VACCINES. "We can handle an open discussion on vaccines". But we are not getting one. The views of two ex-Guardian readers.

Soroush Ebrahimi and I have at least two things in common.

• We are both homeopaths. 
• And we are both former readers of the Guardian newspaper.

There is a third link too, as both of us now believe that these two things are incompatible. As homeopaths we both expect to come under constant attack from the conventional medical establishment - during the last 15-20 years this has become an occupational hazard. What we do not, and cannot accept is that 'our' newspaper, one that we bought because of it open and liberal stance on social and political issues, should have become so opposed to any kind of health debate.

Soroush sent me a copy of his letter sent recently to Sarah Boseley (Health Editor of the Guardian), and he has given me permission to reproduce it here - not least because he is not expecting any response from the newspaper. This is it

     "As a Guardian reader of many years I am well aware that you are very pro-vaccination.

     "We rely on organizations like FDA, CDC and WHO to tell us the truth about the safety of medicines in general and particularly regarding vaccines. But what we find is the ‘game-keeper’ has become the poacher. I would like you to kindly read this article by Robert F Kennedy Jr., 'Americans can handle an open discussion on vaccines' , published by the Children's Health Defence website. In this you will see that:

• "FDA receives 45% of its annual budget from industry.
• The World Health Organization (WHO) gets roughly half its budget from private sources, including the pharmaceutical industry and its allied foundations. 
• And CDC, frankly, is a vaccine company; it owns 56 vaccine patents and buys and distributes $4.6 billion in vaccines annually through the Vaccines for Children program, which is over 40% of its total budget.
• The pharmaceutical industry directly funds, populates and controls dozens of CDC programs through the CDC foundation. 
• A British Medical Journal editorial excoriates CDC’s sweetheart relationship with pharma quotes UCLA Professor of Medicine Jerome R. Hoffman “most of us were shocked to learn the CDC takes funding from industry… It is outrageous that industry is apparently allowed to punish the CDC if the agency conducts research that has potential to cut into profits.
• For American kids born in 1986, only 12.8% had chronic diseases. That number has grown to 54% among the vaccine generation (those born after 1986) in lockstep with the expanding schedule.
• Dr. Aaby was one of five co-authors of a 2017 study of the diphtheria tetanus, and pertussis (DTP) vaccine, the most widely used vaccine on earth, which found that children who received DTP had ten times the risk of dying compared to DTP-unvaccinated children.

      "I would really appreciate your comments especially if you can refute any of RFK’s assertions, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

     "Kind regards, Soroush Ebrahimi

I have asked Soroush to let me know if the Guardian responds to his letter, and if they do I will share their response here. However, the hostility of the Guardian towards any form of natural medicine during the last 20 years, alongside its meek and uncritical compliance to the agenda of the conventional medical establishment, means that we are expecting little.

If the Guardian was still an open and liberal newspaper it would not only respond to Soroush's letter, it would commission Robert F Kennedy to write an article outlining his views. It would examine those views, investigate them, and it would ask those with a differing view to respond to them.

It would, in other words, initiate a health debate on vaccines, and the overall impact conventional medicine has had on our nation's health during its 70 years of almost total dominance within the NHS.

Yet the Guardian, alongside the rest of the mainstream media in the UK, steadfastly refuses to do so. This is why there is little or no 'informed' patient choice in this country about vaccines, and pharmaceutical drugs generally.

• Vaccines, we are told, are safe; and any suggestion that they are cause harm is censored by the mainstream media.
• Pharmaceutical drugs are 'wonder cures', they keep people alive; and if anyone suggests that people now suffer more chronic disease than ever before, they are not heard because the Guardian, and other papers, do not want to know.

Robert F Kennedy, Jn, is correct. We can handle an honest debate on vaccines. Indeed we desperately need to have one. But in order to survive newspapers have to listen to its paymasters, and this is no longer its readers, it's the advertisers. And it's been estimated that some 70% of advertising revenues now comes from the pharmaceutical and allied industries.

So Kennedy is not published in the mainstream media, his views are aired on the internet, by the Children's Health Defence website. And the internet is, of course, fake news, it cannot be relied upon, and so now the conventional medical establishment wants to stop it being published.

All this confirms one thing. The Guardian is no longer an open, liberal newspaper. It is struggling financially, and perhaps one reason for this is that people like Soroush and myself will no longer support it.

And another is that everyone who has received homeopathic treatment will quickly recognise that what it says about natural medicine is untrue..... so why should they believe what the Guardian writes about any other subject is not equally biased and unreliable?

