Part 1 of 5
By J. Holcombe, D. Jacobson, and T. Ruhl
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The world has believed for almost a century that a new and virulent virus came out of nowhere worldwide and killed millions in 1918. Two reports, one published in 2008 and the second in 2009, lay that myth to rest for good.
The first report came as a press release on August 19, 2008, from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID):
“Bacteriologic and
People were killed by common bacteria found in the upper respiratory tract, according to research uncovered by F. William Engdahl:
“The 20 to 40 million deaths worldwide from the great 1918 Influenza Pandemic were NOT due to ‘flu’ or a virus, but to pneumonia caused by massive bacterial infection.”
The NIAID press release did not, however, address what caused the bacterial infections, but research by Dr. Karen Starko does. She implicates aspirin, dovetailing with the NIAID research on pneumonia from massive bacterial infection, and goes further in also explaining the extreme rapidity of death:
“Mortality was driven by 2 overlapping clinical-pathologic syndromes: an early, severe acute respiratory distress (ARDS
1. People who died of pneumonia from a bacteria infection became sick and things deteriorated at varying rates from there to death;
2. People who died so astoundingly fast that those deaths became a classic part of the frightening legend of the 1918 “flu” – people perfectly well in the morning and dead within a matter of hours.
In both groups, aspirin is now the likely causative agent.
For the first group, the pneumonias, aspirin
“I did not lose a single case of influenza; my death rate in the pneumonias was 2.1%. The salycilates, including aspirin and quinine, were almost the sole standbys of the old school and it was a common thing to hear them speaking of losing 60% of their pneumonias.”
~Dudley A. Williams, MD, Providence, Rhode Island.
“There is one drug which directly or indirectly was the cause of the loss of more lives than was influenza itself. You all know that drug. It claims to be salicylic acid. Aspirin’s history has been printed. Today you don’t know what the sedative action of salicylic acid is. It did harm in two ways. It’s indirect action came through the fact that aspirin was taken until prostration resulted and the patient developed pneumonia.”
~Frank L. Newton, MD, Somerville, Massachusetts
“Three hundred and fifty cases and lost one, a neglected pneumonia that came to me after she had taken one hundred grains of aspirin in twenty-four hours.”
~Cora Smith King, MD, Washington, DC
For the second group which died so precipitously, their symptoms are consistent with aspirin overdose, accompanied by rapid death.
“A report from Camp Dix noted, ‘The disease was a veritable plague. The extraordinary toxicity, the marked prostration, the extreme
“In summary, just before the 1918 death spike, aspirin was recommended in regimens now known to be potentially toxic and to cause pulmonary edema and may therefore have contributed to overall pandemic mortality and several of its mysteries. Young adult mortality may be explained by
The cause of the millions of 1918 deaths is not just an
Agencies have been created, international plans have been developed, and pandemic emergency laws have been written with military backup included. Billions if not trillions of dollars have been devoted to finding a vaccine to protect the world from a recurrence of the 1918 Spanish flu.
Yet NIAID has said there is no evidence of a flu and that common respiratory bacteria was responsible.
Meanwhile, the government, the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization treat the rapid deaths as one of the frightening characteristics of a “mysterious” virus and proceed with vaccine development.
Given that the millions of 1918 deaths appear related to the pharmaceutical industry panacea of the day (aspirin) mistakenly applied, and that vaccines are the pharmaceutical industry panacea of this day, which would be mandated through pandemic laws, it is essential for the world to become aware of the facts of 1918.
As the next article will show, the massive promotion of aspirin by the confluence of governments, medical authorities and the pharmaceutical industry contributed to the 1918 deaths.
And now governments, medical authorities and the pharmaceutical industry have come together again and are repeating another massive promotion of a product (vaccines) and are even mandating it.
This opens the question of whether a second pharmaceutical industry product (vaccines) poses a second monumental threat to life, rather than a
Part 2 of 5
“In February 1917, Bayer lost its American patent on aspirin, opening a lucrative drug market to many manufacturers. Bayer fought back with copious advertising, celebrating the brand’s purity just as the epidemic was reaching its peak.” The New York Times
Karen Starko’s research shows that “Aspirin advertisements in August 1918 and a series of official recommendations for aspirin in September and early October preceded the death spike of October 1918.”
“The number of deaths in the United increased steeply, peaking first in the Navy in late September, then in the Army in early October, and finally in the general population in late October.”
Of tremendous significance is a single sentence in Starko‘s work.
“Homeopaths, who thought aspirin was a poison, claimed few deaths.”
That sentence stands out against a backdrop of millions of the deaths caused by Bayer and the pharmaceutical industry of the day.
