Merck’s Vaccine Makes it More Likely to get infected with HIV, follow-up Study Confirms

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | MAY 22, 2012

It is quite normal to hesitate every time a new scientific study is published on a Journal. If there is one thing the public has learned about science in the past decade or so, is that even when it is exact science, there is always room for error. Sometimes errors that are purposely committed, as in the case of climate science. Despite living in an era of great technological and scientific advancement one can never be too cautious when stating a fact. Today, more than ever before, journalists and the public who read news articles need to do their own homework in order to assure the validity of the facts presented.

One particularity about scientific information is that when it serves a commercial purpose it is rapidly and recklessly put out for everyone to see, but when such information is not commercially valuable or makes science and scientific discoveries devolve, it is either not published or it is hidden in the back of the newspapers and magazines; often typed in with miniscule fonts. This is the case of the most recent study regarding the dangers of the vaccine created to prevent contagion with the HIV virus. I know I had to dig deep to find any information on this subject.

Vaccines, regardless of what most of the scientific community says, are toxic products whose use often brings with them unwanted side effects and in numerous occasions cause the death of a patient. The debate on vaccine toxicity and the dangers these products present to users is usually centered on two points. First, how can a vaccine directly cause disease or death, and second, how can a vaccine indirectly cause disease and death. Note that none of the points includes questioning how can a vaccine treat or cure a disease or a condition, to use two terms originating from the medical establishment. That is because it has never been demonstrated that a vaccine has helped treat or cure disease. In fact, the medical-military establishments are ever more eager to use vaccines as weapons, as supposed to medical solutions to real disease.

Merck’s Vaccine Fails in Trials

In the case of the HIV vaccine produced by Merck, which was being subjected to human studies, the results of follow-up observations prompted scientist to warn the public about the link between the vaccine and the increase in likelihood for men to get infected with the HIV virus. According to the study published on the Journal of Infectious Disease, Merck’s vaccine makes it more likely, not less, that some men would become infected with H.I.V. At this point, scientists conducting the trials claim they cannot tell why the vaccine increases the chances of infection, and simply say that men who have not been circumcised and who previously caught the virus of the common cold are two to four times more likely to get infected with HIV. It seems that the cold virus is used by Merck to produce the vaccine, so anyone who catches the same strain of the cold virus increase their chances of infection when compared to other men.

I am not a scientist or a doctor, but it seems to me this is a case where the cure is more dangerous than the disease. The issue with Merck’s vaccine is an old and well-known situation. Most, if not all vaccines, are made with ingredients that are dangerous to humans. The list is long, and those ingredients fall into the categories mentioned above: vaccines that cause damage directly and vaccines that trigger a chain reaction which causes disease. In the case of the HIV vaccine, the second scenario seems like a good place for the scientists in charge of the trial to continue to study further.

The use of a cold virus that in theory is not able to cause people to feel sick with a cold, contains one of the three genes of the HIV virus, a combination that intends to use the widely debunked scientific principle that by injecting a pathogen into the human body, the human immune system can be ’educated’ to cope with future infections caused by the same virus. Most, if not all scientific research is based on this same principle, no matter how long have pharmaceutical companies failed to produce one single vaccine that actually does what they claim it does: cure or treat disease. What is even more worrisome, is that in addition to swindling the public into trusting a product that does not perform as advertised, the pharmaceutical industry actually injects genes of the dangerous viruses they supposedly intend to curtail in order to prevent or treat disease.

“I really wish I could tell you why, but I can’t,” said Dr. Ann Duerr, vaccine specialist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and who also led the new study. In a previous study, Merck had given the vaccine to a total of 778 male volunteers, a number that included men who had strong immunity against the ad5 cold virus (used to make the vaccine) and others who did not have such immunity. At the conclusion of the study, — and this is going by Merck’s published results, not independent analysis — 21 men who received the vaccine resulted infected with HIV, whereas only 9 were infected in the group of men who received placebo. The vaccine known as V520 is made with type 5 adenovirus that was genetically modified not to reproduce, so Merck and its scientists believe that the virus is at fault for the infections. This is a common way to go by the pharmaceutical companies, that is, to blame an ingredient in their vaccines for the failure in delivering the promised results. It is less common for scientists who work on vaccine production to blame the disease causing genes — in this case the HIV genes — for the infection. Such concession, I suppose, would further erode the credibility of the business as usual policy used to create vaccines.

