Get Off Blood Pressure Meds

People with high blood pressure, angina, or arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) are sometimes prescribed a drug known as a calcium channel blocker (CCB).

CCBs are one of the most widely used drugs in cardiovascular medicine, they reduce blood pressure through their action on smooth muscle cells.

Smooth muscles, which are found in blood vessels, the gastrointestinal tract, and the bladder, provide slower rhythmic involuntary contractions. The image below shows a cross section of a blood vessel. Showing the location of the smooth muscle within the wall of the blood vessel, and the lumen, which is the passageway through which the blood flows.

When smooth muscle contracts the internal diameter of the lumen gets smaller. This is a necessary biological function to regulate circulation. The smooth muscle contraction helps to maintain the correct amount of pressure within the blood vessels.

The contraction of smooth muscle is dependent upon calcium, which enters a smooth muscle cell and interacts with contractile proteins to cause muscle contraction.

CCBs target this mechanism. As their name suggests they block calcium in order to prevent smooth muscles from contracting. In people who have high blood pressure this may be useful. However, all drugs have potential short and long term adverse effects. And many people are not aware that there is a better alternative - a common nutrient that does exactly the same thing - magnesium.

Magnesium is a natural calcium channel blocker.

Magnesium, in general, counters the actions of calcium. Magnesium and calcium are antagonistic and hence balance each other. Calcium can be thought of as a stimulator, while magnesium has a calming or relaxing effect. Studies going back almost a century have shown the blood pressure lowering effects of magnesium. And lower dietary intake of magnesium has been linked with higher blood pressure.

However, the circulation-improving actions of magnesium are not limited to its relaxation of smooth muscle. Magnesium has also been shown, through various mechanisms, to improve the function of the endothelium - the cells that form the lining of blood vessels. Magnesium also plays a central role in the production of cellular energy - important for all of the body’s functions including the prevention of heart failure. And magnesium can also fix some arrhythmias.

The term arrhythmia refers to any problem with the rate or rhythm of the heartbeat. It can be too fast, too slow, or with a fluctuating rhythm. Most arrhythmias are harmless, but some can be very serious. During an arrhythmia the heart might not be able to pump enough blood around the body. Which can lead to damage to the brain, heart, and any other organs and systems that are deprived of blood and oxygen.

Arrhythmias are related to the electrical activity of the heart and the correct balance of calcium and magnesium in the heart has a stabilising effect on this electrical activity. A heartbeat is a single cycle in which the heart’s chambers relax and contract to pump blood. The heartbeat is regulated by electrical signals, starting with the sinus node which corresponds to the heart rate (number of beats per minute). The signal from the sinus node spreads to the AV node, where it slows to allow the ventricles (lower chambers of the heart) to fill with blood. The signal then continues to the cells within the wall of the ventricles, which causes the ventricles to contract and pump blood around the body. This is thought to be the reason why magnesium has been shown to be effective in treating many different forms of arrhythmia.

The importance of magnesium in regulating the electrical function of the heartbeat is illustrated by the fact that Dr. Carolyn Dean, who has been researching magnesium for about 20 years, was awarded a prize by the Heart Rhythm Society of the United Kingdom.

In addition to all of this, magnesium plays an important role in glucose and insulin metabolism - by reducing insulin resistance and helping glucose to enter into cells. People who have problems regulating blood glucose levels—in particular, people with type 2 diabetes or the metabolic syndrome—have consistently been found to have lower levels of magnesium.

In one study, magnesium levels of people with metabolic syndrome were compared with those of healthy people. Of the 192 people with metabolic syndrome, 126 had low levels of magnesium in the blood, compared with just 19 of the 384 healthy people.

Magnesium is one of the most important factors where nutrition and heart health are concerned. Unfortunately, magnesium deficiency is currently overlooked by most doctors and cardiologists. Magnesium is the eleventh most abundant element in the human body, Although it accounts for less than 0.1 percent of the body’s mass, it is essential for hundreds of life-sustaining biochemical processes.

This is just one example of nutrition and natural medicine being neglected in favour of drug medicine.

Big Pharma’s Dirty Secret

Research is socialised, only the profits are privatised.

I have written previously about the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is now 4 times bigger than it was 20 years ago, and that this growth represents ill-gotten gains. Since for the most part it was achieved via nefarious activities.

We also know about the huge profits that drugs companies made during COVID-19. Even if we were to believe that the COVID-19 vaccines genuinely helped and were safe, it is worth noting that during 2021 the companies behind two of the most successful vaccines (Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna) were making combined profits of $65,000 every minute, while people in the world’s poorest countries remained unvaccinated.

It has been estimated that 51% of doses went to high‐income countries that represent only 14% of the world’s population. It turned out that predominately unvaccinated countries fared much better than rich developed countries, but that’s another story,

In this article I want to look at how many profitable drugs were actually funded by taxpayers, and how it came to be that big pharma was able to get rich by exploiting taxpayer funded research.

Private companies own most of the patents on COVID-19 vaccines, and those patents have basically become a license to print money. With an unprecedented amount of profit being generated in the last 2 years. Despite the fact that US taxpayers funded the fundamental innovations that made mRNA vaccines possible. In total, over $18 billion of US public funds have been invested in COVID-19 vaccines.

We could be forgiven for thinking that this bizarre situation where taxpayers fund the research and drugs companies take the profits is unique to COVID-19 vaccines. However, it isn’t.

Public funding from US taxpayers contributed to every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016. Collectively, this research involved funding of more than $100 billion.

Despite this huge investment, people in the United States pay more for their drugs than any other country. About half of all big pharma’s profit is generated from within the USA.

Drugs companies say they need huge profits in order to invest in research for new drugs. The reality is that the research to find new drugs is largely socialised, and the profits are privatised.

More specifically, the majority of the profits end up in the pockets of hedge funds and other financial institutions that own big pharma. The same companies that own the mainstream media and the big tech companies, by the way.

The technology transfer from publicly funded research into the hands of the 1% has been made possible because of the Bayh-Dole Act.

In 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole championed a change to the Patent and Trademark Law that gave federal contractors new powers over the ownership and licensing of government science including a right to issue life-of-patent monopolies.

(Above) Senator Birch Bayh and Senator Bob Dole

As a result of the Bayh-Dole Act, universities and other institutions can transfer intellectual property to a private company, rather than the intellectual property belonging to the government, which was previously the case.

There is a lot of political spin surrounding the Bayh-Dole Act. It is most often described as a good thing. For example, because it allows scientific discoveries to be brought to market. However, it actually results in one commercial company having complete control over a medicine and therefore being able to charge whatever it wants for it. In addition, no one is ensuring that the public get a return on their investment.

On the occasions when the public complains about price gouging, big pharma points to the high costs of research and development - which for the most part it didn’t do.

This is just one of the many examples of how healthcare has been configured to make the richest people in society even richer. It is actually within our power to change this. If we become better informed about other options we can directly and immediately start to create change through our own actions. Principally by rejecting medications when they cause more harm than good.

Does Anyone Remember that Great Barrington Declaration?

Dr. Anthony Fauci is back in the news during the last few days because of some interesting comments he made about COVID-19 lockdowns. However, no-one has reminded him about the Great Barrington Declaration that he used the mainstream media to quash. 

The Great Barrington Declaration was an open letter published in October 2020 that criticised the COVID-19 lockdowns. The letter was signed by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, a professor at Oxford University, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor. 

Dr. Martin Kulldorff is a biostatistician. Dr. Sunetra Gupta is an infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology. Dr Jay Bhattacharya is one of the world's leading experts on public health policy.  We might have thought that under normal circumstances three professors from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford, with experience that is directly relevant, would have been listened to during the pandemic. But these are not normal times. Not by any stretch of the imagination. 

The Great Barrington Declaration called for an easing of lockdowns. The authors had the opinion that the lockdowns would eventually cause more harm than good, and there would be an increase in mortality in years to come. It called for measures to protect the vulnerable but to allow everyone else to continue life relatively normally. 

After the declaration was published, Anthony Fauci and colleagues went into action to use the media to quash it. 

Dr. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health sent an email to Dr. Fauci, which read:

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”

Dr. Fauci replied to Dr. Collins that the takedown was underway. Various media organisations were then triggered to follow Lord Fauci’s demands. For example, Wired magazine published an article to dismiss the Great Barrington Declaration by writing:

“Aside from the three lead signatories, there is little about the Great Barrington Declaration that feels convincingly scientific. Not its website, which boasts that the statement has been signed by 2,780 Medical and Public Health Scientists” 

It’s interesting to note that the 2,780 signatures in October 2020 has now grown to more than 932,800 signatures. 

In October 2020 any mention of the Great Barrington Declaration was also censored on social media platforms. 

Back then, many of us ordinary folk were also asking questions like why the decision to lockdown had not included an estimation of the harms of the lockdowns? 

In recent months these harms have started to come to light in the most diabolical way. Data from all around the world is showing a mysterious increase in excess deaths that are not from COVID-19 itself.