In 2009, The New York Times reported:
“Aspirin packages were produced containing no warnings about toxicity and few instructions about use. In the fall of 1918, facing a widespread, deadly disease with no known cure, the surgeon general and the United States Navy recommended aspirin as a symptomatic treatment, and the military bought large quantities of the drug.
“The Journal of the American Medical Association suggested a dose of 1,000 milligrams every three hours, the equivalent of almost 25 standard 325-milligram aspirin tablets in 24 hours. This is about twice the daily dosage generally considered safe today.”
Homeopathy threatened pharmaceutical industry profit. Worse, the homeopathic doctors criticized coal tar based synthetic drugs as a class, the very basis of the pharmaceutical industry.
“Aspirin and the other coal tar products are condemned as causing great numbers of unnecessary deaths. The omnipresent aspirin is the most pernicious drug of all. It beguiles by its quick action of relief of pain, a relief which is but meretricious. In several cases aspirin weakened the heart, depressed the vital forces, increased the mortality in mild cases and made convalescence slower. In all cases it masks the symptoms and renders immeasurably more difficult the selection of the curative remedy. Apparently aspirin bears no curative relation to any disease and it ought to be prohibited.” ~Guy Beckly Stearns, MD, New York
Conversely, using only natural (thus un-patentable) substances, homeopaths saved the lives of almost everyone who came to them during the 1918 calamity. This threatened to expose that the new coal-tar based synthetic drugs (derived from the powerful oil industry), the basis for a giant new investment industry, were in fact disastrous medically. And that had to be stopped.
In The History of the Pharma-Cartel, the Dr. Rath Health Foundation reports that in 1918, “The Rockefeller Foundation [shortly afterwards connected to Bayer] uses the Spanish flu epidemic – and the media (that it already controlled by this time) – to start a witch-hunt on all forms of medicine that were not covered by its patents.”
In his affidavit filed in response to a lawsuit where he was falsely accused of distributing unregistered medicines in South Africa, Dr. Mathias Rath describes The History of the Pharmaceutical Industry:
“The Rockefeller Foundation was the front organization for a new global business venture…. This new venture was called the pharmaceutical investment business. Donations from the Rockefeller Foundation went only to medical schools and hospitals, which had become missionaries of patented pharmaceutical drugs, developed by a new breed of companies that manufactured patented, synthetic drugs….
“This was also the time, when the first vitamins were discovered. It soon became clear that these natural molecules had life-saving health benefits and were able to prevent many chronic health problems….
“These newly discovered natural molecules had only one disadvantage: they were non-patentable. Thus, already in its first decades of existence, the pharmaceutical investment business faced a mortal threat: vitamins and other micronutrients promoted as public health programmes would have prohibited the development of any sizable investment business based on patented synthetic drugs. The elimination of this unwanted competition from micronutrients and other natural therapies became a question of survival for the young pharmaceutical investment business.
“To promote public acceptance of his ‘new medicine’ as the philanthropic umbrella of the newly created pharmaceutical investment industry with patented drugs – the Rockefeller controlled media used the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, to start a campaign against all forms of non-patented medicine and discredit them as ‘unscientific.’ Within the next 15 years essentially all medical schools in the U.S., all influential hospitals and, most significantly, the ‘American Medical Association’ became part of this strategy to align the entire health care sector under the control of the pharmaceutical investment business.”
This witch-hunt, with Bayer in a leading role, has a long and violent history and continues today where the pharmaceutical industry is now moving to draconian measures, with the banning of all herbal remedies across Europe starting May 2011, with efforts to imprison a doctor providing natural cures for brain cancers, the attempt to criminalize homeopaths and all natural practitioners in North Carolina, with banning the mass production of Intravenous Vitamin C (it is a powerfully effective yet gentle treatment for cancer) in December 2010, and a plan in Australia to ban thousands of common garden plants.
Given the pharmaceutical industry’s epic battle against natural remedies, suppressing the truth of 1918 — that the pharmaceutical industry killed millions, and natural healing saved people — becomes paramount.
Part 3 of 5
“The bird and mammalian species took hold on the earth approximately 65 million years ago, i.e. the same time as the dinosaurs went extinct. So did the flu and other viruses of all the surviving species. Since then, all those viruses have been mating and mutating among themselves without the sky caving in due to any infection. Therefore, any talk of a bird or swine flu pandemic with the probability to kill millions of people is either a purposeful or hallucinogenic nonsense to make profit on the backs of the innocent following.”
~Shiv Chopra, microbiologist, vaccine expert
In 2005, the Centers for Disease Control claimed it had reconstructed the “virulent” 1918 virus:
“CDC researchers and their colleagues have successfully reconstructed the influenza virus that caused the 1918-19 flu pandemic, which killed as many as 50 million people worldwide.”
