May 21 Wash DC: Next week, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) will host the 2010 Whistleblower Assembly in Washington DC. According to their latest release, the event is co-sponsored by Semmelweis Society International (SSI) – this despite receiving proof that their alleged connection to SSI is a pharmaceutically-funded fraud. Continue reading ‘Corruption Threatens DC Whistleblowers’

SSI recently received this email from someone who identified himself as a physician and wants to refer SPR victims to Semmelweis:

Please post this to everyone involved in this running feud. I used SSI when I was having my career ruined. Now I don’t know where to send fellow health care providers to when they are getting their lives ruined in a sham peer review. All the clinics and hospitals will use your fued (SIC) against you in court and discerdit (SIC) SSI. Shame on all of you for what you are doing. Both sides of this SSI fued (SIC).

Dear Doctor:

SSI believes that your question is important. As requested, we have posted your email and this response on our website.

If you are mugged and you defend yourself, the casual observer might conclude that you and your mugger are equally and shamefully immoral. Reasonable people know, however, that your morality is not based upon the pedestrian’s casual observations. By raising the specter of shame, you are either profoundly misinformed or are practicing the intellectually lazy doctrine of Relativism. If either is the case, I encourage you to join Dr. Murtagh’s cohorts.

If you read my preliminary investigation and my ongoing investigation you’ll see that “the dispute” began in May 2008 when ex-SSI members James Murtagh and Kevin Kuritzky issued outrageous allegations against UC Professor Peter Duesberg and investigative journalist Celia Farber, with the intent to compel the SSI Board to summarily rescind their 2008 awards without review.

Their complaint called for a competent independent investigation because, if false, their libelous allegations could have professionally harmed both (per se libel) and would have unnecessarily subjected Semmelweis and its Board to unnecessary liability.

As a retired member of the LAPD and licensed investigator who had not heard of the issues, disputants or SSI before 2008, no one was better suited to examine the charges. As soon as I began my investigation however, Murtagh’s camp tried to pressure me into stopping it – going as far as criminal attacks and witness intimidation.

My continuing investigation eventually developed sufficient evidence for this New York Supreme Court lawsuit against and Murtagh and Kuritzky, who are still hiding from process servers. Their co-defendant receives, directly and indirectly, millions of dollars in funding from pharmaceutical and mining companies (and their investors) that avoid billions of dollars in liability by blaming their impoverished black African miners’ silicosis, asbestosis and tuberculosis on “irresponsible sex” (e.g. AIDS). Murtagh, his co-defendants, hedge fund operators, pharmaceutical companies, international mining companies and the UN promote the scam as a “human rights” issue in order to sack Africa’s rich mineral wealth while attacking individuals like Farber and Duesberg who question the arrangement.  Without AIDS, thousands of international mining operations in Africa would close – as they almost did in 1995.

So outrageous were Murtagh’s charges that even his collaborators recently distanced themselves – calling him morally repugnant.

If Murtagh’s allegations against Farber and Duesberg were true, he would enthusiastically respond to the civil charges against him - just as SSI did after Ralph Bard filed his frivolous lawsuit against SSI last December. Because of our fact-based response, Bard’s own neighborhood court will soon dismiss his complaints.

So as you can see, the two sides consist of 1) the current board and membership, and 2) “Murtagh’s camp” which libelously tried to rescind the 2008 awards to Duesberg and Farber without evidence – in what anathematically resembles “sham peer review.”

If you read my bio and investigation you’ll see that I have better things to do than keep the peace between SSI and a tiny group of socially dysfunctional ex-doctors.  But as a victim of retaliation myself, I never targeted others for personal gain. Murtagh’s camp demonstrates that not all peer review are shams: Their behavior only serves to corroborate whatever allegations were once made against them.

My year-long examination concludes that SSI, its membership, mission and goals are too important to turn over to alleged men who attacked SSI on behalf of individuals like Murtagh and Kuritzky.

What also appears to animate Murtagh’s camp is SSI’s refusal to advertise legal services by ex-doctors. The SSI Board stopped this practice last year when they sensed that SSI’s former ex-doctor-lawyer board members were exploited SSI’s website, name and members for personal gain.

Since those lawyers were removed from Board influence last year, SSI has assisted more than a dozen physicians and nurses with free legal consultation and affirmative defense that has saved their careers at a minimum cost.

