February 24, 2010
I have one word for
Sen. McCain — Avandia
Last week, I told you about the draconian legislation proposed by Senator McCain. If his bill passes Congress, it would give the FDA virtual totalitarian powers over nutritional supplements. Now consider that the FDA does have totalitarian powers over drugs. And rightly so. They injure and kill hundreds of thousands of people each year. So you need to know what the FDA is doing with its drug totalitarian powers versus its history with non-drugs.
We already know how the FDA handled the Vioxx scandal. It encouraged the drug company to put Vioxx back on the market after the company admitted it caused heart attacks.
Well, the FDA has done it again. This time, the horrific drug scandal surrounds Avandia — the diabetes drug. In this case, the FDA failed to warn people about the drug. It took a Senate committee to make public the fact that people were dying needlessly at the hands of Big Pharma. According to the Senate committee announcement, Avandia's maker, GlaxoSmithKline concealed documented risks of heart attacks linked to the diabetes drug.
In 2006, Avandia sales reached 3.2 Billion! But the Senate report is startling. It reveals that the drug maker deliberately concealed for years the fact that Avandia causes a huge increased risk for fatal heart attacks! The report concluded that the company didn't issue a warning, which is a drug manufacturer's duty. Instead, "GlaxoSmithKline executives attempted to intimidate independent physicians, focused on strategies to minimize or misrepresent findings that Avandia may increase cardiovascular risk, and sought ways to downplay findings that a competing drug might reduce cardiovascular risk."
Continued Below...
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But it gets even worse. Several years ago, expert FDA safety officers concluded that the drug "should be removed from the market."
Why? It was clear that 500 heart attacks and 300 cases of heart failure would be averted each year if patients took a competing drug.
GlaxoSmithKline knew about Avandia's risk as early as November 2003. Just look at what GlaxoSmithKline found in its own study. The author said, "diabetics taking Avandia had far more heart problems than those given placebos." (Emphasis added.)
European regulators were so concerned that they ordered GlaxoSmithKline to perform additional safety studies. The study showed harm, and a rise of serious heart problems by nearly one-third. Yet, the FDA dragged its heels rather than pull the drug or issue warnings.
That's not even the worst part of the story. In 2007, the New England Journal of Medicine published a warning of the cardiovascular risk for patients taking Avandia. Then several countries - including Canada, the European Union, and Australia - issued warnings that patients with acute coronary syndrome should NOT take Avandia.
Obviously, the FDA failed to protect the American public from this drug and its manufacturer.
I could go on and on about the FDA and its obviously evil overt partnership with Big Pharma. It literally looks the other way while drugs kill people. I remind you that there is not one disease I know of that is caused by a deficiency of a synthetic FDA-approved petrochemical.
If you have diabetes and are taking Avandia, see an integrative physician immediately to take you off of the drug safely. And use the treatments I advise on my website to effectively reverse the disease without drugs.
What else can you do? This is an election year where incumbents are reeling from a populist uprising against big government. Demand from your candidates written statements on the protection of non-drug medicine. Demand they rein in the FDA and other agencies that foster, promote, and permit toxic drugs. Deluge your elected officials to dump McCain's horrific bill, S. 3002, which will place your access to vitamins at the total ruthless mercy of the Pharma-owned FDA.
Finally, if you are in Arizona, do everything you can to unseat Senator McCain. In surrendering your supplements to the agency turning a blind eye to Pharma killers, McCain does not deserve to be your representative. The same for those of you in North Dakota, the home state of Senator Dorgan. He is co-sponsoring McCain's bill.
Yours for better health and medical freedom,
PS. If you live in or near California, and are interested in the type of meeting I attend, you might really want to consider this very enlightening conference: http://www.ohmsociety.com/. I'm planning to attend. There will be exhibitors of natural healing products. The information is outstanding. Meetings like this are where I get many of my ideas and formulate them for Second Opinion readers, who will read it a few months down the road. The meeting is this weekend, so don't wait to sign up.
http://www.ahrp.orgÿ
New York Times 2-19-10
http://finance.senate.gov/press/Gpress/2010/prg022010b.pdf.
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00879970?term=nct00879970&rank=1