We don’t know yet how many of these excess deaths are attributable to the lockdowns and how many are attributable to the COVID vaccines. However, there have been all kinds of other health-related and economy-related negative effects of the lockdowns. Such as, a 77 percent increase in type 2 diabetes in youths.

The weight of public opinion has finally shifted. It is no longer even remotely possible to suggest that the lockdowns were a good thing. That’s why Anthony Fauci made this statement recently at the Atlantic Ideas Festival:

“Sometimes when you do draconian things it has collateral negative consequences just like when you shut things down, even temporarily, it does have deleterious consequences on the economy, the school children, you know that.”

Well, we can fight Fauci with this:

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

― Abraham Lincoln

My new documentary film is now 40% funded on Kickstarter! That’s amazing, but there are only 23 days of the campaign left and if the goal is not reached then none of the funding will be received. Please check it out:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/justinuk/in-the-shadow-of-flexner

When Doctors Go On Strike Fewer People Die

The title of this article might read like clickbait or perhaps an exaggeration, however, it is a fact that multiple studies completed in different parts of the world have found that when doctors go on strike less people die. Other studies have found that doctors going on strike makes no difference to death rates. And no studies have found that death rates increase when doctors are on strike. 

These studies go as far back as 1973 and the most recent study was in 2020. They also include a diverse range of countries - Columbia, the USA, Israel, Spain, Croatia, and Kenya. 

The earliest study in 1973 was in Israel when doctors went on strike for one month and patient deaths dropped by 50 percent.

In 1976 in Bogota, Columbia, when medical doctors went on strike for 52 days, providing only emergency care for patients, the death rate dropped by 35 percent.

In the same year, Los Angeles County doctors went on strike and there was an 18 percent drop in mortality. As soon as the strike was over, the death rate returned to its usual higher levels.

It has been suggested that these numbers simply reflect a change in the location where the death is registered. The idea being that less people go to the hospital to die during a doctors’ strike and die elsewhere instead. However, data from another Israel study contradicts this idea.

In 2000 the Israel Medical Association undertook strike action that lasted for several months.  There was not any official data so the Jerusalem Post surveyed non-profit making Jewish burial societies, which perform funerals for the majority of Israelis, to find out whether the industrial action was affecting deaths in the country.

The director of Jerusalem's Kehilat Yerushalayim burial society said  “The number of funerals we have performed has fallen drastically”. 

In May 1997 there were 139 deaths, in May 1998 there were 133 deaths, and in May 1999 there were 153 deaths. But in May 2000 when doctors were on strike there were only 93 deaths.

It is also well-known that Israel has one of the most technologically advanced and highest-quality healthcare systems in the world.

In 2016 in the UK doctors went on strike and there was a significant impact on services but there was no difference in the number of deaths. 

In 2020 researchers in Kenya looked at the monthly death rates from public hospitals between 2016 and 2018. During the physicians' strike periods there was a significant decline in the number of patients seen, and at the same time a significant decline in the number of patient deaths.

Interestingly, studies looking at the effect of nurses going on strike show the opposite trend. More people die when there are fewer nurses.  An MIT study looking at data from New York State found an 18 percent increase in deaths when nurses go on strike.

The Kenya study mentioned above did not find a connection between nurses’ striking and the number of deaths - it was only the doctors’ absence that reduced deaths. 

Looking in more detail at the data it seems that the reduction in deaths when doctors are absent is in connection with elective (or planned) procedures and outpatient care, rather than emergency treatments.  Separately from this data, in recent years there has been increasing concerns about polypharmacy (simultaneous use of multiple medicines) and the overuse of surgical procedures that in some cases are unnecessary. These are two of the areas where doctors appear to be killing patients. 

Considering the amount of money and resources allocated to healthcare, especially in developed countries, we would expect that we can do better than this.

In the United States healthcare expenditure grew 9.7 percent to $4.1 trillion in 2020, or $12,530 per person, and accounted for 19.7 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Total healthcare expenditure in the UK in 2020 was £257.6 billion, equating to £3,840 per person. And representing 12.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

I believe that by creating greater awareness about these issues we as active citizens can demand a better system whereby patients have more sustainable and more appropriate options available for healthcare. That’s what my new documentary is about.

Check out the Kickstarter campaign and video by clicking here..

References for this article:

Doctors' strikes and mortality: A review

Why Do Patients Stop Dying When Doctors Go on Strike?

Doctors' strike in Israel may be good for health

Junior doctor strikes had a “significant impact” on services but did not increase deaths, study finds

When doctors strike, fewer patients die

The impact of the nurses', doctors' and clinical officer strikes on mortality in four health facilities in Kenya

Big Pharma’s Rap Sheet

Pharmaceutical companies are businesses - they want to increase profits for shareholders, and during the last 20 years they have been very successful in doing that.

In 2001 the global pharmaceutical market was valued at 390 billion U.S. dollars, but by the end of 2020 the market had grown to 1.27 trillion dollars.

Put another way, the pharmaceutical industry is more than 3 times bigger than it was 20 years ago.

According to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the profit margins of pharmaceutical companies during the last 20 years or so were significantly greater than those of S&P 500 companies.

We might think that this is not necessarily a bad thing, since some drugs do save lives. However, there is considerable evidence that much of this increase in revenue has been gained as a result of nefarious activities.

In 2012 GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) was ordered to pay 3 billion dollars to resolve fraud allegations and failure to report drug safety data.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/glaxosmithkline-plead-guilty-and-pay-3-billion-resolve-fraud-allegations-and-failure-report

According to the Depart of Justice in the United States, from April 1998 to August 2003 GSK unlawfully promoted Paxil for treating depression in patients under the age of 18. The FDA has not approved Paxil for pediatric use.

In 2001, GSK published a misleading medical journal article in the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry that stated Paxil “is generally well tolerated and effective for major depression in adolescents” even though the data showed the opposite - it showed Paxil to be ineffective and to cause more harm than good in this group of people.

GSK’s 3 billion dollar fine also covered the promoting of several other drugs for uses that the drugs were not approved for, and for paying kickbacks to physicians for prescribing those drugs.

3 billion dollars might sound like a lot, but the total revenue for the drugs in question during the period covered by the settlement was at least 28 billion dollars. So, 3 billion dollars might be considered an acceptable cost of doing business. But here’s an interesting thing, that misleading journal article about Paxil was never corrected. The article still stands today, with its incorrect and harmful conclusion. None of the academic authors or the medical journal itself have issued an apology or a retraction. And the authorities seem OK with that. This fact was even highlighted by the British Medical Journal in 2015 and still no action was taken to retract the conclusions. Why would our health authorities allow this incorrect conclusion to stand in the medical literature for more than 20 years? Paxil is known to actually increase the risk of suicide in children which for an antidepressant would be ironic if it wasn’t so tragic.

Next up, Pfizer..

In 2009, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer was fined 2.3 billion dollars for:

• falsely promoting 4 of its drugs

• paying kickbacks relating to these drugs

• submitting false claims to government health care programmes.

This is Pfizer’s biggest fine to date, however, it is by no means the only one. In 2012 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reached a 45 million dollar settlement with Pfizer in connection with charges that its subsidiaries had bribed overseas doctors in order to increase foreign sales.

In 2013, a subsidiary of Pfizer agreed to pay 500 million dollars for marketing its kidney transplant drug for unapproved uses, and in 2016 the UK's Competition and Markets Authority fined Pfizer the equivalent of 107 million dollars for charging excessive and unfair prices for an epilepsy drug. These are just a few of the violations on Pfizer’s corporate rap sheet.

In 2013, Johnson and Johnson agreed to pay 2.2 billion dollars in settlement based on the False Claims Act. The company was promoting its antipsychotic drug, Risperdal, for uses that had not been approved, making false statements about its safety, and paying kickbacks to physicians. The drug was inappropriately promoted to the most vulnerable in society including: children, the elderly, and those with developmental disabilities. 

Drug companies seem to be motivated to use whatever means available to them to get as many people as possible to consume their products. These methods are not confined to the directly illegal methods described above.

Another method that has been in place for some time is disease mongering, which involves the practice of widening the diagnostic boundaries of illness in order to increase the market size for a drug. An example of this can be seen in the setting of cholesterol-lowering guidelines. The threshold beyond which is considered a treatable high level has been progressively lowered in order to get more people to swallow the tablets.

Image courtesy of PLOS Medicine.

In general, disease mongering has been described as the promotion of anxiety about future ill-health, exaggerating the number of people affected by a disease and introducing new conditions that are hard to distinguish from normal life, for example, social anxiety disorder. 

Knowing all of this, it’s strange that governments trust big pharma. In November 2020, just before the first covid-19 vaccine was released onto the public, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, publicly announced “I trust Pfizer”.