Because of the complications of HCQIA and peer review, SSI no longer promotes the use of career doctors who become lawyers for the same reason that we would not encourage surgery by a career lawyer who becomes a surgeon. When it comes to peer review cases, experience matters.

If you’re still confused about what you’ve called our shameful dispute, SSI probably isn’t for you. Our mission and goals are too important to waste time with Murtagh cohorts or those who are easily confused by them: Nor do we waste much time thinking about them. Like other benign pathologies, they will eventually slough off or find softer targets.

As a former US Marine and LA cop, I am proud that the SSI Board stood strong in the face of Murtagh and his enablers. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis knew that courage often exacts a terrible price.  Of courage, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression that the loss of courage extends to the entire society.

SSI membership is not for the morally confused or ambivalent. While it takes courage and endurance to fight corrupt multi-billion dollar healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, it would take comparatively little effort to accept the material benefits that would come by surrendering to them in the name of patient safety and Semmelweis.

As long as there are some healthcare professionals who take their Hippocratic Oath seriously, I am proud to remain in that fight.

Clark Baker
Secretary/Treasurer
Semmelweis Society International

Until last year, I was a strong supporter of the pharmaceutical industry. When Merck was sued (Vioxx), I blamed the lawyers for filing frivolous lawsuits against drug makers who, I then believed, were the innovative champions in Humanity’s fight against disease.

I dismissed stories about “big pharma” as fast as I heard them. The notion that scientists would deliberately poison patients for profit, or that the US Government would fund medical doctors like Robert Gallo after he violated his Hippocratic Oath was preposterous. As much as I like Ralph Fiennes, I refused to see a movie as unbelievable as The Constant Gardener.

So when the physicians and nurses at Semmelweis Society International (SSI) asked me to investigate allegations that UC Professor Peter Duesberg had killed millions in Africa, I expected to complete my task within days. With almost thirty years of investigative experience, I figured that a few Google searches would resolve the questions, one way or the other.

Little did I know that the allegations issued by James Murtagh MD, Kevin Kuritzky, and Richard Jefferys would consume thousands of hours of my time or expose me to the ugly underbelly of the pharmaceutical industry and its chicken-ranch relationship with America’s most prestigious universities.

While the evidence I discovered now suggests that millions may have been poisoned and murdered, I’ve found that Dr. Duesberg more closely resembles Moshe the Beadle than his pharmaceutically-funded accusers – who now appear to have far more in common with Phillip Morris than Louis Pasteur.

Since the release of my preliminary report (PDF) in July 2008, filmmaker Brent Leung completed his documentary and investigative reporter Celia Farber, who was also targeted, has filed suit against her accusers in the New York Supreme Court.

My report established the two sides of the dispute:

• One side, (commonly referred to as truthers, goons, and troofers) is comprised of the beneficiaries of millions of dollars in pharmaceutical funding. Truthers insist that HIV attacks cells and causes AIDS.
• The other side, (called rethinkers, denialists, and skeptics) question whether anyone has ever proved that HIV attacks cells and causes AIDS. These individuals rely mostly on private donations and represent a tiny fraction of what truthers receive from the pharmaceutical industry.

After examining both sides, the evidence now indicates that:

1. All HIV/AIDS research is based upon Dr. Gallo’s unproven assumption that HIV attacks cells and causes AIDS;
2. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) spends $206,906 per AIDS death (compared to $13,365 per Diabetes death, $12,000 per prostate disease, $9,000 for Parkinson’s disease and $9,000 for Alzheimer’s disease), even though AIDS has never been a leading cause of death in the United States or Africa;
3. Except for rare individuals like US Senator Charles Grassley and Rep. John Dingell, the US Congress, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) appear to share many of the same organizational flaws that the SEC, FBI, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Treasury exhibited before the 2008 financial.

New Evidence

Although the toxic effects of HIV treatments are well documented, I was still confused by HIV+ patients who reported that, after years of treatment, many became ill within two weeks of discontinuing their medication. If HIV didn’t kill cells or cause AIDS, why were patients getting sick when they interrupted their drug regimen?