Merck’s latest failure to create a ‘safe’ vaccine has been prompted the medical establishment to go out as true firefighters to try to save face. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the US National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease, resorted to good old lies to validate the failure of vaccine medical research: “Historically, vaccines have been the most effective weapon against infectious diseases such as polio, measles, mumps and smallpox .”

Another Merck trial that included 3000 people in 9 countries was abruptly terminated in 2007 after the results showed no positive effects after injecting volunteers with the vaccine, and instead raised suspicion that they were becoming more susceptible to infection with HIV.

The latest of Merck’s medical trials included 1836 people. A total of 172 men who participated in the study ultimately became infected. Those men were highly immune to the ad5 virus and just in previous studies were cited as uncircumcised. According to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the results “add credence to the belief that the effect was real” as he explains that the infections seen in volunteers could have been biological in origin.

Dr. Duerr, who in the past had no explanation to people getting infected with HIV after being injected with the vaccine now believes that men who had caught the adenovirus and had antibodies to it and a set of CD4 cells (white blood cells) had immune systems capable of recognizing such antibodies and more CD4 cells present in their blood. Dr. Duerr says that although it is a good thing to have more CD4 cells, in this case those cells are exactly what the genes from HIV virus will attack.

Objectively speaking, and taking Dr. Duerr’s word at face value, this is an example of how the scientific community experiments with the health and well-being of humanity, carrying out experiments based on outdated premises and principles and in the process, sometimes purposely, creates pharmaceutical products that cause disease, instead of treating or curing people. Clear proof of what seems to be complete ignorance about the final result of their experiment is Dr. Deurr’s conclusion about what her experiment accomplished: “the vaccine could have been creating what the military calls a “target-rich environment.” What a great analogy, since we now know that the Pentagon intends to use vaccines to lobotomize people as shown in a State Department video we reported on back in April.

Human Experiments Despite the Risks

The continuous failure by the scientific community to produce a vaccine that can treat or cure AIDS seems to make scientists bolder in their pursue of a breakthrough, to the point they continue to ignore the dangers volunteers and patients are exposed to when a pharmaceutical product with zero science to support it as well as a dubious future is created and used in humans. It seems as if scientists were experimenting with the intention of “seeing what may come out of their trials”, as supposed to expecting a number of definite results which they may have thought about while doing their research. Another example to support this view is that now the scientists behind the HIV vaccine will begin looking at using a chimpanzee virus to create another version of their vaccine. But wasn’t a Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) the one credited for originating the AIDS epidemic? That is what much of the main stream scientific community accepts today.

Of course others who have investigated further into the origin of the HIV virus have learned that the infection came about through the Polio Vaccine, which was concocted by using a Simian Immunodeficiency Virus strain. As reported by journalist Edward Hooper, HIV was traced to the testing of an oral polio vaccine called Chat. This vaccine was given to about a million people in the Belgian Congo, Ruanda and Urundi in the late 1950s. The vaccine needed to be cultivated in living tissue, and Chat was grown in kidney cells taken from local chimps infected with SIVcmz. The outcome was the contamination of the vaccine and as a consequence the contamination of humans with HIV-1.