For those of us who follow big pharma’s activities, that was the first red flag regarding the covid-19 vaccines. A shoddy clinical trial, extreme censorship of any data that is critical of the vaccines, safety data that should have halted their use, and complete denial of the fact that the vaccines only work for, at best, a few weeks, didn’t help to restore confidence. Not to mention the suppression of the alternatives that genuinely work and are much safer.

Now that the pandemic is subsiding and the hypnotic haze is starting to clear from most peoples’ minds, it is time for us to consider what we are going to do about these crooks.

My Newsletter Is Moving to Substack

I’m moving my newsletter to Substack!

Substack is an uncensored platform where writers can publish their work directly to readers.

I’m doing this for a number of reasons but in particular, because I want to broaden the subject areas that I write about. It is clear now that medical corruption does not operate in isolation but is fully supported by governments and the corporate media. The deep problems within our society also stem back to the finance sector. 

I believe a large part of the solution is to create new alternative economies and to perform local transactions wherever possible. 

My new newsletter on Substack is titled The Self-Sovereign.

Being self-sovereign can loosely be defined as self-ownership. This means different things to different people. Having autonomy over health is an important aspect, but it can also mean being sovereign over our personal data, being completely self-sufficient, or in the case of bitcoin being our own bank. Self-sovereign people are also consciously aware of how their choices impact the rest of society. 

The only way to make The Self-Sovereign newsletter viable is to charge a small amount. Some articles will be freely available to the public and others will be only available to paid subscribers. Subscribers also receive all future videos. For example, I have recently completed a one-hour documentary film about bitcoin and this will be included for subscribers.

I will publish new articles every 7-10 days. 

[Please note that if you have given a donation recently to the value of $20 or more you should have received an invitation in a separate email for a free trial to the newsletter.]

Here is the latest article:

The Scale of Death Caused by the Suppression of Treatments for Covid-19.

Analysis shows that only treatments that do not challenge the covid-19 vaccine industry have been approved.

Click here to subscribe and read the full article…
I hope to see you at The Self-Sovereign!

Pathology Reports Show Systemic Autoimmune Response from Covid-19 Vaccination.

Recent pathology reports from Germany show that covid-19 vaccines can trigger self-destructive processes that lead to debilitating illness and death. The organ that is most often affected is the heart. Which makes covid-19 vaccines a new cause of heart disease. Since heart disease is the main subject of this website it is important that this new cause of disease is documented here. 

In order to understand the significance of these pathology reports we have to first discuss the basics of how the covid-19 vaccines damage the body.

Covid-19 vaccination disease relates to the spike proteins. Spike proteins are found on the surface of SARS-CoV-2. These spike proteins allow the virus to penetrate host cells and cause infection. 

The mRNA vaccines contain mRNA created in a laboratory. The mRNA tells the body’s cells to make spike proteins. Our bodies recognise these spike proteins as a threat and the immune system is activated.

The spike protein generated via the mRNA vaccines is described by the CDC as “harmless”.  The theory, of course, is that the “harmless” spike protein stimulates the body so that it is better prepared to cope with the real virus. However, there are two fundamentally important flaws in this theory, and not enough people are talking about these flaws. In essence, the vaccines induce immunity in the wrong place and in the wrong way.

The vaccines invade the lymph nodes and the bloodstream and produce an immune response in those parts of the body. However, the virus itself enters the mucous membrane of the airways. This is the reason why the vaccines only protect against severe disease but do not prevent infection or the transmission of the virus. Only in severe covid-19 cases does the virus pass beyond the membrane of the airways and into the bloodstream - where it has the opportunity to encounter vaccine-induced immunity. 

Confirmation of this can be found in a recent article published in Nature, the most respected science journal in the world:

“While the currently approved vaccines induce systemic immune responses, they probably do not evoke mucosal immunity in form of mucosal, secretory immunoglobulin A (IgA) or tissue-resident memory T cells (TRM)”

Other discussions about the lack of mucosal immunity from the vaccines have also recently appeared on Science Daily from the University of Buffalo and Ohio State University. 

"We think it is a serious omission to ignore the mucosal immune response to SARS-CoV-2, given its initial sites of infection," said Michael W. Russell, PhD, emeritus professor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at University of Buffalo.

Although most people are aware that any protection offered by the covid-19 vaccines is temporary - only lasting four to six months, it is fair to assume that most people lining up for their third or fourth shot are unaware that the vaccine does not offer immunity at the site of infection.

The second flaw relates to the fact that once the vaccines enter the body they start a colossal civil war.

In the bloodstream, the mRNA gene goes to the inside wall of the blood vessels. The cells in the blood vessel wall then produce spike proteins. Within hours or days of being injected with the vaccine the immune system will scratch at the inside wall of the blood vessels in order to try to remove the cells that are now producing the spike proteins. 

The gene from the mRNA vaccine also invades the lymph nodes and triggers a civil war between the cells that make the spike proteins and the lymphocytes whose job it is to kill cells that make those spike proteins. 

After the first dose of the vaccine there will be varying degrees of damage caused by this civil war, but the second dose of the vaccine causes even more damage, since the second dose is likely to trigger an even bigger immune response. Something that is considered desirable by covid-19 vaccine proponents. This could explain why it is more common for people to experience greater adverse reactions after the second dose than the first dose. Something that is acknowledged by the CDC 

However, it is important to be aware that this greater immune response takes the form of direct tissue damage. The scratching at the inside wall of the blood vessels becomes more intense since any cells that dare to make the spike protein will be attacked by the immune system.

Of course, if the person receiving the vaccine has a strong immune response, then the potential exists for greater damage to the inside wall of the blood vessels. This could explain why people below 60 years of age (who have stronger immune systems) are more likely to experience adverse effects from covid-19 vaccines. 

If the damage to the inside wall of the blood vessels continues, the gene from the vaccine can leak through the walls of the blood vessels and become systemic.

Once the mRNA has escaped it can enter the cells of any of the internal organs such as the liver, the spleen and the heart. Once inside these organs the covid-19 vaccine gene will continue to make spike proteins. This will trigger the body’s killer lymphocytes to carpet bomb and destroy those tissues that have spike proteins. This is an auto-immune response. The body starts destroying its own internal organs in order to stop the propagation of the spike proteins. 

At the same time, the supply of lymphocytes is eventually reduced because they themselves are fighting their own civil war within the lymph nodes - where the gene for the spike protein has also invaded. Eventually, there is an immune deficiency of lymphocytes. This could have implications for the prevention of tumors. Normally, the lymphocytes will keep the cancerous cells under control and prevent tumors, but if large quantities of lymphocytes are destroyed by the vaccine gene and the autoimmune response to the spike protein, then there will not be enough of them to prevent cancerous cells from propagating.

According to Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi (see footnote for credentials) this general immune deficiency could have longer-term implications for viruses such as herpes and shingles, which are always trying to take hold within the body but are normally suppressed by lymphocytes. 

So, once the gene from the vaccine has escaped through the wall of the blood vessels it has the potential to cause system wide effects by triggering an autoimmune response in all of the organs of the body. The most definitive way to find out if this is actually happening is to perform an autopsy.  

Professor Arne Burkhardt is a pathologist who has taught at the Universities of Hamburg, Berne and Tübingen (full credentials in the footnotes). Professor Burkhardt was able to conduct post-mortem examinations on 15 people who died after receiving covid-19 vaccinations.

The microscopic evaluation of the tissues showed an autoimmune attack on multiple organs. The most frequently affected organs were the heart (fourteen of fifteen cases) and the lung (thirteen of fifteen cases). Pathologic alterations were furthermore observed in the liver (two cases), thyroid gland ( two cases), salivary glands (two cases) and brain (two cases).

For example, the two images below show the microscopic evaluation of the small blood vessels of the heart. The endothelial cells that line the blood vessels have been heavily attacked and are inflamed.

Professor Arne Burkhardt in an interview said that in his forty years of experience he had not seen anything like these combinations of killer T lymphocytes throughout the body.

Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi and Professor Burkhardt have published an article summarising these findings on the Doctors for Covid Ethics website. They conclude:

“Histopathologic analysis show clear evidence of vaccine-induced autoimmune-like pathology in multiple organs. [This] must be expected to very frequently occur in all individuals, particularly following booster injections…

Beyond any doubt, injection of gene-based COVID-19 vaccines places lives under threat of illness and death. We note that both mRNA and vector-based vaccines are represented among these cases, as are all four major manufacturers.”

We do not know how many people have died or been seriously injured as a result of taking the covid-19 vaccines. Some reports have suggested that less than 1% of vaccine adverse effects are actually reported.

It seems obvious though that coercing people to take third and fourth booster shots is a terrible idea.  If an individual person survived two shots of a covid-19 vaccine without inducing autoimmune organ damage, can they survive a third shot or a fourth? It is important to note that most of the people in this pathology report who died after vaccination, died at home or in the car. Presumably unaware of the damage that was taking place inside their body?

And how many shots does it take before the person’s immune system is compromised in general and the person becomes susceptible in the longer-term to other viruses and cancer? 

