Corporate Corruption News Articles

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New data from the National Institutes of Health reveal the agency and its scientists collected $710 million in royalties during the pandemic, from late 2021 through 2023. These are payments made by private companies, like pharmaceuticals, to license medical innovations from government scientists. Almost all that cash – $690 million – went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and 260 of its scientists. Information about this vast private royalty complex is tightly held by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). My organization, OpenTheBooks.com, was forced to sue to uncover the royalties paid from September 2009 to October 2021, which amounted to $325 million over 56,000 transactions. Payments skyrocketed during the pandemic era: Those years saw more than double the amount of cash flow to NIH from the private sector, compared to the prior 12 combined. All told, it's $1.036 billion. NIH is still redacting pieces of the data that would help us more easily connect therapeutics with their government-paid inventors. For example, they refuse to show us the amount of royalties paid to each individual scientist. So we still can't entirely follow the money. In the meantime, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has sponsored the Royalty Transparency Act, which sailed unanimously through the committee process and deserves a floor vote immediately.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the pharmaceutical industry from reliable major media sources.

More than a dozen countries require that companies print nutritional labels on the front of food packages – a move that's come as the rate of diet-related diseases, like hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke and obesity, increases worldwide. So far, the United States does not require any front-of-package nutrition labels. But that could soon change. The US Food and Drug Administration is currently developing front-of-package labels that it could require corporations to begin printing as early as 2027. Despite significant opposition from food companies ... the FDA is evaluating different mandatory label designs to determine which is most effective at informing consumers, but also which is legal under US corporate free speech laws. The labels under consideration by the FDA ... mark only "nutrients of concern", like sugar and sodium – not-ultra processed foods. But many advocates say that should change. UPFs are industrially formulated products made out of substances extracted from foods, like sugars, salts, hydrogenated fats, bulking agents and starches. Today, UPFs make up 73% of the US food supply, according to Northeastern University's Network Science Institute, and provide the average US adult with more than 60% of their daily calories. But research is increasingly linking UPFs to a whole host of health issues: from cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes to colorectal cancer and depression.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption from reliable major media sources.

The Biden administration suspended federal funding to the scientific nonprofit whose research is at the center of credible theories that the COVID-19 pandemic was started via a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it was immediately suspending three grants provided to the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) as it starts the process of debarring the organization from receiving any federal funds. For years now, EcoHealth has generated immense controversy for its use of federal grant money to support gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab. HHS said that EcoHealth had failed to properly monitor the work it was supporting at Wuhan. It also failed to properly report on the results of experiments showing that the hybrid viruses it was creating there had an improved ability to infect human cells. In testimony to the House's coronavirus subcommittee, [EcoHealth President Peter ] Daszak claimed that EcoHealth attempted to report the results of its gain-of-function experiments on time in 2019, but was frozen out of NIH's reporting system. [An] HHS memo released today says a forensic investigation found no evidence that EcoHealth was locked out of NIH's reporting system. The department also said that EcoHealth had failed to produce requested lab notes and other materials from the Wuhan lab detailing the work being done there.

Note: Watch our 15-min Mindful News Brief video on the strong evidence that bioweapons research created COVID-19. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on COVID and government corruption from reliable major media sources.

What Americans eat, how they diet and exercise, what nutritional supplements they take, the sugar content of their sodas, the high fructose corn syrup in their processed foods, and the price of their diabetes medication have long been objects of endless gambling on Wall Street. Now, with drugs like Mounjaro, Wegovy, and Ozempic in the mix, new vistas of corporate exploitation have opened up. It's not a conspiracy theory that food addiction is a tool of corporate profiteering. Consider that tobacco companies, upon being regulated out of the business of addictive smoking, turned their sights onto addictive eating. Health columnist Anahad O'Connor wrote, "In America, the steepest increase in the prevalence of hyper-palatable foods occurred between 1988 and 2001–the era when Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds owned the world's leading food companies." Many of these ultra-processed foods are specially marketed to children, which in turn can change their brain chemistry to desire those foods for life. Alongside the aggressive marketing of hyper-palatable foods is a massively profitable weight-loss industry that preys upon individual shame to the tune of more than $60 billion a year. In fact, some of the same companies pushing high-calorie foods are in the business of weight loss. The ultra-processed food industry is becoming symbiotic with the weight-loss drug industry. The former ensures we eat poorly and the latter is there to feed off our shame.

Note: This is strangely comparable to when pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma LP secretly pursued a plan to become "an end-to-end pain provider" by selling both opioids and drugs to treat opioid addiction. It is now estimated that 1 in 8 adults in the US have taken Ozempic or another weight-loss drug. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption and Big Pharma profiteering from reliable major media sources.