Origins of HIV

Perhaps the most outspoken person when it comes to the real origin of the HIV virus is Dr. Boyd E. Graves, who filed a Freedom of Information Act Request for the US to make public its Special Virus program, which he claims contains details about the creation of HIV. Dr. Graves put out a 1971 Special Virus Flow Chart that seems to explain the origin of many of the viruses known today to cause disease in humans. Among them is HIV. Supporting Dr. Graves position is a book called Full Disclosure, authored by Dr. Gary Glum, published in 1994, but obstructed from selling in bookshops by the US government. An extract from the book’s first chapter describes the origin of HIV:

AIDS was the result of a decades-long research program carried out in Chemical and Bacteriological Warfare labs in this country (USA) and others. For those involved, it is a triumph of science and the answer to what they regard as the planet’s most pressing problem: population control. AIDS is the perfect biological weapon. It can be confined with some degree of success to certain specific groups, and since the incubation period can be more than seven years, millions can be infected before the first person in the chain displays any symptoms.

Read more from Dr. Glumm’s censored book here.

A point that is often overlooked by the public and little reported by the media is, how can the medical establishment propose to look for a cure or a treatment for a disease caused by a virus or any other pathogen without being sure about the origin of such?  This situation is true for HIV and AIDS. One only needs to watch the film House of Numbers to notice the lack of consensus about the origin, diagnosis and treatment of HIV. Doesn’t such uncertainty render any purported vaccine or pill useless?

Scientists Expose Fraudulent Global Vaccination Policies

by Rosemarie Mathis
President SANE VAX
January 14, 2012

On January 12, 2011 the Annals of Medicine published a ground-breaking peer-reviewed paper titled, Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine policy and evidence-based medicine: Are they at odds?, 1written by renowned researchers Lucija Tomljenovic, Ph.D.,and Christopher Shaw, Ph.D., with the Neural Dynamics research Group, University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. 2.

The article points out to the medical community what most consumers now know about the fraudulent global health agency policies in combination with the pharmaceutical companies lack of science based evidence demonstrating the safety and efficacy of Gardasil and Cervarix before they were unleashed on unsuspecting parents of adolescents.

Clinical Trials on Healthy People vs. Mass Vaccination Campaigns

Tomljenovic and Shaw clearly state the obvious in their abstract by stating that vaccines represent ‘a special category of drugs generally given to healthy individuals and therefore a small level of risk for adverse reactions is acceptable.’

Merck’s clinical trials were flawed because they used an aluminum adjuvant as a ‘placebo’ and only used saline as a comparative for minor, non-serious adverse reactions. With serious adverse reactions, they pooled the results from the saline group and the aluminum ‘placebo’ group. By doing this, they concealed the true rate of serious reactions.

If FDA approved drugs and vaccines were as safe and effective as Pharma would like consumers to believe the risk level should be negligible to none. The FDA removal of drugs after they have been on the market and damaged desperate people looking for cures who then have to file lawsuits to recover damages is simply unacceptable.

Medical Ethics Questioned

The authors also point out the myth of informed consent – basically a waiver signed by medical consumers that they have been ‘educated’ about the risk vs. benefit ratio of the drug about to be administered. Tomljenovic and Shaw open their paper citing that ‘medical ethics demand that vaccination be carried out with the participant’s full and informed consent’ and not just the handing out of the HPV vaccine Patient Product Insert – prepared by none other than the vaccine’s manufacturer.

What the authors do not cover in this paper is what happens to informed consent when governments grant children the right to consent to medical procedures, such as California’s recent passage of AB 499 – basically granting parental rights of children ages 12 and older to the state for the treatment of STD’s. Is it really because the ‘state’ knows better – or is it because legislatures have been paid off by the pharmaceutical companies?

The authors go on to state:

“What is more disconcerting than the aggressive marketing strategies employed by the vaccine manufacturers is the practice by which the medical profession has presented partial information to the public, namely, in a way that generates fear, thus promoting vaccine uptake………It thus appears that to this date, medical and regulatory entities worldwide continue to provide inaccurate information regarding cervical cancer risk and the usefulness of HPV vaccines, thereby making informed consent regarding vaccination impossible to achieve.”