Scientists in Israel who are members of the government's advisory panel raised this alarm recently, as the government seems intent on pushing for a fourth booster shot. These scientists warned that the plan could backfire, because too many shots might cause a sort of immune system fatigue, compromising the body’s ability to fight the coronavirus. According to the New York Times and Japan Times. 

During the last two years many countries have seen the enforcement of a number of illogical rules. The authorities have been intent on trying to enforce further lockdowns and vaccine shots. The lockdowns ravage economies and the shots ravage our bodies. 

Not to mention the fact that there has been a much safer and more effective option available all along - early treatment. As discussed in my previous article.

It might be difficult for some of us to accept that our governments and health authorities could get things so wrong (either by design or through incompetence), however, I think we have to keep in mind that these are the same authorities that spent tens of billions of dollars lowering peoples’ cholesterol levels even though people live longer and healthier with higher cholesterol and advises people with type 2 diabetes to eat more grain based foods that disrupt blood glucose levels. Not to mention the numerous drug scandals such as Vioxx that killed more Americans than the Vietnam War, and the opioid scandal that has so far killed more than 400,000 people in the United States alone.

—-
Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi was born in Washington, DC, and educated at schools in Switzerland, Egypt, and Thailand. He studied medicine at the University of Bonn in Germany, where he received his MD in 1970. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg from 1972 to 1976, and at The Protein Laboratory in Copenhagen from 1976 to 1977. He joined the Institute of Medical Microbiology at Giessen University in 1977 and was appointed associate professor in 1982. He was named chair of Medical Microbiology at the University of Mainz in 1990, where he remained until his retirement in 2012. Dr. Bhakdi has published over three hundred articles in the fields of immunology, bacteriology, virology, and parasitology, for which he has received numerous awards and the Order of Merit of Rhineland-Palatinate. 

Professor Arne Burkhardt is a pathologist who has taught at the Universities of Hamburg, Berne and Tübingen. He was invited for visiting professorships/study visits in Japan (Nihon University), the United States (Brookhaven National Institute), Korea, Sweden, Malaysia and Turkey. He headed the Institute of Pathology in Reutlingen for 18 years. Subsequently, he worked as an independent practicing pathologist with consulting contracts with laboratories in the US. Burkhardt has published more than 150 scientific articles in German and international scientific journals as well as contributions to handbooks in German, English and Japanese. Over many years he has audited and certified institutes of pathology in Germany

Other Resources

Many people visiting this website will be familiar with the work of Dr Stephanie Seneff. Dr. Seneff has published a detailed review article of the dangers associated with the covid-19 vaccines and the problems with the published data that was used to give them emergency approval. Although this article can be technical in places it is definitely insightful and worth taking the time to read. Click here for the article.

Many people will also be aware of the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting Systems (VAERS). This data is difficult to interrogate so someone has very kindly created Open VAERS, which displays the VAERS data in a way that it should be displayed: https://openvaers.com/

I do not get paid for writing these articles, and due to the Trusted News Initiative it is not possible to publish anything that is critical of covid-19 vaccines. Therefore, please consider giving a small donation if you can (the button is at the top right hand side of this page). Thank you!

Why Some Parts of the World Are Covid-Free

While many countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, and the rest of Europe have had, and continue to have, a high number of deaths from covid 19, other countries have comparatively very few deaths. This graph shows the total number of covid 19 deaths for different countries and continents, per million people.

We can see that, for example, India and the continent of Africa have a low number of deaths. In fact, the United States has so far had around 15 times more covid deaths than Africa. 

While there are likely to be a number of reasons why this is the case, there could be an important link with a specific medication that has been widely used in Africa.

For more than 30 years the Mectizan Donation Program has been running in Africa, and a few other countries, with the aim of eliminating diseases such as River Blindness. Merck, the manufacturer of Mectizan, made a pledge to donate as much of this medication as is needed for as long as is needed.

Since 1987 there have been 4 billion treatments of Mectizan and 1 billion of these were made available in 2019.

So, what is Mectizan? Well, it’s Ivermectin. The medication that you may have heard about in the media during the last few months described as a horse dewormer, not fit for humans. The FDA in the United States even decided to include a picture of a horse on it’s website, just to remind us that this medication is for horses and not humans. This description of Ivermectin by the media and health authorities is in stark contrast to reality. In addition to the 4 billion treatments that have been given to humans, two scientists won the Nobel Prize for the use of Ivermectin in humans, and  Ivermectin is so safe, it is literally given out like candy to people in Africa. Again, humans not horses. 

Many people became aware of the Nobel Prize for ivermectin, so the media then set out to convince us that Ivermectin is used for parasitic infections only and has no action against viruses. However, an article published in a Nature journal is at odds with that description. The article describes the numerous antiviral properties of Ivermectin and summarises evidence to suggest that Ivermectin could be effective against, Dengue, Zika virus, Yellow Fever, West Nile Virus, and 15 other viruses, as well as covid 19.

So, before covid 19, large amounts of ivermectin were already being widely distributed in Africa. Could this have inadvertently protected Africa from covid 19?

Well, if we look specifically at those countries that participated in the Mectizan Donation Program we can see that all of these countries have a similar, low number of deaths from covid 19.

And it's not just Africa. Many parts of India have also widely used Ivermectin, and also have a low number of covid 19 deaths compared with other so called developed countries. 

The state of Uttar Pradesh in India is particularly interesting. Uttar Pradesh is India’s largest state by population, with over 200 million people. The Health Department introduced Ivermectin in August 2020, for close covid 19 contacts, health workers and patients. 

Uttar Pradesh did have a spike in covid deaths in May 2021, however, at its peak, the number of deaths per day was around 10 times less than the spikes of deaths that have been seen in the USA and the UK.  And since the end of July, Uttar Pradesh has had almost no covid deaths.

Not only have the number of deaths come down to zero but the number of cases too.

In fact, half of the districts in Uttar Pradesh have been officially declared covid-free.

This is despite the fact that as of the beginning of November 2021 only 22% of people in Uttar Pradesh had been fully vaccinated. 

For comparison, we could also look at the state of Kerala in India, Kerala is a small state in Indian terms, with 31 million people. Kerala only used Ivermectin for severe covid cases and completely abandoned the use of Ivermectin in August 2021. 

Kerala is still reporting 134 covid deaths per day and a 7-day average well over 200. Despite the state being only one seventh the population size of Uttar Pradesh. 

So, why are the media lying to us about Ivermectin? This is likely to be, at least in part, due to alliances such as the Trusted News Initiative. The Trusted News Initiative is a large group of corporate media organisations that have aligned together.

Publicly, these media corporations claim to combat the spread of harmful vaccine disinformation. It is curious that the Trusted News Initiative aligned together on vaccine information around the same time that the first covid vaccine was given. The announcement to control vaccine information was made on 10 December 2020 and the first shot of any covid vaccine was administered on 8 December 2020. 

At that time, when the first covid shot was given, it was really impossible to know what effects the vaccines would have. Emergency approval only was given, and the whole world embarked upon an ongoing experiment to find out how effective and safe the vaccines are. For the Trusted News Initiative to decide to censor information about the vaccines before the vaccines were widely distributed is nothing short of criminal.

The job of the media is to ferret around and try to find the truth, the story behind the story, not to decide what the truth is and force that upon the public.   

The Trusted News Initiative includes the BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft, Reuters, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, the European Broadcasting Union, The Hindu, Reuters, and other organisations. 

In fact, this is not the first time that the Trusted News Initiative has worked together to decide what information the public can receive. The Trusted News Initiative also operated during the 2019 General Election in the UK, the 2020 General Elections in Myanmar and Taiwan, and the US Presidential Election.

The Trusted News Initiative is also not the only powerful group of people censoring information. There is also the International Grand Committee on Disinformation. These people are not scientists or journalists. The organisation is made up of politicians from the UK, Canada, and the United States. The Singapore Parliament also participated in the group's virtual meeting in December 2020. 

But what is disinformation? Are these groups of elite people really out to protect us, or to protect their own interests? 

One of the members of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation is Damian Collins, a conservative member of parliament in the UK. In a Guardian article in July 2021, Damian Collins is quoted as saying that:

“people who had not been vaccinated could not expect the same treatment as those who had.”

The information contained in this article is just a fraction of the data strongly suggesting that Ivermectin and other existing low-cost treatments could have provided a rapid and sustained way out of the covid 19 pandemic.

So why is this information censored?

Could it be that the current covid 19 situation serves the purposes of too many powerful people?

Ivermectin is a generic drug and it is very cheap to make. The safety profile of Ivermectin also means that it can be freely distributed without a medical consultation. This represents direct competition for the brand new covid 19 vaccine industry.

The projected revenue for the six vaccines currently in use, for 2021 alone, is up to 65 billion dollars.

Many people still falsely believe that the vaccine is free if they don’t pay for it at the point of injection. Obviously it is not free. This huge amount of new revenue for big pharma is despite the fact that the technology for the mRNA vaccines was developed using more than 8 billion dollars of public funds.