Why should it be?

 

THE FREE PRESS. Most of our newspapers are in trouble. So what can be done to save them?

300 years ago our British media began to develop. Newspapers began to appear, and reach the people, providing them with information that they would have otherwise been ignorant.

The Governments of the time did not like these news sheets, not least because they were often castigated and ridiculed by them.

So Governments tried to suppress them, and a long battle ensued for press freedom - the fight for the ability to publish the truth free from political influence. Over the years, the press won. A 'Free Press' emerged, becoming one of the king-pins of our democracy.

Now, our 'Free Press' is in trouble, serious financial trouble. The circulation of many national and local newspapers have declined, many have gone.

My attention was drawn to this last week when I received a reference to a Guardian article on Homeopathy. I went to the Guardian website and read what was a well written, and well balanced piece on the subject. Unfortunately the article was over 15 years old!

But whilst reading it I noticed that part of the screen was taken up with request to pay for my visit to the Guardian website. This was the message (with my emphasis).

Since you’re here…
… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever, but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help.

The Guardian is editorially independent. So we set our own agenda. Our journalism is free from commercial bias. It isn’t influenced by billionaire owners, politicians or shareholders. No one edits our editor. No one steers our opinion. This means we can give a voice to the voiceless. It lets us challenge the powerful - and hold them to account. At a time when our honest, factual reporting is critical, it’s one of many things that set us apart.

Our approach is different from others in the media. While others offer only fixed subscriptions, we give our readers the option to support us voluntarily. This is not meant as a short term solution; this approach is for now and for the future. By supporting The Guardian, you’re investing in the long term sustainability of our independent, investigative journalism.

If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps to support it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as £1, you can support the Guardian – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.

The Guardian newspaper was once my paper. I was a regular reader, long before the internet. I read it because I trusted it as a source of serious, progressive, independent information about the world around us.

So why did I stop reading it? And why did I not send a £1 to support my old newspaper? 

The reason can be found above, in the second paragraph

• editorially independent?
• we set our own agenda?
• our journalism is free from commercial bias?
• it isn't influenced by billionaire owners, politicians or shareholders?

Would that this was true! If is was I would still be buying the newspaper, leave alone sending them a £1 over the internet!

My problem with the Guardian is that, for over 15 years, it has published nothing positive about homeopathy. Indeed, it has become a bastion of medical fundamentalists, and homeopathy skeptics, people like Ben Goldacre, who have been allowed to publish both their affirmative views on so-called 'scientific' medicine, and their jaundiced and unsupported views on homeopathy. In neither has the Guardian give 'a voice to the voiceless'. There has been no right of reply to allow the homeopathic community to air their views in the Guardian, or indeed, in any other part of the mainstream media.

So I do not believe that the Guardian is 'editorially independent', that it is any longer a paper 'that sets its own objectives', or that its journalism is 'free from commercial bias'. If its advertising revenues are declining what remains of them are still coming mainly from the pharmaceutical industry and its allies. Perhaps it is a little too much to expect the Guardian (and other struggling newspapers) to bite the hand that is feeding them.

So if I, and indeed the entire homeopathic community, is being continually attacked by the Guardian to win and maintain pharmaceutical advertising, I (and many other like-minded people) will certainly do nothing to support it. 

In taking this stance I am not alone. Many of my colleagues, practitioners of homeopathy and other natural therapies, feel the same. You don't feed that hand that attacks you!

And as conventional medicine declines, throughout the world, and natural therapies increase in popularity, the media now finds itself riding a horse that is destined to be a loser! The Guardian, and most of the mainstream media organisations, have lost out on the support of a small, but significant and growing group of people. Moreover it is a group of people who would once have gravitated around the Guardian. But no more. Natural medicine is alive and well, despite the sustained attacks the Guardian has made on it.

Natural medicine is growing. 

The Guardian is in decline.

There was a touch of regret when I wrote that. Yet actually, the situation is worse than this. As far as health is concerned, I am aware of two main trends that the Guardian steadfastly refuses to recognise and report.

1. That conventional medicine, and pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, are causing serious illness and ill-health. It does not take much 'investigative journalism' to realise this, and that it is a scandal needing investigation. So is the Guardian challenging the powerful pharmaceutical companies about this? No, it is not.
2. That homeopathy is a safe and effective medical therapy, one that has cured my illnesses over the years, and the sickness of many millions of patients over the last 220 years. So is the Guardian giving a voice to homeopathy, and other natural therapies? No, it has removed its voice, and refuses to hear it.