Whatever the CDC reconstructed, it was not what killed millions of people in 1918-19.
The CDC appears unaware that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has proven that it was not a virus or flu, but a common upper respiratory bacteria that was transformed into massive infection and then deadly pneumonias by the immune suppressing effect of aspirin.
Aspirin killed people, not a virus.
In 1918, the convergence of a toxic drug, massive corporate advertising, and government, military and medical pressure to use the drug, led to tens of millions of deaths. That combination of groups has come together again, this time behind vaccines.
The question, though, is why are vaccines being promoted at all for a pandemic “like the 1918 flu” since the deaths then were not caused by a flu?
Given that it was common bacteria, the following CDC statements make no sense:
“This report describes the successful reconstruction of the influenza A (H1N1) virus responsible for the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic and provides novel information about the properties that contributed to its exceptional virulence….
“The influenza pandemic of 1918-19 killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people worldwide, many more than the subsequent pandemics of the 20th century. The biological properties that confer virulence to pandemic influenza viruses were poorly understood. Research to better understand how the individual genes of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus contribute to the disease process could provide important insights into the basis of virulence.”
The CDC is putting out a view of the 1918 deaths which is a complete science fiction. It doesn’t fit with either historical or biologic data. Nor does their “virulent virus” view answer the lingering questions around 1918 – such as why young people died or why people died so quickly. Both are answered by Dr. Karen Starko’s work on aspirin use and overdose during 1918.
Though no virus was responsible for the deaths, the CDC has another problem. There has been no evidence showing the reconstruction of the virus, either. German virologist Stefan Lanka points to the source of the story on reconstruction and to missing pieces of the virus, in this 2005 interview:
“Dr Jeffery Taubenberger, from whom the allegation of a reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic virus originates, works for the US-American army and has worked for more than 10 years on producing, on the basis of samples from different human corpses, short pieces of gene substance by means of the biochemical multiplication technique PCR. Out of the multitude of produced pieces he has selected those which came closest to the model of the genetic substance of the idea of an influenza virus, and has published these.
“In no corpse however was a virus seen or isolated or was a piece of gene substance from a such isolated. By means of the PCR technique, there were produced out of nothing pieces of gene substance whose earlier existence in the corpse could not be demonstrated.
“If viruses had been present, then these could have been isolated, and out of them their gene substance could have been isolated too; there would have been no necessity for anyone to produce laboriously, by means of PCR technique – with clearly a swindle intention – a patchwork quilt of a model of the genetic substance of the idea of an influenza virus.”
The interviewer then asked how a layman could check this, to which he replied:
“About these short pieces of gene substance, which in the sense of genetics are not complete and which do not even suffice for defining a gene, it is being maintained that they together would make up the entire gene substance of an influenza virus.
“In order to see through this swindle, one only has to be able to add up the published length pieces in order to ascertain that the sum of the lengths of the individual pieces, which supposedly makes up the entire viral gene substance of the purported influenza virus, does not make up the… genome of the influenza virus model.
“Even simpler it is to ask in what publication you can find the electron microscope photo of this supposedly reconstructed virus. There is no such publication.”
In not dealing with either the bacterial infection or the role of aspirin in causing the 1918 deaths, and by continuing the “virulent virus myth,” the CDC is promoting the need for anti-viral drugs (which it mentions by name), as well as the development of vaccines, yet none of them would be appropriate for dealing with what killed people during 1918.
The CDC continues with its false promotion of 1918 deaths being flu related, and ignores common respiratory bacteria that NIAID showed was the source, and the global medical blunder of using toxic aspirin:
The CDC’s characterization of 1918 as a time when a virulent virus threatened all humanity is patently untrue. That false view was used by George Bush to engender terror that a new virulent virus – related to the 1918 virus – was going to occur and kill millions again.
Why does the CDC persist in this myth despite evidence to the contrary? Eschewing motives, one might only suggest some effects of projecting the terrifying myth that millions of people could die from the virus:
1. Distraction from the hard reality that natural treatments were the only
effective treatments during 1918;
2. Cloaking of Bayer, aspirin and the industry’s role in the deaths;
3. Sales of billions in anti-viral drugs and vaccine development;
4. Increased financial power to the pharmaceutical industry to control media
~Shiv Chopra, microbiologist, vaccine expert
In 2005, the Centers for Disease Control claimed it had reconstructed the “virulent” 1918 virus:
“CDC researchers and their colleagues have successfully reconstructed the influenza virus that caused the 1918-19 flu pandemic, which killed as many as 50 million people worldwide.”
Whatever the CDC reconstructed, it was not what killed millions of people in 1918-19.
The CDC appears unaware that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has proven that it was not a virus or flu, but a common upper respiratory bacteria that was transformed into massive infection and then deadly pneumonias by the immune suppressing effect of aspirin.