The current situation with covid 19 has also been a perfect excuse for governments to exert greater control over their citizens. Which governments do not like exerting power? And do politicians really serve the interests of the public? Or are they more concerned with maneuvering themselves into comfortable and lucrative positions?

Then, there is the dramatic acceleration in the transfer of wealth from working class and middle class people to the elites. This process has been taking place for decades but it has accelerated during covid 19. 

40 million Americans filed for unemployment during the pandemic but billionaires saw their net worth increase by more than half a trillion dollars. Small businesses have had to close, and only the big corporations survive. 

In addition, during covid 19 the most powerful financial institutions have been benefiting from hundreds of billions of free dollars. For example, in 2020 the federal reserve printed more than 3 trillion dollars of free money. And most of this went to the finance sector. In much the same way that the bank bailouts did after the 2008 financial crash.  And the money printing is continuing, using the covid 19 pandemic as justification.

During covid 19, a number of big tech companies have seen their share price soar. And it's not just the share price. Google owner Alphabet saw its earnings increase dramatically during 3 months of lockdown, as people stuck at home used more of its services. Net profit jumped 162% to a record 17.9 billion dollars in one quarter

In this short article I have highlighted a tiny fraction of the corruption that is keeping the covid 19 pandemic going. Of course, it is not the case that every politician and every employee within these large organisations is in on it. But it is perhaps not that difficult to imagine that there could be a number of powerful networks at a high level consisting of a small number of elite people across multiple industries, working to protect and serve their own interests. At the very least, it is pretty clear that the response to the pandemic within most developed countries has been abysmal and very often counter-intuitive.  

While all of this is taking place, our attention is being directed at those people who decided not to receive a covid 19 vaccination. We are being encouraged to direct blame at our fellow citizens. Governments, the corporate media, and the big tech companies are attempting to divide us. While we fight amongst ourselves we are being distracted from the colossal mistakes that have been made by our leaders, and the epic corruption that is fueling the covid 19 pandemic. We are living through what is probably the greatest crime against humanity in history. 

resources

Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance https://covid19criticalcare.com/

The Bird Group https://bird-group.org/

Dr. Peter McCullough https://t.me/PeterMcCullough

Bret Weinstein https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi5N_uAqApEUIlg32QzkPlg

Robert F. Kennedy https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/

A Calmer Look at COVID-19

It is my personal view that sufficient information now exists to suggest that the risk posed by COVID-19 has been exaggerated.

The exaggeration is primarily centered around the suggested death rate. The media are currently quoting a death rate of around 4%, however, this is based on very limited data. At this stage we do not have any idea how many people have been exposed to COVID-19 and did not experience any symptoms, or experienced only mild symptoms that did not require them to go to hospital.

In Wuhan, China, the population has been exposed to a high level of air pollution for a number of years prior to COVID-19, which predisposes to a higher death rate. If the data from Wuhan is taken out of the equation, the death rate across the rest of China may be within the range of 0.2-0.4%.

Wuhan City, China

Italy, which has been having a horrific time with COVID-19,  also has a longer term problem with air pollution. In addition, the northern part of the country has the worst air quality and is also where COVID-19 seems to be more prevalent within the country. In fact, people are now talking about how much the air has improved since movement restrictions have been in place.

Incidentally, if you are in any way unconvinced that air pollution can have a significant effect, consider the fact that the World Health Organisation estimates more than 4 millions deaths worldwide are directly attributable to poor outdoor air quality each year.

Italy also has another important factor. It has a very large elderly population. In fact, just about all of the countries that have a reported high level of COVID-19 cases also have a large elderly population (defined by the percentage of people above 65 years and the overall population size).

Wuhan, China and Italy appear to have not just high levels of air pollution but also specifically high levels of PM2.5 particles, which the body cannot filter out through the nose and therefore accumulate in the body over time increasing the risk of heart disease, lung disease, and other serious conditions. COVID-19, remember, causes death because of respiratory problems.

In addition, studies had already shown that Italy has a significantly higher rate of deaths due to influenza than other European countries.

I believe  air pollution and the number of elderly people within the population are important factors in the high number of cases in certain countries so far. However, Spain does not have poor air quality but also has a high incidence of COVID-19 deaths. So, what could be the cause in Spain? Well, smoking. In Spain, a lot of people smoke cigarettes, again, predisposing to more complications with COVID-19.

Earlier this week, scientists at the University of Oxford said they completed a preliminary epidemiological model that suggested almost half of the UK population have already been exposed to COVID-19. If this model terms out to be accurate it means that the death rate associated with COVID-19 is much much lower than what is currently being quoted. Since it would indicate that the vast majority of people have already built a natural immunity to the virus.  

Just thinking about this also from a common sense point of view, if Prince Charles has already been exposed to it, along with many other celebrities who have tested positive, doesn’t this indicate that many of us ordinary people have also already been exposed to the virus?

COVID-19 is a serious health concern and governments and health authorities must make arrangements to care for those people who are likely to be affected, however, it is unlikely to be the generation destroying monster virus that we have been led to believe and panic over. This has huge implications since the current global lockdown is having a terrible effect on the poor. More than half a billion people around the world live in extreme poverty. Many are without food at this moment. Governments have a very difficult job in assessing all the risks on both sides, however, it may have been better to focus resources on providing adequate care for those living in higher risk areas or with preexisting conditions, and the elderly, rather than closing down the whole world for months. Instead of trillions of dollars of bailouts, just think about what could be achieved if that money was directed specifically at helping those at risk.  In the end, more lives may have been saved and hundreds of millions would not have to go even more hungry than usual.  

Just my opinion based on what data is currently available.

---

UPDATES: Mar 28th, an updated model by Imperial College in the UK is now predicting 5,700 deaths in the UK from COVID-19 - the previous estimate that informed government policy was 250,000 deaths. Meanwhile, at least 860,000 people in the higher risk category in the UK were already struggling to afford enough food before the crisis, and at least 1 million of people in the higher risk category report always or often being lonely, and therefore may struggle to find people to deliver food to them.

Dr Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Sanford University, previously published an article in the Wall Street Journal arguing the same points that I have mentioned above. His interview covers this in some detail:

---

7th April: Studies have now been done confirming COVID-19 deaths are associated with air pollution, as per my hypothesis in the original blog entry above. As reported in the Guardian:

Professor Peter Gotzsche Fired from Cochrane Collaboration

Professor Peter Gotzsche, featured in Statin Nation II has recently been fired from the Cochrane Collaboration - the organisation he helped to establish.

The Cochrane Collaboration is (or was) a highly respected international medical research organisation specialising in systematic reviews of the clinical evidence on a wide range of medical issues.

The idea of the Cochrane Collaboration was to provide a view of the clinical evidence that has not been tainted by commercial interests. This is a tall order since almost all of the data available to them has already been put through big pharma’s marketing machine - the raw material available to the Cochrane Collaboration (the data) has already been controlled or manipulated to some extent by industry. Nonetheless, Cochrane have been able to do some very useful analysis and publish influential and important reports.

Professor Peter Gotzsche has personally worked hard for decades to expose medical corruption and he has not held back in his strong criticisms of the pharmaceutical industry. Viewers of Statin Nation II will recall Gotzsche referring to pharmaceutical companies as engaging in “organised crime”.

We might expect that Gotzsche’s critique of big pharma is a good fit for Cochrane, and for a while it seems to have been. However, the Cochrane board recently voted 6 to 5 in favour of booting him out. And 4 of the 5 who wanted to keep him in have also since resigned.

In Statin Nation II, back in 2015, concerns were raised about the Cochrane Collaboration in relation to an apparent U-turn in their view of the clinical evidence for statins. Video clip below:

Later in the film during the interview with Professor Ebrahim, I asked for the best evidence that supports the notion that statins extend life expectancy. Professor Ebrahim referred me to the CTT data and the CTSU in Oxford- which has huge issues that have also been discussed in the film and elsewhere around the world. Also in another blog post available here.

It wasn’t just the all-cause mortality data that was a potential problem but also Professor Ebrahim’s unwillingness to accept that statins have significant adverse effects. It wasn’t possible to include all of this discussion with Professor Ebrahim in the film itself but the full one hour interview is included in the extras and complete package.

I have to say that during the making of Statin Nation II towards the end of 2014, after I interviewed Professor Ebrahim, I contacted Professor Gotzsche and urged him to take a look at the Cochrane reviews of statins. I was already concerned that the reputation of the Cochrane Collaboration would be tarnished by the inconsistencies in the published positions. Unfortunately, Professor Gotzsche took no action on this at that time and instead referred me back to Dr. John Abramson, who is featured in the first Statin Nation film but has nothing to do with Cochrane. I was disappointed by this at the time, and now I can’t help thinking that if action had been taken then, the Cochrane rot could have been postponed and Peter would still have his job.

