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Weaponized Vaccination Prepared for Phony Pandemic…
The URL for this article is: http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=2802
URGENT ACTION ITEM: Demand the right to self-quarantine (self-shield) instead of vaccination or involuntary quarantine NOW. Tell State and Federal officials and legislators that you want to make your own health choices in the event of a pandemic declaration. Click here (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27275) NOW and then share this article with everyone on your list urging them to do the same.
There is no time to lose. With this coming Fall, and the promised Swine Flu Pandemic nearly upon us, and with WHO on the verge of declaring the non-lethal, bio-engineered, weaponized H1N1 Swine Flu a “Level 6 Pandemic”, for which they actually redefined “Pandemic” as “Widespread, spreading from human to human but not particularly dangerous” from its previous definition of “widespread, rapidly spreading and very dangerous”, we are very close to a marriage of the illness care system’s deadly vaccine hoax and the phony “terrorism protection” of the emerging police state in the US. What is planned, and has been legislated into existence, is the total eradication of your right to choose what does – and what does not – go into your body in the form of a mandated vaccine for a weaponized virus (which is fizzling into a non-event disease, by the way, unless resurrected by a weaponized vaccine…). The implications of this action are potentially lethal to you and any remaining vestiges of constitutionality or personal health freedom. Of course, the designation of this “disease” as a “Pandemic” would be merely laughable if the implications of a medically-induced police state were not so horrific.
Legislation is already in place which would require you to either submit to vaccination once a Pandemic State is declared by either the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Governor of your State or both. Refuse this vaccine and you will find yourself confined either as a felon without benefit of judge or jury if the offense is a State level one, or involuntarily incarcerated in Federal FEMA holding camps if the offense is a Federal one. Either way, unless we demand, and obtain, the right to self quarantine (self-shield) once the “Pandemic” is rolled out, our only choice, if we are in the US, entering or leaving the US at that time, will be to either submit to a weaponized substance being injected into our bodies or involuntary detention for alleged (and totally irrational) “public health” purposes.
This excellent article by Stephen Lendman, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization makes many of the points that the Natural Solutions Foundation has been making for the last several years: the US government is aiding and abetting a along-term and well-orchestrated health assault on its people in the form of dangerous, uninsurable vaccinations. Their dangers are legion but, despite the propaganda to the contrary, not one of them has ever been proven safe or effective. They have all been proven wildly profitable, however both at the primary level (what the drug companies receive when they sell them to doctors, governments, military systems, etc.), secondary level (payment to the doctor’s office or health care system for administration of these toxic and ineffective injections) and at the wildly profitable third level (on-going treatment for diseases induced by the impact of both the vaccine’s active materials and the astoundingly toxic adjuvants, preservatives and other compounds included in the vaccine shot).
The list of vaccine related conditions and diseases far exceeds just the tragedy of vaccine induced autism. It extends to – and beyond –
~Leukemia (once rare, but now a common disease in both children and adults) because of the leukemia virus contamination known and tolerated for decades by the FDA
~Neurological damage (for example, epilepsy caused by the totally unnecessary Rotovirus vaccination recently added to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), whose recommendations are increasingly being mandated by State governments and “Autism Spectrum Disorders”, Hyperactivity, Learning Disabilities and “Juvenile ALS”, a brand new disorder invented to explain why girls and women are dying after Gardasil vaccination “against” HPV)
~Asthma and pneumonia
~Chronic Fatigue
~Fibromyalgia
~Genital Warts and Herpes following vaccination with Gardasil and shingles vaccines
~Guillian Barre Syndrome (post vaccination polio by another, hastily-invented name)
~Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia (five times as likely in persons who have been vaccinated “against” flu)
~Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Multiple Sclerosis and other life-threatening auto-immune diseases
~The disease against which the vaccination was supposedly given (for example, Yellow Fever vaccine causes Yellow Fever in a significant number of people who receive it. That number increases greatly if the person is over 60 years old. Vaccine FDA-approved inserts carry the notice that the symptoms of the disease being vaccinated against are among the side effects of the vaccination!)
~Death — thousands and thousands of deaths. In fact, one might call vaccination part of the “Josef Mengele School of Medicine” and this sick joke would be frighteningly accurate.
The Natural Solutions Foundation has petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to require it to prohibit all advertising which states or implies that vaccines are either safe, effective or both, since neither is true of any vaccine: none has ever been proven safe or effective. Vaccines are, in fact, so dangerous that they are a totally uninsurable risk. Parents have received over $2 Billion from the special US Masters Vaccine Court although most cases are never heard and few are parents win their cases in this kangaroo court system. That money, of course, was not provided by the drug companies, but rather from a special tax parents (or other providers) are required to pay on every vaccine shot.
Vaccines are most profitable, however, when large numbers of doses are administered. If you want to make a lot of money, and then go on making a lot more money AND render a population infertile, vaccines are your tool.
Please take this situation seriously. Although the “disease” is not serious, the loss of freedom and imposition of a death machine is very, very serious. And please, take a moment to make a recurring tax deductible donation, large or small, to the Natural Solutions Foundation by clicking here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=189). We are here for you. Even in difficult economic times, a dollar a month from everyone on our list will make it possible for your health freedom to have a massive and resonant voice.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
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Here is the letter which I wrote to the author of this article congratulating him on his excellent piece:
Dear Mr. Lendman,
First, let me congratulate you on your excellent article on preparing the US population for mandatory vaccination. As the Medical Director of the Natural Solutions Foundation, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org, I have been sounding the same alarms that you write about here in articles, blogs, blasts and radio shows.
The Natural Solutions Foundation’s primary list is approximately 1/4 million people and our materials are forwarded widely. We focus on the right to access information, natural and organic products, clean food (which most emphatically does NOT include genetically modified ones) and the right to make health choices employing these options and eschewing others, such as vaccination, if that is what people wish.
The Natural Solutions Foundation has published extensively on the dangers of vaccines and the fact that the entire science of virology stands on junk science and that political motivations, not scientific or health-based ones, control both regulation and public health policy with absolutely disastrous results.
The legislative and regulatory climate of the US, EU and, through Codex Alimentarius (the world food code), which is largely dominated and driven by multinational corporate interests – and worse – is of extreme concern to any person who is even dimly aware of the realities. In addition to the legislation you cite as posing a real threat to both freedom and health through the unchecked declaration of a public health threat or “pandemic”, I would add that PATRIOT I, II and II as well as BARDA restate, reinforce and repeat the government’s “right” to require mandatory vaccination or “treatment” for a declared health threat without substantiation, documentation, consultation or verification.
The Natural Solutions Foundation has created a call for the right to self-quarantine instead of accepting mandatory vaccination or other unwelcome treatments. We ask people to demand the right to self quarantine at
salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27275.
Clicking on this link allows people to send emails to their federal and state legislators, Secretary of Health and Human Services, the White House and And the Governor of their State with a single mouse click. We would appreciate it if you would let your contacts know about this option and direct them to this link.
FDA’s rush to approve vaccines and medications which provide profit, but pose significant dangers (HPV, with its genetically modified components, toxins including Polysorbate 80, a compound known to be related to infertility, stands as an outstanding example while the demonstrably lethal Sanofi-Aventis Avian Flu vaccine, now stockpiled by the US and the epilepsy and pneumonia inducing rotovirus vaccine recently added to the ACIP schedule stand as three of many) continues unabated while governments seek to offer it yet more money to degrade our health and our food through both mandatory vaccination and Codex-imposed under nutrition.
It is interesting to note that Codex Alimentarius, created at the behest of the post WWII pharmaceutical industry (once its leaders got out of jail following their sentences by the Nuremberg Commission for their crimes against humanity) is front and center in the push to remove food, and thus health, freedom and choice from Americans through the Codex-compliant agricultural bills now before Congress. We call this process “HARMonization.”
I would like to share your excellent article with our readership (with full citation, of course) and would like to invite you to be my guest on our Internet Radio Station, www.HealthFreedomRadio.com. You would be interviewed by the Trustees of the Foundation, Major General Albert N. Stubblebine III (US Army, Ret.), Ralph Fucetola, JD, and myself. Interviews are generally an hour long, but, since we are on internet radio, may run longer if our guest has more to say than fits into a rigid time frame. I suspect that you have more to say!
In your excellent article you state that the Emergency Medical Powers Act has not yet been passed by States. I must take exception to that, although I wish it were true. As of April 15, 2006, 32 states have introduced 92 legislative bills or resolutions that are based upon or feature provisions related to the articles or sections of the act. Of these bills, 37 had passed by that date. There can be little doubt that the number has increased since then.
Again, please accept my appreciation for your outstanding synthesis of these issues. I look forward to interviewing you so our listeners and supporters will have the chance to learn more about these issues.
Yours in health and freedom,
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
And here is the article itself:
Readying Americans for Dangerous, Mandatory Vaccinations
Copyright by Stephen Lendman, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization
Global Research, June 10, 2009
At least three US federal laws should concern all Americans and suggest what may be coming – mandatory vaccinations for hyped, non-existant threats, like H1N1 (Swine Flu). Vaccines and drugs like Tamiflu endanger human health but are hugely profitable to drug company manufacturers.
The Project BioShield Act of 2004 (S. 15) became law on July 21, 2004 “to provide protections and countermeasures against chemical, radiological, or nuclear agents that may be used in a terrorist attack against the United States by giving the National Institutes of Health contracting flexibility, infrastructure improvements, and expediting the scientific peer review process, and streamlining the Food and Drug Administration approval process of countermeasures.”
In other words, the FDA may now recklessly approve inadequately tested, potentially dangerous vaccines and other drugs if ever the Secretaries of Health and Human Services (HHS) or Defense (DOD) declare a national emergency, whether or not one exists and regardless of whether treatments available are safe and effective. Around $6 billion or more will be spent to develop, produce, and stockpile vaccines and other drugs to counteract claimed bioterror agents.
The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act slipped under the radar when George Bush signed it into law as part of the 2006 Defense Appropriations Act (HR 2863). It lets the HHS Secretary declare any disease an epidemic or national emergency requiring mandatory vaccinations. Nothing in the Act lists criteria that warrant a threat. Also potential penalties aren’t specified for those who balk, but very likely they’d include quarantine and possible fines.
The HHS web site also says the Secretary may “issue a declaration….that provides immunity from tort liability (except for willful misconduct) for claims of loss caused, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from administration or use of (vaccine or other pharmaceutical) countermeasures to diseases, threats and conditions determined by the Secretary to constitute a present, or credible risk of a future public health emergency….”
The industry-run US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) notoriously rushes inadequately tested drugs to market, putting their efficacy and safety into question, and turning those who use them into lab rats. It includes everyone if a mass vaccination is ordered on the mere claim of a public emergency – no proof required.
The Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (S. 3678) is the other worrisome law, effective December 19, 2006. It amended “the Public Health Service Act with respect to public health security and all-hazards preparedness and response, and for other purposes.” Even its supporters worry about issues of privacy, liability, and putting profits over public health. Critics express greater concerns about dangerous remedies for exaggerated or non-existant threats as well as mass hysteria created for political purposes.
At least one other measure is also worrisome – The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA). So far it’s just a proposal by the Center for Law and the Public’s Health – “A Collaborative at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities (as) a primary, international, national, state, and local resource on public health law (and) policy for public health practitioners, judges, academics, policymakers, and others.”
MSEHPA is now “track(ing) legal responses to the emerging international response to the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) outbreak, including declarations of public health emergency at the international, national, state, and local levels….” even though forensic evidence can’t confirm any H1N1 deaths. No emergency exists anywhere, and reporting one is all hype to sell dangerous drugs to unsuspecting people globally.
On its web site, the ACLU says this about MSEHPA:
It’s “written in a way that doesn’t adequately protect citizens against the misuse of the tremendous powers that it would grant in an emergency. (It’s) replete with civil liberties problems. Its three top flaws are that:
(1) It fails to include basic checks and balances (by) grant(ing) extraordinary emergency powers (that) should never go unchecked. (It) could have serious consequences for individuals’ freedom, privacy, and equality.”
(2) “It goes well beyond bioterrorism (with) an overbroad definition of ‘public health emergency” that may be anything a local or national authority declares for any reason with no conclusive evidence for proof.
(3) “It lacks privacy protections (and) undercut(s) existing protections for sensitive medical information.”
MSEHPA worries other organizations besides the ACLU, both conservative and progressive – including the Free Congress Foundation, American Legislative Exchange Council, conservative association of state legislators, Human Rights Campaign, and Health Privacy Project.
The Real Threat of Dangerous, Mandatory Vaccinations
In the wake of the hyped Swine Flu scare, media reports suggest mass vaccinations are coming. The May 6 Kimberly Kindy – Ceci Connolly Washington Post one, for example, headlined “US May Add Shots for Swine Flu to Fall Regimen” without saying they’ll be mandatory but reading between the lines suggests the possibility this year or later.
The writers report that “The Obama administration is considering an unprecedented fall vaccination campaign” to include regular and Swine Flu shots, the latter because it’s “spreading across the globe.”
HHS’ Dr. Robin Robinson said “We are moving forward with making a vaccine,” and if the government proceeds with a national program, enough supply will be produced to provide two doses for all Americans with spokespersons like National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, claiming adverse reactions aren’t to be expected and adding another shot for Swine Flu “should not present a problem.”
The New York Times also hypes the scare with reports of city schools closed after unconfirmed Swine Flu cases, a few adult deaths blamed on H1N1 bringing the claimed total in the city to seven, and the World Health Organization (WHO) saying on June 3 that it’s moving closer to declaring a worldwide (Level 6) Swine Flu pandemic – even though none exists.
With all the hype, misinformation, and willful lies WHO’s Dr. Keiji Fukuda, in charge of flu, said only 117 deaths globally have been “blamed” on Swine Flu and any warning may include the caveat that the virus isn’t very lethal. A more accurate statement would explain that no forensic evidence links any deaths to H1N1, and influenza annually kills about 30,000 people in America alone – something the major media never report or that scattered accounts of any type flu deaths worldwide are no cause for alarm or reason for scary headlines.
It’s also unconscionable for the WHO, US and other nations’ officials to spread lies, deception, and hysteria so major pharmaceutical companies can foist dangerous vaccines and other drugs on unsuspecting people, harming their health and making them vulnerable to later diseases and possible early deaths.
Massachusetts May Be A Forerunner of What’s to Come
On April 28, the Massachusetts Senate unanimously passed a pandemic flu preparation bill that rises to the level of martial law. If approved by the House and signed into law, it will mandate among other measures:
— “vaccination, treatment, examination, or testing of” all individuals involved in providing health care – as perhaps step one before ordering the same process for all state residents;
— owners or occupiers of all premises “to permit entry into and investigation of the premises;”
— closure, evacuation, and decontamination of all suspected facilities; and
— restricting or prohibiting “assemblages of persons.”
