Previously: UK: Drug Known to Cause Birth Defects Since the 70s Still Prescribed to Pregnant Women
We simply cannot stress enough that the US government is threatening to regulate AI while Americans are being poisoned from every single direction. Everywhere you look, there is some new poison entering the bodies of Americans.
Pharma cannot be regulated. Big agriculture cannot be regulated. Petrochemical companies cannot be regulated.
Your small business can be regulated into oblivion, however. IRS agents with guns can come kill you because you didn’t pay enough taxes. The government can run small businesses out of business by pushing lunatic minimum wage laws.
The government can censor social media. The government can somehow steal Daily Stormer’s domains, and block them from using any American or European services for anything. The government can kidnap your kids and put them in a homosexual rape house to be turned into trannies.
The government can do coronavirus lockdowns, where cops can beat the shit out of you for refusing to wear a mask.
Property taxes exist, which means you do not actually own property in America. The government will force Christians to bake anal cakes.
There is this insane situation going on where the American government uses both Stalinism and libertarianism, situationally. When it comes to regulating poisons that are going into your body, it’s pure libertarianism. Meanwhile, when it comes to small businesses, freedom of speech, parental rights, private property, or freedom of association, it’s Stalinism.
Do you see this? Do you smell what I’m cooking? It’s a very important insight.
I don’t support libertarianism or Stalinism. However, pure libertarianism, or, in fact, pure Stalinism, would both be a million times better than what we have now.
People are whining I put Stalin in the banner. If you’re whining about that, you’re a baby. Promoting Stalin is funny. Stalin was an awesome criminal and psychopathic power-hungry lunatic who seized control of a superpower using the most brutal mastermind tactics possible, then had all the Jews he climbed over hunted down and killed. Imagine that Trotsky was in Mexico hanging out with goofy and untalented mural painters when the NKVD sunk an ice pick into his brain.
I don’t support Stalinism, however. I would support Russia annexing the Baltics, but Putin doesn’t want to do that, and there’s no real reason to do it, so I don’t support it. However, the claim that “Stalin murdered millions of people” is stupid on its face. Claiming famines are done on purpose is unfalsifiable. Collectivization would have led to famines regardless, so you’d have to argue that collectivization was itself a conspiracy by Stalin to kill his own workforce, and it’s like, “why?”
Stalin did kill a lot of people, for sure, but there were not mass exterminations. People against him (or suspected of being against him) were sent to Siberia and died of exposure. That happened. If we’re talking about millions of people, then let’s see the mass graves.
Point being: I would exchange the Biden Administration for the Stalin Administration without even thinking about it. Stalin executed homosexuals; he didn’t steal kids and give them to homosexuals.
In 2009, Emma Murphy took a phone call from her sister that changed her life. “At first, I couldn’t make out what she was saying; she was crying so much,” Murphy says. “All I could hear was ‘Epilim’.” This was a brand name for sodium valproate, the medication Murphy had been taking since she was 12 to manage her epilepsy.
Her sister explained that a woman on the local news had claimed that taking the drug during her pregnancies had harmed her children. She was appealing for other women who might have experienced this to come forward.
Murphy found the news segment that evening and watched it. “I was just stunned,” she says. “Watching that, I knew. I knew there and then that my children had been affected.”
Janet Williams and Emma Murphy
At that point, Murphy was a mother to five children, all under six, and married to Joe, a taxi driver in Manchester. “My kids are fabulous, all of them, but I’d known for years that something was wrong,” she says. “They weren’t meeting milestones. There was delayed speech, slowness to crawl, not walking. There was a lot of drooling – that was really apparent. They were poorly, with constant infections. I was always at the doctors with one of them.
