Truth, Healthcare, freedom

In the early 1990s, a pharma campaign dramatically rewired how the public understood depression. Here’s how it happened—and why it worked. Before they launched the campaign, pharma did market research on what people believed caused depression, says psychiatrist Dr. @joannamoncrieff , author of “Chemically Imbalanced.” “They asked people: ‘What do you think depression is caused by?’ And one of the options they gave to people is: It's caused by a chemical imbalance or some sort of biological abnormality in the brain,” she told me. They found that the vast majority of people didn't think that depression was caused by an underlying medical condition: “They thought depression was caused by unemployment, divorce, having been abused as a child, adverse life events… and they also thought that treating depression with a drug would just numb someone's emotions, and wasn't a sensible idea, and might lead to people becoming dependent on the drug,” she says. They thus concluded that an elaborate marketing effort was needed. Antidepressant manufacturers funded a “Defeat Depression” campaign that sought to convince people that depression is a medical condition caused by a “chemical imbalance in the brain” and a lack of serotonin that must be treated with anti-depressants. The pharmaceutical industry “very deliberately set out to change people's minds and to persuade people instead that depression is a biological condition and needs a biological remedy, i.e., the drugs that they were promoting,” she says.

Operation Tall has a public face and one which was hidden and it remained hidden for more than 3 years - Here, in less than 2 minutes, you can learn about that hidden face you were never meant to see.

Lara Logan shares a tough moment with her paediatrician post-COVID: Asking about vaccine ingredients, she learned of a "new adjuvant much safer than aluminium ones." Her question: "So the aluminum ones weren't safe?" The doctor's shrug said a lot. Trusting "the science" felt one-sided when answers weren't clear upfront. This 56-sec clip captures the frustration many parents feel when seeking full transparency. Have you ever pushed for more details on your child's care and gotten an unclear response? How did it affect your trust?

House Compressional Hearing on US Health Insurance Companies Rep Greg Murphy, MD says Health Insurance Companies have destroyed the healthcare industry and have made an entire industry around denying care for profit “I have been a physician for 35 years and sadly have had a front seat to witness the decay and decline of one of America's largest industries and that's the health insurance industry. I have had patients cry in my room, have had physicians cry to me, throw up their hands in disgust and quit because of actions of our health insurance industry. Nothing you're going to say to me today is going to change that. You have put profits above patients and you put profits above those who care for patients. You're sitting here blaming hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, even physicians. There is blame to go away, to go around there. But you have squarely abused your privilege of authority” “There has been systematic denial and delay of care. It took me eight denials myself to get a medicine that I need to exist” “There's been a weaponization of prior authorization. You are killing people who are trying to get deliver healthcare. There's been abuse with the Medicare Advantage plans. My God, I could talk about that for hours. Deceiving and extorting taxpayer dollars” “There had been record profits. I don't want to hear about the fact you're not taking profits. We know how money gets moved around in these companies. The C-suite executive salary compensations is a slap in the face to the average American who goes bankrupt because they cannot afford health care.” “You've manipulated medical cost ratios by the way that you pay physicians and the way that you hide money through your PBMs. The vertical integration. You guys own PBMs. You own pharmacies. You own health agencies, physician groups. Good God, you own a bank.” “If I had my way, I'd turn all of you guys into dust. We'd start back from scratch. We'd have competition in the industry. We'd have associated health plans. And we would have nonprofit hospitals rather than profit being put over patients. Sadly enough, I'm not naive enough to believe that anything that's been said today is going to change boardroom behavior. I don't think it will happen. The bottom line is profit”

They lied and children died. “We’re suing the American Academy of Pediatrics for Racketeering and that they’ve been knowingly lying for decades about the safety of the Childhood Vaccine Schedule. Our plaintiffs had children that died immediately after their vaccines…”

Christina Parks I’m forever grateful to Senator Ron Johnson for having these critical hearings and for Dr. David Wiseman for bringing me in to testify. I was also floored that many of you listened to the whole 5 hours!!!

Michael Parenti on conspiracy theories

Michael Parenti passed away peacefully this morning, surrounded by his family, at the age of 92. One of the most influential anti imperialist thinkers in the United States, Parenti spent decades exposing how power actually works beneath the language of democracy, development, and humanitarianism. In this 1986 lecture at the University of Colorado Boulder, he dismantles the myth that foreign aid is about helping people. Parenti argued that foreign aid functions as a subsidy for empire, transferring wealth from ordinary people in the Global North to elites in the Global South who protect multinational interests. Drawing on economists like Kenneth Boulding and Thorstein Veblen, he highlighted the missing class dimension, that those who profit from imperial investments are not the ones who pay the costs of maintaining them. He pointed to the Philippines, Cuba before the revolution, and British ruled India to show a recurring pattern. Infrastructure was built for plantations and exports while entire communities were left without roads, clinics, or schools. Aid money, he argued, props up private corporations and funds police and military forces whose real role is suppressing impoverished populations. His message was blunt and remains urgent. Empire benefits a small elite and devastates everyone else. Without class analysis the conversation is baby talk. With it the machinery of empire becomes impossible to deny.

Whispers emerge Moderna are exiting the vaccine market and Reuters reports them "curbing Investments in vaccine trials". This news follows a recent messenger RNA RSV clinical trial failure, which a stunned Professor Robert Clancy said "they shouldn't have been doing". It was "PAUSED" following safety signals where he says "1 in 8 kids nearly died from overwhelming RSV infection". CLANCY: "The one thing we learnt back in the 70's, is you steer away from trying to produce an RSV vaccine, because you get immune enhanced disease".... "A lot of people should have told them and they should have known themselves"

Robert Friedland on the masive copper shortage to meet future grid, clean energy and AI demand: “We’re consuming 30m tonnes of copper a year. Only 4m tonnes of which is recycled. That means to maintain 3% GDP growth — with no [further] electrification — we have to mine the same amount of copper in the next 18 years as we mined in the last 10,000 years, combined. In the next 18 years, I’ve got to mine the same amount of copper as we mined the last 10,000 years. [This is without any new] electrification, without data centers, without solar and wind and the greening of the world economy. You people have no idea whatsoever what we’re facing.”