Other states may be planning similar measures as precursors to mandatory nationwide vaccinations and overall suspension of civil liberty protections.
Adverse Vaccination Effects on Gulf War Troops
Before deploying to the Persian Gulf in 1990 – 91 (and thereafter to the present), all US troops got a standard series of inoculations against infectious diseases – the same ones given to all US citizens traveling to the region. After arriving, 150,000 also got anthrax vaccinations and 8000 botulinum toxoid ones even though concerns were raised about adverse long-term health consequences.
A National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine (IOM) study was conducted to assess them with results released in September 2000. In December 1997, the Department of Defense (DOD) announced that all US military forces would receive anthrax vaccinations. The Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program (AVIP) began in March 1998 even though IOM found little published peer-reviewed scientific information on its safety.
In its study, IOM reported evidence of an association between vaccinations studied and transient acute common health effects, including redness, swelling, and fever commonly associated with other vaccinations. However, conclusive proof of long-term problems wasn’t determined – likely because study findings were skewed not to find them. More on that below.
IOM also studied botulinum toxoid vaccines and found evidence of an association between the vaccine and transient acute local and systemic effects similar to anthrax vaccinations. Again, conclusive proof of long-term adverse health effects wasn’t found – another very dubious conclusion as evidence below explains.
Military personnel usually get multiple vaccinations. IOM studied their effects but didn’t prove or disprove any long-term adverse effects. However several independent studies of British Gulf War veterans found some link between multiple vaccinations and later health problems.
Gary Matsumoto is a New York-based award-winning investigative journalist. His 2004 book, “Vaccine A: The Covert Government Experiment That’s Killing Our Soldiers and Why GIs are Only the First Victims” took sharp issue with IOM results and the Pentagon’s denial of Gulf War syndrome.
Investigating the shadowy vaccination development world, he discovered US military-employed doctors and scientists conducted secret medical experiments on US citizens in violation of the Nuremberg Code and fundamental medical ethics.
For its part, Nuremberg established legal medical experimental standards now incorporated into ethical medical codes, including:
— requiring voluntary consent of human subjects without coercion, fraud, deceit, and with full disclosure of known risks;
— experiments should avoid “all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury;”
— experiments should never be conducted if there’s “an a priori reason to believe death or disabling injury will occur;”
— risk “should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved..;” and
— experiments should be terminated if there’s reason to believe they’ll cause “injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.”
According to Matsumoto, the Pentagon violated these and other standards, betrayed the troops, and the fundamental duty of military and civilian leaders to protect them. Since at least 1987, biowarfare development trumped the welfare of tens of thousands of GIs used as human guinea pigs for inoculation with experimental unlicensed anthrax vaccines containing squalene – an oil-based adjuvant (to enhance immunity) known for decades to cause severe autoimmune diseases in lab animals, yet administered involuntarily without disclosure of its harmful effects to human health. Matsumoto wrote:
“The unethical experiments detailed in this book are ongoing, with little prospect of being self-limiting because they have been shielded from scrutiny and public accountability by national security concerns.” He suggested the “writing (was) on the wall” of what’s to come with prospects now it may be soon.
“When UCLA Medical School’s Michael Whitehouse and Frances Beck injected squalene combined with other materials into rats and guinea pigs back in the 1970s, few oils were more effective at causing the animal versions of arthritis and multiple sclerosis.” In 1999, immunologist Dr. Johnny Lorentzen at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute found that on injection, an “otherwise benign molecule like squalene can stimulate a self-destructive immune response,” even though it occurs naturally in the body.
Other research shows that squalene is the experimental anthrax vaccine ingredient that caused devastating autoimmune diseases and deaths for many Gulf War veterans from the US, UK, and Australia, yet it continues in use today and for new vaccines development in labs. There’s a “close match between the squalene-induced diseases in animals and those observed in humans injected with this oil: rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and systemic lupus erythematosus.”
Other autoimmune diseases are also linked to humans injected with squalene. “There are now data in more than two dozen peer-reviewed scientific papers, from ten different laboratories in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia, documenting that squalene-based adjuvants can induce autoimmune diseases in animals…observed in mice, rats, guinea pigs and rabbits. Sweden’s Karolinska Institute has demonstrated that squalene alone can induce the animal version of rheumatoid arthritis. The Polish Academy of Sciences has shown that in animals, squalene alone can produce catastrophic injury to the nervous system and the brain. The University of Florida Medical School has shown that in animals, squalene alone can induce production of antibodies specifically associated with systemic lupus erythematosus.”
Micropaleontologist Dr. Viera Scheibner conducted research into the adverse effects of adjuvants in vaccines and wrote:
Squalene “contributed to the cascade of reactions called “Gulf War syndrome. (GIs developed) arthritis, fibromyalgia, lymphadenopathy, rashes, photosensitive rashes, malar rashes, chronic fatigue, chronic headaches, abnormal body hair loss, non-healing skin lesions, aphthous ulcers, dizziness, weakness, memory loss, seizures, mood changes, neuropsychiatric problems, anti-thyroid effects, anaemia, elevated ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate), systemic lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Raynaud’s phenomenon, Sjorgren’s syndrome, chronic diarrhea, night sweats and low-grade fever.”
Matsumoto’s book includes numerous case studies of GIs afflicted with one or more of the above syndromes, their devastating effects, and the outlandish US government reaction – failing to acknowledge their existence or a connection between them and administered vaccines. Also denying the effects of other toxic Gulf theater exposures (like depleted uranium) as well as withholding meaningful treatments or protocols.
US Army Captain George L. Skypeck spoke eloquently for many when he said:
“Was the character of my valor less intense than those at Lexington? Was the pain of my wounds any less severe than those at Normandy? And was my loneliness any less sorrowful than those at Inchon? Then why am I forgotten amongst those remembered as ‘heros?’ ”
If mass vaccinations are ordered, millions of Americans may ask: Why do you keep using unsafe vaccines and other drugs when clear evidence shows their dangers? Why do you jeopardize all Americans by unleashing a future plague of serious illnesses, diseases, and disabilities? Why have you willfully and maliciously ruined my health?
Immunologist Dr. Pamela Asa first recognized autoimmune diseases showing up in GIs that mirrored those in lab animals injected with oil formulated squalene adjuvants. By 1997, hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent testing vaccines containing them, in animal studies since 1988 and human clinical trials since 1991 – by leading research institutes like NIH, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
According to Matsumoto, today, “Squalene adjuvants are a key ingredient in a whole new generation of vaccines intended for mass immunization around the globe” even though researchers at Tulane Medical School and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research proved “that the immune system responds specifically to the squalene molecule.”
The immune system “see(s) and recognizes it as an oil molecule native to the body. Squalene is not just a molecule found in a knee or elbow – it is found throughout the nervous system and the brain.” When injected in the body, the immune system attacks it as an enemy to be eliminated. Eating and digesting squalene isn’t a problem. But injecting it “galvanize(s) the immune system into attacking it, which can produce self-destructive cross reactions against the same molecule in the places where it occurs naturally in the body – and where it is critical to the health of the nervous system.”
Once self-destruction begins, it doesn’t stop as the body keeps making the molecule that the immune system is trained to attack and destroy.
Immunologist Dr. Bonnie Dunbar also did extensive research on hepatitis B-inflicted illnesses and found similar autoimmune processes involved in molecular mimicry in people with devastating neuroimmune syndromes after getting vaccine injections.
Matsumoto says “Squalene is a kind of trigger for (a) real biological weapon,” what Soviet researchers called “a biological time bomb!!” and Matsumoto says is “the immune system.” When its “full repertoire of cells and antibodies (attack) tissues they are supposed to protect, the results can be catastrophic.” He and Dr. Pam Asa conclude that “Oil adjuvants are the most insidious chemical weapon ever devised,” including ones with squalene – something the Soviets knew could be used as a weapon in the 1980s.
Matsumoto says that “the real problem with using squalene (isn’t) that it mimics a molecule found in the body; it is the same molecule. So what American scientists conceived as a vaccine booster (or what’s now being developed in labs) was another ‘nano-bomb,’ instigating chronic, unpredictable and debilitating disease. When the NIH….argued that squalene would be safe because it is native to the body, just the opposite was true,” and, of course, still is. “Squalene’s natural presence in the body made it one of the most dangerous molecules ever injected into man” and using it in vaccines is outlandish and criminal.
So why does Washington sanction its use? According to Matsumoto: “scientists in the United States are now literally invested in squalene. Army scientists who developed the second generation anthrax vaccine have reputations to protect and licensing fees to reap (as well as) worldwide rights to develop and commercialize the new recombinant vaccine for anthrax” and ones for other health threats.
Disturbingly, “Many of the cutting-edge vaccines currently in development by the NIH and its corporate partners contain squalene in one formulation or another. There is squalene in the prototype recombinant vaccines for HIV, malaria, herpes, influenza (including the swine strain), cytomegalovirus and human papillomavirus.” Some of these “are intended for mass immunization(s) around the globe” and that possibility should terrify everyone enough to refuse any mandate or doctor’s prescription to take them.
Another problem is that “Autoimmunity (takes) years to diagnose” because early symptoms (headaches, joint pain, etc.) are so vague they can easily be from other causes.
From inception, vaccines have always been dangerous enough for some experts to call them biological weapons undermining health, manipulating and crippling the immune system, and creating the possibility of future debilitating diseases. So Big Pharma’s solution is new, more potent genetically engineered vaccines and drugs that may end up harming or killing many who take them, especially people with weakened immune systems.
Matsumoto and others sounded the alarm to alert everyone to avoid these poisons masquerading as protective drugs. In fact, they benefit only the bottom lines of companies that manufacture them and scientists reaping generous royalties.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13859
Urgent Action Step: Click Here (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27275) to Demand the Right to Self Quarantine in the Event of a Pandemic
Click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=2752) to read the Natural Solutions Foundation’s White Paper on Self-Quarantine.
Click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=2698) to read the Natural Solutions Foundation’s suggestions for safe and effective self-quarantine in case you are actually either infected with something that might make you sick or presented with the choice of vaccination or self-quarantine.
Bear in mind, however, that the genetically engineered, weaponized Swine Flu might, as of today, according to the CDC currently be infecting as many as 100,000 Americans. What kind of pandemic is that? An organism which is infecting hundreds of thousands of people who have no symptoms, virtually no deaths (and no reason to believe that those deaths ascribed to the organism are, in fact, associated with it) is not something to vaccinate against. In order to even halfway justify calling these events a “Pandemic”, the World Health Organization changed the meaning of “Pandemic” from a widespread communicable disease condition to which people have no previous immunity and which causes widespread disease and death to, well, uh, er, a disease which is transmitted from one person to another in more than two regions of the globe but without necessary disease consequences of any significance. But which may come back more unpleasantly this fall, JUST when we have a new vaccine ready which people will be forced to take so they can be protected against a disease which just about nobody dies from and which has never been shown to be a health threat of any major consequence anywhere in the world.
In fact, to make it clear just how little credibility the CDC, WHO and vaccine mafia actually have, it is worth remembering what the MMD, the Media of Mass Deception, appears to have totally forgotten: dying from Swine Flu may actually be good for your health if you are Mexican because of the 168 people confirmed dead of H1N1 Swine Flu by the US CDC, 152 of them came back to life in a miracle of biblical proportions.
Clearly, the rush to vaccinate, and to create a “Pandemic” is a political and economic one, not based on any public health threat whatsoever.
I believe that the real danger from this weaponized agent is the possibly lethal impact of the vaccine which will be presented to you and those you are responsible for along with the political danger of loss of liberty in the mad rush to “safety” from this non-pandemic pandemic. The other danger, of course, is what will happen to people who are quarantined in internment camps and what will happen to people who live through the events which will inevitably surround the creation of a phony “Pandemic” with all its attendant militarization and abusive controls.
This outstanding article which follows by William Engdahl makes a number of important points. The rush to mandatory vaccination Swine Flu, in the UK, France, Massachusetts, NY and elsewhere for Swine Flu, a disease which may not even exist (read on!), is madness.
Vaccines are extremely dangerous. No insurance company in the world will insure against the risks inherent in vaccination and they are, in fact, characterized as uninsurable risks which a special US fund (paid for by vaccine recipients) has paid out over 2billion dollars from to parents of children killed or maimed by vaccinations. The vast majority of vaccine damage are never compensated. The US Government has removed all potential liability from vaccine manufacturers making them totally invulnerable to legal repercussions for the dangerous and often deadly products they produce and sell at enormous profits.
In fact, vaccines are explicitly acknowledged not to protect against the diseases they supposedly are designed to prevent (read the Package Inserts for vaccines, available on line and in your doctors’ offices if you doubt that) and often to result in the very disease to which they are supposed to make you immune.
Vaccines are,however immensely, enormously and hideously profitable, however and so the Pharmaceutical Cartel, with virtually limitless amounts of money to bribe legislators and regulators (pretty inexpensive, all in all) and buy science (moderately expensive), public opinion (about 4 billion dollars a year) has bought for itself and its deadly products a respectability it does not deserve for products which should, in a rational society, be banned forever.
Vaccines are not automatically either safe or effective. In fact, they have never been scientifically found to be either safe OR effective. For that reason, the Natural Solutions Foundation has submitted a Citizens Petition (a law suit against the Government) to the Federal Trade Commission to compel them to prohibit advertising across state lines or via other channels which they control which suggests or implies that vaccines and their components have been found to be safe, effective or both.
Public health is, as William Engdahl points out, being militarized. But the Natural Solutions Foundation believes that forced vaccination, like forced drugging, is both wrong-headed and enormously dangerous. We therefore ask you to join us in urging decision-makers to rescind their dangerous, potentially lethal, rush to compulsory vaccination and involuntary quarantine for those who refuse vaccination with the far saner, safer and infinitely more freedom-saving
option of self quarantine. Instead of being forcibly detained for an indefinite period, self-quarantine allows you to protect yourself while staying at home, eating foods you have stockpiled for such an eventuality in your own surroundings, able to communicate with friends, family, etc.
Lawmakers in the US have already decided that in the event of a pandemic like the one that the World Health Organization says it is about to declare for the absurd and possibly non-existent “H1N1 Swine Flu” that you will be required to take whatever vaccine they throw at you or face incarceration under both the Emergency Medical Powers Acts passed by virtually every State AND the Patriot Acts I, II and II plus BARDA at the Federal Level.