Aspirin killed people, not a virus.
In 1918, the convergence of a toxic drug, massive corporate advertising, and government, military and medical pressure to use the drug, led to tens of millions of deaths. That combination of groups has come together again, this time behind vaccines.
The question, though, is why are vaccines being promoted at all for a pandemic “like the 1918 flu” since the deaths then were not caused by a flu?
Given that it was common bacteria, the following CDC statements make no sense:
“This report describes the successful reconstruction of the influenza A (H1N1) virus responsible for the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic and provides novel information about the properties that contributed to its exceptional virulence….
“The influenza pandemic of 1918-19 killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people worldwide, many more than the subsequent pandemics of the 20th century. The biological properties that confer virulence to pandemic influenza viruses were poorly understood. Research to better understand how the individual genes of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus contribute to the disease process could provide important insights into the basis of virulence.”
The CDC is putting out a view of the 1918 deaths which is a complete science fiction. It doesn’t fit with either historical or biologic data. Nor does their “virulent virus” view answer the lingering questions around 1918 – such as why young people died or why people died so quickly. Both are answered by Dr. Karen Starko’s work on aspirin use and overdose during 1918.
Though no virus was responsible for the deaths, the CDC has another problem. There has been no evidence showing the reconstruction of the virus, either. German virologist Stefan Lanka points to the source of the story on reconstruction and to missing pieces of the virus, in this 2005 interview:
“Dr Jeffery Taubenberger, from whom the allegation of a reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic virus originates, works for the US-American army and has worked for more than 10 years on producing, on the basis of samples from different human corpses, short pieces of gene substance by means of the biochemical multiplication technique PCR. Out of the multitude of produced pieces he has selected those which came closest to the model of the genetic substance of the idea of an influenza virus, and has published these.
“In no corpse however was a virus seen or isolated or was a piece of gene substance from a such isolated. By means of the PCR technique, there were produced out of nothing pieces of gene substance whose earlier existence in the corpse could not be demonstrated.
“If viruses had been present, then these could have been isolated, and out of them their gene substance could have been isolated too; there would have been no necessity for anyone to produce laboriously, by means of PCR technique – with clearly a swindle intention – a patchwork quilt of a model of the genetic substance of the idea of an influenza virus.”
The interviewer then asked how a layman could check this, to which he replied:
“About these short pieces of gene substance, which in the sense of genetics are not complete and which do not even suffice for defining a gene, it is being maintained that they together would make up the entire gene substance of an influenza virus.
“In order to see through this swindle, one only has to be able to add up the published length pieces in order to ascertain that the sum of the lengths of the individual pieces, which supposedly makes up the entire viral gene substance of the purported influenza virus, does not make up the… genome of the influenza virus model.
“Even simpler it is to ask in what publication you can find the electron microscope photo of this supposedly reconstructed virus. There is no such publication.”
In not dealing with either the bacterial infection or the role of aspirin in causing the 1918 deaths, and by continuing the “virulent virus myth,” the CDC is promoting the need for anti-viral drugs (which it mentions by name), as well as the development of vaccines, yet none of them would be appropriate for dealing with what killed people during 1918.
The CDC continues with its false promotion of 1918 deaths being flu related, and ignores common respiratory bacteria that NIAID showed was the source, and the global medical blunder of using toxic aspirin:
“Are current antivirals and vaccines effective against the 1918 virus?"
“Yes. Two types of antiviral drugs, rimantadine (Flumadine) and oseltamivir (Tamiflu), have been shown to be effective against influenza viruses similar to the 1918 virus. Vaccines containing the 1918 HA or other subtype H1 HA proteins were effective in protecting mice against the 1918 virus. In fact, the current influenza vaccine provided some level of protection against the 1918 virus in mice."
“Are new prophylactics and therapeutics against the 1918 virus under way?"
“The reconstruction of the 1918 virus will enable CDC to pursue development of a vaccine candidate reference virus that would provide optimal protection against this or similar viruses.”
The CDC’s characterization of 1918 as a time when a virulent virus threatened all humanity is patently untrue. That false view was used by George Bush to engender terror that a new virulent virus – related to the 1918 virus – was going to occur and kill millions again.
