittee because to do so would have reduced the likelihood that a drug would have been approved.Thirty-four medical officers stated that the pressure on them to approve new drugs was “somewhatgreater” or “much greater” than before 1995. One medical officer reported, “In the last two years, Irecommended that two drugs not be approved. They were both approved without consulting me. Thisnever happened before. In one case, the drug did not meet the standards set up by the division, so theymodified the standards.” Lurie and Wolfe concluded that “changes in FDA review and approval policies... appear to have led to a significant decline in the safety and efficacy standards for new drugs.” Theyalso stated that new drugs have a greater likelihood of approval because of “inappropriate pressure fromCongress, the drug companies, and senior FDA employees.” (Washington Post 12/30/98, and PublicCitizen's Health Research Group, www.citizen.org.)