Although patients like Karri Stokely attributed her four-month post-drug illness to “the shock of no longer being on toxic drugs,” I didn’t accept it. Toxins don’t ordinarily make someone sicker when stopped – addictive drugs do that. If someone takes regular doses of arsenic for six months, there is no evidence that their sudden abstinence would cause anything but a recovery. Conversely, addicts (and those who know them) understand the distress that comes with abstinence from coffee, tobacco, and harder drugs like alcohol, cannabis, opiates, meth or cocaine. The degree of withdrawal depends upon factors that include the addict’s health, dosage, resistance, the intoxicant, and how the drugs are metabolized.

But while post-HIV drug symptoms sounded suspiciously like addiction withdrawal, I found little more than a mild warning (404) of the “potential for additive central nervous system effects when SUSTIVA is used concomitantly with alcohol or psychoactive drugs.” Nothing alluded to intoxicating properties of the drug itself.

When I met Karri Stokely last week, she explained her medical history, her two-month recovery from a post-operative infection, and various tests that eventually led to her HIV+ diagnosis in June 1996 when she began her treatment. (more)

Karri reported that she was initially prescribed Combivir and Crixivan until 2001, when her doctor detected signs of liver damage and switched from Crixivan to Sustiva. After that, Karri took Combivir and Sustiva as prescribed until April 2007, when she discovered Dr. Duesberg’s questions about AIDS research. After studying the information on Rethinking AIDS and Virus Myth, she abruptly stopped her medication.

At first, Karri detected no adverse symptoms. During the second week, however, she noticed increasing symptoms of fatigue, exhaustion, depression, insomnia, body aches, and a significant loss of appetite. During the next month, she developed an extreme sensitivity to pain when touched, even when lying in bed or eating. Visits to the toilet and tub were difficult and, as the weeks passed, her weight dropped from her normal 135 to 114 (she’s 5-8). Karri also experienced night sweats and often noticed a thin green/yellow coating on her tongue. Most notably, her throat was sore and she possessed an almost continuous and unquenchable thirst.

“I felt as if my system was shutting down,” she said.

Karri’s decline continued from April through August 2007, when her symptoms began to subside. She returned to her clinic for another blood test in August and, when the lab results returned a week later, the nurse called Karri in a panic: “Your lab tests are way off! You didn’t stop taking your drugs, did you?”

The nurse became more alarmed when Karri admitted that she’d been off the drugs for four months.

Nurse Nancy asked, “Why would you do such a thing? Do you know what happened to your lab work?

“No.”

“Do you even want to know what your lab work says?”

“Yes.”

“Your T-Cell count dropped to 97 (from 200s) and viral load to 135,000! Are you coming in?”

A week later, Dr. Van Hook crossed his arms and scowled at Karri. “Why would you do this?”

Karri asked him, “Did you know there is another view of HIV, that it might not cause AIDS?”

“No,” said the doctor.

“Do you want to know?”

“No, Karri, I don’t want to know. You’ve done a very stupid thing and you will be dead very soon.”

Karri Stokely didn’t die and, during the next two years, her symptoms disappeared entirely.

After listening to Karri’s story and comparing notes with other reports, I noted similarities between Karri’s symptoms and known withdrawal syndromes, including those of antidepressants. I also found reports that HIV drugs were being crushed and smoked by addicts in Africa:

The children do not know where they are and they stop making sense.

The research, production, and distribution of this class of drugs is not without controversy. Japanese researchers recently reported antidepressant (SSRI) users “who developed increased feelings of hostility or anxiety, and have even committed sudden acts of violence against others.” (Other SSRI stories indexed here.) Texas psychiatrist Karen Wagner MD was recently exposed for failing to disclose a $160,000 payment from GlaxoSmithKline while understating the dangers of Paxil for children.

Many of these known SSRI withdrawal reactions are consistent with Karri’s post-Sustiva experience.

As for Nurse Nancy’s report of Karri’s erratic T-Cell counts and viral loads, numerous clinical studies show a direct connection between the stress of withdrawal (cocaine and heroin) and decreases in immune function for up to two years. Those reports show a direct correlation between addiction, withdrawal, and the human immune system (white blood cells, T-cells, and viral loads) regardless of whether HIV is present or not. But because AIDS experts and testing rely on T-cells and viral loads to establish HIV infection, it’s hard to understand how the experts know the difference between HIV infections and physiological changes due to illicit drug use. This would also explain why active and former drug addicts are frequently identified as HIV carriers.