Why does the CDC persist in this myth despite evidence to the contrary? Eschewing motives, one might only suggest some effects of projecting the terrifying myth that millions of people could die from the virus:
1. Distraction from the hard reality that natural treatments were the only
effective treatments during 1918;
2. Cloaking of Bayer, aspirin and the industry’s role in the deaths;
3. Sales of billions in anti-viral drugs and vaccine development;
4. Increased financial power to the pharmaceutical industry to control media
and influence government;
5. Increased illnesses and deaths from chemical pharmaceutical agents, one of
the highest risk factors;
6. Fearful dependence on “expert medical authority” and complex expensive
“solutions” to save people;
7. Surrender of unlimited authority to government regulatory agencies to
“protect” the public from natural products; VIDEO
8. Use of the specter of millions of deaths as the justification for the
removal of human rights to “protect” the public;
9. Enhancement of the pharmaceutical industry moves toward an uncontested
global monopoly over health (life and death);
10. Industrialization, commercialization, and militarization of “disease”; and
11. An open door to use of “pandemic emergency” to justify martial law.
The truth — that medical authorities using Bayer aspirin (and generic aspirin) killed so many millions of people that those deaths became one the most terrifying events in human history — fundamentally threatens a global multi-trillion dollar investment industry built around unquestioned “medical expertise” and their use of synthetic drugs.
But the fuller truth contains something more dire for the pharmaceutical industry than “only” the millions of deaths they caused because something else of great significance happened then as well – non-industrial medicine, those using organic substances, saved people from death.
1918 set up a global test comparing millions of people, those who were treated by industrial medicine and those treated by organic medicine. The first group died in unfathomable numbers. Nearly all of the second group lived.
That reality shines out from 1918, focusing the world’s attention backwards historically to the rise of the synthetic chemical pharmaceutical industry where once humanity had only used nature.
What stands out is the failure and toxicity of one of the industry’s oldest and most trusted products – aspirin – to a calamitous degree. Add to that Bayer’s global advertising of its toxic product, and government and media influence, and they combined to increase the loss of life to a level never seen before.
Bayer’s product produced so many millions of deaths that it competes with the black plague in number of deaths – 20 to 50 million deaths during 1918 and 1919 versus 25 to 75 million during the course of many years of the Bubonic Plague.
But that single synthetic pharmaceutical product has by now far outstripped the number of deaths from the most infamous disease in history since, as a later section on Bayer will show, the deaths have not stopped even up to today and are of epidemic proportions.
Natural health practitioners are the ones who saved lives during 1918 while aspirin killed. Today the government, under influence from Bayer and other pharmaceutical companies, is suppressing access to natural health products which have no lethality and saved lives during 1918, in favor of predictably lethal vaccines, the need for which is based on an extremely misdirecting myth – blaming a flu (or virus) that was not the cause.
Beyond the deaths Bayer caused with its aspirin, in the 1980s, it knowingly “sold millions of dollars of blood-clotting medicine for hemophiliacs – medicine that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS,” reported the Sydney Morning Herald back in 2003. The medicine was developed from HIV-infected plasma donors. “As a result, thousands of hemophiliacs became infected with HIV,” CBS advised in 2009. Here’s a less forgiving MSNBC news video on the matter.
In light of the millions of 1918 deaths from Bayer’s invention of aspirin (a coal tar-based synthetic) and now Bayer’s synthetic vaccines (potentially contaminated with anything), an automatic reassessment of natural versus synthetic treatments is triggered.
Life or death is at stake for humanity in that reassessment.
5. Increased illnesses and deaths from chemical pharmaceutical agents, one of
the highest risk factors;
6. Fearful dependence on “expert medical authority” and complex expensive
“solutions” to save people;
7. Surrender of unlimited authority to government regulatory agencies to
“protect” the public from natural products; VIDEO
8. Use of the specter of millions of deaths as the justification for the
removal of human rights to “protect” the public;
9. Enhancement of the pharmaceutical industry moves toward an uncontested
global monopoly over health (life and death);
10. Industrialization, commercialization, and militarization of “disease”; and
11. An open door to use of “pandemic emergency” to justify martial law.
The truth — that medical authorities using Bayer aspirin (and generic aspirin) killed so many millions of people that those deaths became one the most terrifying events in human history — fundamentally threatens a global multi-trillion dollar investment industry built around unquestioned “medical expertise” and their use of synthetic drugs.
But the fuller truth contains something more dire for the pharmaceutical industry than “only” the millions of deaths they caused because something else of great significance happened then as well – non-industrial medicine, those using organic substances, saved people from death.
1918 set up a global test comparing millions of people, those who were treated by industrial medicine and those treated by organic medicine. The first group died in unfathomable numbers. Nearly all of the second group lived.
That reality shines out from 1918, focusing the world’s attention backwards historically to the rise of the synthetic chemical pharmaceutical industry where once humanity had only used nature.
What stands out is the failure and toxicity of one of the industry’s oldest and most trusted products – aspirin – to a calamitous degree. Add to that Bayer’s global advertising of its toxic product, and government and media influence, and they combined to increase the loss of life to a level never seen before.
