Health, Politics and Patient Choice

Our health has nothing to do with politics! But politics can seriously damage our health unless we can all look objectively at the safety/effectiveness of medical treatment.

In most countries of the world health becomes a political issue only when there is an argument/discussion about how much more money should be spent on conventional medical treatment! For instance, in Britain the only ‘political’ issue about health ever discussed is how much additional money should be spent on pharmaceutical medical care in order to support the allegedly underfunded, and ‘broken’ National Health Service (NHS).

It is now very different in the USA. The Democratic Party unquestioningly supports pharmaceutical medical care; whilst the Republican Party is now questioning its safety and effectiveness, and particularly the quality of the medical ‘science’ on which it is based. The foolishness of such a political divide over health issues can quickly be outlined.

If Republicans refuse vaccination on the basis of an unsubstantiated political stance (that vaccines are unsafe and ineffective) they would be denying themselves medical treatment which might benefit their health, even save their lives.

If Democratic supporters are prepared to get vaccinated on the basis of bad medical ‘science’, and vested interests that insists that vaccines are safe and effective they would be putting their health, even their lives, in serious danger.

Whether to take pharmaceutical drugs is not political. In Britain there is no health debate, political or otherwise. We either accept what we are told by the powerful Conventional Medical Establishment (the pharmaceutical industry, the NHS, the mainstream media, and our Government) and take the risk. Or we examine the medical evidence and either accept pharmaceutical medicine.

USA citizens have to make a decision about which political stance they want to to believe. Who do they believe? What is the evidence? I am following the medical debate in the USA with much interest, as I believe that pharmaceutical drugs are largely ineffective, and certainly dangerous to our health. In Britain there is no political party to argue my case, but when I practiced homeopathy I saw so many people who had been damaged by pharmaceutical drugs/vaccines (and were helped by taking the offending drug in homeopathic potency on the basis of “like curing like”) that I needed no further convincing.

So how should citizens of the USA make their decision? First and foremost they should not do so through their party political affiliations! If I was an American citizen I would not be a Trump supporter. But I would support his policy on health.

Second, I would look at the arguments that are being made to support the policies of the two main political parties. JF Kennedy is raising important issues about the quality and honesty of the ‘science’ that ‘confirms’ the safety and effectiveness of drugs and vaccine. He argues that the pharmaceutical industry has effectively ‘captured’ drug regulation, and that as a result patients are no longer effectively protected from dangerous pharmaceutical ‘medicines’. And much more (I won’t rehearse all the arguments here).

Third, Kennedy highlights the rise and rise of chronic disease (allergy, arthritis, autism, dementia, diabetes, heart, kidney, liver, lung disease, et al) over the last 70+ years, and asks why this has almost exactly mirrored the massive increase in pharmaceutical drug taking. Many of the “safe and effective” drugs and vaccines that drug regulators have encouraged us to take have, after many years (sometimes decades) have been withdrawn or banned because they have been belatedly found to be too dangerous to prescribe. Can this correlation be accepted as causal? No, perhaps not. But whilst Kennedy asks the question, and seeks to find an answer, his opponents seem unprepared even to ask the question. They appear to be in denial.

Fourth, I would look at the vested interests that supports each side of the political debate, not least when health and medicine are involved. Who is likely to benefit from a particular policy? Several years ago I read (somewhere) that every federal politician in the USA was financed by the pharmaceutical industry. I believe this is why governments have allowed their citizens to be poisoned by drug-based medicine, and have taken little or no effective action despite regular medical scandals.

So who gains and who loses from Kennedy’s policies? The pharmaceutical industry would undoubtedly be the main loser if there was greater regulation (more insistence on proper and honest science) on drugs and vaccines. So Kennedy’s policies would provide little advantage to them. The Democrats seem to favour the status quo, that is, the dominance of pharmaceutical medicine in health care. Drug companies will obviously want to enforce their ‘medications’, with mandated vaccines, et al, as this maximises their sales and their profits.