The Natural Solutions Foundation believes that self quarantine, also known as “self-shielding”, is a much better, safer and well-regarded method for protecting both groups of people and individuals which you should have the right to select if you do not wish to be either vaccinated or incarcerated. We therefore urge you to take the following action step to inform decision makers and legislators of your strong desire to be permitted to use self-quarantine strategies by clicking Here (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27275).
This novel option is both logical and time tested in other epidemic situations. The Natural Solutions Foundation is once again providing innovative solutions to the serious problems facing us around our health and our health freedom. Please take a moment to click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=189) to set up a recurring tax deductible donation to help keep the Natural Solutions Foundation active and working for you.
We appreciate our freedoms and appreciate your help in making it possible for the Natural Solutions Foundation to keep on keeping health freedom alive.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
Sarkozy’s Secret Plan for Mandatory Swine Flu Vaccination
F. William Engdahl, Global Research
June 3, 2009
The French Government is developing secret plans to impose mandatory vaccination of the entire French population, allegedly against possible Swine Flu disease according to reports leaked in a French newspaper. The plan is without precedent and even defies recommended public health advice. Pharmaceutical giants benefit from the move, as the Swine Flu increases the trend to militarization of public health and use of needless population panic to advance the agenda.
The Sarkozy government has authorized spending of an estimated €1 billion to buy vaccines allegedly to combat or protect against H1N1 Swine Flu virus.
According to a report in the May 30 edition of the French newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, the Sarkozy government has authorized spending of an estimated €1 billion to buy vaccines allegedly to combat or protect against H1N1 Swine Flu virus. The only problem is that to date neither the WHO nor the US Government’s Center for Diseases Control (CDC) have succeeded to isolate, photograph with an electron microscope and chemically classify the H1N1 Influenza A virus. There is no scientifically published evidence that French virologists have done so either. To mandate drugs for a putative disease that has not even been characterized is dubious to say the least.
Even more bizarre is the admission by the US Government’s Food & Drug Administration, an agency responsible for health and safety of its citizens, that the ‘test’ is approved for premature release to test for H1N1 is not even a proven test. More to the point, there is no forensic evidence in any of the deaths reported to date that has been presented that proves scientifically that any single death being attributed to H1N1 Swine Flu virus was indeed caused by such a virus. European epidemiologists believe the deaths reported to date are ‘coincidental’ or what are called opportunistic infections.
What we know conclusively is that the people who died often had prior respiratory complications of an undisclosed nature. People die every day with respiratory diseases. In the USA alone some 36,000 flu-related deaths are recorded yearly with no undue panic or alarm. Most are elderly or patients with lung diseases. To date in all France, 24 people have been identified by health authorities as even having ‘symptoms’ of H1N1. It is worth noting that the WHO and CDC list the symptoms of H1N1: temperature, coughing, headache, runny nose. Hmmmmm. Do you know anyone with such Swine Flu symptoms? Also worth noting is that in the counting of the more than 15,000 ‘confirmed’ H1N1 Swine Flu cases worldwide the vast majority made miraculous recovery within three to seven days, just as in the case of a bad cold.
The goal: Militarization of Public Health
Increasingly it is becoming clear that the successive waves of mass panic created in recent years by CDC, WHO and leading government agencies has an ulterior motive. We have been hit with mass panic over eating beef when cattle in the UK and elsewhere developed fatal illness that was called BSE or ‘Mad Cow’ disease. Later evidence emerged that BSE was the result of vaccination of the cows to kill harmless insects that got under the animal’s skin. More recently, after reports of incidence of what is called ‘Blue Tongue’ disease in cows, sheep and goats in Belgium and Holland in 2006, animal veterinary authorities in Germany, Switzerland and Austria imposed mandatory vaccination or treatment with drugs allegedly to protect the animals from bites by insects allegedly carrying the usually harmless illness.
The vaccinations of the animal herds has been made mandatory for an illness that typically was so mild as to go unnoticed and in only extreme rare cases could be tied to death. All animals after three months must be vaccinated. The vaccines, according to a report in the Swiss publication Aegis-Impuls from 2008, resulted in mass deaths, decreased birth rates, decline in milk yields, heart attack and other severe effects. The vaccines were used despite the fact none apparently had been previously certified as safe. They typically contained aluminium hydroxide and Thiomersol or mercury, as adjuvants and or preservatives, both highly toxic and both also used in most human vaccines.
Despite mass protests and reports to the veterinary authorities in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the warnings went unheeded and mandatory mass vaccinations continued. Little wonder that farmers are taking their tractors to the streets to protest.
The report of a secret French government plan to vaccinate every French citizen over three months of age, over 100 million doses, is more than alarming. According to the French Le Journal du Dimanche, anticipating a probable return of the virus in the fall, the government will spend nearly a billion euros to buy vaccines. Authorities will announce in the fall if they decide to make the vaccine mandatory. “We will be ready to go in a very short time”, explains the Minister of Health. According to sources, the state wants to order 100 million doses of flu vaccine from three laboratories, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi and Novartis. The latter two are French companies.
The French report comes just after the State of Massachusetts State Senate passed a mandatory vaccination bill that authorizes mandatory vaccination against purported H1N1 Swine Flu. In New York State the state hospital planning authority is debating making mandatory annual vaccination against flu of all public health employees, despite the fact that no approved vaccine for H1N1 exists. More and more it is beginning to appear that the scare about pandemic from flying birds or flying pigs is an excuse to justify mandatory vaccination with substances whose harmful side effects are demonstrably worse than any flu they should guard us against.
Novavax, a US pharmaceutical company based in Rockville, Maryland, conveniently enough just announced it is developing a vaccine for H1N1 based on “virus-like particles” that contain three key proteins of the flu virus without the genes required for replication. The vaccine is produced by techniques of genetic modification of organisms or GMO. The announcement came within days of the company announcing losses for the fiscal year of $36 million.
The drug Tamiflu which is officially recommended by the WHO as treatment to ‘ameliorate’ the symptoms of possible Swine Flu or H1N1 Influenza A as it has been renamed, is itself highly toxic. Health Canada informed Canadians of international reports of hallucinations and abnormal behavior, including self harm, in patients taking the antiviral drug Tamiflu. In some cases death was the result and severe lung complications are widely reported associated with Tamiflu, the drug whose main financial benefactor is believed to be its largest stockholder, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
In 1976 in the US President Gerald Ford, nervous about winning a close election ordered mass immunization of the population in the face of a possible pandemic to show voters he was a ‘hands on’ President. The 1976 pandemic never came but a vast number of people suffered serious neurological side effects from the vaccine that was rushed into production, including 25 reported deaths from Guillain-Barré syndrome.
Mandatory vaccination with drugs whose side effects are unknown because they have not been rigorously and independently tested begins to smack of the kind of inhuman mass human experiments carried out in the United States with mentally retarded, prisoners and other disadvantaged people or in Germany during the 1930’s.
URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/sarkozys-secret-plan-for-mandatory-swine-flu-vaccination/
URGENT! SUPPORT HR 2218 TO PROTECT CHILDREN FROM COMPULSORY DRUGGING and PROTECT PARENTAL RIGHTS AT THE SAME TIME
ACTION ITEM: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27246
OPPOSE S 324 TO PROTECT PREGNANT MOTHERS AND THEIR BABIES FROM COMPULSORY SCREENING AND COERCIVE DRUGGING:
ACTION ITEM:http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=23065
Children are the latest victims in the Drug Crimes Against Humanity. Let me share my bias with you and then tell you why I believe that babies and children are being assaulted in increasing numbers with a deadly weapon: psychotropic drugs. These drugs kill and maim at the physical, neurological, psychological and emotional levels. They have lethal and sub-lethal side effects but are, astonishingly, handed out like candy as if they were properly tested, safe or effective. They are none of the above. Click here, http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27246, to tell State and Federal Legislators to protect parents’ right to make medical decisions for their children and stop the use of government money for unscientific and skewed screening tests to herd kids into the drug pusher’s offices where unnecessary and dangerous prescriptions await them.
Pregnant mothers are up for “protection” from postpartum depression by being “screened” with phony screening tools and then “offered” drugs which the PDR advises doctors to avoid or use with extreme caution in women of child-bearing age. Infants exposed to these toxic compounds can suffer a horrifying range of damage, including being born with their internal organs outside of their bodies and life long brain damage. “Never mind”, says Big Pharma, “pregnant and new moms are an untapped market. Let’s go for it! And just think! Babies with brain damage, diabetes, etc., all require meds for the rest of their lives. Yes, indeed! We will surely go for it.” And go for it they did by getting the bill passed in the House of Representatives whose companion bill, S 324, is now before the Senate. Click here http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=23065 to tell your Senators not to pass this dangerous and totally unnecessary bill.
I was graduated from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1970 and took my Postgraduate training in Child, Adolescent and Adult Psychiatry, finishing my training in 1975. I am trained in psychoanalysis, group therapy and a host of other modalities. I have run drug and other treatment facilities, worked in inpatient and out patient facilities for children, adults and adolescents and have been in the private practice of psychiatry and medicine for decades.
All without drugs, electroshock or other dangerous, primitive and harmful techniques. I believe that psychoactive drugs, like virtually all other drugs, are dangerous and, unless you are in a surgery suite or an emergency room, unnecessary.
This is a conviction born out of a very long and successful drug free medical and psychiatric practice (during which, unlike most of my medical colleagues, I have never been sued for malpractice).
When I saw the article in the most recent journal of the Schafer Autism Report which is reproduced below, I wrote to congratulate the Report for publishing this outstanding piece decrying the medication of millions and millions of children for little more than mythic disorders.
Representative Ron Paul MD (TX-R) introduced the Parental Consent Act, HR 2218, on April 30, 2009. The bill prevents Federal monies from being used to support mental health screenings which are nothing short of pharma marketing tools for kids. They have no scientific validity, are supported by, and developed by, the greedy folks at Big Pharma. Kids answer trick questions in normal ways and they are “diagnosed” with phony terms and lables. Parents who resist the requirement for medication which almost always follows face enormous pressure, including jail time for “medical neglect” or “child abuse”. This sells pills, all right, but it sure does not protect rights or kids brains and bodies.
As a psychiatrist and physician I can tell you that psychoactive drugs are dangerous. They can cause permanent physical damage, obesity, suicide, homicide, diabetes, neurological damage which is life-long, rob children of their moods and their developmental opportunities and much, much more. Every single school shooting in the US has involved kids either on drugs or coming off them. There is, in my opinion, absolutely no excuse for psychoactive medicines.
Furthermore, parents have the right, and must continue to have the right, to make the life and death decisions for their children with which they have been entrusted. Those rights are fundamentally as the rights we claim for ourselves to make our own decisions about what happens to our own bodies. Absent that, our bodies are owned by others who make decisions about what happens to them and we are, by definition, slaves. I have no wish to be a slave to the government of any country or to its corporations, including Big Pharma. So it is my duty to oppose these pieces of legislation.
This is an invitation to join me in that opposition and bring all of your contacts along.
By the way, the Natural Solutions Foundation is a privately supported not for profit, tax exempt organization and we depend on your donations. Please visit http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=189 to make your donation. Recurring donations are especially helpful. We appreciate your support, whether large of small.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMarketPlace.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.HealthFreedomRadio.com
Here is the letter I wrote to the Editor of the Schafer Autism Review:
To the Editor:
I am writing to congratulate you on your publication of “The Wholesale Sedation of America’s Youth” By Andrew M. Weiss. As a Child, Adolescent and Adult Psychiatrist who has practiced drug free medicine for my entire career, I found myself reading my own thoughts and writings in this excellent article. Physicians, Nurse Practitioners and others who endorse and enforce medicating children because they have been entrained or constrained to do so win the approval, praise and appreciation of the forces that use them and of their peers, but are, in fact, worthy of scorn and, at best, loss of licenses or, at worst, criminal prosecution for their mindless, damaging and cowardly refusal to think clearly about the needs of the children they are charged to heal, not poison.
Every doctor is trained to think logically and systematically about diagnosis and treatment. If they refuse to use that training because they have allowed themselves to be brainwashed and browbeaten into down and dirty, quick and quality-less medicine, then shame upon each and every one of them. Drug ads, phony science and cheer leader “continuing medical education” seminars are nothing short of cynical organized deceptions designed to accomplish one goal and one goal only: the generation of massive profits.
Who stands between a child and pharmaceutical damage? A doctor. Who steps aside for 8 million American children every year? A doctor. If parents object or refuse to medicate their children, they run the very real risk of being charged with medical abuse or neglect, loosing their children and/or facing criminal charges for trying to protect the vulnerable youngsters in their care. Commonly drug-company-sponsored “screening tools” used by teachers or other school personnel are what got the kids in front of the doctor or nurse practitioner staring at the dangerous end of a prescription pad.
On April 30, 2009 Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) introduced the Parental Consent Act, HR 2218, “To prohibit the use of Federal funds for any universal or mandatory mental health screening program.” The ominously Orwellian-named “New Freedoms Initiative, passed in 2004 during the drug-friendly reign of President George W. Bush, provides for mandatory screening of every child from 0 to 18. In uterine screening is accomplished by “mental health screening” of pregnant women and the compulsory drugging of those women to “protect” the unborn child despite the former cautions urged on doctors to avoid the use of psychotropic medication in women of child bearing age because of the known and unknown dangers inherent in exposing unborn or nursing babies to those drugs.
The New Freedoms Initiative also mandates the screening for “mental problems” of everyone involved in any way with children – parents, grandparents, teachers, policemen and women, merchants who sell children things, clergy, doctors, nurses, etc. In short, everyone.
The madness must stop. Doctors must think about children and childhood as a developmental process, not a disease. Parents must be free to be what the law says they are, “GUARDians” and bureaucrats and administrators, teachers and others involved with children must ask why a child is showing signs of stress or distress and look for ways to solve that problem, not dissolve the child’s mind in a chemical soup of long and short term toxicity.
The Natural Solutions Foundation, www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org and www.HealthFreedomUSA.org, of which I am proud to be the Medical Director, supports the right of every person to make their own health decisions and, of course, of parents to make those decisions for their children. And we strongly support the rights of parents and others to say “NO!” to drugs, “No” to compulsory screenings to get kids onto subjective, and profitable diagnostic conveyor belts.
Our Health Freedom Action eAlerts offer action options to concerned parents and other persons to preserve these essential rights.
Medical fascism is facing us all. Soviet Russia was condemned world-wide because it condoned the atrocious use of psychoactive drugs to control its population and prevent behaviors it found disagreeable or unwelcome in vast numbers of people. Are our children our dissidents? Do their discontents require chemical straight jackets and personality-ectomies? Have we become mindless mind-assassins, robbing our children of their emotions and their neurological developmental opportunities because we do not dare to ask the penetrating question, “WHY?” to this drug mania we have been marketed into?