Last week, the nation's largest prison and jail telecom corporation, Securus, effectively defaulted on more than a billion dollars of debt. After decades of preying on incarcerated people and their loved ones with exploitative call rates and other predatory practices that have driven millions of families into debt, Securus is being crushed under the weight of its own. Securus is one of two corporations that dominate roughly 80 percent of the U.S. prison telecom industry. Both companies are owned by private-equity firms: Securus, by Platinum Equity, and ViaPath (previously Global Tel Link), by American Securities. Together, Securus and ViaPath contract with 43 state prison systems and over 800 county jails. Their dominance of the market allows them to routinely charge incarcerated people and their families egregious rates for rudimentary communications services: A 15-minute phone call can run as high as $8.25; a 25-minute video call up to $15; and basic emails as much as $0.50, or more with attachments. The nature of agreements between these telecom providers and correctional agencies often further incentivizes the financial exploitation of the incarcerated, creating profit-sharing kickback schemes that provide prisons and jails with a portion of sales revenue. The ... tactics that brought Securus down–narrative change, policy campaigns, regulatory efforts, and investor activism–offer a roadmap for tackling exploitative corporate profiteers across the prison industry.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

For the first time, researchers have pulled together scientific and regulatory data to develop a database of all known chemicals used in plastic production. It's a staggering number: 16,000 plastic chemicals, with at least 4,200 of those considered to be "highly hazardous" to human health and the environment, according to the authors. "Only 980 of those highly hazardous chemicals have been regulated by agencies around the world, leaving us with 3,600 chemicals that are unregulated – and these are only the known chemicals," said Martin Wagner, first author and project lead of the PlastChem Report. The ... report outlines a systematic approach to identify and prioritize chemicals of concern that can be used by agencies and regulators around the world, including those attending the April meeting of the International Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution. The committee is part of the United Nations Environment Programme, which has committed to developing a Global Plastics Treaty between 175 nations by the end of 2024. "The most important criterion we used is toxicity," Wagner said. "Many of these chemicals are known to be very toxic for human health or the environment. They are carcinogenic or mutagenic or toxic to reproduction. Some have organ-specific toxicity, typically the liver, as that is where many of the chemicals are absorbed from circulation." The report [also] found that detailed hazard information is missing for more than 10,000 of the 16,000 chemicals.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on toxic chemicals and corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.

Widespread sexual abuse of children in the entertainment industry must be urgently stamped out, an independent UN expert told the Human Rights Council on Tuesday, presenting hard-hitting findings and recommendations on how to end the scourge. "The sexual abuse and the exploitation of children within the entertainment industry resulting from unethical systems, structures, practices or abuse of power and authority is widespread," said Mama Fatima Singhateh, the UN Special Rapporteur on sale and sexual exploitation of children. Child performers in the entertainment industry are exposed to sexualized, violent and aggressive environments that are unsafe for their integral development and in which they can be exposed to the consumption of addictive substances, she said the report. The Special Rapporteur found that predatory sexual behaviour, including grooming, was accepted as the norm in the entertainment industry. Moreover, perpetrators often faced no repercussions for unlawfully exercising power and authority over young and aspiring child performers. "Abusive work conditions and portrayal of sexual abuse and exploitation of children in various entertainment platforms ... objectify and instrumentalise children," Ms. Singhateh said. "Victims and survivors have been met with silence, non-acknowledgement, lack of investigation, duress, intimidation or non-availability of reparation measures."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media corruption and sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

A US court this week banned three weedkillers widely used in American agriculture, finding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law in allowing them to be on the market. The ruling is specific to three dicamba-based weedkillers manufactured by Bayer, BASF and Syngenta, which have been blamed for millions of acres of crop damage and harm to endangered species and natural areas across the midwest and south. Discovery documents turned up in the litigation showed the companies knew that their dicamba weedkillers would probably lead to off-target crop damage. This is the second time a federal court has banned these weedkillers since they were introduced for the 2017 growing season. In 2020, the ninth circuit court of appeals issued its own ban, but months later the Trump administration reapproved the weedkilling products. But a federal judge in Arizona ruled on Monday that the EPA made a crucial error in reapproving dicamba, finding the agency did not post it for public notice and comment as required by law. US district judge David Bury wrote ... that it was a "very serious" violation and that if EPA had done a full analysis, it probably would not have made the same decision. Bury wrote that the EPA did not allow many people who are deeply affected by the weedkiller – including specialty farmers, conservation groups and more – to comment. "The evidence has shown that dicamba cannot be used without causing massive and unprecedented harm to farms as well as endangering plants and pollinators," said George Kimbrell [with] the Center for Food Safety, which litigated the case.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and government corruption from reliable major media sources.