The fact that the Guardian refuses to publish anything about either of these trends, and refuses even to acknowledge or discuss them, has a further consequence. It means that I can no longer trust what the newspaper says about anything else.

If it is not prepared to be honest in what it publishes about health, something I have been involved in for some time now, how can I any longer believe that the paper is reporting openly, impartially, honestly and fairly about politics, or the environment, or anything else?

But wait, I hear someone say. Was it not the Guardian that reported recently on the harm being caused by medical implants? Yes, indeed, the Guardian was involved in this piece of real investigative journalism. 

Yet, as I asked on my blog, why did this investigation look into, and heavily criticise medical implants, when it continues steadfastly to refuse to criticise the harm being done to patients by the pharmaceutical industry? I can only assume that the Guardian is not supported by the medical implant industry which is smaller, less influential, and provides the Guardian, and other newspapers, with insufficient financial support.

This is why we no longer have a free press. The press is free from government, but it is not free from the commercial and industrial interests that continue to support it. And this is why the mainstream media picks and chooses who it attacks, and who it supports.

So the Guardian is not editorially independent. It does not set its own agenda. Its journalism is not free from commercial bias. And it is influenced by corporate interests, which control its editorial policy, and steers the opinions it shares with the public. The Guardian is controlled by the powerful, and together they have ensured that natural medicine has become voiceless.

Fortunately, natural medicine speaks for itself in its ability to treat sick people, safely, effectively, and inexpensively. People continue to hear us. But not by reading the Guardian.

The Guardian caught

The mainstream media has been attacking anyone espousing 'drug-free' medicine. Foremost in the firing line has been Homeopathy. And foremost amongst the mainstream media attacking Homeopathy has been the Guardian Newspaper. Now, the Guardian has been caught doing so.

          "In a first for journalism, the UK’s Guardian national daily newspaper has been caught falsifying their own newspaper’s public record in a bid to airbrush the facts about vaccine-caused-autism.  Whilst some other media outlets have adopted the approach of ignoring the evidence and writing and broadcasting one-sided reports, this time The Guardian newspaper has been caught changing it.  The Guardian removed the evidence – gone without a trace – from their online newspaper.

It is not surprising that the cover-up has been discovered when the Guardian was looking at the Vaccination-Autism link. Big Pharma cannot allow people to realise that the link is strong, if not definite. And those in the pocket, or in the pay of Big Pharma strive hard not to publicise, or discuss the links.

So one of our major, and hitherto most respected newspapers, The Guardian is actually trying to stop you getting important information.

It will be interesting to see how the Guardian responds. It is losing readership steadily, and a major reason for this is that people can no longer trust it to tell the truth. Certainly, I no longer read what was once 'my' newspaper because I saw the lies the paper was telling about Homeopathy. If it could print anti-homeopathy pieces, and refuse to publish anything in response, how could I trust it to tell me the truth about other important issues?

And why should I, or anyone, buy a newspaper if it wasn't able to publish balanced, and impartial news?

If anyone has any doubts about whether they are being told the truth about health - by the Guardian, by the BBC, or by any other mainstream media outlet, read this piece.

Aspirin - a Miracle Drug?

Certainly the mainstream media wants us to believe that Aspirin is a miracle drug; but do they tell us the truth? The Guardian, for instance, was quick to broadcast the news that Aspirin, "the world's humble true wonder drug"(http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/12/aspirin-cancer-wonder-drug-lancet) has been shown by researchers to offer real defence against many forms of cancer.

Yet as What Doctors Don't Tell You (WDDTY) pointed out, the same Oxford University professor, who made these headlines in most mainstream media, was the same person who 3 years ago discovered that Aspirin was a major cause of stroke in older people.
http://www.wddty.com/aspirin-reduces-cancer-risk-but-raises-chances-of-stroke-says-same-researcher.html

Nor did the mainstream media tell us what he said about the study:

"We can't say with absolute certainty that there won't be some unknown harm in taking aspirin for 30 years ... people have to accept there's some uncertainty here".

Uncertainty? He demonstrated that aspirin caused a 7-fold increase in stroke over the past 25 years among elderly patients; and is on record as warning that aspirin could soon replace high blood pressure as the leading cause of stroke with the over-75's.


And as WDDTY point out, a study from Eastern Virginia Medical School discovered the drug is killing 20,000 Americans every year from gastrointestinal bleedings - when official records put the figure at just 59.


We need publications like WDDTY. They remind us, constantly, that we are not being told the truth about drugs and health, not just by doctors, or Big Pharma, or the NHS, or the government - but by our mainstream media.