Statin Corruption Exposed on Television in USA

Recently, Full Measure with Sheryl Attkisson aired a piece describing some of the financial ties between experts who set the cholesterol clinical guidelines and the pharmaceutical industry. This was something that was included in STATIN NATION way back in 2012 but its very rewarding to see larger parts of the media slowly catching up.

Full Measure is produced by and airs nationally on stations of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. According to their YouTube channel it is available in 43 million households via ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CW, MyTV, Univision and Telemundo affiliates. Since I am not in the U.S. I didn’t see the broadcast however, someone from the Statin Nation Facebook group kindly informed me about it.

Incidentally, most blog entries are posted on the Statin Nation Facebook page first, so if you use Facebook please follow the page: https://www.facebook.com/statinnation

Even if you are already aware of the issue concerning clinical guidelines it is still worth watching Sheryl Attkisson’s piece below, since there is an interesting short discussion with a statinator doctor who receives quite a lot of money for her views.

For reference, here is a very short excerpt from Statin Nation that first publicized this in 2012, also featuring Dr. Abramson!

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST STATINS AND CHOLESTEROL MISINFORMATION

Important Papers in the War Against the War Against Cholesterol

There are a number of reasons why so many doctors believe in statins and the cholesterol hypothesis. One easily appreciable reason is that they simply haven’t been exposed to the huge amount of contrary data.

Doctors are predominantly shown data that has already been put through the pharmaceutical industry’s marketing machine and presented with sufficient twists and turns to create “unequivocal evidence”

During the last ten years I have attempted to show the contrary evidence in published articles, my books and documentary films. It is difficult to summarise all of this in a blog post however, I thought it might be useful to provide a reminder of some of the key scientific publications during the last decade that in particular should have caused our health authorities to sit up and rethink their position.

These publications individually represent a significant challenge to the cholesterol hypothesis and the widespread use of statins.

It is Important to note that this is certainly not the totality of the evidence against the widespread use of statins - it is just a selection of papers that stand by themselves as a significant challenge. I have also, where possible, tried to select papers that are available free so anyone can have access to them.

Unfortunately, some of these reports have generally gone unnoticed and not received the same level of attention as the pharmaceutical industry’s sponsored information.

I have been working on this list during the last few days and coincidentally, the Guardian published a totally biased article yesterday specifically to attack those doctors who do not believe the dogma that cholesterol causes heart disease. This is not really a surprise since some time ago I met with the deputy editor of the Guardian and presented him with a free copy of Statin Nation. He instantly dismissed the information without even watching the film stating “that’s funny because my neighbour thinks statins are wonderful”. I don’t know who his neighbour is but I would be surprised if they are better qualified than the 18 internationally renowned experts interviewed for the Statin Nation documentaries. It goes without saying that the Guardian piece is completely full of inaccuracies and only serves as a mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical companies. How this article came about would also be intriguing to find out since it doesn’t mention any new studies, just an attack on those who dare question a false hypothesis.

The Ugly Side of Statins

(2013) This paper is written by Professor Sherif Sultan and his colleague Professor Niamh Hynes. Professor Sultan is one of the worlds leading vascular and endovascular surgeons. He is President of International Society Of Vascular Surgeons. This paper forms a concise and powerful systematic critique of the evidence for the widespread use of statins and also discusses statin adverse effects.

Download the PDF

The Cholesterol hypothesis: Time for the obituary?

(2011) This is an editorial written by Professors Tore Schersten, Paul J. Rosch, Karl E. Arfors, and Ralf Sundberg. There is no better summary of this editorial other than its own abstract:

“The cholesterol hypothesis links cholesterol intake and blood levels to cardiovascular disease. It has had enormous impact on health care and society during decades, but has little or no scientific backing that is relevant for the human species. Apparently, the hypothesis is false and should be buried.“

Download PDF

Nationwide Study in Sweden Finds No Benefit

(2011) Researchers at Linköping University looked at statin usage across all but one municipalities of Sweden and found that statins had not provided any benefit despite a large increase in usage. This study is important because it is one of the few studies that have looked retrospectively at if statins actually work in the real world. Double blind placebo controlled clinical trials are considered the gold standard but what is often overlooked is that the results of a clinical trail are a prediction of how the drug will perform in the real world, not a certainty. In a clinical trial the trial participants are carefully selected and the same results do not necessarily materialise in the real world. In this national study of Sweden the researchers found no benefit in the real world.

Download PDF

Lipid levels in patients hospitalized with coronary artery disease.

(2009) The American Heart Journal published analysis of 136,905 patients admitted to hospital with heart disease in the United States. They found that people with heart disease have lower levels of LDLs (so called “bad” cholesterol) than the general population. In essence, lower LDLs were associated with a greater risk. Not higher LDLs as we are told.

Link to study

Low admission LDL-cholesterol is associated with increased 3-year all-cause mortality in patients with non ST segment elevation myocardial infarction.


(2009) Researchers at the Henry Ford Heart and Vascular Institute, Detroit, USA found that lower LDL levels were associated with worse 3-year survival after ST segment elevation myocardial infarction, which is the most severe type of heart attack.

Download PDF

Lipid Paradox in Acute Myocardial Infarction— The Association With 30-Day In-Hospital Mortality

(2015) Researchers at Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan looked at the LDL levels of people admitted to hospital after a heart attack. They found that lower LDL levels were associated with a significantly higher 30 day death rate.

Download PDF

Lack of an association or an inverse association between low-density- lipoprotein cholesterol and mortality in the elderly: a systematic review.

(2016) This is the first systematic review of cohort studies where low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) has been analysed as a risk factor for all-cause and/or cardiovascular mortality in elderly people. The conclusion:

“High LDL-C is inversely associated with mortality in most people over 60 years. This finding is inconsistent with the cholesterol hypothesis (ie, that cholesterol, particularly LDL-C, is inherently atherogenic). Since elderly people with high LDL-C live as long or longer than those with low LDL-C, our analysis provides reason to question the validity of the cholesterol hypothesis. Moreover, our study provides the rationale for a re-evaluation of guidelines recommending pharmacological reduction of LDL-C in the elderly as a component of cardiovascular disease prevention strategies.“

Download PDF

LDL-C does not cause cardiovascular disease: a comprehensive review of the current literature.

(2018) Almost the same researchers as the study above conducted another review. The researchers concluded that the cholesterol hypothesis is unable to satisfy any of the Bradford Hill criteria for causality and support for the cholesterol hypothesis is often based on misleading statistics, exclusion of unsuccessful trials and ignoring numerous contradictory observations.

Download PDF

The statin-low cholesterol-cancer conundrum.

(2011) Three giants in the study of cholesterol and statins, Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, Dr. Kilmer McCully and Professor Paul J. Rosch published a paper in 2011 examining, as the title suggests, the link between low cholesterol, statins, and cancer. There is an established connection between low cholesterol and cancer however, whether or not statins cause cancer is more difficult to determine when all the data is considered. The authors take a sophisticated look at this issue.

Download PDF

Statins and All-Cause Mortality in High-Risk Primary Prevention

(2010) Professor Kausik Ray and colleagues completed a meta-analysis of 11 randomized controlled statin clinical trials Involving 65 229 participants. This paper is significant because it was the first study to more accurately separate out the data for primary and secondary prevention. They found that the use of statins in primary prevention does not extend life expectancy. Interestingly, Professor Ray has since continued to be a strong supporter for the use of statins and cholesterol lowering.

Download PDF

Statins stimulate atherosclerosis and heart failure: pharmacological mechanisms.

(2015) Professor Okuyama and Professor Hamazaki from Japan, along with Dr. Peter Langsjoen, and others published an important paper detailing the ways that statins actually cause heart disease. They discuss the studies showing statins cause an increase in the amount of calcified plaque in the arteries (these studies should be listed as separate entries in this blog post). Along with the other ways that statins damage the heart through CoQ10, vitamin K2 and selenium depletion.

Link to the study

Towards a Paradigm Shift in Cholesterol Treatment

(2015) Professors Okuyama and Hamazaki publish a supplemental of more than 100 pages discussing cholesterol issues. The focus is more on Japan however the data discussed is relevant to every country. They discuss the huge amount of data confirming a link between low cholesterol and a shorter life expectancy, and low cholesterol and an increased incidence of various cancers and other serious diseases.

Download PDF

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST STATINS AND CHOLESTEROL MISINFORMATION

Cholesterol “the Hallmark of Animal Life”

We know that cholesterol is essential for life. Cholesterol plays an important role in the immune system and is critically important for the structural integrity of all the 50 trillion plus cells the body is made up of.

Cholesterol is also the raw material needed for all of the sex hormones, bile acids for digestion, and vitamin D. And certain parts of the body such as the brain, the nervous system and the eyes need a lot more cholesterol than other parts of the body. For example, 25% of the body’s cholesterol is found in the brain.