Bayer’s product produced so many millions of deaths that it competes with the black plague in number of deaths – 20 to 50 million deaths during 1918 and 1919 versus 25 to 75 million during the course of many years of the Bubonic Plague.
But that single synthetic pharmaceutical product has by now far outstripped the number of deaths from the most infamous disease in history since, as a later section on Bayer will show, the deaths have not stopped even up to today and are of epidemic proportions.
Natural health practitioners are the ones who saved lives during 1918 while aspirin killed. Today the government, under influence from Bayer and other pharmaceutical companies, is suppressing access to natural health products which have no lethality and saved lives during 1918, in favor of predictably lethal vaccines, the need for which is based on an extremely misdirecting myth – blaming a flu (or virus) that was not the cause.
Beyond the deaths Bayer caused with its aspirin, in the 1980s, it knowingly “sold millions of dollars of blood-clotting medicine for hemophiliacs – medicine that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS,” reported the Sydney Morning Herald back in 2003. The medicine was developed from HIV-infected plasma donors. “As a result, thousands of hemophiliacs became infected with HIV,” CBS advised in 2009. Here’s a less forgiving MSNBC news video on the matter.
In light of the millions of 1918 deaths from Bayer’s invention of aspirin (a coal tar-based synthetic) and now Bayer’s synthetic vaccines (potentially contaminated with anything), an automatic reassessment of natural versus synthetic treatments is triggered.
Life or death is at stake for humanity in that reassessment.
Part 4 of 5
A confluence of events created a “perfect storm” for widespread salicylate toxicity. The loss of Bayer’s patent on aspirin in February 1917 allowed many manufacturers into the lucrative aspirin market. Official recommendations for aspirin therapy at toxic doses were preceded by ignorance of the unusual nonlinear kinetics of salicylate (unknown until the 1960s), which predispose to accumulation and toxicity; tins and bottles that contained no warnings and few instructions; and fear of “Spanish” influenza, an illness that had been spreading like wildfire. ~ Dr. Karen Starko
Given the role that it played in the millions of 1918 deaths, a further look at aspirin is in order.
Bayer aspirin was one of the earliest of drugs from the pharmaceutical industry, dependent on the oil industry, and has become the most commonly used and trusted drug. As such, it exemplifies the displacement of natural treatments by synthetic drugs.
Is Bayer aspirin safe today?
During 1918, repeatedly, first hand medical accounts point to aspirin as the source of pneumonias. In collecting these accounts, Julian Winston notes in 1998:
“In reading the accounts of the epidemic, it seems that most of the deaths were caused by a virulent pneumonia that was especially devastating to those who depressed their system with analgesics – the most common being aspirin.”Here’s one of the accounts he reproduced:
“I had a package handed to me containing 1,000 aspirin tablets, which was 994 too many. I think I gave about a half dozen. I could find no place for it. My remedies were few. I almost invariably gave Gelsemium and Bryonia. I hardly ever lost a case if I got there first, unless the patient had been sent to a drug store and bought aspirin, in which event I was likely to have a case of pneumonia on my hands.” -J. P. Huff, MD, Olive Branch, Kentucky.Winston adds,
“The Physician from whom I first learned homeopathy, Raymond Seidel, MD, HMD, said that he decided to be a homeopathic doctor during the flu epidemic when he was working as a delivery boy for a homeopath in New Jersey. Raymond Seidel told me that he decided to become a homeopathic doctor when he was a ten-year old delivery boy for a local homeopath.”
Seidel told him:
For Bayer and the pharmaceutical industry, they are the unquestioned basics of their industry.
Yet they all routinely kill.
Citing articles from various medical journals in his landmark report from 2002, Toxic and Deadly NSAIDs, an Investigative Report, Roman Bystrianyk summarizes:
“Over 100,000 people are hospitalized for GI bleeding and of those 16,500 die every year. And these values are considered ‘conservative.’
“Also the figures only include prescription NSAIDs used to treat only arthritis and only in the United States. If prescription and over the counter NSAID-related hospitalizations and death rates were counted for not only arthritis, but for all conditions, and throughout the world, the figures would no doubt be enormous. Taking those figures and applying them over the many years that this class of drug that has been available since the early 1970s and the numbers would be horrific. And yet, no study to date has attempted to quantify these figures.”
He then reposts a graph from The New England Journal of Medicine article by M. Wolfe, et al., “Gastrointestinal Toxicity of Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs”, (June 17, 1999, Vol. 340, No. 24, pp. 1888-1889), which shows this alarming statistic relative to other causes of deaths:
“I saw that the people who were taking aspirin were dying, about half those who were drinking a lot were dying, and those that received homeopathic remedies were living.”Aspirin was the first of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, the others not available until 1955 when Tylenol was first marketed. They are the most commonly used drug on the market, sold over the counter and by prescription.