2023 was a year marked by devastating conflicts from Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine to Hamas's horrific terror attacks on Israel, from that country's indiscriminate mass slaughter in Gaza to a devastating civil war in Sudan. And there's a distinct risk of even worse to come this year. Still, there was one clear winner in this avalanche of violence, suffering, and war: the U.S. military-industrial complex. In December, President Biden signed a record authorization of $886 billion in "national defense" spending for 2024, including funds for the Pentagon proper and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. Add to that tens of billions of dollars more in likely emergency military aid for Ukraine and Israel, and such spending could well top $900 billion for the first time. Annual spending on the costly, dysfunctional F-35 combat aircraft alone is greater than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, Lockheed Martin's contracts with the Pentagon were worth more than the budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined, and its arms-related revenues continue to rival the government's entire investment in diplomacy. One $13 billion aircraft carrier costs more than the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Before investing ever more tax dollars ... the military strategy of the United States in the current global environment should be seriously debated.

Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria's President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022. Despite these remarkable and costly debacles ... the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades. American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money. To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today's federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA. Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays.

Note: War profiteering is an old game. General Smedley Butler wrote War is a Racket in 1935. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war and government corruption from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

The annual "Trouble in Toyland" report, produced by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) and released before the holiday season, historically has focused on safety hazards found in traditional children's toys. According to the 38th annual "Trouble in Toyland" report, released in mid-November, "Toys that spy on children are a growing threat." The threats "stem from toys with microphones, cameras and trackers, as well as recalled toys, water beads, counterfeits and Meta Quest VR headsets." "The riskiest features of smart toys are those that can collect information, especially without our knowledge or used in a way that parents didn't agree to," said Teresa Murray, Consumer Watchdog at the U.S. PIRG Education Fund and author of the report. "It's chilling to learn what some of these toys can do," Murray said. Smart toys include "stuffed animals that listen and talk, devices that learn their habits, games with online accounts, and smart speakers, watches, play kitchens and remote cars that connect to apps or other technology," according to PIRG. Smart toys can pose the risk of data breaches, hacking, potential violations of children's privacy laws such as the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), and exposure to "inappropriate or harmful material without proper filtering and parental controls." According to PIRG, "We don't know with certainty when our child plays with a connected toy that the company isn't recording us or collecting our data."

Note: A 2015 New York Times article called smart objects a "trainwreck in privacy and security." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

Federal regulators announced warnings against two major food and beverage industry groups and a dozen nutrition influencers on Wednesday, as part of a broad action to enforce stricter standards for how companies and social media creators disclose paid advertising. The Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters on Monday to American Beverage, a lobbying group whose members include Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, as well as the Canadian Sugar Institute and a dozen health influencers who collectively have over 6 million followers on TikTok and Instagram. The agency flagged nearly three dozen social media posts that it said failed to clearly disclose who was paying the influencers to promote artificial sweeteners or sugary foods. The action follows a months-long investigation by The Examination and The Washington Post that revealed how the food and beverage industry had enlisted popular dietitians to promote industry-friendly messages on social media posts that often failed to disclose the names of sponsors. Social media marketing ... has been described as the Wild West of advertising. Over $6 billion is expected to be spent on influencer marketing in the United States in 2023. The enforcement action is the first the FTC has taken against major food and beverage industry groups for social media marketing. The agency urged the trade groups and nutrition influencers to remove posts or add proper disclosures and noted that future failures could trigger fines of more than $50,000 for each violation.

Note: Read how cereal giant Kellogg used fake experts to sell its sugary cereals. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption from reliable major media sources.

Unhealthy foods are becoming a silent epidemic, with one in seven adults and one in eight children globally now effectively addicted to ultra-processed foods. It's time to address this issue at its source: advertising. Consumption of junk food begins not with what goes in our mouths but with the messaging into our brains via advertising. UK junk food advertising is an industry worth tens of millions of pounds working to glamorise unhealthy diets. My own work looks at outdoor advertising, such as on billboards and bus stops. In 2022, among the biggest spenders on outdoor advertising were the likes of Coca-Cola, McDonald's, KFC, Subway and MĂĽller. They spent Ł195m filling public spaces with monuments to fat, salt and sugar. Advertisers will say this is simply a question of choice, and that junk food ads respond to consumer demand. But do any of us feel deprived of choice by the absence of ads touting the supposed health benefits of smoking? Of course not. Society would be better off without ads for junk food on street corners. The good news? We can take action. Local authorities can introduce ethical ad policies that ban junk food ads on council-owned sites. Somerset council recently took this step, following in the footsteps of Bristol and Transport for London, whose junk food ad ban was predicted to save the NHS more than Ł200m. Outdoor advertising offers a poorly regulated platform for big corporations to push unhealthy diets on an unassuming public.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption from reliable major media sources.