Since graduation from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1970 and completion of my Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship in 1975 I have practiced medicine and psychiatry without resorting to drugs. The results have been nothing short of astonishing for someone trained in the “Medical Model” – my patients got well because the underlying cause of their discomforts, disabilities, distortions and difficulties were uncovered and addressed. Using intensive nutritional strategies, herbology, homeopathy, detoxification, NeuroBioFeedback, frequency medicine and a host of other techniques, each patient was treated individually and their treatment tailored to their realities, including emotional ones. This type of medicine takes time – lots of it – and therefore the cottage industry, piecework compensation which doctors have allowed insurance carriers to impose upon them (insurance carriers which are often co-owned by Big Pharma so that forcing doctors to see more patients in a shorter time is a successful marketing ploy for their shareholders’ interests) make the economics unpalatable to insurance companies. Doctors have, in the main, behaved like good serfs and allowed themselves to be made wage slaves to the interests of the insurance companies, seeing more patients in shorter slots – and writing prescriptions quickly so they can see the next patient and the next and the next.
The solution? If you are a parent, find a health care professional who does not take insurance and pay for treatment so you and the doctor can spend as much time as your child needs. If you are a doctor or nurse practitioner, rethink your slavish devotion to the medicine of convenience – yours – and start doing what you have been expensively trained to do: think about root causes, look for underlying factors and return to your roots as a healer. Yes, you will have to unlearn much and question more. But you were a bright student looking for ways to help people when you fought your way into medical school. You were, after all, the best and the brightest. You may still have the capacity to think and to discern real science from marketing. And, somewhere deep down inside you, perhaps you still have a deep commitment to service and truth.
You will quickly find, if you follow the intellectual path I am advocating, that many of your most cherished believes must be abandoned by the wayside. One of those believes is that you must continue to take insurance payment for your services or you will not make a living. In fact, those doctors who have dared to let go of the insurance teat report that they are making more money, spending less in overhead and serving patients better than they dreamed possible before they took the plunge into service, not serfdom.
Yours in health and freedom,
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
And here is the Special Edition article to which I was responding:
Special Edition
The Wholesale Sedation of America’s Youth
By Andrew M. Weiss, Skeptical Inquirer. is.gd/yXAW
In the winter of 2000, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a study indicating that 200,000 two- to four-year-olds had been prescribed Ritalin for an “attention disorder” from 1991 to 1995. Judging by the response, the image of hundreds of thousands of mothers grinding up stimulants to put into the sippy cups of their preschoolers was apparently not a pretty one.
Most national magazines and newspapers covered the story; some even expressed dismay or outrage at this exacerbation of what already seemed like a juggernaut of hyper-medicalizing childhood. The public reaction, however, was tame; the medical community, after a moment’s pause, continued unfazed. Today, the total toddler count is well past one million, and influential psychiatrists have insisted that mental health prescriptions are appropriate for children as young as twelve months. For the pharmaceutical companies, this is progress.
In 1995, 2,357,833 children were diagnosed with ADHD (Woodwell 1997) — twice the number diagnosed in 1990. By 1999, 3.4 percent of all American children had received a stimulant prescription for an attention disorder. Today, that number is closer to ten percent. Stimulants aren’t the only drugs being given out like candy to our children. A variety of other psychotropics like antidepressants, antipsychotics, and sedatives are finding their way into babies’ medicine cabinets in large numbers. In fact, the worldwide market for these drugs is growing at a rate of ten percent a year, $20.7 billion in sales of antipsychotics alone (for 2007, IMSHealth 2008).
While the sheer volume of psychotropics being prescribed for children might, in and of itself, produce alarm, there has not been a substantial backlash against drug use in large part because of the widespread perception that “medically authorized” drugs must be safe. Yet, there is considerable evidence that psychoactive drugs do not take second place to other controlled pharmaceuticals in carrying grave and substantial risks. All classes of psychoactive drugs are associated with patient deaths, and each produces serious side effects, some of which are life-threatening.
In 2005, researchers analyzed data from 250,000 patients in the Netherlands and concluded that “we can be reasonably sure that antipsychotics are associated in something like a threefold increase in sudden cardiac death, and perhaps that older antipsychotics may be worse” (Straus et al. 2004). In 2007, the FDA chose to beef up its black box warning (reserved for substances that represent the most serious danger to the public) against antidepressants concluding, “the trend across age groups toward an association between antidepressants and suicidality . . . was convincing, particularly when superimposed on earlier analyses of data on adolescents from randomized, controlled trials” (Friedman and Leon 2007). Antidepressants have been banned for use with children in the UK since 2003. According to a confidential FDA report, prolonged administration of amphetamines (the standard treatment for ADD and ADHD) “may lead to drug dependence and must be avoided.” They further reported that “misuse of amphetamine may cause sudden death and serious cardiovascular adverse events” (Food and Drug Administration 2005). The risk of fatal toxicity from lithium carbonate, a not uncommon treatment for bipolar disorder, has been well documented since the 1950s. Incidents of fatal seizures from sedative-hypnotics, especially when mixed with alcohol, have been recorded since the 1920s.
Psychotropics carry nonfatal risks as well. Physical dependence and severe withdrawal symptoms are associated with virtually all psychoactive drugs. Psychological addiction is axiomatic. Concomitant side effects range from unpleasant to devastating, including: insulin resistance, narcolepsy, tardive dyskenisia (a movement disorder affecting 15–20 percent of antipsychotic patients where there are uncontrolled facial movements and sometimes jerking or twisting movements of other body parts), agranulocytosis (a reduction in white blood cells, which is life threatening), accelerated appetite, vomiting, allergic reactions, uncontrolled blinking, slurred speech, diabetes, balance irregularities, irregular heartbeat, chest pain, sleep disorders, fever, and severe headaches. The attempt to control these side effects has resulted in many children taking as many as eight additional drugs every day, but in many cases, this has only compounded the problem. Each “helper” drug produces unwanted side effects of its own.
The child drug market has also spawned a vigorous black market in high schools and colleges, particularly for stimulants. Students have learned to fake the symptoms of ADD in order to obtain amphetamine prescriptions that are subsequently sold to fellow students. Such “shopping” for prescription drugs has even spawned a new verb. The practice is commonly called “pharming.” A 2005 report from the Partnership for a Drug Free America, based on a survey of more than 7,300 teenagers, found one in ten teenagers, or 2.3 million young people, had tried prescription stimulants without a doctor’s order, and 29 percent of those surveyed said they had close friends who have abused prescription stimulants.
In a larger sense, the whole undertaking has had the disturbing effect of making drug use an accepted part of childhood. Few cultures anywhere on earth and anytime in the past have been so willing to provide stimulants and sedative-hypnotics to their offspring, especially at such tender ages. An entire generation of young people has been brought up to believe that drug-seeking behavior is both rational and respectable and that most psychological problems have a pharmacological solution. With the ubiquity of psychotropics, children now have the means, opportunity, example, and encouragement to develop a lifelong habit of self-medicating.
Common population estimates include at least eight million children, ages two to eighteen, receiving prescriptions for ADD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, autism, simple depression, schizophrenia, and the dozens of other disorders now included in psychiatric classification manuals. Yet sixty years ago, it was virtually impossible for a child to be considered mentally ill. The first diagnostic manual published by American psychiatrists in 1952, DSM-I, included among its 106 diagnoses only one for a child: Adjustment Reaction of Childhood/Adolescence. The other 105 diagnoses were specifically for adults. The number of children actually diagnosed with a mental disorder in the early 1950s would hardly move today’s needle. There were, at most, 7,500 children in various settings who were believed to be mentally ill at that time, and most of these had explicit neurological symptoms.
Of course, if there really are one thousand times as many kids with authentic mental disorders now as there were fifty years ago, then the explosion in drug prescriptions in the years since only indicates an appropriate medical response to a newly recognized pandemic, but there are other possible explanations for this meteoric rise. The last fifty years has seen significant social changes, many with a profound effect on children. Burgeoning birth rates, the decline of the extended family, widespread divorce, changing sexual and social mores, households with two working parents — it is fair to say that the whole fabric of life took on new dimensions in the last half century. The legal drug culture, too, became an omnipresent adjunct to daily existence. Stimulants, analgesics, sedatives, decongestants, penicillins, statins, diuretics, antibiotics, and a host of others soon found their way into every bathroom cabinet, while children became frequent visitors to the family physician for drugs and vaccines that we now believe are vital to our health and happiness. There is also the looming motive of money. The New York Times reported in 2005 that physicians who had received substantial payments from pharmaceutical companies were five times more likely to prescribe a drug regimen to a child than those who had refused such payments.
So other factors may well have contributed to the upsurge in psychiatric diagnoses over the past fifty years. But even if the increase reflects an authentic epidemic of mental health problems in our children, it is not certain that medication has ever been the right way to handle it. The medical “disease” model is one approach to understanding these behaviors, but there are others, including a hastily discarded psychodynamic model that had a good record of effective symptom relief. Alternative, less invasive treatments, too, like nutritional treatments, early intervention, and teacher and parent training programs were found to be at least as effective as medication in long-term reduction of a variety of symptoms (of ADHD, The MTA Cooperative Group 1999).
Nevertheless, the medical-pharmaceutical alliance has largely shrugged off other approaches and scoffed at the potential for conflicts of interest and continues to medicate children in ever-increasing numbers. With the proportion of diagnosed kids growing every month, it may be time to take another look at the practice and soberly reflect on whether we want to continue down this path. In that spirit, it is not unreasonable to ask whether this exponential expansion in medicating children has another explanation altogether. What if children are the same as they always were? After all, virtually every symptom now thought of as diagnostic was once an aspect of temperament or character. We may not have liked it when a child was sluggish, hyperactive, moody, fragile, or pestering, but we didn’t ask his parents to medicate him with powerful chemicals either. What if there is no such thing as mental illness in children (except the small, chronic, often neurological minority we once recognized)? What if it is only our perception of childhood that has changed? To answer this, we must look at our history and at our nature.
The human inclination to use psychoactive substances predates civilization. Alcohol has been found in late Stone Age jugs; beer may have been fermented before the invention of bread. Nicotine metabolites have been found in ancient human remains and in pipes in the Near East and Africa. Knowledge of Hul Gil, the “joy plant,” was passed from the Sumerians, in the fifth millennium b.c.e., to the Assyrians, then in serial order to the Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Indians, then to the Portuguese who would introduce it to the Chinese, who grew it and traded it back to the Europeans. Hul Gil was the Sumerian name for the opium poppy. Before the Middle Ages, economies were established around opium, and wars were fought to protect avenues of supply.
With the modern science of chemistry in the nineteenth century, new synthetic substances were developed that shared many of the same desirable qualities as the more traditional sedatives and stimulants. The first modern drugs were barbiturates — a class of 2,500 sedative/hypnotics that were first synthesized in 1864. Barbiturates became very popular in the U.S. for depression and insomnia, especially after the temperance movement resulted in draconian anti-drug legislation (most notoriously Prohibition) just after World War I. But variety was limited and fears of death by convulsion and the Winthrop drug-scare kept barbiturates from more general distribution.
Stimulants, typically caffeine and nicotine, were already ubiquitous in the first half of the twentieth century, but more potent varieties would have to wait until amphetamines came into widespread use in the 1930s. Amphetamines were not widely known until the 1920s and 1930s when they were first used to treat asthma, hay fever, and the common cold. In 1932, the Benzedrine Inhaler was introduced to the market and was a huge over-the-counter success. With the introduction of Dexedrine in the form of small, cheap pills, amphetamines were prescribed for depression, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, motion sickness, night-blindness, obesity, narcolepsy, impotence, apathy, and, of course, hyperactivity in children.
Amphetamines came into still wider use during World War II, when they were given out freely to GIs for fatigue. When the GIs returned home, they brought their appetite for stimulants to their family physicians. By 1962, Americans were ingesting the equivalent of forty-three ten-milligram doses of amphetamine per person annually (according to FDA manufacturer surveys).
Still, in the 1950s, the family physician’s involvement in furnishing psychoactive medications for the treatment of primarily psychological complaints was largely sub rosa. It became far more widespread and notorious in the 1960s. There were two reasons for this. First, a new, safer class of sedative hypnotics, the benzodiazepines, including Librium and Valium, were an instant sensation, especially among housewives who called them “mothers’ helpers.” Second, amphetamines had finally been approved for use with children (their use up to that point had been “off-label,” meaning that they were prescribed despite the lack of FDA authorization).
Pharmaceutical companies, coincidentally, became more aggressive in marketing their products with the tremendous success of amphetamines. Valium was marketed directly to physicians and indirectly through a public relations campaign that implied that benzodiazepines offered sedative/hypnotic benefits without the risk of addiction or death from drug interactions or suicide. Within fifteen years of its introduction, 2.3 billion Valium pills were being sold annually in the U.S. (Sample 2005).
So, family physicians became society’s instruments: the suppliers of choice for legal mood-altering drugs. But medical practitioners required scientific authority to protect their reputations, and the public required a justification for its drug-seeking behavior. The pharmaceutical companies were quick to offer a pseudo scientific conjecture that satisfied both. They argued that neurochemical transmitters, only recently identified, were in fact the long sought after mediators of mood and activity. Psychological complaints, consequently, were a function of an imbalance of these neural chemicals that could be corrected with stimulants and sedatives (and later antidepressants and antipsychotics). While the assertion was pure fantasy without a shred of evidence, so little was known about the brain’s true actions that the artifice was tamely accepted. This would later prove devastating when children became the targets of pharmaceutical expansion.
With Ritalin’s FDA approval for the treatment of hyperactivity in children, the same marketing techniques that had been so successful with other drugs were applied to the new amphetamine. Pharmaceutical companies had a vested interest in the increase in sales; they spared no expense in convincing physicians to prescribe them. Cash payments, stock options, paid junkets, no-work consultancies, and other inducements encouraged physicians to relax their natural caution about medicating children. Parents also were targeted. For example, CIBA, the maker of Ritalin, made large direct payments to parents’ support groups like CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) (The Merrow Report 1995). To increase the acceptance of stimulants, drug companies paid researchers to publish favorable articles on the effectiveness of stimulant treatments. They also endowed chairs and paid for the establishment of clinics in influential medical schools, particularly ones associated with universities of international reputation. By the mid 1970s, more than half a million children had already been medicated primarily for hyperactivity.