Indeed, what company would not want government to mandate their products? I can see no similar beneficiaries of Kennedy’s policies, which in the main appear to be based on the need for patients to (i) have accurate information about the drugs/vaccines they are being asked to take, and (ii) the importance of health freedom, and patient choice, in making a decision.

Many people will not have the time or inclination to examine these arguments. But my fifth reason for taking my decision is that at least Kennedy is arguing his case. I would recommend that everyone takes this as his/her baseline. We should all want to hear the case for an against any policy! Yet in response Kennedy is being castigated and abused, often at a personal level; his position and arguments are not being refuted through investigation and evidence.

If one side of any argument is resorting to abuse, and refusing to engage, to provide evidence for their stance, their arguments are invariably weak.

Personal abuse is not an argument for anything in politics, or indeed, life generally. Nor is straightforward dismissal of an idea. When the conventional medical establishment uses terms like “disinformation”, “fake news”, or “conspiracy theory” I suspect it stems from a failure to engage in discussion. (I have written about this in more detail here).

There is one final argument, one that relates to health freedom, and patient choice. When we are ill we all have choices, although we are really told this. Mandating any one of these choices (for example, forcing vaccines on those who wish to remain vaccine free) deprives us of this choice. Pharmaceutical drugs are not our only option to ill-health. Over 50 years ago I decided that when I was ill I wanted to be treated with homeopathy. Yet I would no more want to force other people to make that decision than I would accept being forced to take a vaccine myself!

In this respect USA citizens are actually very lucky! There is, at least, a political debate going on there. In Britain, and most other countries, there is no such debate. For instance, would anyone in the USA believe me if I said that we hear little about this important health debate here? There is virtual silence from the UK media, the pharmaceutical-dominated NHS, and the Government - and any other mainstream source of information available to patients. And the health issues now being debated in America are ones that are equally important to us here in Britain.

So we should all ask - WHY? Surely if a drug, or a vaccine is (or even might be) unsafe, we should all be informed, the issue should be thoroughly investigated by people without a vested interest, so that each one of us can make up our own minds. This is not a party political issue. Politicians should not be making our decision for us. This is not about ‘the left’ or ‘the right’. It is about our health, and what we, each one of us, choose to do about it.

(This article was first published on my new forum, at 

https://safemedicine.substack.com/p/health-politics-and-patient-choice)

Weight-Loss Drugs. The first fatalities have been announced, alongside other serious 'side effects.

Is this the second stage of another drug scandal? 

Wygovy, Oxempic and Mounjaro, as weight loss drugs, have been heavily promoted over the last 2+ years, despite conventional medicine knowing that they can cause serious adverse drug reactions. As usual, users of the drugs are not being informed about these ‘side effects’.

So back in February 2024 I asked the question - were we in the early stages of yet another medical scandal? And I reminded readers about the history of Acomplia, a weight loss drug that barely lasted two years before being banned.

Wygovy; Ozempic; Mounjaro: weight loss drugs, and the promotion of pharmaceutical drugs

Steven Scrutton

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12 February 2024

The obesity/diabetes drugs, Wygovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro, have become a pharmaceutical best sellers. They are making the drug companies very wealthy! The active ingredient, semaglutide, helps control blood sugar, lowers appetite, and makes patients feel "full". The current claim of medical science is that all these semaglutide drugs can lead to weight loss…

Read full story

Now in Britain, the Sun newspaper has reported that the drugs are now being linked with one death every week. It is thought that in the UK alone there are now over 1.5 million people taking these drugs, the numbers rising after the NHS made them available in June 2025.

     “One death a week is now linked to weight loss injections, figures reveal. Jabs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro have been connected to 24 deaths in the 21 weeks since January. Linked fatalities logged by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency rose from 82 in January this year to 106 by June”.