Money Talks – Nobody Walks – but the Vaccine Injured

According to Maplight California – a web site that reveals money’s influence on politics, contributions from interest groups to CA legislators who supported the bill were $2,174,648 – more than 28 times the $76,404 given to interest groups who opposed the bill.It is also interesting to note that republican based groups and pro-life groups were on the dissenting side vs. the overwhelming number of liberal and democratic groups supporting the bill.

Similar bills are now in front of South Carolina and Florida legislatures. We are now personal witnesses to the erosion of medical ethics encouraged by politicians abundantly rewarded with special interest contributions.

Tomljenovic and Shaw continue their message by reminding medical professionals that ‘contrary to claims that cervical cancer is the second most common cancer in women worldwide, existing data show that this only applies to developing countries. In the Western world cervical cancer is a rare disease with mortality rates that are several times lower than the rate of reported serious adverse reactions (including deaths) from HPV vaccination.’

The author’s state – what should become the mantra of all medical practitioners and consumers concerned about vaccine safety and efficacy:

Future vaccination policies should adhere more rigorously to evidence-based medicine and ethical guidelines for informed consent.

Tomljenovic and Shaw cite these key messages:

- To date, the efficacy of HPV vaccines in preventing cervical cancer has not been demonstrated, while vaccine risks remain to be fully evaluated.

- Current worldwide HPV immunization practices with either of the two HPV vaccines appear to be neither justified by long-term health benefits nor economically viable, nor is there any evidence that HPV vaccination (even if proven effective against cervical cancer) would reduce the rate of cervical cancer beyond what Pap screening has already achieved.

- Cumulatively, the list of serious adverse reactions related to HPV vaccination worldwide includes deaths, convulsions, paraesthesia, paralysis, Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), transverse myelitis, facial palsy, chronic fatigue syndrome, anaphylaxis, autoimmune disorders, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolisms, and cervical cancers.

- Because the HPV vaccination programme has global coverage, the long-term health of many women may be at risk against still unknown vaccine benefits.

- Physicians should adopt a more rigorous evidence-based medicine approach, in order to provide a balanced and objective evaluation of vaccine risks and benefits to their patients.

- The almost exclusive reliance on manufacturers’ sponsored studies, often of questionable quality, as a basis for vaccine policy-making should be discontinued.

- Greater efforts should be made to minimize the undue commercial influences on academic institutions and medical research, as this influence may impede unbiased scientific inquiry into important questions about vaccine science and policies.

- Passive adverse event surveillance should be replaced by active surveillance to better understand the true risks associated with vaccines, particularly new vaccines.

The abstract of Tomljenovic and Shaw’s paper, Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine policy and evidence-based medicine: Are they at odds? is posted on the SANE Vax Inc. web site. The entire paper can be accessed via this link on or after January 12. Share the 12-page paper with your medical practitioner, school nurses, and boards of education considering enforcing state legislation, and parents or guardians considering HPV vaccination for their child. Should you have difficulty accessing the entire paper you may contact the corresponding author via email at .

The entire paper can be accessed via this link on or after January 12. Share the 12-page paper with your medical practitioner, school nurses, and boards of education considering enforcing state legislation, and parents or guardians considering HPV vaccination for their child.

Medical consumers need to demand the healthcare industry stop focusing on ‘drug policies’ and direct efforts toward uncovering science-based evidence to identify those actually at risk for the disease. As Tomljenovic and Shaw readily point in their dissertation on the HPV vaccine, the risk of cervical cancer is relatively small to justify a mandatory mass vaccination program with vaccines of questionable safety.

SaneVax Inc. views the presentation of partial and/or non-factual information regarding cervical cancer risks and the usefulness of HPV vaccines, as cited above, to be neither scientific nor ethical. These practices do not serve public health interests, nor are they likely to reduce the levels of cervical cancer. Independent evaluation of HPV vaccine safety is urgently needed and should be a priority for government-sponsored research programs.