The brand of psychiatry that became increasingly popular in the 1980s and 1990s did not have its roots in notions of normal behavior or personality theory; it grew out of the concrete, atheoretical treatment style used in clinics and institutions for the profoundly disturbed. German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, not Freud, was the God of mental hospitals, and pharmaceuticals were the panacea. So the whole underlying notion of psychiatric treatment, diagnosis, and disease changed. Psychiatry, which had straddled psychology and medicine for a hundred years, abruptly abandoned psychology for a comfortable sinecure within its traditional parent discipline. The change was profound.
People seeking treatment were no longer clients, they were patients. Their complaints were no longer suggestive of a complex mental organization, they were symptoms of a disease. Patients were not active participants in a collaborative treatment, they were passive recipients of symptom-reducing substances. Mental disturbances were no longer caused by unique combinations of personality, character, disposition, and upbringing, they were attributed to pre-birth anomalies that caused vague chemical imbalances. Cures were no longer anticipated or sought; mental disorders were inherited illnesses, like birth defects, that could not be cured except by some future magic, genetic bullet. All that could be done was to treat symptoms chemically, and this was being done with astonishing ease and regularity.
In many ways, children are the ideal patients for drugs. By nature, they are often passive and compliant when told by a parent to take a pill. Children are also generally optimistic and less likely to balk at treatment than adults. Even if they are inclined to complain, the parent is a ready intermediary between the physician and the patient. Parents are willing to participate in the enforcement of treatments once they have justified them in their own minds and, unlike adults, many kids do not have the luxury of discontinuing an unpleasant medication. Children are additionally not aware of how they ought to feel. They adjust to the drugs’ effects as if they are natural and are more tolerant of side effects than adults. Pharmaceutical companies recognized these assets and soon were targeting new drugs specifically at children.
But third-party insurance providers balked at the surge in costs for treatment of previously unknown, psychological syndromes, especially since unwanted drug effects were making some cases complicated and expensive. Medicine’s growing prosperity as the purveyor of treatments for mental disorders was threatened, and the industry’s response was predictable. Psychiatry found that it could meet insurance company requirements by simplifying diagnoses, reducing identification to the mere appearance of certain symptoms. By 1980, they had published all new standards.
Lost in the process was the fact that the redefined diagnoses (and a host of new additions) failed to meet minimal standards of falsifiability and differentiability. This meant that the diagnoses could never be disproved and that they could not be indisputably distinguished from one another. The new disorders were also defined as lists of symptoms from which a physician could check off a certain number of hits like a Chinese menu, which led to reification, an egregious scientific impropriety. Insurers, however, with their exceptions undermined and under pressure from parents and physicians, eventually withdrew their objections. From that moment on, the treatment of children with powerful psychotropic medications grew unchecked.
As new psychotropics became available, their uses were quickly extended to children despite, in many cases, indications that the drugs were intended for use with adults only. New antipsychotics, the atypicals, were synthesized and marketed beginning in the 1970s. Subsequently, a new class of antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft was introduced. These drugs were added to the catalogue of childhood drug treatments with an astonishing casualness even as stimulant treatment for hyperactivity continued to burgeon.
In 1980, hyperactivity, which had been imprudently named “minimal brain dysfunction” in the 1960s, was renamed Attention Deficit Disorder in order to be more politic, but there was an unintended consequence of the move. Parents and teachers, familiar with the name but not always with the symptoms, frequently misidentified children who were shy, slow, or sad (introverted rather than inattentive) as suffering from ADD. Rather than correct the mistake, though, some enterprising physicians responded by prescribing the same drug for the opposite symptoms. This was justified on the grounds that stimulants, which were being offered because they slowed down hyperactive children, might very well have the predicted effect of speeding up under-active kids. In this way, a whole new population of children became eligible for medication. Later, the authors of DSM-III memorialized this practice by renaming ADD again, this time as ADHD, and redefining ADD as inattention. Psychiatry had reached a new level: they were now willing to invent an illness to justify a treatment. It would not be the last time this was done.
In the last twenty years, a new, more disturbing trend has become popular: the re-branding of legacy forms of mental disturbance as broad categories of childhood illness. Manic depressive illness and infantile autism, two previously rare disorders, were redefined through this process as “spectrum” illnesses with loosened criteria and symptom lists that cover a wide range of previously normal behavior. With this slim justification in place, more than a million children have been treated with psychotropics for bipolar disorder and another 200,000 for autism. A recent article in this magazine “The Bipolar Bamboozle” (Flora and Bobby 2008) illuminates how and why an illness that once occurred twice in every 100,000 Americans, has been recast as an epidemic affecting millions.
To overwhelmed parents, drugs solve a whole host of ancillary problems. The relatively low cost (at least in out-of-pocket dollars) and the small commitment of time for drug treatments make them attractive to parents who are already stretched thin by work and home life. Those whose confidence is shaken by indications that their children are “out of control” or “unruly” or “disturbed” are soothed by the seeming inevitability of an inherited disease that is shared by so many others. Rather than blaming themselves for being poor home managers, guardians with insufficient skills, or neglectful caretakers, parents can find comfort in the thought that their child, through no fault of theirs, has succumbed to a modern and widely accepted scourge. A psychiatric diagnosis also works well as an authoritative response to demands made by teachers and school administrators to address their child’s “problems.”
Once a medical illness has been identified, all unwanted behavior becomes fruit of the same tree. Even the children themselves are often at first relieved that their asocial or antisocial impulses reflect an underlying disease and not some flaw in their characters or personalities.
Conclusions In the last analysis, childhood has been thoroughly and effectively redefined. Character and temperament have been largely removed from the vocabulary of human personality. Virtually every single undesirable impulse of children has taken on pathological proportions and diagnostic significance. Yet, if the psychiatric community is wrong in their theories and hypotheses, then a generation of parents has been deluded while millions of children have been sentenced to a lifetime of ingesting powerful and dangerous drugs.
Considering the enormous benefits reaped by the medical community, it is no surprise that critics have argued that the whole enterprise is a cynical, reckless artifice crafted to unfairly enrich them. Even though this is undoubtedly not true, physicians and pharmaceutical companies must answer for the rush to medicate our most vulnerable citizens based on little evidence, a weak theoretical model, and an antiquated and repudiated philosophy. For its part, the scientific community must answer for its timidity in challenging treatments made in the absence of clinical observation and justified by research of insufficient rigor performed by professionals and institutions whose objectivity is clearly in question, because their own interests are materially entwined in their findings.
It should hardly be necessary to remind physicians that even if their diagnoses are real, they are still admonished by Galen’s dictum Primum non nocere, or “first, do no harm.” If with no other population, this ought to be our standard when dealing with children. Yet we have chosen the most invasive, destructive, and potentially lethal treatment imaginable while rejecting other options that show great promise of being at least as effective and far safer. But these other methods are more expensive, more complicated, and more time-consuming, and thus far, we have not proved willing to bear the cost. Instead, we have jumped at a discounted treatment, a soft-drink-machine cure: easy, cheap, fast, and putatively scientific. Sadly, the difference in price is now being paid by eight million children.
Mental illness is a fact of life, and it is naïve to imagine that there are not seriously disturbed children in every neighborhood and school. What is more, in the straitened economy of child rearing and education, medication may be the most efficient and cost effective treatment for some of these children. Nevertheless, to medicate not just the neediest, most complicated cases but one child in every ten, despite the availability of less destructive treatments and regardless of doubtful science, is a tragedy of epic proportions.
What we all have to fear, at long last, is not having been wrong but having done wrong. That will be judged in a court of a different sort. Instead of humility, we continue to feed drugs to our children with blithe indifference. Even when a child’s mind is truly disturbed (and our standards need to be revised drastically on this score), a treatment model that intends to chemically palliate and manage ought to be our last resort, not our first option. How many more children need to be sacrificed for us to see the harm in expediency, greed, and plain ignorance?
Schafer Autism Review
http://www.sarnet.org/lib/todaySAR.htm
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Health Freedom is Our First Freedom
Mandating No HARMonization with CODEX, Food Safety and Food Regulation
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
April 3, 2009
A Natural Solutions Foundation White Paper
Regarding U.S. Codex Office and Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) for
Adoption of Codex Committee Policies by the U.S. Codex Delegation and FSIS
in Harmony with the Dietary Substances Health and Education Act (DSHEA),
19 USC 3512 (the Anti-Harmonization Statute) and other Statutory and Case Law
Weaponized Pandemic Viruses – Weaponized Mandated Vaccines…
Forced Industrialization of the Food Supply…
Action Item: Tell your members of Congress “NO! to forced industrialization of food” — DEFEAT the fake “Food Safety” bill HR 2749 or to amend to protect us all! Click here: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26714
Index
Introduction – The Foundation
Introduction – Purpose
Requests for Congressional Action
Statement of Grounds – Facts
Statement of Grounds – Legal
Recommended Findings of Fact
Conclusions
Sharing this White Paper
I. Introduction-A – Who Are We?
The Natural Solutions Foundation, founded in 2004, is an international NGO (Non Governmental Organization) focused on health freedom. We are active and registered in several countries and are a not for profit 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization in the United States.
The Mission of the Foundation is to discover, develop, demonstrate and disseminate natural solutions to the problems facing us and threatening our health and freedom, achieving and maintaining a healthy self, community and world. Since its founding, the Natural Solutions Foundation has pursued a vigorous program on many fronts, including educating Congress and decision makers about natural solutions to significant social problems involving health and wellness.
We consider health freedom to be an essential part of those solutions and have, for example, spearheaded a powerful citizens’ initiative to have “Health Freedom is Our First Freedom” recognized as one of the Top Ten Social Issues on http://www.Change.org. Once this was accomplished, “Health Freedom is Our First Freedom” was then accepted into President Obama’s official Briefing Book on http://www.Change.gov.
We have also developed an international presence, in part by attending Codex Alimentarius meetings around the world, helping to ban the use of fluoride in infant formulas intended for healthy infants by providing powerful scientific information to Codex delegates who were eager for ways to help their infants at the Codex Committee for Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU, Chaing Mai, 2006), shared vitally needed health-focused information with Codex member states and provided leadership to Codex member states on how to protect their country’s food supplies without running afoul of the World Trade Organization’s draconian trade sanctions.
The Natural Solutions Foundation understands that threats to health and freedom are both domestic and international, as are the solutions. We have well over two hundred thousand people on our Action eAlert supporter list. Individuals and other organizations are welcome to participate in our many programs and action options so that netroots and decision makers share the same information and conclusions about the solutions to problems touching us all.
Among the innovative solutions we are pursuing are “Mouse Warrior Campaigns” which allow everyone with Internet access to communicate their opinions and need for “Health Freedom as Our First Freedom” to members of Congress, executives, health and food quality/safety officials around the globe and other people making decisions about health freedom and health freedom policy. We urge everyone to join our free, secure Health Freedom Action eAlerts by visiting our home page, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org or our international page, http://www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org and signing up there. Our efforts include the International Decade of Nutrition Program and an alliance among Health Conscious Nations expressed through international cooperation at Codex (the World Food Code) and the creation of Valley of the Moon™ Eco Demonstration Project (VotM™) with its Beyond Organic, BioDynamic, Zero Emissions™ (BO-BD-ZE™), ecologically sound communities and schools for farmers and non-farmers alike. VotM™ exists to share high impact, low technology, natural solutions to permit economically and environmentally sustainable, chemical free farming and other sustainable techniques for health and economic stability. Among these solutions, we consider Fr. Godfrey Nzamajo’s UN Center of Excellent-recognized Songhai Community in Benin to provide an outstanding example. VotM™ has formed a strategic alliance with the Songhai Community, sponsoring and teaching BioDynamic methods testing in several countries including the Republic of Panama. See: www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org.
II. Introduction-B: What Does This White Paper Accomplish?
This White Paper addresses the urgent need for Congress to adopt further assurances that American access to clean, biologically effective, health promoting and wholesome nutrition will not be compromised by “HARMonization” with new Federal food safety laws (including HR 2749, 875, 759, S. 425, etc.) or domestic or international rules, regulations or standards such as the Guidelines and Standards ratified and promulgated by the Codex Alimentarius Commission (the World Food Code). Such assurances already exist in US law but are flagrantly ignored by those attending Codex Alimentarius. Reigning in that disregard is essential to the food safety and security of the United States. And, since nutrients and nutrition are essential to health, halting such disregard of the law will improve the national health and the national bottom line at the same time by reducing expenditures for health care and diet related illnesses, currently accounting for at a minimum of 1 out of every three dollars spent on health care. Diabetes, a disease of under nutrition, and its heartbreaking (and often lethal) consequences accounts for 1 out of every seven dollars spent in the health care sector in the US.
US participation in Codex Alimentarius and similar international activities drives food toward the unsustainable, the toxic, the non-nutritive and the undisclosed. It supports forced industrialization of food, denigrating natural and organic standards while placing unsustainable burdens on non-industrialized, family, home, private association food production, including home businesses, farms, ranches and gardens.
The assurances needed are that these assaults on local food production will change — we recommend protections built on the basis of the protections already enacted in the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), the Anti-Harmonization Act, 19 USC 3512, the Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 USC sec 203 (s) (2) and the DSHEA savings clause 1011 of the 2007 FDA reorganization act, as well as the First Amendment since full disclosure and free dissemination of information about the relationship between health benefits and food components is illegally suppressed by the FDA through its claims policies and other regulatory measures.
The FDA was documented to be a failed agency by the November 2007 Report of the Subcommittee on Science and Technology, “FDA Science and Mission at Risk.”
That report concluded that FDA a failed agency because:
1) The FDA cannot fulfill its mission because its scientific base has eroded and its scientific organizational structure is weak.
2) The FDA cannot fulfill its mission because its scientific workforce does not have sufficient capacity and capability.
3) The FDA cannot fulfill its mission because its information technology (IT) infrastructure is inadequate.
4) FDA does not have the capacity to ensure the safety of food for the nation.
5) The development of medical products based on “new science” cannot be adequately regulated by the FDA.
6) There is insufficient capacity in modeling risk assessment and analysis.
7) The FDA science agenda lacks a coherent structure and vision, as well as effective coordination and prioritization.
8) The FDA has substantial recruitment and retention challenges.
9) The FDA has an inadequate and ineffective program for scientist performance.
10) The FDA has not taken sufficient advantage of external and internal collaborations.
11) The FDA lacks the information science capability and information infrastructure to fulfill is regulatory mandate.
12) The FDA cannot provide the information infrastructure support to regulate products based on new science.
We would add:
13. The FDA does little or nothing to control or prevent conflicts of interest leading to decision which impact the public health which are based, in whole or in part, on the financial and professional advancement and advantage of the decision-makers who are thus unable to act impartially.