Even so the paper tries to pull back when it says “It does not mean the injections, now being used by up to 1.5 million Britons, caused the deaths, only that they may have played a part”. Nor does it ask for an investigation into the possibility of drug-caused death to protect patients from drug harm. Indeed the article goes on to say that “On the basis of the current evidence, the benefits of GLP-1 medicines outweigh the potential risks when used for the licensed indications”. Who has made this statement? On what evidence has this judgement been made? We are not, of course, told!

The Independent Newspaper has also produced an article entitled, “Weight-loss jabs linked to hundreds of cases of life-threatening illness and 10 deaths”, adding that since the GLP-1 drugs, including Mounjaro, Ozempic and Wegovy, were licensed, there have been “hundreds of reported cases of acute and chronic pancreatitis among people taking them”. So it is not just death!

Several other news agencies have reported these deaths, which is unusual at this stage, such as the BBC, Sky News, Channel 4 News, even the British Medical Association, the Patient Safety Learning website, and even the Government website has seen fit to provide a “general reminder” about the known adverse reactions caused by the drugs. This is perhaps unusual - media outlets are generally quieter at this stage, in deference to their pharmaceutical paymasters!

However, this is the usual second-stage of an upcoming pharmaceutical scandal. The first stage is “the wonder drug” stage. The second stage concerns the denial, discounting, and justification of the harm caused to patients. Often, during this stage, conventional medicine seeks to find new uses and justifications for taking the drug, like this one recently reported on MIMS, “Semaglutide could correct prediabetes in people with schizophrenia on antibiotics”.

The third stage, for which we will now have to wait patiently, will come when the level and seriousness of patient harm becomes too difficult for government, conventional medicine, and the mainstream media to continue trying to justify.

So far, then, my prediction of another pharmaceutical medical scandal is on course!

The Causes of Ill-Health: Poverty

The distribution of income has always been the basis on which our health, and our access to medical care, has been determined. Wealth and health have always been closely entwined. My local paper recently published an article on poverty, ill-health and longevity as it applied to the town in which I live.

          “People living in areas of high deprivation experience greater health inequalities, including higher rates of premature mortality and poorer health outcomes. They also often face additional challenges such as higher crime rates, greater exposure to narcotics, and lower levels of educational attainment”.

It is widely recognised that poverty is an important cause of ill-health. To put this another, more controversial way, it is the wealthy that cause the ill-health of the poor; because it is the rich and influential who decide how income and wealth are distributed. Let me explain.

The mechanism of poverty creation can be quickly summarised.

First, we should recognise that, at any single moment in time, any organisation has only a finite amount of disposable income/wealth to be distributed between interested parties.

So, if there are 10 people working for an organisation; and the organisation creates 100 units of disposable income/wealth; and each person receives 10 units, there is no inequality. Each person receive 10 units, and there is no affluence, and no poverty; and so an equal access to health services.

But this is rarely what happens. We should not complicate this simple picture with concepts of the ‘worth’ of a person, or what he/she adds to the organisation’s ‘growth potential’, or the ‘value’ any one person might add to an organisation; or even digress into a discussion about the rights and wrongs of income/wealth distribution.

So when the person(s) in control of an organisation decide to take a bigger share, the other 9 will receive less. This is where inequality begins. And it applies at whatever level, or organisation we choose to focus on - to a family, to a company, to a country. Poverty is created by the decisions taken, usually by the powerful, to take a larger share of an organisation’s distributable income.

• So if the boss, or person in charge, or the shareholders, et al, decide to take 20%, the other 9 will each receive a share of wealth under 8 units.

• And if those in control decide to take 40%, the other 9 will receive just over 6.5 units. Then, if the foreman demands more than 6.5 units, the other 8 will receive even less. And so it goes down the chain.

At the end of this process we have created poverty. And we know, it has always been self evident, that poorer people have more ill-health, more disease, and earlier death. And this has always been the case.

Wealth is created by any organisation in two separate ways. First, it charges more than it needs for the product or services it provides. In so doing it contributes to the impoverishment of those who purchase those goods and services at a high price. Second, it pays those people who work to make/provide the products or services as little financial reward as possible.