Sources:

1.Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine policy and evidence-based medicine: Are they at odds? Annals of Medicine.
http://www.unboundmedicine.com/medline/ebm/record/22188159/full_citation/Human_papillomavirus__HPV__vaccine_policy_and_evidence_based_medicine:_Are_they_at_odds

2. Maplight California -AB 499 – An Act to Amend Section 6926 of the Family Code, Relating to Minors
http://maplight.org/california/bill/2011-ab-499/1007609/total-contributions

Story by Norma Erickson and Leslie Carol Botha of SANEVAX, INC. Original article as it appeared on NaturalNews.com

Medical Experiments Moving to Middle East

PRNewswire
August 17, 2011

DUBAI — Global pharmaceutical companies are currently seeking emerging markets to conduct clinical trials due to the increase in drug development costs and the demand to advance drugs faster.

The Middle East is forecasted to be one of the fastest growing markets for clinical research outsourcing based on availability of the required infrastructure, access to necessary patients, faster timelines and lower costs compared to other markets.

Clinical Trials Partnership Middle East Summit will assemble all stakeholders from leading research sites, clinical research organisations, regulators, government organisations and pharmaceutical companies to provide strategies and knowledge on critical issues such as regulatory compliance, optimising clinical trials, overcoming clinical trials challenges and identifying business opportunities in the Middle East region.

Taking place between 28th & 30th November 2011 in Dubai, this three day summit is a must for all executives, senior level directors or directors from the pharmaceutical, biotech, clinical research organisations and clinical investigators who are looking to discuss the advances of the regions clinical trials market.

Clinical Trails Partnership Middle East Summit kicks off with an essential interactive workshop on day one, looking at a comprehensive overview of ‘Good Clinical Practice’ in relation to the regional and international guidelines for conducting clinical trials.

The next two days are packed full of exciting and innovative discussions, crucial networking opportunities and exciting round table discussions where delegates will be able to share their views and knowledge on subjects such as ‘Improving the quality of clinical trials by using standardised performance metrics’.

Event Director for Clinical Trails Partnership Middle East Summit, DoaaSaid, described the conference as’A vital event for the increasing success and on-going improvement and competitiveness of the regions clinical trials market.’ Delegates in the field will come away from the summit with all the tools needed to better their practices, making them more competitive and efficient. They will also have the chance to make vital relationships and connections in the scheduled networking periods.

Placebo Fraud Shakes Modern Medical Science

NaturalNews.com

You know all those thousands of clinical trials conducted over the last few decades comparing pharmaceuticals to placebo pills? Well, it turns out all those studies must now be completely thrown out as utterly non-scientific. And why? Because the placebos used in the studies weren’t really placebos at all, rendering the studies scientifically invalid.

This is the conclusion from researchers at the University of California who published their findings in the October issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine. They reviewed 167 placebo-controlled trials published in peer-reviewed medical journals in 2008 and 2009 and found that 92 percent of those trials never even described the ingredients of their placebo pills.

Why is this important? Because placebo pills are supposed to be inert. But nothing is inert, it turns out. Even so-called “sugar pills” contain sugar, obviously. And sugar isn’t inert. If you’re running a clinical trial on diabetics, testing the effectiveness of a diabetes drug versus a placebo then obviously your clinical trial is going to make the diabetes drug look better than placebo if you use sugar pills as your placebo.

Some placebo pills use olive oil which may actually improve heart health. Other placebo pills use partially-hydrogenated oils which harm heart health. Yet only 8 percent of clinical trials bothered to list the placebo ingredients at all!

Stay with me on this placebo issue… because it gets even more bizarre…

There are no FDA rules regarding placebos in clinical trials

It turns out there are absolutely no FDA rules regarding the choice or composition of placebos used in clinical trials. Technically, a clinical trial director could use eye of newt or lizard’s legs as placebo and would not even be required to mention such nefarious details in the trial results. That would cause trouble, trouble, boil and bubble! (Shakespeare reference for all you literary fans…)

We already know that clinical trials are rife with fraud. Most of the clinical trials used by pharmaceutical companies to win FDA approval of their drugs, for example, are funded by pharmaceutical companies. And it is a verifiable fact that most clinical trials tend to find results that favor the financial interests of whatever organization paid for them. So what’s to stop Big Pharma from scheming up the perfect placebo that would harm patients just enough to make their own drugs look good by comparison?