The revelation that Sustiva is not reported to be an extremely addictive psychotropic drug is disturbing. After speaking with patients like Karri who interrupted their prescriptions, it now appears that abstinence from so-called “ARVs” like Sustiva results not in an increased risk of AIDS but, instead, precipitates the onset of a painful and violent withdrawal syndrome not dissimilar to withdrawal from cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and alcohol. Unfortunately for patients like Karri, AIDS clinicians typically mischaracterize the withdrawal syndrome as a manifestation of AIDS that will soon kill them. Unless given further information, care, and nurturing, most patients are physically and emotionally unprepared to contradict their white-coated physicians. Once the drug is re-administered, however, the “AIDS symptoms” disappear in ways not unlike junkies who inject a long-awaited dose of heroin.

Conclusion

It is not known how many AIDS medications are addictive or why; nor have I established whether the pharmaceutical industry unintentionally or deliberately marketed addictive drugs for the purpose of misleading otherwise uninfected individuals. But if a retired cop can identify Sustiva’s addictive properties, it’s hard to understand how the GlaxoSmithKline’s PhDs could have missed so much evidence.

Intentional or not, by marketing this class of drugs (MAOIs and SSRIs) as “AIDS medications,” the pharmaceutical industry has built into its HIV cocktails a mechanism that punishes HIV patients when they interrupt their drug use.

Karri’s cocktail contained two drugs – a deadly poison (AZT) that kills and a highly addictive drug that makes patients feel cheerful, more optimistic, and more physically active.

At $419/mo, a patient (or taxpayers) would pay $5,028 a year for Sustiva alone. Multiplied by the alleged HIV+ US population of 1,185,000, receipts could total $6 billion/year. Multiplied by the estimated global HIV+ population, GlaxoSmithKline could generate $100 billion in sales and tax deductions annually.

Despite these facts, no one can seriously believe that a pharmaceutical company would deliberately poison and addict millions of homosexuals, drug users, and illiterate Africans for $100 billion dollars a year. No, that’s out of the question. Of course they wouldn’t.

But if the pharmaceutical industry knows that Sustiva and/or other HIV drugs are addictive, it would also explain the hysterical attacks by so-called AIDS researchers who, instead of delivering proof that HIV attacks cells and causes AIDS, attack individuals like Karri Stokely who have the temerity to ignore the results of HIV tests that prove nothing.

While the Harrison Act of 1914 prohibits the distribution of addictive drugs to perpetuate addiction, the evidence suggests that GlaxoSmithKline has circumvented the spirit of this law by delivering intoxicants, other than opiates and coca, to millions by classifying them as HIV treatments.

Karri Stokely is one of many former HIV patients who have kicked the habit and now live a happy, healthy and drug-free life. I look forward to the day when politicians jump start the agencies that are supposed to be looking out for the most vulnerable in the US, Europe, and Africa.

Smoking the pills has a hallucinogenic and relaxing effect.

The New York Post reports that investigative reporter Celia Farber has filed suit this week against Atlanta physician James Murtagh MD, former medical student Kevin Kuritzky, and Richard Jefferys for libel and defamation:

The Harpers article gave credence to the work of Peter Duesberg, who believes HIV is a harmless “passenger” virus and not the cause of AIDS, and questioned the value of expensive antiretroviral drugs. Jefferys and his team blitzed the Semmelweis Society with e-mails claiming Farber had altered quotes and falsely misrepresented scientific papers.

The Semmelweis Society, in turn, launched its own investigation and concluded the AIDS industry itself has all the characteristics of a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise that desperately needed whistleblowers.

Filed in the New York Supreme Court, Farber’s lawsuit gives the pharmaceutical industry their first opportunity to prove 20 years of allegations by applying rules of evidence before a real jury – a significant departure from their preferred methods that have relied on rhetorical blogs and highly paid pharmaceutical activists.

When Farber began reporting on HIV and AIDs in 1989, she was attacked in much the same way that the tobacco industry attacked Jeffrey Wigand PhD for disclosing its own corporate secrets.

With annual sales estimated between $500 billion and $1 trillion annually the pharmaceutical industry funds, directly and indirectly, an army of salesmen and attackers who target individuals they view as threats. In this email, Cornell researcher John P. Moore PhD warned:

This IS a war, there ARE no rules, and we WILL crush you, one at a time, completely and utterly (at least the more influential ones; foot-soldiers like you aren’t worth bothering with).

In a recent email to House of Numbers filmmaker Brent Leung, Moore promised to destroy Leung’s career just as he had destroyed Celia Farber.