Google maintains one of the world's most comprehensive repositories of location information. Drawing from phones' GPS coordinates, plus connections to Wi-Fi networks and cellular towers, it can often estimate a person's whereabouts to within several feet. It gathers this information in part to sell advertising, but police routinely dip into the data to further their investigations. The use of search data is less common, but that, too, has made its way into police stations throughout the country. Traditionally, American law enforcement obtains a warrant to search the home or belongings of a specific person, in keeping with a constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. Warrants for Google's location and search data are, in some ways, the inverse of that process, says Michael Price, the litigation director for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' Fourth Amendment Center. Rather than naming a suspect, law enforcement identifies basic parameters–a set of geographic coordinates or search terms–and asks Google to provide hits, essentially generating a list of leads. By their very nature, these Google warrants often return information on people who haven't been suspected of a crime. In 2018 a man in Arizona was wrongly arrested for murder based on Google location data. Google says it received a record 60,472 search warrants in the US last year, more than double the number from 2019. The company provides at least some information in about 80% of cases.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

I had to watch every frame of a recent stabbing video ... It will never leave me," says Harun*, one of many moderators reviewing harmful online content in India, as social media companies increasingly move the challenging work offshore. Moderators working in Hyderabad, a major IT hub in south Asia, have spoken of the strain on their mental health of reviewing images and videos of sexual and violent content, sometimes including trafficked children. Many social media platforms in the UK, European Union and US have moved the work to countries such as India and the Philippines. While OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, has said artificial intelligence could be used to speed up content moderation, it is not expected to end the need for the thousands of human moderators employed by social media platforms. Content moderators in Hyderabad say the work has left them emotionally distressed, depressed and struggling to sleep. "I had to watch every frame of a recent stabbing video of a girl. What upset me most is that the passersby didn't help her," says Harun. "There have been instances when I've flagged a video containing child nudity and received continuous calls from my supervisors," [said moderator Akash]. "Most of these half-naked pictures of minors are from the US or Europe. I've received multiple warnings from my supervisors not to flag these videos. One of them asked me to ‘man up' when I complained that these videos need to be discussed in detail."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and Big Tech from reliable major media sources.

Every year, up to 9,000 people die in the US as a result of a prescription medication error. That figure doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of patients who suffer adverse effects from taking the wrong medication or taking meds in the wrong way. Now, an investigative report from the Los Angeles Times reveals that pharmacies make an estimated 5 million errors every year in California alone, according to the state's Board of Pharmacy. But even as pharmacy errors mount across the US, pharmaceutical lobbyists are pushing to keep reports of errors hidden from officials and the public. The problem, according to pharmacists and others, is most acute at big retail pharmacy chains such as CVS and Walgreens, where overworked staff are pushed to the limit to meet sales quotas, despite desperate staffing shortages. To combat the rising tide of pharmacy errors, the California State Board of Pharmacy is sponsoring a bill that would require pharmacies to report every error to a third party outside the government. The bill would also allow the pharmacist responsible for the store to increase staffing if the workload has become too overwhelming to keep patients safe. But the bill is opposed by the California Community Pharmacy Coalition, a lobbying group representing retail pharmacies, including the big chains. The coalition believes pharmacy staffing requirements are too strict and it does not want the pharmacy board to have access to the error reports.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and Big Pharma profiteering from reliable major media sources.

A 2022 investigation by the journal The BMJ declared that FDA oversight of clinical trials, including those for Pfizer and Moderna's mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, was "grossly inadequate," from not conducting enough inspections to failing to alert scientific journals or the public when violations were flagged. But the issues here are not confined to behind the pharmacy counter. Dr. John Abramson, author of the recent book "Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It," traces the roots of issue back decades. "In 1992, when what turned out to be effective HIV drugs were stuck in the bottleneck of the FDA, they didn't have enough staff to get them through quickly enough. Many people were dying, and it was a real crisis," he explains. "The solution was that the Prescription Drug User Fee Agreement was passed. The drug companies started to pay a user fee with that was due upon application for new drug approval. And now roughly 65% of the FDA budget for overseeing human products comes from the drug and device companies. This comes with rigid timelines, and as I see from the outside, some degree of influence and obligation to the drug companies that derives from this agreement." The numbers here vary – Forbes puts that budget figure as high as 75%. Another similar conflict of interest that concerns Abramson is what he calls "the revolving door that goes between FDA and the drug industry."