“I knew there was something wrong and I’d say it to doctors, to friends, to family, but no one was listening. I was told: ‘It’s a phase.’ ‘You’re reading too much into things.’ ‘You’re depressed.’” At times, she had wondered if her medication was to blame. “Everyone knows about thalidomide, but then I’d think: there’s no way. It can’t be. I’ve been told so many times – by midwives, by doctors, by consultants – over so many years that it was safe to keep taking.” By the time Murphy saw the news item, one of her children, Lauren, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy.
“It was 10 at night, but I called the news station straight away and asked for this woman’s number,” says Murphy. “I knew I should wait until morning, but I couldn’t. Janet answered the phone and we talked for two hours.” At this point, Murphy wells up and has to pause. Then she says simply: “She saved my life.”
This call between Murphy and Janet Williams was the start of an incredible partnership. It led to the report published this month by England’s patient safety commissioner, Dr Henrietta Hughes, which recommended a compensation scheme for families of children harmed by valproate taken in pregnancy. Hughes has suggested initial payments of £100,000 and described the damage caused by the drug as “a bigger scandal than thalidomide”. It is estimated that 20,000 British children have been exposed to the drug while in the womb.
Williams and Murphy have campaigned relentlessly to reach this point. It is by no means the endpoint – even now, an estimated three babies are born each month having been exposed to the drug. Together, the women formed In-Fact (the Independent Fetal Anti Convulsant Trust) to find and support families like theirs. They were instrumental in the creation of an all-party parliamentary group to raise awareness in government. They went to Geneva to get foetal valproate spectrum disorder (FVSD) included in the latest version of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases.
Perhaps most crucially, they uncovered papers from the early 1970s that revealed the key decisions that informed how the drug would be prescribed. They found notes from the manufacturer, Sanofi, that stated that valproate could be teratogenic – harmful to foetuses. They also found the response from the Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM), then the main decision-making body on new medicines, which concluded that the risk was low and that patients should not be informed, in order to avoid “fruitless anxiety”.
All this has taken 15 years, but Williams has been battling for a lot longer. “Both my boys are now in their 30s,” she says. “We realised what had happened when our youngest was just 12 months.”
Williams, who lives in Pilling, Lancashire, was diagnosed with epilepsy at 16 and prescribed valproate. She had gone on to marry Steve, a bus driver, and have two sons, Lee and Philip. Both spent time in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). “Within 12 hours of being born, Lee was very jittery, shaky, refusing his feeds, and they rushed him off to NICU,” she says. “They explained that it was withdrawal from the valproate. He was there for seven days, but they said absolutely nothing about how it would affect him in later life. I gave birth to his brother, Philip, 16 months later and went through exactly the same thing.”
For the next year, many problems worried her. The boys were slow to reach for toys, roll over, crawl or attempt to talk or walk. When they were two and one respectively, they were given an appointment with a geneticist at St Mary’s hospital in Manchester. “The whole family went,” says Williams. “The geneticist told me both boys had been diagnosed with FVSD within 24 hours of being born. She said she’d looked at the research papers and couldn’t find any reason for the problems they were having other than valproate. At first, I was speechless. ‘So the medications caused this?’ was my first question. She said: ‘I’m afraid so.’ There was so little research; there wasn’t much she could tell us about what to expect. “I’d harmed my children. That’s how I felt. The guilt is enormous and it never leaves you.”
…
Murphy learned that symptoms of FVSD vary, which was why her children had been affected in such different ways. Neurodevelopmental disorders are the most common. Between 30% and 40% of children exposed to valproate during pregnancy have delays in development, lower intellectual abilities, poor language skills and memory problems. Children with a history of valproate exposure in pregnancy have a threefold risk of autistic spectrum disorder compared with the general population. There is also an 11% risk of congenital malformations, including heart and kidney defects, spina bifida, cleft palate and limb defects.
The government won’t do anything.
Maybe they will change the chemicals causing this to similar chemicals that do the same thing.
But these people do not care. This is a democracy, meaning that all government officials function on one principle only: who will pay them the most money.
Pharma has a lot of money.
More campaigning mothers.