In 1994 Congress unanimously adopted DSHEA, signaling a new approach to allowing Americans the freedom to develop the most advanced and dynamic nutritional marketplace in the world. Memorializing the essential concept that nutrients are to be treated as foods, and, as such, cannot be limited or controlled in their dose or combination any more than eating, for example, lamb flavored ice cream could – or should – be regulated, DSHEA created a legal climate which allows natural remedies, therapies that may benefit and medical treatment to flourish through the active participation of over 90% of the US population.
However, that expression of the People’s will has been continually undercut by a clear Federal agency [FDA, IOM, EPA, USDA] prejudice against natural, wholesome, non-industrialized food and nutrition. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), EPA, IOM, NIH and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) all fail the Public trust in this regard.
Nonetheless, the Dietary Supplement industry has responded with growth and expansion to massive consumer demand since the adoption of DSHEA. Much of this growth may be attributed to the thriving free market in Dietary Supplements established by DSHEA. As U.S. District Court Judge Tena Campbell stated in Nutraceutical Corporation and Solaray, Inc. v. Lester Crawford, Acting Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Case No. 2:04CV409 TC, USDC, Utah Central Division, “the legislative history of the DSHEA indicates that Congress generally intended to harmonize the treatment of dietary supplements with that of foods when it added the dietary supplement subsection…”
Many people in the health and wellness industries, Health Freedom Advocates like the Natural Solutions Foundation and consumers fear that the Federal agencies’ avowed adherence to “HARMonizing” our laws and regulations to the Codex Alimentarius process (starting October 11, 1995, Federal Register and continuing unabated since then) is, over time, reversing these positive, and widely supported developments. There is great public consternation and well-earned concern that these agencies are seeking to HARMonize United States Standards, Guidelines and Codes of Practice with the restrictive rules and practices prevalent in certain countries outside the United States. These restrictive, anti-high-potency nutrient standards are consonant with Codex standards and guidelines such as the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline (VMG – ratified by Codex Alimentarius Commission July 4, 2005, Rome, Italy to the public jubilation of the US Delegate, despite the fact that this Guideline violates US law in both principle and fact), rather than with the freedom of access to nutrients and other wellness products protected and guaranteed by DSHEA.
Because of DSHEA, most of the world’s Dietary Supplement consumption and demand takes place in the United States, meaning that US law should be the basis for international HARMonization rather than the other way around. The United States has far more experience with the strong positive [and virtually absent negative ] consequences of free consumer access to nearly unlimited health supports than any other country and understands fully the importance both to health and to freedom of health choice embedded in this access pattern. The United States also has developed a wide clinical experience with diverse nutrients and substances which supports the conclusion that nutrients at levels chosen by consumers and the practitioners who use them for their patients are enviably safe and free of toxic effects and dangers. In fact, deaths from these products are virtually unknown, while their competitors, pharmaceutical drugs, are noted by the American Medical Association and others as constituting a major cause of death, even when used according to professional guidelines and recommendations.
Congress must reject the position stated by FDA in the US Federal Register (October 11, 1994) that it would “HARMonize” [emphasis added] our laws and regulations to international standards, even when those international standards were not yet completed. Further, Congress must mandate that delegates and participants in international standard setting bodies, of which Codex is only one, may ONLY support and ratify those standards, guideline or regulations which are directly supported by US law
In addition to the highly restrictive VMG, the Codex Committee on General Principles has prepared, among other things, “Proposed Draft Working Principles for Risk Analysis for Food Safety (Guidance to National Governments) [and] Proposed Amendments to the General Principles of the Codex Alimentarius” [and] “New definition of risk analysis terms related to food safety.” These principles include the definition developed by a World Health Organization Workshop on Application of Risk Analysis to Nutrients of an adverse event caused by nutrients as “any change in a bio marker” [emphasis added] regardless of the beneficial impact of those nutrients – http://www.who.int/ipcs/highlights/nutrientraproject/en/. The Codex Committee on Methods of Analysis and Sampling should consider the proper science and methods to apply to Dietary Supplements and nutritional products. Risk Assessment without regard to benefit is advised by the aforementioned Codex Vitamin and Mineral Guideline. National “Nutrient Risk Managers” are advised to use population data when it is available to set limits that prevent this bizarre class of events called “adverse events” which translate to “any change in a bio marker regardless of the beneficial impact of those nutrients”. When such population data are not available, this class of bureaucrats is advised to pool data from desperate populations and literally guess what those limits would be. If no data exist to be pooled, then they are advised to follow the same non-science-based process to set limits.
These principles and practices leave the health of whole populations literally subject to collapse. No such limit setting for nutrients is permitted under US law.
The same document also refers to “safe upper limits” for nutrients despite the fact that under DSHEA specifically exempts nutrients from upper limits of any type. Science makes it clear that biology concurs with US law in this case and the dangers of taking any type of supplement are virtually non-existent while the dangers of taking pharmaceutical drugs, whose sales are significantly impacted when people are free to use nutrients, are so great that the American Medical Association and other organizations have listed the unintended effects of properly used drugs as a major cause of death in the developed world.
Laibow, RE, et. al., Codex Book, Natural Solutions Foundation, 2005
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Frame/FrameRedirect.asp?main=http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/rdad/FRPubs/2006-0004.htm
III. Congressional Mandate and Protective Clause Request
We urge Congress (1) to mandate to the U.S. Codex Office. FSIS (or its successor) and all other agencies and government instrumentalities, all delegates to Codex or other national or international standard setting bodies that they shall adopt as the policy of the U.S. Codex [or other agency] Delegation and Agencies support only for harmonization of Codex Standards, Guidelines and Codes of Practice, or other international standards and regulations, that conforms to United States law and practice, and (2) to adopt DSHEA (and family/organic/small enterprise, church, school, club, garden, farm, ranch, seed saving and similar food-related enterprise) protective language in any food safety bill or other bill relating in any way to food (closely patterned after the “Rule of Interpretation” protecting DSHEA products added to the 2007 Kennedy FDA enabling act, Section 1011).
First, with respect to the agencies and delegates representing American interests internationally, they must be instructed specifically to:
1. Reject any international standard that is inconstant with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution or any other part of the US Constitution, DSHEA or with 19 USC 3512 or any other US law, statute or regulation,
2. Support the Congressional determination that vitamins and minerals are foods, not drugs or toxic chemicals, and, therefore,
3. Support the rejection of any regulation, standard or agreement which imposes upper limits on nutrients. Since optimal intake levels of nutrients is the result of biochemical individuality and may vary (based on complex, shifting, interdependent and interweaving factors such as age, diet, nutrient absorption capacity, the presence or absence of co-factors, genetic makeup, underlying nutritional status, disease state, toxic body burden), no maximum intake levels or upper limits for nutrients have biological significance and must not be determined or fixed by government policy, regulation or agreement. Nutrients are not toxins and must not be regulated as if they were. Nutrient combinations and doses have been demonstrated, through 14 years of US consumer and practitioner experience, to be remarkably safe at any desired level. In the same way that liver ice cream should not be prohibited by government legislators or regulators, so nutrients must not be the subject of such regulations since they pose no risk to consumers, although their hazards to the expensive illness care industry, which is widely acknowledged to be playing a significant role in helping to bankrupt the US economy, are significant.
Risk Assessment is a wholly unnecessary and a totally inappropriate mechanism for determining safety and dosage of nutrients although it is highly significant as a tool for limiting exposure to toxins. In their documents dealing with the use of Risk Assessment for nutrients, both WHO and Codex make note of the fact that Risk Assessment is a tool of toxicology and that its use for substances which are essential for survival is both untested, unproven and has never been subjected to either professional scrutiny or peer review. Given that Codex is supposed to operate strictly on a “Science Based” principle, this makes the use of Risk Assessment for determination of any aspect of nutrient policy totally inappropriate.
4. Support the biochemical reality embodied in DSHEA’s protection of all supplements and categories of nutrients which Codex, through the Codex Vitamin and Mineral Guideline and other texts, violates when it states that the principal nutritional value of foods comes from its vitamins and minerals. Food world wide is demineralized and diminished in nutrients, including the vitamins and other co-factors, including helpful and essential factors, many of which have yet to be identified in a laboratory but whose absence can be detected through the clinical problems and diseases which result.
Exemplary and abundant scientific and clinical evidence supports the importance of essential fatty acids, oils, complex plant residues with physiological impact in foods, flavinoids, antioxidants, amino acids and other vital factors, sisosterols, and many other compounds which are essential to health and which are found in food. All of these compounds are protected under DSHEA, but ignored or limited by the Codex Alimentarius Commission. Further, World Health Organization guidance in the above referenced Workshop document makes it clear that nutrients are treated as toxins and any effective biological activity is to be considered an adverse event.
In other documents, the World Health Organization identifies under-nutrition as the cause of the epidemic, preventable, non-communicable diseases which are the principle killers of the developed world:
Cancer
Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke
Diabetes
Obesity.
DSHEA allows nutrients to be used to protect against, mitigate, treat, or cure these conditions of under nutrition. Codex makes this impossible for any country following its guidelines, thus assuring massive under-nutrition. US delegates and agencies must be prevented from supporting anything which defies US law and supports massive under-nutrition. These guidelines, standards and other agreements stand in stark contradistinction to both the principles and intent of DSHEA.
5. The agencies must “Take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” (Article II, Section 3, United States Constitution) as established by DSHEA that, as foods, nutritional supplements of any type do not require safe upper limits, maximum potencies, maximum permissible upper limits or similar constraints on their use and that any such limits are antithetical to the legislative intent and guarantees of DSHEA.
6. Furthermore, the Natural Solutions Foundation urges support for the position, already enshrined in US law, that:
(a) Nutients are foods and should be regarded as such.
(b) Toxic burdens (industrial chemicals, pesticides, heavy metals, fungicides, food additives, artificial colors, preservatives and flavors, etc.) are well known to increase nutrient requirements to levels which cannot be met by food alone.
(c) High nutrient density dietary supplements may be required to counteract the deleterious effects on health of toxic burdens.
(d) Natural source dietary supplements present no significant health hazard, based on sound scientific analysis and a 14 year history of a self-imposed experiment by the American people who have taken massive amount of supplements and nutrients with no harm or negative consequences to their health although it can be argued that there has been harm done to the bottom lines of the industries that profit from their ill health.
(e) Synthetic/GMO source synthetic nutrients provide the only hazards associated with nutrient ingestion at any level which people select for themselves. Appendix 3 to the Final Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Foods Derived from Biotechnology, approved by the Codex Alimentarius Commission in 2008 makes it clear that neither the safety nor bio-availability of nutrients derived from Biotechnology (GMO)s) is known and that such compounds may actually function as “anti-nutrients”, interfereing with metabolism, absorption and enzyme function. The Final Report recommends testing their impact on large human populations, although involuntary testing, such as already being carried out through unlabeled GMOs in the food chain, violates both US and International law.
(f) Compounds which are, in fact, toxic, like pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, GMOs, industrial toxins and veterinary drug residues should be reduced via the principles of Risk Analysis and the Precautionary Principle, to levels which have no discernible impact on any human or animal system. Toxicology supports this principle for toxins while biochemistry refutes it for nutrients.
(g) Compounds which fail to pass the Ames or similar cancer protective tests should be banned from the human food chain as already required under US law.
(h) Optimal health should be the stated public policy goal of the world’s food standard setting bodies, including Codex Alimentarius, and of the United States. Delegates and representatives to all such bodies must be clearly instructed to support and endorse only those items which further this goal.
(i) Preservative techniques which increase free radical concentrations and/or which result in the degradation of food components to toxic or carcinogenic compounds [e.g., irradiation] should be globally banned.
(j) All known or suspected toxins which are applied to food or created through its farming, growth, processing, packaging, shipment or treatment should be clearly labeled to allow consumers optimal choice in their food supply.
(k) No US delegation shall permit persons with any type of financial, professional or personal ties to the industries involved in the deliberations. Any other type of conflict of interest shall bar persons from participating as delegates. No private consultations with industry representatives or others who stand to gain from the particular outcome of any deliberation or action shall be permitted. All such contacts shall be open to the public and matters of clear public record.
(l) No US regulator or bureaucrat shall be permitted to take employment, remuneration, subsidy or support of any type from the industry with which that regulator or bureaucrat has been involved while on the public payroll for a period of 5 years following termination of their employment by the US or State governments, agencies, foundations, organizations or other bodies. Financial, professional or other conflicts of interest between government employees and industries which they are involved in regulation shall result in immediate dismissal and the possibility of civil or criminal charges.
Second, regarding all pending (sic) “Food Safety” bills, the Natural Solutions Foundation strongly recommends that public health and personal liberty require protective language, such as the following, be enacted in any such bill, whether the bill divests the FDA of food safety authority (as HR 875 would do, creating a new Food Safety Agency) or would further empower FDA (as HR 759 would do) [this language is patterned after the DSHEA protective clause, Section 1011, of the 2007 FDA act.]:
“Rule of Interpretation
“No provision of this act shall be deemed to apply (a) to any home, home-business, homestead, small farm (including organic or natural) agricultural activity, social club, association, church, school or other local organization, (b) to any family farm or ranch, or (c) to any natural or organic food product, including dietary supplements regulated under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994.”
Another version of the protective language that has been suggested is:
“Rule of Interpretation
Whereas Congress has determined that local, family and similar agriculture does not have a significant impact on interstate commerce with regard to food safety issues, and
Whereas large-scale industrial agriculture in the United States and elsewhere is the primary source of food contamination and food-borne illness,
No provision of Federal law or regulation, nor any expenditure of Federal funds shall be interpreted or used to interfere in any way with the food (including seed) related activities of
(a) any home garden, home-business, homestead, non-industrialized, family or owner operated, or organic or natural, agricultural activity (including organic or natural agricultural activity, social club, association, church, school or other local organization,
(b) any family farm or ranch, or
(c) any natural or organic food product, including dietary supplements.”
We also note the language of the Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 USC sec 203 (s) (2) which provides, “(2) Any establishment that has as its only regular employees the owner thereof or the parent, spouse, child, or other member of the immediate family of such owner shall not be considered to be an enterprise engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce or a part of such an enterprise…” Language such as this would be helpful to allay our concerns.
If the FDA Center for Food Safety is to be moved into a new Food Safety Agency, then Dietary Supplements, regulated as foods under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) should be included in such agency, with the proviso that such substances, as foods, are deemed safe when used as directed.
We agree with the Public Statement of the Ad Hoc Alliance of health freedom advocates, consumer groups and family farm, home and natural food producers –
“We reject all forms of food dictatorship.
