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Tuesday 4 June 2019

The Under-Reporting of Drug Side Effects. Doctors say they are 'rare' but only between 10% & 1% of adverse reactions are ever reported. So they are not as 'rare' as we are told.

The conventional medical establishment routinely ignores the harm caused to patients by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.

A study, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, (2006; 296: 1086-93), found that although prescribing doctors should report side effects and adverse reactions experienced by their patients many do not do so. In fact, the actual rate of reporting was found to be alarmingly low, about 10 times below the optimum level set by the World Health Organization. The study reported on procedures amongst doctors in Portugal, where 26 adverse reactions were reported per 1 million population, whereas WHO say that this should be closer to 300 report per million people.

The researchers said that this under-reporting was not restricted to Portugal, and that the USA, Canada, Italy, Sweden and the UK, also have very low reporting rates.

Commenting on this study, the magazine What Doctors Don't Tell You said that if the WHO targets were reached, the whole drug industry would 'grind to a halt'. In the Guardian, on 12th May 2006, Sarah Bosely wrote that the BMA had said the Yellow Card scheme (the UK system of reporting drug side effects) was not being used enough. The article quoted BMA figures that found at least 250,000 people went to hospital each year because of the damaging side-effects of medication, and that about 5,000 people die as a result. The BMA urged doctors to be 'more vigilant', and to report any and every suspected side-effects their patients experience. They said that only an estimated 10% of adverse drug reactions were reported through the "yellow card" scheme to the MHRA, and a BMA spokesperson commented:

          "Doctors have a professional duty to report all adverse drug reactions, especially if children or the elderly are involved. Unfortunately too many health professionals are confused about reporting procedures. Doctors must make sure they report any suspected [adverse drug reactions] and at the same time increase awareness among their patients about the reporting process."

Another BMA spokesman said that not all side-effects could be picked up in clinical trials before drugs are licensed and prescribed which meant that greater vigilance was needed by doctors, pharmacists and nurses. In the same article the MHRA (Britain's drug regulator urged healthcare professionals to use the yellow card scheme, stating:

          "There is no need to prove that the medicine caused the adverse reaction, just the suspicion is good enough." 

The article concludes by saying that it has long been known that doctors do not report all the suspected side-effects their patients tell them about, and that 10 years earlier (1996?) the BMA had issued similar guidance to doctors, but with little effect. Sadly, in the decade and more that has passed since this was written, nothing has changed!

So what does this under-reporting of drug side effects mean, in practical terms?

It means that if only 10% of known adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs and vaccine are reported they are all 10 times more dangerous than conventional medicine accepts or admits!

It means that there has been a circular argument going on for over 20 years, and no doubt much longer. The side effects of drugs are under-reported by doctors - which means in turn that the dangers of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are not fully appreciated. This, in turn, means that drugs are being prescribed on the basis that they are safer than they are.

Yet the under-reporting of drug side effects may be worse than this, perhaps as low as 1%, particularly (but not exclusively) with regard to vaccine damage. This 1% figure comes from USA government reports. In 1986 the USA government relieved vaccine manufacturers of all liability for vaccine injury. They created the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in 1990 which was supposed to collect and analyse the adverse effects of vaccines. The system has has been criticised every since. To address the weaknesses, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) gave Harvard Medical School $1 million dollars to track VAERS reporting, and create an automated reporting system overhaul the VAERS reporting system. It successfully transformed the system from a 'passive' to an 'active' one.

The report showed that vaccine injury reports through VAERS were less than 1% of the actual number, that whilst the CDC showed only about 30,000 adverse events in the USA annually, the Harvard study showed about 35,570 adverse events - just in the population of Massachusetts. It calculated that there was an adverse event in 2.6% of vaccinations - hardly the 'rare' event that we are told about by doctors. So, with typical honesty, the CDC buried the study!

               “Unfortunately, there was never an opportunity to perform system performance assessments because the necessary CDC contacts were no longer available and the CDC consultants responsible for receiving data were no longer responsive to our multiple requests to proceed with testing and evaluation.”

It is clear from this that whatever the conventional medical establishment tells us about the safety of vaccines, and pharmaceutical drugs generally, they are not telling us the whole truth. If only 1% of drug and vaccine damage is being reported it means that they are 100 times more dangerous than they admit.

Yet there is another issue - are doctors prepared to tell us the truth when it is they who have prescribed harmful and dangerous drugs to their patients.

In an Observer article, published on 20th January 2008, Dennis Campbell reported that Steve Walker, chief executive of the NHS Litigation Authority, said that doctors must own up to the mistakes they make in order to reduce compensation claims that were totalling £613 million annually at that time. He called for "a new culture of honesty and openness". We are no to this now then we were in 2008!

Cambell continued. Negligence lawyers said the main reason victims take legal action is to obtain more information, so what doctors had to do was simple, to report any error or mistake, more than this, doctors should feel under an obligation to tell patients, to apologise and explain.

          "The explanation bit is really important to many, many claimants. It doesn't matter if it heads off a claim or encourages a claim, people as human beings and patients are entitled to this and they should be getting it. Some patients are dissatisfied by not getting this information already. Some patients and patients' relatives feel short-changed by the system. They believe there's a lack of honesty, of frankness and of candour."

Walker wanted doctors to 'sympathise with the patient or the patient's relatives' and to 'express sorrow or regret' at any death or injury that followed 'substandard care' with pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.

          "I feel ..... very strongly that people are entitled to know when something has gone wrong; entitled to an apology if something has gone wrong; entitled to an explanation of what went wrong and why, in words that they will understand; and entitled to the opportunity to ask questions about what happened and why," 

This kind of transparency is not a feature of the conventional medical establishment. Since 2008 medical negligence cases have dramatically increased. This is usually explained within the context of doctors, or some other medical staff, making a mistake or an error. This ignores the fact that every pharmaceutical drug and vaccine used by conventional doctors are inherently dangerous! Defending dangerous drugs and vaccines by blaming the resulting problems on the doctors who prescribe them is fundamentally wrong. The blame needs to be placed within a medical system that supports and encourages their use, and then denies the existance of problems until those problems can no longer be denied!

The article first appeared in my E-Book, "DIE's: the disease-inducing-effects of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines". This e-book shows that it is the dangerous pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines being prescribed, and their side effects, that are causing sickness and diseases at unprecedented levels. And that within the conventional medical establishment there is little honesty about the harm that is routinely caused by these drugs and vaccines.

Many people have read this book and found it hard to believe how common illnesses and diseases, many now at epidemic proportions, some never known before the present era, are known to be caused by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. There surprise is understandable.

No-one has ever told them before!