Corruption is rampant throughout the pharmaceutical industry. Recently, Texas psychiatrist Karen Wagner was accused of disclosing $600 of the $160,000 she received from GlaxoSmithKline while ghostwriting a pediatric study that “helped the company promote the myth that Paxil was ‘safe and effective’ for use in children…” At the same time, “internal Glaxo emails show the data from pediatric Paxil trials were negative.”

Of 93 adolescents taking Paxil in the study, six had a suicide event (five attempted suicide), whereas one of the 89 adolescents on placebo had a suicide event. The suicide risk ratio for adolescents exposed to Paxil in the study was six times greater than those on placebo.

In Gallo’s Egg and later reports, Clark Baker described how the alleged co-discoverer of HIV, Robert Gallo, had failed to blame retroviruses for human leukemia (1975) and T-cell leukemia (1980) before blaming the alleged leukemia virus HTLV-1 on AIDS (1983-1984). When his research assistant found no connection between the alleged retrovirus and AIDS, Dr. Gallo scribbled over the report and published these in Science, (1, 2, 3, 4), completely circumventing the scientific peer review process. By the time Gallo’s scientific misconduct was confirmed in 1993, billions of tax dollars had been redirected from legitimate diseases to fight Dr. Gallo’s unproven virus.

When in this 2005 report, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) identified 1) heart disease, 2) stroke, 3) cancer, 4) chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, 5) accidents, and 6) diabetes as the leading causes of death in the United States from 1970-2002, HIV and AIDS were not even mentioned.

According to the Fair Foundation, the NIH spends $206,906 per AIDS death in this country, while it spends only $13,365 per Diabetes death, $12,000 per prostate disease, $9,000 for Parkinson’s disease and $9,000 for Alzheimer’s disease.

If Miss Farber was the dangerous reporter the defendants made her out to be, one wonders why the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t brought their complaints to court before, and why operatives like Seth Kalichman are now recoiling like vampires at dawn. Kalichman’s employer relies on millions of dollars to study South Africa’s virtually non-existent HIV mortality. (The South African Government removed the original link shortly after the US Congress sent another $50 billion to Africa – more here).

To be fair, Kalichman’s attacks against Farber are completely understandable. Having arrested thousands of felons during my career in law enforcement I understand, as well as Bernie Madoff, the awkwardness of being caught promoting a fraud. Like the tobacco operatives who badgered, threatened, and ridiculed Jeffrey Wigand PhD, the pharmaceutical industry has never had a problem finding people like Seth Kalichman, Murtagh, Kuritzky, Moore, or Jefferys to attack corporate threats like Farber, Peter Duesberg, and anyone else who threatens their arrangement.

Like the HIV/AIDS scandal, Bernie Madoff succeeded not because he was a masterful fraudster, but because the SEC and FBI failed to respond to repeated credible allegations that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.

For decades, the tobacco industry deliberately misled millions of people around the world because politicians won elections with tobacco money. Like tobacco, Washington politicians are reluctant to challenge the makers of HIV drugs because 1) many rely on pharmaceutical campaign contributions and 2) those who question HIV/AIDS are usually accused of being anti-gay.

The two most targeted groups for HIV testing and “treatment” (homosexuals and blacks) are also among the most silent. One cannot count the number of full-page glossy HIV testing and treatment ads in America’s leading gay publicans without appreciating how the gay movement is funded in America.

Despite the tragic death of Joyce Ann Hafford, the black community is still heavily targeted. Last year, Abbott Labs paid Magic Johnson $60 million to push HIV testing in that community. Apparently no one has noticed that AIDS only kills people who are subjected to HIV testing and treatment. Because of the toxic nature of “black box” HIV drugs, one wonders if Magic Johnson even takes them.

As for Murtagh, Kuritzky, and Jefferys, their only defense is to prove that Celia Farber is the monster they say she is. After two decades of allegations, one would think that they could come up with some verifiable evidence.

Shortly after issuing his report, the SSI Board unanimously appointed Baker to its Board where he still serves. 

Earlier this week, Baker traveled to Visalia CA where he assisted attorneys Jeff Grass, Alan Ullberg, and SSI Vice President Saundra Counce RN, in their successful defense of SSI member Lyle Grittith, MD.

Courthouse News also weighs in.  Developing…