There has always been inequality in the distribution of income and wealth. Our history demonstrates the very rich have always lived side-by-side with very poor people, and that how income and wealth is determined depends entirely on the decisions and values of those who control the group or organisation in question.

So in Britain the decision maker, or “the boss”, was once the Roman government, and levels of inequality was based on military power. This ability to appropriate the lion's share of wealth then passed to the Angles, the Saxons, and the Viking invaders. Then it moved to Kings, to ‘Royal’ families, and increasingly to the Barons. As land-owning became more important to the creation of wealth it moved to the aristocratic, or landowning classes. With the industrial revolution it moved to the newly-rich industrialists and merchants. Then multinational companies were formed. And now we seem to be subject to a small but powerful numbers of multi-billionaires.

Each ‘boss’, at each stage in history, is able to establish their own rules, and seek to justify the mal-distribution of income and wealth, based on his own self-interest.

Wealth is not just about the ownership of private jets, and yachts. It is about ownership and control of the organisation.

At no time has there ever been an effective mechanism to decide how rich rich people are allowed to become; or how poor poor people can be; or to successfully moderate the difference. Taxation has been tried; but now government’s are telling us that this is not possible, the rich are too important to tax; just as some companies have become to “too important” to fail. We have developed the idea of a ‘minimum wage’ but they have become little more than a safety net to avoid the worst scenarios of impoverishment: they have never been implemented at levels that actually avoids the creation of poverty.

What is clear that it is always the rich, the powerful, the influential who determines the distribution of income and wealth. It follows that they also control our health, and our access to safe and effective medical treatment.

The Pharmaceutical Medical Establishment is now one of the biggest culprits in creating vast wealth, and therefore extreme poverty. This article, for example, describes how “CEOs of BioNTech, Pfizer, J&J and Merck Make List of Highest-Paid Pharma Execs”. And I have recently written about how one Big Pharma company, Eli Lilly, can increase the price of one of its drugs, Mounjaro, by over 170% - overnight.

Drug companies are remarkably successful at creating wealth, and spending that wealth to control the health market.

It needs to be recognised that this has always been the basis on which our health, and access to medical care, has been decided - throughout the world - from time immemorial. And once this is recognised we must accept that it is income and wealth that determines how good, or how bad our health, and our health services are:

• the amount of money we can spend on food, and the nutritional value of that food;

• how much exercise we have;

• the extent to which we can control stress levels in our lives;

• whether we are able to afford the health treatments we are offered;

• and much more.

So the decisions made by the rich and powerful have always had a crucial impact on the health of poorer people. Never was this more so than when, in the 18th century, the enclosure movement began the process of moving people from their (modest but viable) agrarian roots, forcing them from their rural communities into the new towns of the industrial revolution. The “industrial revolution” led to large sections of the population to living in squalid, sub-standard, insanitary homes, working in atrocious conditions, for unimaginably long hours, for poverty wages, and with poor nutrition and diet. None of this was conducive to the good health of working people. As usual the ‘revolution’ benefitted only a small group of the new rich. And it was achieved at the expense of the poverty (and ill-health) of millions of people.

The poverty of the late 18th and 19th centuries, created by the new wealthy industrialists, triggered devastating epidemics of infectious diseases, like cholera, influenza, scarlet fever, smallpox, typhoid, typhus, and yellow fever. The regular epidemics of infectious disease regularly killed many thousands/millions of people.

However, the devastation they caused became a problem, even for the rich. This was not directly the result of people dying in large numbers, but because the workforce on which the new wealth was created was being decimated - and/or recruitment to the national army was being seriously affected.

And so our modern concern with health began.

These epidemic diseases did not affect everyone. Walk around a Victorian graveyard, look at the tombstone inscriptions, and you will see that many people still lived long lives, well into their 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and beyond. These were, of course, the people who could afford to purchase gravestones! They were not the poor, living in sub-standard housing, working in squalid conditions, with a poor diet, etc.