Fact: Placebos are usually provided by the very same company funding the clinical trial! Do you detect any room for fraud in this equation?

How drug companies can fake clinical trials with selected placebo pills

Placebo performance strongly influences whether drugs are approved by the FDA, by the way. As the key piece of information on its regulatory approval decisions, the FDA wants to know whether a drug works better than placebo. That’s the primary requirement! If they work even 5% better than placebo, they are said to be “efficacious” (meaning they “work”). This is true even if the placebo was selected and used specifically to make the drug look good by comparison.

You see, if there are no regulations or rules regarding placebo, then none of the placebo-controlled clinical trials are scientifically valid.

It’s amazing how medical scientists will get rough and tough when attacking homeopathy, touting how their own medicine is “based on the gold standard of scientific evidence!” and yet when it really comes down to it, their scientific evidence is just a jug of quackery mixed with a pinch of wishful thinking and a wisp of pseudoscientific gobbledygook, all framed in the language of scientism by members of the FDA who wouldn’t recognize real science if they tripped and fell into a vat full of it.

Big Pharma and the FDA have based their entire system of scientific evidence on a placebo fraud! And if the placebo isn’t a placebo, then the scientific evidence isn’t scientific.

Oh, but wait. They’ll call it science because they wish the placebo to be a placebo. Yep — the clinical researchers are now psychics, mediums and fortune tellers who simply decree that little pill of olive oil to “be a placebo!” while waving their hands over it in a gesture borrowed from David Copperfield.

James Randi may have never seen a psychic transmute lead into gold, but he’s no doubt seen doctors transmute biochemically active substances into totally inert materials merely by wishing them so! It’s so amazing!

And this brings me to the really interesting “how-to” part of this article…

How to make your own placebo just like clinical researchers do

Are you wondering how to make your own FDA-approved, scientifically validated placebo? It’s easier than you think.

Step 1 – Find something shaped like a pill. It could be a pill full of olive oil, white sugar, palm oil, fluoridated water, chalk dust, synthetic chemicals or just about anything you can imagine.

Step 2 – Close your eyes and get ready to concentrate.

Step 3 – This is the important part – Repeat out loud five times while turning counter-clockwise, “I am a scientific researcher practicing evidence-based medicine!” You must say this until you really, truly believe it. If you don’t believe it strongly enough, the placebo effect will be ruined.

Step 4 – Thrust your palm in the direction of the placebo pills and shout, at the top of your voice, “You are now placebo!” You may feel a shiver of energy coursing through your body. That’s the power of placebo reaching out to the pills.

The process is now complete. You may now use these placebo pills in any clinical trial and expect full approval of such use by your colleagues, famous medical journals and FDA regulators. (This is not a joke. This is the state of the art today in conventional medicine.)

Hope also has a huge role to place in all this. The more you hope your placebos are really placebos, the better results you’ll get. In fact, in reporting on this whole fiasco, the lead researcher of the study uncovering all this, Dr Beatric Golomb, said, “We can only hope that this hasn’t seriously systematically affected medical treatment.”

But of course it has. (And by the way, no disrespect toward Dr Golomb. She deserves kudos for being willing to tackle this subject which will no doubt make her very unpopular among the cult of Scientism as practiced by conventional medical researchers today.)

How to improve your clinical trial results

For improved results, try to use the most harmful placebo substances you can. For example, in real clinical trials involving AIDS patients — who tend to be lactose intolerant — researchers have used pills made of, guess what? Lactose!

That’s sort of like running a clinical trial on a cure for heroin addiction and using heroin as the placebo, isn’t it? Gee, somehow our drug worked “better than placebo.” Funny how that works, isn’t it?