“We oppose all deceptive attempts to industrialize the food supply under the guise of “food safety.” Current bills before Congress such as HR875, S425, HR759, etc., lack any producer protective language patterned after Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 USCsec 203(s)(2) and DSHEA protective language of the 2007 FDA act, Section 1011.
“They are unacceptable to the members of a free society and must be defeated.
“Government or corporate entities must not infringe on a citizen’s land, their right to own, produce, sell, or use food, seeds or healing substances … , nor should any threat of war, emergency, or disease be used to abrogate or limit these rights.”
Action Item for Ad Hoc Public Statement:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27134
For well researched details about the potential threat posed by the (sic) “Food Safety” bills pending in Congress, see independent investigative reporter Linn Cohen Cole’s writings on this subject, which have been widely reprinted, including by the Foundation, for example, A Solemn Walk Through HR 875 by Sue Diederich and Linn Cohen-Cole: http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=2287
These two sets of recommendations are predicated upon the clear expression from hundreds of thousands of Americans, representing the views of millions, that “Health Freedom is Our First Freedom.”
IV. Statement of Grounds
A. Factual Grounds
The Codex Alimentarius Commission has adopted Standards, Guidelines and Codes of Practice are based on regulatory principles that will, if the United States “Harmonizes” with them as announced, but despite US law, over time, limit access to nutrients, complementary therapies and dietary supplements of consumers in the United States, and that will significantly restrict access to clinically effective vitamin and mineral supplements worldwide. This will have a markedly deleterious impact on liberty and an equally significant one health, if the definition of the major killers of our time as preventable diseases of under-nutrition by the World Health Organization is be believed.
Based on evaluation of its contents and the public statements of the Chairman of the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU), Bonn, 2004, it is the intent and understanding of that Committee (which promulgated the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline, which was then ratified by the Codex Commission in full (July 4, 2005, Rome, Italy) that, despite the limited title of the Guideline, it will, because of the legal structure under which the Codex Alimentarius Commission operates, restrict all classes of nutrients, not just those classed as Vitamins and Minerals. While Codex texts, including this one, are voluntary, countries which deviate from them without following very specific steps, are liable to enormous WTO trade sanctions.
Furthermore, since the guidance offered by the aforementioned WHO Workshop makes it clear that high potency nutrients are to be considered as producing adverse events when their ingestion results in any change of a biomarker in any direction leading to change, no matter how beneficial, this guidance means that high potency nutrients will be unavailable in any HARMonized country, enhancing under-nutrition and the burden of suffering and death caused by preventable sub-optimal nutrition. High potency nutrients, absence of anti-nutrients and foods free from toxins are the antidote.
The US must not support restrictive and, under our laws, illegal, measures such as those ratified by Codex, with the US delegation’s vigorous approval and leadership.
If the Codex Alimentarius Commission continues to support restrictive measures, such as the Vitamin and Mineral Guidelines, Codex will restrict access to wholesome nutrition in several ways:
1. Setting so called “upper safe limits” (maximum potencies, maximum permissible upper limits or similar limitations) for each vitamin and mineral based on inappropriate scientific risk assessment from the science of toxicology, not the science of nutrition; this violates scientific sense and clinical experience. “Optimum levels” which carry no legal weight and are not used to restrict access to nutrients are a much more reasonable, clinically and scientifically supported standard and must be individually determined for each individual.
2. Setting any upper limits on supplements and nutrients; this directly violates US law by violating the legislative intent and provisions of DSHEA which hold that Dietary Supplements are Foods, not Drugs.
3. Marginalizing and eliminating nutrient supplement access for the nearly 1 billion people worldwide, who, by international standards and the assessments of the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, now experience devastating widespread under nutrition and go hungry on a regular basis. Declines in IQs for the world’s hungry and under-nourished children are but one of the devastating results. Why would the US, which spends so much money in foreign aid, adopt or support positions which put the world’s most vulnerable into an even more vulnerable, but completely preventable, compromised position? In addition, the population-based Codex standard, which represent no strong science whatsoever, as made clear by the directions to National “Nutrient Risk Managers” under-appreciate the nutritional status of the world’s hungry 4.6 billion people, most of whom lack the recommended amount of one or more essential nutrient every day of their lives.
4. Creating, through setting maximum permitted vitamin and mineral consumption limits, an approach to regulating dietary supplements which is consistent with and leading the way toward, if not itself directly establishing, prior restraint, illegal under the US Constitution.
5. Substantially restricting the amount of nutrition and health information about vitamins and minerals consumers will be allowed to receive, asserting that only drugs can contain label claims for products that are suitable for the prevention, alleviation, treatment or cure of disease, disorder or particular physiological conditions; this violates the US Right of Free Speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.
6. Fostering the incorrect worldwide health assumption that adequate levels of nutrients can be found in a regular diet since the ideas of nutritional sufficiency and “average expectable daily diet” are totally unsupported by nutritional science while an abundant body of scientific literature and clinical experience as well as the repeated findings of international organizations like the World Health Organization, UNESCO and the Food and Agriculture Organization confounds these assumptions. Were either idea true, there would be no widespread malnutrition or under-nutrition in the world.
7. Continuing to fail to implement the WHO/FAO “Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health” which explicitly supports better health through better nutrition, including dietary supplementation, to address the epidemic of “preventable diseases of under-nutrition” including major killers like Cancer, Heart Disease and Stroke, Diabetes and Obesity.
American health consumers (otherwise know as “people”) are becoming active and organized to protect and expand their health rights. The threat to dietary supplements which DSHEA corrected in 1994 mobilized more letters to a pre-internet Congress than any other issue in the history of the United States, including the Viet Nam War.
Worldwide health is being significantly undermined by the Codex-created limits to nutrients available in many countries and regions when they make their regulations and laws “Codex Compliant”, according to official documents prepared jointly by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization. Codex, by itself, cannot change U.S. law unless U.S. agencies adopt its regulations. To do so, US regulatory agencies would need to supersede US law. Indeed, FDA has done so on several occasions, most Codex’s upper potency limits, established for vitamins and minerals, will restrict U.S. consumer access to high-potency vitamins and minerals to which they are accustomed since US policy, legal or not, has been to “HARMonize with international standards in preference to US ones as articulated in the FDA statement on harmonization in the US Federal Register (October 11, 1995). “In a notice published in the Federal Register of October 11, 1995 (60 FR 53078), FDA articulated its policy regarding the development and use of standards with respect to the harmonization of various national and international regulatory requirements and guidelines” – http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/fr970707.html . Some U.S. companies are already choosing to “dumb down” their potencies to mirror their international formulations.
FDA’s highly restrictive and by their own analysis, crushingly expensive for small companies, unnecessary imposition of Current Good Manufacturing Procedures on the industry, more akin to drug industry rules than food industry in a sector which is filled with small Mom-and-Pop business providing innovation and leadership at low financial return, furthers this process. These cGMPs will become fully effective over the next year. FDA has admitted that about 2/3 of small nutrient companies will go out of business because of the cost and burdens of this imposition.
Codex Alimentarius standards and guidelines are enforced at the international level via trade sanctions imposed by the World Trade Organization (WTO) through its dispute resolution process. However, there is grave concern in many quarters that statements such as this, from the WTO web site, “the SPS Agreement explicitly permits governments to choose not to use the international standards. However, if the national requirement results in a greater restriction of trade, a country may be asked to provide scientific justification,” – http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/sps_e/spsund_e.htm – make it incumbent upon each member nation of the WTO to bring its domestic standards into conformity with Codex standards and guidelines in order to avoid the creation of hidden barriers to international trade. This would violate both DSHEA and with 19 USC 3512. Codex misapplies an inappropriate toxic chemicals risk assessment model to regulate helpful nutrients which have virtually no known toxicity and therefore, present virtually no consumer or environmental danger. Any assessment of vitamin and mineral usage should evaluate nutrients using nutritional science rather than with toxicological science which is properly used to evaluate toxin and dangerous industrial chemicals. Since supplements, including vitamins and minerals, are defined as foods under DSHEA, upper limits of any type are inappropriate, unnecessary and violate US law. They should therefore be opposed by the United States with vigor both in Codex meetings and otherwise rather than enthusiastically endorsed in violation of US law.
The Natural Solutions Foundation has publicized what we refer to as “The Codex Two Step Process” showing how any country can lawfully opt out of Codex restrictions to protect its national nutrition and food traditions, without WTO sanction. See our short video on the subject at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QNg3MD6BxM
A fully developed template of just how this would work, called the “Codex Book”, is available from the Natural Solutions Foundation at http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=220.
An essential principle to remember here is that, despite propagandistic junk science to the contrary, nutrients have no meaningful toxicity. The human body is able to rid itself of excess doses of nutrients or store them for future use in times of shortfall, whereas it is not able to rid itself adequately of toxic and dangerous chemicals. This difference, coupled with differential impact of nutrients and detrimental impact of toxins, is precisely the distinction upon which the determination that the latter are, in fact, toxic while the former are clearly non-toxic. The Codex Vitamin and Mineral Guideline (VMG) disregards the unique biological individuality which determines the basic nutritional needs of each individual. Biological requirements can vary widely (by orders of magnitude) during the life span since nutritional requirements are affected by climate, dietary supply, genetics, energy output, toxic load, emotional, organ and immune health, electromagnetic and geopathic stress as well as normal and pathological aging processes and enzymatic decline with aging. Codex disregards this and all other short and long term biological individuality. Codex fails in this fundamental requirement by erroneously disregarding biological, physiological and pathophysiologic variation in nutrient needs.
Codex was founded upon the initiative of pharmaceutical executives who stand to profit from under nutrition because it leads to diseases they make treatments for. It was not founded by nutritionists or humanitarians.
The US delegation to Codex is packed with representatives of, and people representing the interests of, corporate concerns who manufacture and market drugs for humans and animals, agricultural chemicals, industrialized food supply companies whose and other industrial sectors whose interests run counter to health and consumer protection. Consumers and health professionals are scant on Codex delegations and their positions are given virtually no weight either in the Codex deliberations or the preparation of US Codex positions.
Codex documents make it clear that the process of risk assessment does not properly apply to nutrients and that the process must be modified to account for the differences between nutrients and toxins. But whether or not Codex continued with its wrong-headed approach, the US is violating its own law when it presses for these strategies, approves them, does not oppose them and seeks to implement them at home.
The procedures employed to accomplish that modification are untested through scientific or clinical evaluations and are entirely theoretical. Their devastating impact upon the earth’s population, however, is easily predicted and devastating.
Briefly, Codex fails in its fundamental requirement of protecting consumers, as stated in its Mandate, by erroneously applying toxic chemical risk assessment principles to nutrients which are foods, not toxins, erroneously asserting that
1. Nutrients should be treated and evaluated as toxins.
2. Such evaluation requires and relies upon novel, non peer-reviewed and untested procedures whose accuracy and utility have not been evaluated through appropriate studies and trials.
3. Dietary Supplements, including vitamins and minerals are toxins, not foods, and therefore require upper limits on ingestion
4. Foods and nutrients are not useful in treating disease.
5. Dietary supplements have little value because people can get the limited amounts they need from food.
6. The nutritional quality of foods is due primarily to the vitamin and mineral content of those foods.
7. Rigid, low limits should be set for vitamins and nutrients because nutritional requirements do not change with biochemical, age-related, genetic and other assaults and do not vary from person to person, despite abundantly documented genetic and environmental variations within and between populations.
8. Theoretical reference values are more important than unique individual nutrient needs and clinical requirements.
9. Toxicology science is preferred to individual choice as the best control on access to foods such as Dietary Supplements.
10. Dietary Supplements require control on access despite the fact that they are foods under DSHEA.
The well documented safety of Dietary Supplements, as foods, is documented by La Leva di Archimede at http://www.laleva.cc/petizione/english/ronlaw_eng.html, with particular reference to http://www.laleva.cc/petizione/ron_law_tables/tabella.html, http://www.laleva.cc/petizione/ronlaw/australia_societal_vs_individual_risks2.pdf, http://www.laleva.cc/supplements/medical_injury_law.pdf, http://www.laleva.cc/petizione/ronlaw/leape_relative%20risks1.pdf, http://www.laleva.cc/petizione/ronlaw/relative_risk_boeing72.pdf , http://www.laleva.cc/petizione/ronlaw/relative_risks_bubbles3.pdf) and Dr. Andrew Saul’s presentation to the Canadian Parliament, “Where Are The Bodies?”, http://www.doctoryourself.com/testimony.htm .
Codex reinforces, in its Vitamin and Mineral Guidelines, related documents and positions, and numerous other texts, its already existing prohibition on preventing truthful information about the ability of foods and nutrients to treat, diagnose, prevent, mitigate and cure disease and prohibiting the truthful association of health benefits and food components. Codex prohibits supplemental nutritional feeding world wide with disastrous potential results and the dissemination of information on the positive impact of nutritional supplementation and support on chronic, degenerative disease. Codex rejects without scientific basis or support the position supporting access to nutrients strongly documented and endorsed by a vast scientific literature and numerous joint publications of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) which detail the essential contribution of nutrition to the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases in both the developing and developed world. World hunger experts recognize that nutrient supplementation can be extraordinarily useful in improving world health and eliminating disease (vitamin A supplements in developing countries can offer 30 times as much social improvement as millions of dollars of development aid), a fact the Codex Vitamin and Mineral Guideline (VMG) and related texts ignore without scientific support or validation for their position. Shockingly, the US is clearly the driving force behind this position, despite the fact that it violates US law.
Codex ignores the WHO-documented high costs of under nutrition in loss of life, degraded quality of life and economic loss created by the chronic diseases of nutrient-deficiency which are so abundantly documented in clinical, biochemistry and epidemiological literature. The human and economic impact/costs of under nutrition are recognized by the World Health Organization and the Food and the Food and Agriculture Organization who document that chronic disease (e.g., heart disease and stroke, diabetes, obesity, cancer, etc.) is a non-contagious epidemic problem which can be prevented, treated and cured through adequate nutrition. These sources further document that nutrition often cannot be provided by diet. Clinically necessary nutrient intake is, however, prohibited under the proposed Codex Vitamin and Mineral Guideline.
At loggerheads with the US positions at Codex and similar bodies, The United States Supreme Court has spoken forcefully, enforcing consumers’ right to truthful information about health care issues. See: Thompson v Western States Medical Centers – 535 U.S. 357, where Justice O’Connor wrote,
“If the First Amendment means anything, it means that regulating speech must be a last – not first – resort. . . We have previously rejected the notion that the Government has an interest in preventing the dissemination of truthful commercial information in order to prevent members of the public from making bad decisions with the information. . . Even if the Government did argue that it had an interest in preventing misleading advertisements, this interest could be satisfied by the far less restrictive alternative of requiring . . . a warning that . . . its risks were unknown.”