Note: Read about Brook Jackson, a researcher for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trials, who discovered patient safety concerns, data integrity issues, and other significant issues at her site. When she reported it to the FDA, she was fired the same day. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and health from reliable major media sources.

Over 30 million Americans a year use benzodiazepines, or "benzos," including Xanax, Valium, Ativan and Klonopin. Benzodiazepines are prescribed to treat anxiety disorders, insomnia, muscle spasms, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, seizures and epilepsy. But this widely used class of drugs is linked to severe side effects and life impacts that can last for years – even after people have stopped taking the drugs – a new study finds. "Patients have been reporting long-term effects from benzodiazepines for over 60 years. I am one of those patients," Dr. Christy Huff, a cardiologist and co-author of the study, said in a news release. The new research, published in PLOS One, includes a lengthy list of side effects that a majority of benzo users experienced more than a year after they stopped taking the drugs. Those long-lasting symptoms include low energy, difficulty focusing, memory loss, anxiety, insomnia, sensitivity to light and sounds, digestive problems, symptoms triggered by food and drink, muscle weakness and body pain. Alarmingly, users also struggled with severe life impacts: 54.7% reported suicide attempts or suicidal thoughts, for example. Health experts noted numerous other problems with benzos, including an increased risk of suicide and dependence on the drug, among other adverse side effects. Withdrawal from benzos can produce troubling symptoms as soon as within 24 hours, and these adverse effects can last for months.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.

A study of military veterans has shown the strongest evidence yet that the widespread chemical trichloroethylene (TCE)–used in spot removers, office products and dry-cleaning–is linked to Parkinson's disease. The research focused on service members who were stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina between 1975 and 1985, when levels of TCE in the base's water reached 70 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency's limit. After accounting for demographic factors, Camp Lejeune veterans were 70 percent more likely to develop the movement disorder than service members stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, where the water was uncontaminated. The large study, published last week in the journal JAMA Neurology, adds to a handful of smaller, earlier papers that found a link between TCE and Parkinson's. TCE, which can be in liquid or vapor form, has been commonly used since the 1920s, including as an inhaled surgical anesthetic and in several cleaning products. Today, it's primarily used in making refrigerants and degreasing metal equipment. The chemical breaks down slowly and can be detected in the air, water and soil. It's also found in one-third of U.S. drinking water. The Camp Lejeune drinking water was contaminated with TCE and other chemicals from 1953 to 1987, per the study, due to leakage from underground storage tanks, industrial spills, waste disposal sites and a dry-cleaning business.

Note: Internal corporate documents reveal how global chemical giant Syngenta secretly influenced scientific research regarding links between its top-selling weedkiller and Parkinson's disease. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health from reliable major media sources.

Antidepressants raise the risk of suicide while also giving people the means to kill themselves, scientists have warned, after discovering thousands of inquests linked to the drugs. Psychologists at the University of East London (UEL) analysed media reports of nearly 8,000 coroners' inquests in England and Wales between 2003 and 2020, in which antidepressants were mentioned. They found the drugs were linked to 2,718 cases of hanging and 2,329 overdoses, of which 933 people had overdosed on antidepressants themselves. A further 2,083 had been struck by a train, tube, lorry or other vehicle, had jumped or fallen to their death, drowned, shot themselves, or been involved in a fire or electrocution. Study author Dr John Read ... said: "Not only do antidepressants not reduce suicidality, but they also actually increase it for many, and for some they provide the mechanism for killing oneself." The research, ... concluded: "If the goal is to prevent suicide then clearly they are not working for thousands of people." Around one in six of the adult population takes antidepressants each year. In 2018, Prof Read surveyed nearly 1,500 people taking antidepressants and found that 50 per cent reported suicidal thoughts after starting the drugs. Recent studies have also called into question the benefits of antidepressants. Last year, University College London (UCL) concluded that depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance of serotonin and argued that life events were a larger factor.

Note: Antidepressants are some of the most commonly prescribed medications, yet their significant risks are often withheld from public debate. Furthermore, an in-depth investigation reveals the glaring conflicts of interest and financial ties to corporate drugmakers that are behind many studies marketing clinical antidepressants as safe. 

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