9 Comments
Apr 4, 2022Liked by Modern Discontent

An excellent article. Thank you.

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Apr 4, 2022Liked by Modern Discontent

So, just sayin'. We live in a fascist police state. This is what one expects when the government and its agencies are captured by corporate interests. Corporate interest trumps the interest of people (no pun intended). Until I accepted this point of view, I was unable to understand "how this could happen". Another way of framing it is this: "why does a dog lick its ass?"

Aloha y'all

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It's difficult. I don't want corporate interesting superseding regulatory agencies, but at the same time I'm having difficulties rationalizing a viable regulatory agency that isn't inherently corrupt. Altogether it just feels like there may be no way around it except to be the individual and really do your own research and see where you can find the information.

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It's the nature of bureaucracies, and most companies. Grow grow grow, aka mission creep, consume more get more take more.

That said, yes, do your own due diligence. Even so, we rely on other "expert" opinions as there's too much of it all. I'm not interested in reading 40,000 pages a month of Pfizer data, but I'm interested in what those who seem to have their eyes opened have to say about it.

In the end we are relying upon others all the time. Community when it works well, dystopia when it doesn't

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Apr 4, 2022Liked by Modern Discontent

A great companion to the bmj article, thank you! 👍🏽 I've been aware how long this problem has been occurring, which made me very skeptical of pfizers press releases about safety and efficacy.

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It certainly doesn't help with the recent dump of more documents, but at least now more laypeople will know what to look for and how to spot erroneous results or methodology.

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I just found this stack. As a request for your next investigative study, how about recent evidence of correlation between acetaminophen taken during pregnancy and neurological injury to the child. I found this absolutely amazing. Huge increase in autism ect over last 40 years.

I always thought it was pretty incredible that as the drug with the dubious distinction of responsibility for (the most cases?) of acute liver failure...it continued to be open marketed with very little public warning for this. As a psychiatric nurse I often wanted to (but didn't for obvious reasons) tell my suicidal patients "Don't use Tylenol. You probably won't die but you may need a liver transplant". (people who use pills tend to just empty the medicine cabinet).

Anyway, what other pharmaceutical has a longer, more ubiquitous history of use? (maybe aspirin, which has been discouraged for years in favor of tylenol especially in pregnant women and children).

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I believe there was a shift where a lot of these studies were "outsourced" to pharmaceutical companies because the cost was so burdensome. I believe the fast tracking is relative, but more recently the fast-tracking process has been even further exacerbated. I don't think even back then acceleration would have included only one year and one Phase III trial of evidence as being good enough.

But it certainly hasn't helped. If you want to rush to get something onto the market you're better off with only good results so in some sense acceleration may incentivize more positive results.

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They also conducted very limited studies which meant they may have had to fudge some information for their one or two clinical trials when most drugs may conduct 4 or 5.

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