The basic rule, announced by the case, to determine constitutionally permitted government restrictions on Commercial Speech (speech that makes or is about an offer for a transaction, such as the sale of Dietary Supplements) is a Two Prong Test: the first prong is to ask two questions: (1) is the speech in question about unlawful activity and (2) is the speech misleading. If “no” to both, the speech is entitled to protection unless the Government can carry its burden and prove (1) the governmental interest involved is “substantial”, (2) the regulation must “directly advance” the governmental interest and (3) the regulation of Commercial Speech cannot be “more extensive than is necessary to serve that interest” (quoting Central Hudson v Public Service, 447 US 557, at 566).
B. Statement of Grounds – Legal Authority
1. The primary Legal Basis for the actions Congress should take to mandate a policy that “Health Freedom is Our First Freedom” is the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the . . . the right of the people . . .to the Freedom of Speech..” and of Association.
2. A further Legal Basis for the Proposed Policy is Section 3512 of Title 19 and specifically, 19 USC 3512(a)(1) and (a)(2) as applied to the protection of human life through DSHEA.
Section 3512. Relationship of agreements to United States law and State law
(a) Relationship of agreements to United States law
(1) United States law to prevail in conflict
No provision of any of the Uruguay Round Agreements, nor the application of any such provision to any person or circumstance, that is inconsistent with any law of the United States shall have effect.
(2) Construction
Nothing in this Act shall be construed –
(A) to amend or modify any law of the United States, including any law relating to –
(i) the protection of human, animal, or plant life or health,
(ii) the protection of the environment, or
(iii) worker safety, or
(B) to limit any authority conferred under any law of the United States, including section 2411 of this title, unless specifically provided for in this Act.
3. Additionally, the Statutes authorizing the various agencies involved contain general provisions that support the actions needed. Federal Law includes provisions that grant the relevant Secretary broad authority to promulgate rules and regulations “necessary to carry out the Act[s].”
4. Codex Alimentarius (“Codex”) is the World Food Code, an international agency under the joint sponsorship of WHO (World Health Organization) and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), two primary organs of the United Nations.
According to its Statute, the purposes of Codex are “protecting the health of the consumers and ensuring fair practices in the food trade.” (Codex Statute, Article 1(a)) Codex does this by promulgating standards, codes of practice and guidelines. Codex General Principles, 1 reads:
“The Codex Alimentarius is a collection of internationally adopted food standards presented in a uniform manner. These food standards aim at protecting consumers’ health and ensuring fair practices in the food trade. The Codex Alimentarius also includes provisions of an advisory nature in the form of codes of practice, guidelines and other recommended measures intended to assist in achieving the purposes of the Codex Alimentarius. The publication of the Codex Alimentarius is intended to guide and promote the elaboration and establishment of definitions and requirements for foods to assist in their harmonization and in doing so to facilitate international trade.”
Finalized standards, after “acceptance by governments” are published by Codex. (Codex Statute, Article 1(d)) It is clear from this language that Codex guidelines, being only advisory, do not impose any requirements on marketers unless and until they are adopted by individual national governments.
V The Findings of Fact that Congress Should Adopt
In acting to protect the Public from “HARMonization” to further protect Health Freedom as Our First Freedom, we urge Congress to find:
(a) The Vitamin and Mineral Guideline adopted by CODEX on July 4 2005 uses inappropriate science (i.e., Risk Assessment procedures [Toxicology]) rather than appropriate science (i.e., Nutritional Science [Biochemistry]) which is very likely to inappropriately mandate maximum permissible levels of nutrients so low that they are, by intention, without impact on any human being, the intended outcome of Risk Assessment procedures; a Fact Hearing must be, and petitioner hereby requests that a fact hearing be, held to determine the scientifically factual and appropriate basis for the use of Risk Analysis [Toxicology] rather than more appropriate nutritional [Biochemistry] scientific standards in all decisions pertaining to nutrition.
(b) Codex has accepted the use of Risk Assessment procedures for nutrients. However, Risk Assessment is a methodology relevant only to toxicology and both irrelevant and antithetical to Nutritional Science and biochemistry. The Risk Assessment methodology employed by CODEX has been arbitrarily modified without scientific validation or professional consensus to restrict permissible dosages of nutrients essential to life to levels which can, by intent, have no impact on any human being, no matter how sensitive. This misapplication, distortion and misconstruction of Risk Assessment is in clear contradiction to the principles of toxicology and scientific Risk Assessment procedures which have been developed to determine the highest dosages of dangerous industrial and natural toxins to which humans can be exposed to without discernible effect. For this reason, instead of evaluating vitamin and mineral upper limits using inappropriately modified and unscientific Risk Analysis, US Policy must further the use of Nutritional Science to support the liberal access to nutrients enjoyed under legislative protection in the US. Under the Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act, passed by unanimous Congressional consent in 1994, while a nutrient may be dealt with by the FDA if it is shown to pose a significant risk to health and safety, nutrients are treated as foods which, as such, may have no upper limits set upon their use.
(c) The United States has failed to oppose the use of these scientifically unsupported and unverified Risk Assessment techniques in the CODEX Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses. It has failed to note or oppose these procedures on the basis of the substantial Conflict of Interest represented by the publicly acknowledged personal, professional and financial involvement in commercial Risk Assessment by the Chairman of the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses as the head of the BfR, a commercial Risk Assessment company. The United States has failed to oppose the classification of nutrients as toxins in 1994, by that same committee despite the clear violation of US law which that classification represents. And, since 1994, the United States has failed to present any opposition to the use of Risk Analysis and other attempts to limit access to nutrients in order to prevent the restrictive (and illegal under US law) Vitamin and Mineral Guideline from reaching Step 8 and from being ratified on July 4, 2005 at the 28th Codex Alimentarius Commission meeting in Rome, Italy, contrary to DSHEA (Dietary Supplement health and Education Act of 1994) and the unanimous determination of Congress that Dietary Supplements are Foods, not toxic substances and, as foods, can have no upper limit set upon their intake or use.
(d) U.S. District Court Judge Campbell stated in April 2005 (Nutraceutical Corporation and Solaray, Inc. v. Lester Crawford, Acting Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Case No. 2:04CV409 TC, USDC, Utah Central Division),
“…the legislative history of the DSHEA indicates that Congress generally intended to harmonize the treatment of dietary supplements with that of foods when it added the dietary supplement subsection…”
(e) The CODEX Technical Report discussing the application of Risk Assessment to nutrients makes it clear that this procedure does not apply to nutrients because, unlike drugs, they have minimum intake limits that are required for life and health. Risk Assessment procedures were modified for application to vitamin and mineral supplements without scientific validation, peer review or clinical testing.
There is a considerable body of established scientific literature supporting the nutritional harm caused by low-level intake of essential and vital nutrients. Has the United States held a public fact finding hearing to determine if this jerry-rigged statistical system has any applicability to Nutritional Science and what the risks to the US and global population are when Risk Assessment is applied to nutrients? If not, why has the US supported the use of this technique in the nutritional determinations made by the CCNFSDU when so many lives are at stake in this issue, estimated by public health scientists to exceed 3 Billion consequential deaths world-wide? Why has the US supported and adopted this scientifically, biologically and factually indefensible Policy which should be abandoned in favor of a Policy which supports and promotes nutrients as foods, as DSHEA mandates, as the domestic and international standard which are so strongly supported by both science and US Law? A fact Hearing must be, and petitioner hereby request that a fact hearing be, held to determine the impact on public health in the United States from the use of Risk Analysis [Toxicology] rather than more appropriate nutritional [Biochemistry] scientific standards.
The Natural Solutions Foundation entered a Citizens Petition and Comments to the USDA and FDA on this topic in 2005 and 2006. The Media Release of June 9,2006 stated:
“Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III (US Army, Ret.) announced today that the Natural Solutions Foundation is Petitioning the U.S. Codex Office and the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) – Docket No. FSIS-2006-0004 (both agencies of the U.S. Department of Agriculture) to adopt support for international nutrient regulations (and any other international harmonization) only as it conforms to United States law and practice as the policy of the U.S. Codex Delegation.”
Neither USDA nor FDA responded to the Petition of the Citizens concerned with this issue, although several hundred thousand messages were sent to the agencies in support thereof.
Source: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/06/prweb397379.htm
(f) The Dietary Supplement Health Education Act (DSHEA), 1994 classifies supplements as foods which therefore may have no Safe Upper Limits, Maximum Permissible Upper Limits or other restrictions upon their use.
(g) FDA has improperly adopted a policy of harmonization with International Standards, even where those standards are not finalized when those standards are in violation of US law or regulatory practice. “In a notice published in the Federal Register of October 11, 1995 (60 FR 53078), FDA articulated its policy regarding the development and use of standards with respect to the harmonization of various national and international regulatory requirements and guidelines” – http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/fr970707.html .
(h) The adoption of the Risk Assessment Model and the anti-DSHEA harmonization Policy are ultra vires and premature; have occurred without sufficient Public Hearings and in direct contravention of the Public Policy of the United States as enacted by Congress. The appropriate US agencies must therefore assert a Nutritional Standard as the only lawful alternative to the inappropriate and unscientific use of toxicological Risk Assessment with regard to Dietary Substances. It is incumbent upon the United States therefore to ensure that the proper science is presented and considered in the process of attempting to set upper limits for nutrient supplements and to vigorously support the reopening of the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline to correct its scientific deficiencies since the science upon which it is based, relying on toxicology while ignoring the appropriate science, biochemistry, is flawed, creating a position that is contrary to US legal requirements and domestic (as well as global) health and well being of every man, woman and child on the planet.
Because the US delegations to Codex have consistently acted against the interest of US law and the public interest, and because on the issue of the Codex Vitamin and Mineral Guideline the science used to support it is deeply flawed, and because the science which supports the use of high potency nutrients is abundant, Congress should direct the US delegation at Codex to call for the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline to be reopened and further direct it to press for adoption of a DSHEA-like standard to allow the world to harmonize to a health-promoting standard of nutritional sufficiency. Access to wholesome nutrients should not be restricted under the guise of (sic) “Food Safety” bills that merely force the industrialization of all food production.
VI Conclusions
The Natural Solutions Foundation urges Congress to take urgent action with regard to CODEX and the International Food Safety Agency:
Specifically, Congress should hold Public Hearings on following Questions of Fact:
1. Whether or not the use of Toxic Risk Assessment to determine the allowable forms and dosages of Vitamins and Minerals will promote public health. We believe it will not, as the use of Risk Assessment is inappropriate science with reference to Foods, including Vitamins and Minerals
2. Whether forms and dosages of Vitamins and Minerals determined through Toxic Risk Assessment will adversely impact on the health and well-being of the residents and Citizens of the United States.
3. Whether Codex delegations acted against US legislative and regulatory policy and, if so, upon whose authority, whether Codex delegations should be free of industry personnel and include health, consumer and health freedom personnel and whether standards, including the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline and related texts, should be reopened upon application by the US to bring these standards into line with both science and US law.
Thereafter, Congress should adopt appropriate legislation further protecting the inalienable right of the People to “Health Freedom as Our First Freedom.”
The policy of FDA and the USDA in the various Codex Committees (and in other multinational arenas, such as the (sic) “North American Union”) should be a policy of strict support for the Dietary Supplement Health Education Act (DSHEA) food-based standard as the international standard for vitamin, minerals and all other dietary supplements as well as all other US laws. Additionally, all standards and regulations promulgated by the US should facilitate consumer choice and protection.
DSHEA, passed unanimously by the U.S. Congress in 1994, recognizes and protects the value of individuals making personal nutritional and health choices in a way that is rejected by the Codex guidelines. It also protects all speech concerning health benefits associated with nutrients or food. Any attempt to restrict or limit dosages, potency, information or access to supplements or information about nutrition, food and supplements denigrates their classification under DSHEA as foods and, hence, without need for access restriction.
The culmination of 50 years of U.S. legislation and litigation has refined the supplement policy of the United States ensuring that individual choice and desire play a key role in ensuring private and public health. The Codex guideline subordinates individual choice to scientifically inaccurate and unsupported, supposed professional expertise. The DSHEA balances professionals, science and people.
Members of the public have continually warned United States policy makers that pending international regulations fail to meet both the standards of United States law and the requirements of the international law.
See for example, Public Citizen’s comments regarding harmonization:
http://www.citizen.org/trade/harmonization/comments/articles.cfm?ID=4394
And the National Health Federation, “Codex Breaks its own Rules” http://www.thenhf.com/codex_may_2005_nhf_press_release.htm
Also, the European Alliance for Natural Health Submission on Risk Assessment at:
http://www.alliance-natural-health.org/_docs/ANHwebsiteDoc_120.pdf
See also these Media Releases from the Foundation:
June 3, 2005
Natural Solutions Foundation files Emergency Citizen Petition to Support DSHEA in CODEX Crisis
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/06/prweb246972.htm
July 5, 2006
Codex Chairman Seeks to Thwart Natural Solutions Foundation Pro Health Codex Initiative
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/07/prweb406560.htm
October 10, 2006:
US Urged by Natural Solutions Foundation to Alter Codex Course, Support WHO Global Strategy to End World Hunger, Promote World Health
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/10/prweb444957.htm
We therefore urge Congress to mandate that the U.S. Codex Office, FSIS and all other Federal agencies adopt as Public Policy support only for regional, multinational and international Standards, Guidelines and Codes of Practice that conform to United States law and practice, which support consumer choice and natural well-being and specifically the provisions of DSHEA through 19 USC 3512, “United States law to prevail in conflict – No provision of any of the Uruguay Round Agreements, nor the application of any such provision to any person or circumstance, that is inconsistent with any law of the United States shall have effect.”
We further urge Congress to direct the US Codex Office and all future delegations to call for a reopening of any Codex standard, guideline or other text which violates US law.
Finally, Congress must include clear and unambiguous protection for homes, farms, ranches, small businesses and natural products from enhanced food safety laws (such as H.R. 875 and 759) and regulations that may be applied to industrialized agriculture but which would have a chilling effect on local and natural food and nutrition.
“Health Freedom is Our First Freedom” and the People must be free to engage in farm and food activities that enhance their health and prosperity.
Dated: April 2, 2009
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
This White Paper has been published at: http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=2394
Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III (US Army, Ret.)
President & Trustee
Rima Laibow, MD
Medical Director & Trustee
Ralph Fucetola JD
Vice President – Legal & Trustee
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