Knowing this, it should not be a great surprise to find that eggs, the symbol of life itself, are high in cholesterol. The egg is the symbol often used to represent the primordial source, and was apparently frequently used by a wide range of early cultures when depicting the origins of the universe. Since cholesterol is an important life giving nutrient, we would expect it to be present in abundance during the early stages of life.

Now, the presence of cholesterol has been used to identify the oldest animal on record. Researchers from Australian national university examined an unusual oval shaped fossil that was preserved in sandstone cliffs in the White Sea region of Russia. The fossil is from an animal that roamed the earth 558 million years ago.

Scientists had previously debated the nature of the fossil. They debated if it was an animal or something else. But the presence of a significant amount of cholesterol enabled it to be unequivocally identified as an animal. The cholesterol molecules they found are in abundance in almost all of today’s animals but have low abundance is other life forms such as bacteria.

Professor Jochen Brocks said “these creatures in fact produce cholesterol, which is the hallmark of animals and tells us in fact that this creature is our earliest ancestor”

Ironic isn’t it that the last few decades have seen a global war on cholesterol..

As a reminder, here are the cholesterol poster and LDL poster I created some time ago. Feel free to print and share.

Cholesterol Poster

Click on the image itself to print / download.

LDL Poster

Click on the image itself to print / download.

LDL ‘cholesterol’ Does Not Cause Cardiovascular Disease - Another New Study.

Two new published studies from Statin Nation interviewees this week should push the cholesterol hypothesis a step back into the history books. Seventeen authors including: Uffe Ravnskov, Paul J Rosch, Sherif Sultan, Tomohito Hamazaki, Peter H Langsjoen, Kilmer S McCully, and Harumi Okuyama, published an article summarising the research showing that LDLs (so called ‘bad cholesterol’) do not cause heart disease. The paper highlights the following points:

• The cholesterol hypothesis is based on misleading statistics and ignoring contradictory observations.

• Only around 15% of clinical trials that found a negative result for cholesterol-lowering are cited in other reports.

• There is no association between total cholesterol levels and the degree of arterial damage - in general, and also with regard to statin clinical trials.

• In the Framingham Heart Study. “For each 1 mg/dl drop in TC [total cholesterol] per year, there was an eleven percent increase in coronary and total mortality”.

• The LDL level of patients who have had a heart attack is lower than normal.

• Elderly people with higher LDL live the longest.

• Cardiovascular mortality has not decreased as a result of widespread statin treatment. Here is a quote from the paper that refers to this point:

“In a Swedish study including 289 of the 290 municipalities, no association was found between statin use and the change in mortality from acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Also, the American National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that during the period 1999-2006 the number of AMI and strokes increased from 3.4 to 3.7%, and from 2.0 to 2.9%, respectively. During the same period mean LDL-C level decreased from 126.1 to 114.8 mg/dL, and the self-reported use of lipid-lowering drugs increased from 8 to 13.4%. Furthermore, statin utilisation in 12 European countries between 2000 and 2012 was not associated with reduced CHD mortality or its rate of change over the years.”

In the second paper, Uffe Ravnskov writes about familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) - a genetic condition that prevents the body from removing cholesterol. People with FH have very high cholesterol levels. FH has often been used as a part of the explanation for the use of statins. However, there is not sufficient data to say that statins benefit people with FH. This is still unknown. However, for some time Uffe Ravnskov has argued that coagulation factors should be considered as a priority - which is the subject of the paper.

One of the videos from the Statin Nation Extras Package discusses this also:

Unfortunately, just this website and the Irish Times seem to have reported on the first study and only this website has reported on the second study. Therefore please share this post with everyone and anyone you can get to listen!

Update (18/09/18): The Sun, Express, and Metro newspapers have now reported on the first study, albeit with various factual errors.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST STATINS AND CHOLESTEROL MISINFORMATION

British Medical Journal Says Statins Provide No Benefit for Healthy Elderly

A new study published today in the British Medical Journal has found statins do not provide any benefit for elderly people, unless they have type 2 diabetes. In order to understand the significance of this study it is useful to first discuss some background and some key important concepts.

Background

Although clinical trials are considered the gold standard in terms of evidence, in reality these trials provide a potential predicted benefit rather than a guarantee of benefit.

Clinical trials and the way they are reported are fraught with issues. Most of these issues relate to the commercial interests. The pharmaceutical company sponsoring the trial believes it owns the data and therefore decides what is published, what is not published, and how and when it is published.

The data can easily be manipulated. The scope or design of the trial can be determined in such a way that might be favorable to the drug being tested. Data about adverse effects can be excluded from the final analysis or not even collected in the first place. The data is also sometimes not made available to other researchers who want to verify the findings. In addition, the results of the trial can be exaggerated in favor of the drug during the writing of the report, by using relative percentages and other misleading calculations.

All of this means it is important to look at post marketing surveillance data and other studies that assess how the medication is actually performing the the real world.

Most of this kind of data for stains has so far failed to show any benefit associated with their widespread use.

For example, researchers collected data from all but one of the municipalities in Sweden and they found that statins had not provided any benefit despite a huge increase in usage.

In 2012 the British Heart Foundation published a report detailing a wide range of heart disease statistics. One of the highlights of this report was the decline in the heart disease death rate that was seen in the UK between 2002 and 2010. This decline was attributable to a reduction in the number of people who smoke and improved emergency treatments within hospitals - statins were not listed in the report since they played no measurable contribution to the decline in heart disease deaths. But much of the mainstream media falsely claimed that statins were responsible for the decline - none of the journalists bothered to check.

The New Study

Now a new study has found no benefit associated with the use of statins in healthy elderly people. But the study did find a benefit for elderly people with type 2 diabetes (more about that later).

This was a large study conducted in Spain and published in the British Medical Journal today. Using data from the Catalan primary care system database (SIDIAP), the researchers identified 46,864 people aged 75 years or more with no history of cardiovascular disease between 2006 and 2015.

Through my contacts I obtained the press release from the British Medical Journal and read the study report prior to official publication.

The press release from the British Medical Journal reads: “New study does not support widespread use of statins in healthy older people to prevent heart disease and stroke”

One thing that makes this study significant is that according to the current clinical guidelines for cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention, most of the people in this study would be suitable candidates for statin treatment. This should lead to an urgent reassessment of the guidelines, which many doctors already suspect are designed to put more people on statins unnecessarily.

In the study, any benefit was limited to just those people with type 2 diabetes aged between 75 and 84. After age 84, the benefit also disappeared in the type 2 diabetes population.

An important question remains concerning why the diabetic patients benefited when the other patients did not?

It is widely acknowledged that statins cause type 2 diabetes (T2DM). It would be expected that any statin induced diabetes would play out as an increase in heart disease in older age. Since people with diabetes are up to five times more likely to have heart disease.

If the statin benefits were great enough to compensate for this somehow and still produce a benefit, then surely this benefit would also have been seen in the non-diabetic population? I contacted the lead author of the study to ask this specific question and I received the following reply:

"We agree that there exists evidence about the increased risk of T2DM associated with statins, however, we did not observe such increment in our study in people older than 74 years. We have pointed out possible explanations for these results:

The increased risk for T2DM associated with statins is higher in persons with intensive statin regimens, and 85% of statin regimens in our study published in the BMJ were of low to medium potency,

The mean follow-up of the study participants was 7.7 years (which is also the approximate mean duration of statin consumption), thus the possibility that longer duration of statin use might have shown an increased incidence of diabetes cannot be ruled out.

We also speculated with the possibility that the effect of statins on the glucose metabolism may be age-dependent, but this question remains to be elucidated in future independent studies.

We considered that the main explanation to justify the restriction of the benefit from statin therapy to individuals with T2DM was the association of statin effectiveness with the CVD risk of the individuals. In our study, participants with T2DM had a higher prevalence of other cardiovascular risk factors (hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, tobacco use, obesity) than the general population of the same age, and the incidence of cardiovascular disease in those with diabetes was more than 50% higher than in those without diabetes.

Following current guidelines, most of the population older than 74 years would be suitable candidates for statin treatment because the incidence of CVD in this population (i.e. risk) is well above the risk threshold of 10%, but this increased risk is mainly due to age. We think we need specific risk prediction tools for these older people.

Our results do not support these recommendations in the old and very old persons without diabetes, and they raise an important question: whether the current risk threshold for statin indication (10% risk of atherosclerotic CVD at 10 years) is appropriate in this population." Dr. Rafel Ramos, Department of Medical Sciences, School of Medicine, University of Girona, Spain.

I have included Dr. Ramos's reply in its entirety. In my view it is a fairly balanced explanation, which is extremely refreshing. All too often we see reports intent on portraying statins as a wonder drug. 

In the report itself the authors do also state that the possibility that a longer duration of statin use might have shown an increased incidence of cancer, or haemorrhagic stroke.

The study has important implications for millions of healthy elderly people who are taking statins.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that any benefit found in this study for elderly diabetic people needs to be considered alongside the huge amount of data showing that higher cholesterol is generally better, particularly in the elderly:

And also, don't let statins break your heart!