For Bayer and the pharmaceutical industry, they are the unquestioned basics of their industry.
Yet they all routinely kill.
Citing articles from various medical journals in his landmark report from 2002, Toxic and Deadly NSAIDs, an Investigative Report, Roman Bystrianyk summarizes:
“Over 100,000 people are hospitalized for GI bleeding and of those 16,500 die every year. And these values are considered ‘conservative.’
“Also the figures only include prescription NSAIDs used to treat only arthritis and only in the United States. If prescription and over the counter NSAID-related hospitalizations and death rates were counted for not only arthritis, but for all conditions, and throughout the world, the figures would no doubt be enormous. Taking those figures and applying them over the many years that this class of drug that has been available since the early 1970s and the numbers would be horrific. And yet, no study to date has attempted to quantify these figures.”
He then reposts a graph from The New England Journal of Medicine article by M. Wolfe, et al., “Gastrointestinal Toxicity of Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs”, (June 17, 1999, Vol. 340, No. 24, pp. 1888-1889), which shows this alarming statistic relative to other causes of deaths:
U.S. Mortality Data for Seven Selected Disorders in 1997. A total of 16,500 patients with rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis died from the gastrointestinal toxic effects of NSAIDs. Data are from the National Center for Health Statistics and the Arthritis, Rheumatism, and Aging Medical Information System.
Aspirin, the first of this class of drugs, has existed since the 1800s. How many people has it alone killed?
Another useful graph compares “yearly estimated NSAID deaths since 1991 with the number of murders committed with firearms each year in the United States and with the number of U.S. Forces killed in Vietnam if that war was being fought in the 1990s instead of 1961-1972,” Bystrianyk writes:
Comparison of NSAID related deaths with yearly murders with firearms and the number of US forces killed in Vietnam. From James F. Fries, “NSAID Gastropathy: The Second Most Deadly Rheumatic Disease? Epidemiology and Risk Appraisal”, Journal of Rheumatology, 1991, (Supplement 28), Vol. 18, pp. 6-10; and Singh Gurkirpal, MD, The American Journal of Medicine, July 27, 1998, p. 31S.
The graph assumes a linear increase in the number of NSAID deaths; the actual numbers are unknown. But, Bystrianyk repeats that the “16,500 NSAID deaths per year is considered conservative” since it does not include over the counter medications or prescriptions for conditions other than arthritis.
Bystrianyk adds:
“Another important observation is that most people have no warning signs that these drugs are causing them internal damage before ending up in the hospital with a serious medical condition. And as we have seen from the statistics, approximately 10% of these hospitalizations end in death….
Even aspirin, the first NSAID that was synthesized over 100 years ago by Felix Hoffman at Bayer industries is not free of risk. And considering that aspirin is being highly recommended to reduce the incidence of heartdisease we must consider the gastrointestinal damage being caused as well.”
Bystrianyk then quotes J. Weil, et al., from their 2005 British Medical Journal article entitled, 'Prophylactic aspirin and risk of peptic ulcer bleeding':
“We found that no particular dose of aspirin between 75 mg and 300 mg daily currently used in cardiovascular prophylaxis is free of risk of causing bleeding from gastric or duodenal ulcers. Even very low (75 mg) doses of aspirin reportedly caused gastric bleeding in volunteers. … Some 10,000 episodes of ulcer bleeding occur in people aged 60 and over each year in England and Wales. … It [sic] may be deduced that 900 of the 10,000 episodes could be associated with and ascribed to prophylactic aspirin use. A general change to low doses (75 mg) of aspirin would not eliminate the risk….” [Emphasis addedMaking matters worse, Bystrianyk writes:]
“Unfortunately the risk of hospitalization and death is not the only possibility from taking these types of drugs. Other studies also indicate that the risk of Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) while using NSAIDs is also quite substantial. One author suggested that the number of deaths could be similar to those that are being seen with gastrointestinal bleeding. If so the numbers of deaths attributed to NSAIDs would increase dramatically from the already large figure of 16,500.”His source is J. Page and D. Henry from their March 2000 article in the Archives of Internal Medicine 'Consumption of NSAIDs and the Development of Congestive Heart Failure in Elderly Patients':
“In this study, we found that recent use of NSAIDs by elderly patients doubles the odds of being admitted to hospital with an episode of CHF [Congestive Heart Failure]. The estimated relative risk for first admission with heart failure, and the risk of this outcome was increased substantially by NSAID use in those with a history of heart disease.… Assuming the association between use of NSAIDs and CHF is unconfounded, the disease burden attributable to these drugs may be large – approaching the levels of morbidity and mortality that we have previously documented for serious upper gastrointestinal complications of NSAID use in NSW [New South Wales].”The following statement Bystrianyk made about all NSAIDS (including Bayer aspirin) could as easily characterize what happened during 1918, including the complete silence surrounding Bayer’s drug – aspirin (and the generic versions) – that is now implicated in killing millions of people during 1918.