And if you still don’t get the results you want, just start inventing your own data like other clinical trial researchers do. Remember Dr Scott Reuben? This highly-respected clinical trial researcher faked at least twenty-one clinical trials for Big Pharma (http://www.naturalnews.com/028194_S…). His fraudulent clinical trials are still being cited to sell prescription medications!

Heck, who needs placebo when you can just invent the data?

Come to think of it, who needs science when you can just use anything you want and call it placebo in the first place?

Conventional medicine operates clinical trials in the same way that banks and securities firms handle mortgage documents. They all just sort of make things up as they go along, committing felony crimes on a daily basis while hoping nobody notices. On that note, check out this amazing story by Greg Hunter called The Perfect No-Prosecution Crime (http://usawatchdog.com/the-perfect-…).

Where on the skeptics when it comes to Big Pharma science fraud?

Seriously, you just gotta love the state of medical science today. I’ve never watched a more hilarious group of nincompoops reassure each other that they’re all so scientific while practicing the most quack-ridden chicanery imaginable. The stuff being pulled off today in the name of Big Pharma’s clinical trials makes psychic detectives and tarot card readers look downright scientifically gifted by comparison.

It really makes you wonder about so-called “skeptics,” doesn’t it? If they’re skeptical of homeopathy, tarot cards, psychic mediums and people who claim they can levitate, I can at least understand the urge to ask tough questions about all these things. I ask tough questions, too, especially when people tell me they’ve seen ghosts or spirits coming back from the dead or other unexplained phenomena. (And I’ve already publicly denounced so-called “psychic surgery” which it quite obviously little more than sleight-of-hand trickery combined with animal blood.)

But most conventional skeptics never step out of bounds of their “safety zone” of popular topics for which skepticism may be safely expressed. They won’t dare ask skeptical questions about the quack science backing the pharmaceutical industry, for example. Nor will they ask tough questions about vaccines, or mammography, or chemotherapy. And you’d be hard pressed to find anything more steeped in outright fraudulent quackery than the pharmaceutical industry as operated today (and the cancer branch of it in particular).

That’s why I’m skeptical about the skeptics. If a skeptic doesn’t question the loosey goosey pseudoscience practiced by Big Pharma, then they really have no credibility as a skeptic. You can’t be selectively skeptical about some things but then a fall-for-anything fool on other scams just because they’re backed by drug companies.

But getting back to this study in particular…

Abstract of the study

Here’s some of the text from the abstract of this study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine (http://www.annals.org/content/153/8…)

What’s in Placebos: Who Knows? Analysis of Randomized, Controlled Trials

1. Beatrice A. Golomb, MD, PhD;
2. Laura C. Erickson, BS;
3. Sabrina Koperski, BS;
4. Deanna Sack, BS;
5. Murray Enkin, MD; and
6. Jeremy Howick, PhD

Background: No regulations govern placebo composition. The composition of placebos can influence trial outcomes and merits reporting.

Purpose: To assess how often investigators specify the composition of placebos in randomized, placebo-controlled trials.

Data Sources: 4 English-language general and internal medicine journals with high impact factors.

Study Selection: 3 reviewers screened titles and abstracts of the journals to identify randomized, placebo-controlled trials published from January 2008 to December 2009.

Data Extraction: Reviewers independently abstracted data from the introduction and methods sections of identified articles, recording treatment type (pill, injection, or other) and whether placebo composition was stated. Discrepancies were resolved by consensus.

Data Synthesis: Most studies did not disclose the composition of the study placebo. Disclosure was less common for pills than for injections and other treatments (8.2% vs. 26.7%; P = 0.002).

Limitation: Journals with high impact factors may not be representative.

Conclusion: Placebos were seldom described in randomized, controlled trials of pills or capsules. Because the nature of the placebo can influence trial outcomes, placebo formulation should be disclosed in reports of placebo-controlled trials.

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