NYU Professor Uncovers How the FDA Systematically Covers Up Fraud and Misconduct in Drug Trials

Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 11.12.14 AM That misconduct happens isn’t shocking. What is: When the FDA finds scientific fraud or misconduct, the agency doesn’t notify the public, the medical establishment, or even the scientific community that the results of a medical experiment are not to be trusted. On the contrary. For more than a decade, the FDA has shown a pattern of burying the details of misconduct. As a result, nobody ever finds out which data is bogus, which experiments are tainted, and which drugs might be on the market under false pretenses. The FDA has repeatedly hidden evidence of scientific fraud not just from the public, but also from its most trusted scientific advisers, even as they were deciding whether or not a new drug should be allowed on the market. Even a congressional panel investigating a case of fraud regarding a dangerous drug couldn’t get forthright answers. For an agency devoted to protecting the public from bogus medical science, the FDA seems to be spending an awful lot of effort protecting the perpetrators of bogus science from the public.

The sworn purpose of the FDA is to protect the public health, to assure us that all the drugs on the market are proven safe and effective by reputable scientific trials. Yet, over and over again, the agency has proven itself willing to keep scientists, doctors, and the public in the dark about incidents when those scientific trials turn out to be less than reputable. It does so not only by passive silence, but by active deception. And despite being called out numerous times over the years for its bad behavior, including from some very pissed-off members of Congress, the agency is stubbornly resistant to change. It’s a sign that the FDA is deeply captured, drawn firmly into the orbit of the pharmaceutical industry that it’s supposed to regulate. We can no longer hope that the situation will get better without firm action from the legislature.

From the Slate article: Are Your Medications Safe? 

In the past week or so, I’ve come across several important articles that will leave any rational observer increasingly skeptical of the entire medial industry in the U.S. This isn’t something I say lightly, and I think it’s an absolutely horrific development for our society.

Just last week, Liberty Blitzkrieg published an article titled, Introducing “Physician Dispensing” – The Latest Troubling Medical Industry Scam, which expounded on why an erosion of trust in doctors is so troubling. If you missed that piece, I suggest going back and reading it. Here’s an excerpt:

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Decoding the NSA: How the Agency Manipulates Language to Mislead the Public

When we as a species use language to communicate and engage with one another, we have a certain understanding that certain words mean certain things. That is the entire purpose of language, effective communication between human beings that can be easily understood. As a result, we should be able to assume that when government bureaucrats utilize words that are commonplace within society, that these words represent specific commonly understood meanings. That would be a huge mistake.

Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman of the ACLU have compiled an excellent list of some commonplace words used by the NSA to mislead us into thinking they aren’t doing the bad things that they are actually doing. Words such as “surveillance,” “collect,” and “relevant.” From Slate:

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has been harshly criticized for having misled Congress earlier this year about the scope of the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities. The criticism is entirely justified. An equally insidious threat to the integrity of our national debate, however, comes not from officials’ outright lies but from the language they use to tell the truth. When it comes to discussing government surveillance, U.S. intelligence officials have been using a vocabulary of misdirection—a language that allows them to say one thing while meaning quite another.

Surveillance. Every time we pick up the phone, the NSA makes a note of whom we spoke to, when we spoke to him, and for how long—and it’s been doing this for seven years. After the call-tracking program was exposed, few people thought twice about attaching the label “surveillance” to it. Government officials, though, have rejected the term, pointing out that this particular program doesn’t involve the NSA actually listening to phone calls—just keeping track of them. Their crabbed definition of “surveillance” allows them to claim that the NSA isn’t engaged in surveillance even when it quite plainly is.

Collect. If an intelligence official says that the NSA isn’t “collecting” a certain kind of information, what has he actually said? Not very much, it turns out. One of the NSA’s foundational documents states that “collection” occurs not when the government acquires information but when the government “selects” or “tasks” that information for “subsequent processing.” Thus it becomes possible for the government to acquire great reams of information while denying that it is “collecting” anything at all.

That definition of “collect” is completely and totally insane.

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A Look into the Malware the FBI Uses to Spy Through Webcams

Really interesting article that discusses a case in which a Texas judge decided to block the FBI from installing malware on suspect’s computer that would allow them to take over the machine’s webcam amongst other malicious things.  While it’s good news that the judge blocked its use, the author accurately points out that: “another of Smith’s reasons was that he could not justifiably issue a warrant on a computer that could be outside of that area. A federal judge may have fewer qualms with that issue.”

Indeed, which is why we should all be acutely aware of the kinds of “tools” the FBI has at its disposal against peaceful dissidents, particularly after they identified Occupy Wall Street activists as “terrorists.”  From Wired:

A Texas judge has blocked the FBI from installing malware on a laptop that would have been able to take over its webcam.

This kind of malware is extremely common elsewhere on the web, of course, but that’s the kind of nefarious, underhand tactic you’d expect from scammers, or even just perverts wanting to spy on women undressing. But the FBI is apparently learning from these techniques, and it wants to install similar malware on the computer of an unknown person they suspect of being guilty of fraud so they can track him down.

Smith described the warrant the FBI sought as “not a garden-variety search warrant”. It wouldn’t have just taken control of the laptop’s webcam — it would also have recorded a heap of personal information, including email and other web activity, personal passwords and files and the laptop’s location. It also aimed to gather “accounting entries reflecting the identification of new fraud victims”.

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