Or make a one time donation:

In US$

In GB £

References:

Nilsson, S et al. No connection between the level of exposition to statins in the population and the incidence/ mortality of acute myocardial infarction: An ecological study based on Sweden’s municipalities. Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine 2011, 10:6 https://jnrbm.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1477-5751-10-6

British Heart Foundation report: Coronary Heart Disease Statistics 2012. Available from https://www.bhf.org.uk/publications/statistics/coronary-heart-disease-statistics-2012

Link to the new study: http://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3359

Revolutionary Electromedical Cancer Treatment Approved by EU

The European Union has just approved a revolutionary cancer treatment that was featured in my documentary film Body Electric.

The TheraBionic device uses radio frequency electromagnetic fields to treat advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (liver disease). The fields block the growth of tumor cells, while not affecting the growth of normal cells. The approval of the device by the EU represents a huge step forward in the acceptance of alternative treatments based on the understanding of bioelectricity.

Professor Pasche and colleagues (featured in Body Electric) had previously found that different types of tumor respond to specific frequencies and the treatment is adjusted accordingly. The premise of the Body Electric film is that the future of medicine is electrocueticals based on an understanding of bioelectricity, with less emphasis on pharmaceuticals.

This development was also reported in The Cancer Letter

A Move Towards Totalitarian Medicine?

People often ask me, if statins are so bad why do so many doctors prescribe them? This is a good question - it is perfectly understandable that people feel conflicted by the differing points of view.

Image by Big Brother Utopia

Doctors worldwide prescribe statins to tens of millions of people who do not need them. These people will not receive any benefit from the medication and have a significant possibility of life altering adverse effects. Part of the reason for this catastrophic situation is related to the medical system in general. In particular: the commercial interests, the hierarchical nature of medicine, the Flexner report (discussed in Body Electric), medical education that is not only influenced by commercial interests but also professors representing the old guard unwilling to accept new evidence, unprofessional and lazy journalism, commercially driven media organizations, few unbiased alternative information sources, and the implementation of commercially driven clinical guidelines. Now, a new factor could be emerging - a new way to exert peer pressure on doctors.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found a way of nudging doctors to prescribe more statin medications to people who don’t need them. Well, actually two new ways, but both using a similar method. They used an online patient dashboard with 'nudges' to doctors. One nudge provided physicians with information on their performance relative to other physicians in terms of prescribing, and the other a simple prompt to physicians to make a decision on prescribing a statin.

During the study, the dashboard nudge that showed the physician information on their performance relative to other physicians, led to more than 3 times as many statin prescriptions. When compared to normal care.

The medical profession sometimes believes it is immune to the effects of persuasion and suggestion. For example, a survey conducted on medical students found that 86% thought it was improper for a politician to receive a gift, but only 46% thought it was improper for themselves to receive a gift of a similar value from a pharmaceutical company. Indicating that the medical students believed they would be less influenced by a gift than politicians are.

But the fact that simple onscreen nudges can lead to 3 times as many prescriptions, indicates that doctors are in fact only human. And these aspects do influence prescribing outside of the evidence base.

This should be a concern for all kinds of reasons. Not least because according to a survey completed in America, 94% of doctors have some kind of link with the pharmaceutical industry.

The idea of nudging the prescription habits of doctors is in my view a deterioration towards achieving control by the drugs companies over what doctors do. Commercially influenced clinical guidelines already do a good job of that, and now nudging doctors using peer pressure can help to exert control over those doctors brave enough to do what they think is best for the individual patient despite the guidelines.

Below is a video excerpt from the Statin Nation extras. Professor Peter C. Gøtzsche talks about clinical guidelines and the fact that these can sometimes inappropriately restrict doctors.

The study discussed above is published in JAMA

Effect of an Automated Patient Dashboard Using Active Choice and Peer Comparison Performance Feedback to Physicians on Statin PrescribingThe PRESCRIBE Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial

Other studies referred to:

Campbell, EG et al. “A National Survey of Physician-Industry Relationships” New England Journal of Medicine 2007; 356:1742-1750

Wazana, A “Physicians and the Pharmaceutical Industry: Is a Gift Ever Just a Gift?” Journal of the American Medical Association 2000; 283:373-380

Other links:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180728084128.htm

https://www.europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com/news/77830/nudging-triples-prescription-statins/

'Good' Cholesterol (HDLs) Found to be Bad in New Study

We all know the official line - the higher your cholesterol level the greater your risk for heart disease. And a high level of LDLs or a low level of HDLs is bad.

Image by TLECOATL ZYANYA

In fact, every aspect of this hypothesis has been repeatedly destroyed, but the vast majority of the medical community continue to ignore the facts, as astonishing as this is.

We have studies going back more than 40 years showing a strong link between higher cholesterol and a longer life. Other studies have shown a strong link between higher cholesterol levels and reduced incidence of cancer and infections (see this video clip).  

A dietary trial published in the British Medical Journal in 2016 found that for each 30 mg/dL (0.78 mmol/L) reduction in cholesterol there was a 22% greater risk of death (see previous post here).

We also know that people who have a heart attack do not have high cholesterol - they have the same average total cholesterol levels as other people of a similar age (see this previous post here).

And we know that cholesterol-lowering at the population level does not reduce the risk of heart disease (see Statin Nation).

The LDL level (so called bad cholesterol) is also actually lower in people with heart disease, not higher - according to a large study published in the American Heart Journal.

Higher levels of so called ‘bad’ cholesterol also predict better athletic performance (see here).

Drugs that increased HDLs (so called good cholesterol) have increased the number of deaths. The drug Torcetrapib reduced "bad" LDLs by 25% and increased "good" HDLs by 72%, and at the same time increased the number of deaths due to cardiovascular causes by 40% and doubled the number of deaths from all causes (see Statin Nation book and this blog post).

Now, a new study has again challenged the idea that HDLs are good. The new study has been published in the American Heart Association journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. The researchers found an association between higher HDL levels and an increase in carotid plaque in women.

Medscape recently reported comments from Robert Rosenson, MD, Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine, New York City, who has chaired four international working groups on the biology HDLs.:

"HDL can be a good, bad, or neutral particle," he said.

And that’s not all. A few days ago Professor Sheriff Sultan (featured in Statin Nation II) informed me about a study recently completed in China at Sichuan University and funded by a Sichuan Province-Supporting Technology Project. The study compared blood cholesterol and blood glucose in patients with coronary artery atherosclerosis and healthy individuals.

The researchers found that the cholesterol levels did not correlate significantly with artery atherosclerosis but blood glucose levels did.

The researchers stated: “Hyperlipidemia is not an important cause of coronary atherosclerosis”.

And yet again there is a lack of reporting from the media about these studies - because most journalists are lazy and they only write about cholesterol and statins when a press release is issued from a drugs company that they can cut and paste into their newspaper or website.

Or make a one time donation:

In US$

In GB £

New Study Finds Statin Use Associated With Another Type of Muscle Damage.

It is already well-known that statins damage muscles. This is the most common of all the statin adverse effects, and somewhat ironically includes damage to the heart muscle.

Now a new study has found another link between statins and muscle damage. This time Idiopathic inflammatory myositis (IIM) - a varied group of autoimmune related muscle disorders that are characterised by chronic inflammation that results in muscle weakness. These conditions can cause gastrointestinal, cardiac and pulmonary dysfunction. According to the British Society for Rheumatology these muscle conditions are a significant problem for morbidity and mortality.

Lead author Gillian E. Caught from Adelaide Medical School, University of Adelaide, South Australia, told theheart.org | Medscape Cardiology:

"They are severe, debilitating conditions that can result in permanent disability and death, and unfortunately, do not go away when the statin is discontinued because the statin has triggered an autoimmune response. That is why these patients need to be treated aggressively with steroids to help try to get the condition under control."

Dr Caught also said that the general musculoskeletal adverse effects associated with statin use are well known and are estimated to affect between 7% and 29% of all statin users.

The new study is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

It is a population-based case-control study using the South Australian Myositis Database and the North West Adelaide Health Study, using data from confirmed cases of IIM diagnosed between 1990 and 2014 in patients 40 years or older.

Patients with Idiopathic inflammatory myositis were 79% more likely to be taking statins than the control group.

As more studies emerge confirming what patients have been saying for decades about statin adverse effects, the real risk / benefit ratio associated with statin use is becoming more clear. Increasing, data is showing that statins cause far more harm than we have been led to believe.

Media Silence and Misinformation

As far as I can see this important finding has not been reported anywhere in the mainstream media. Instead, articles like this one published in the Irish Independent continue to suggest that statins are saving lives.

A Huge Problem

Recently, the CDC found that 50% of men and 38% of women aged 60 years and older in America were taking a medication to lower cholesterol.

This blog and website is made possible through patronage. To find out how to become a patreon, and make a significant difference with just $1 per month, please click here.