“NSAIDs are truly a silent epidemic that have caused a tremendous amount of pain and death. Public knowledge of this tragedy is virtually non-existent with an enormous amount of information written primarily existing within the sanctuary of medical libraries. Pharmaceutical companies still market and promote worldwide sales of these toxic substances and governmental agencies have done nothing of any substance to alert the public.”Of course, research continues to expose the hazards of NSAIDS. One site that tracks current research is Pain-Topics.org. In May of this year, Stewart B. Leavitt, MA, PhD, wrote, “Results of the new research suggest that even short-term use of these pain relievers is unsafe for [heart attack] patients with pain.” In that piece he also mentions adverse effects on the liver, as well as the heart.
Given all the information presented so far in this series, a set of questions arises as to Bayer’s culpability and influence over regulators. In the next and final installment, we pose those questions.
Part 5 of 5
Without question, the 20 to 50 million deaths during the 1918-19 “flu” epidemic represent the greatest iatrogenic catastrophe in human history.
The attribution of those deaths to a virulent new virus has been debunked by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which said that common upper respiratory bacteria were responsible. Aspirin, heavily marketed and medically recommended, suppressed the immune system and led to massive infection resulting in pneumonia and death.
The central role that aspirin played in those deaths contrasts sharply with the survival of those who avoided it in favor of natural treatments. Aspirin, not a virus, created a pharmaceutical industry calamity.
It also created the largest industrial catastrophe in history, with no industrial disasters even approaching the death count – far outstripping the number of deaths from Chernobyl, Bhopal, or even projected deaths from Fukishima. The number of deaths has only been approached by deaths from WWII, to which Bayer also contributed.
While 1918 exposes the extreme toxicity of Bayer’s central drug, aspirin, it reveals something more profound – the abject failure of the coal-tar based synthetic drug industry to treat disease.
With this information, a new series of questions arise – no longer medical ones, but ones of power and profit.
1. Bayer was a leading German pharmaceutical company. Soldiers who had won a war against the Germans and escaped death, died after the war in even greater numbers. When they came home, the public in their home countries began to die as well. Is it reasonable to suggest that the Germans, through Bayer and its heavily advertised product, literally continued killing their enemies?
2. Twenty years after Bayer contributed to the largest number of deaths by disease (20 to 50 million) in human history, Bayer was a primary funder of Hitler, helped run the basic operations of the war, including the concentration camps, and in causing WWII and slaughtering and experimenting on people during the Holocaust, was responsible for the deaths of 50-70 million people. Was Bayer a financial backer of the German military during WWI as well?
3. How many of the 20 to 50 million deaths in 1918 stem from Bayer aspirin and Bayer’s actions, including its heavy advertising of aspirin?
4. Did Bayer influence the official recommendations for aspirin therapy which came from the Surgeon General, the Navy, and the American Medical Association?
5. Did Bayer know its aspirin was toxic and hide the information? If so, were warnings or dosages not included in order to sell more aspirin? Was 1918 a Bayer medical scandal as well?
6. Did Bayer make any efforts – through its advertising, or influence with government and the military, or through financial arrangements, or in any other way – to promote or even ensure the use of aspirin (in military settings, for instance), or to generate greater fear of the Spanish flu, in order to sell more of its lethal product? Was 1918 a Bayer financial scandal as well?
7. Has Bayer done anything since 1918 to cover up its role in what happened during 1918, and to promote the myth, instead, of a deadly new virulent virus as mass killer?
8. Was Bayer involved in putting Bush into office, and/or in writing the “pandemic martial laws” which remove all human and constitutional rights, which states adopted based on the virus myth, or in paying for lobbying for them?
9. Was Bayer involved in designing and/or writing the Food Safety Modernization Act which can be used to destroy supplement companies and practitioners, or any of the four other bills to accomplish the same, or in the EU
10. How many people have died from aspirin since 1918 and how much money has Bayer made from aspirin since that time? Has Bayer been involved in preventing any FDA investigations into deaths from NSAIDs?
11. Flu was not the cause of the 1918 deaths. While this article has focused on medical evidence indicating that aspirin overdose is the most reasonable explanation for the terrifying rapid deaths, and aspirin use appears responsible for the massive bacterial infections that led to lethal pneumonias, there is a first cause before aspirin itself – Bayer’s desire for profit. As millions of people died, how much money did Bayer make during the 1918-19 “flu”?
Those questions are the new questions surrounding 1918 and they need to be answered.