The wealthy people killed in epidemics, usually in small numbers those who succumbed to them as a result of life-styles based on over-indulgence rather than poverty, thereby undermining their immune system, and thus their susceptibility to disease epidemics.

So the concept of providing health care to everyone developed in many of the wealthier countries of the world arose from the need for a healthy workforce, and a strong army.. The regular disruption of epidemics were unwanted. So as the 19th century progressed health philanthropy took hold. So UK politicians, for instance, focused their attention on developing public health reforms, better housing, cleaner water supplies, improved sanitation, increased wages and better nutrition, and universal education. Gradually the health of working people improved, back close to where it was in pre-industrial revolution times. As public health conditions improved fewer people became susceptible to infectious disease epidemics which gradually became fewer, less severe, and less disruptive.

Health insurance schemes in Britain began in the early 1900’s. This meant that money became available to anyone able to offer health services. By this time the cause of epidemics had been linked to newly understood ‘germs’. Pasteur (wrongly, see this link) attributed these germs as the cause of epidemics. And it was not long before the drug industry realised there was money to be made by creating drugs (and later vaccines) to kill these germs. And since then they have done so, making huge profits, and gaining control of health care.

Ultimately in 1948 on the National Health Service (NHS), a service ‘free for all’ regardless of income and wealth. Similarly other countries followed suit, making health care widely available to all in different ways.

The pharmaceutical industry realised that government money was, in effect, a bottomless pit - as long as they could convince patients that they needed their drugs, and that government should be supplying them - regardless of their safety, or their cost. So, from an industry that had hitherto been steeped in failure, it became the most profitable and wealth industry in the world.

It was fortunate for the pharmaceutical industry that they soon realised they had to keep the ongoing failure of their drugs, and the regular health scandals they produced, from the public (their customers). So they were able to use their huge wealth to ‘make up the rules’ and ‘control the agenda’, even to change the history of health care!

• So politicians were brought on-side by pharmaceutical lobbying, the strongest of all industrial lobbies.

• Conventional medical treatment soon become almost entirely dependent on drug treatment, and increasingly they have not been in a position to question, criticise or investigate the harm caused by the drugs they were using.

• The mainstream media, many of them struggling to survive, was bought into line with drug advertising, etc.

• The compliance of medical ‘science’ was similarly controlled, bought and paid for by pharmaceutical profits.

• And Drug Regulation, set up with the single purpose of protecting patients from dangerous drugs/vaccines, was successfully infiltrated and taken over.

This is how the rich have always operated. They have always oppressed the poor, and made the rules through which society is governed. Over the last century the Pharmaceutical Medical Establishment has taken effective control of most of the sources of information patients might have that might inform and protect them from a dangerous medical system. Moreover, decades of extraordinarily successful promotion and propaganda has convinced most people that they depend on pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, and that they could not survive without them.

This is why the travesty and tragedy of the Covid-19 Pandemic was able to happen - the rich in control, the poor helpless, feeling that they had no option but to conform.

Meanwhile, courtesy of adverse drug/vaccine affects, illness and disease spirals out of control. It is chronic disease that are the new epidemics. Allergy, arthritis, autism, dementia, diabetes, heart/liver/kidney disease, et al, are all now running at epidemic levels, and rising, and all of them, at least in part, courtesy of adverse drug reactions. And we are still scared, almost out of our wits, by the pharmaceutical narrative: about the regular threats of infectious disease, fears generated by a pharmaceutical industry that has no safe or effective treatments for them.

We have been processed to believe that we are all under serious threat - and we that need the pharmaceutical industry to save us.

This is no more or less than rich powerful elites have done throughout the ages. There is an enemy.

We have to defend ourselves from the threat.

The poor must form the army, go to war, and if necessary, die.

Only than will the (wealthy) Establishment be able to prevail!