Big Pharma finds a new crop of guinea pigs: autistic kids

Big Pharma’s latest guinea pigs – kids with autism

If there’s one thing Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know, it’s how little it really knows about the drugs it puts on the market.

You’ll hear drugmakers talk about the meds they unleash on us as if they understand precisely how — and why — they work. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The most recent, brazen example of that is coming from Roche pharmaceuticals with it’s experimental new drug to “treat” autism. That’s right. Autism.

The FDA has just granted it “breakthrough therapy” status, meaning that the wheels are greased to zip it along the approval track even faster than usual.

But what do experts really know about this med balovaptan?

That little detail could turn out to be the most shocking eye-opener of all.

And it tells us that Big Pharma is ready, willing, and able to put the most vulnerable among us at risk to keep those mega-dollars rolling in.

‘Fragments of knowledge’
What causes autism?

There are plenty of suspects in the line-up, and some of which come straight from Big Pharma itself.

But drugmakers want us to believe that they have all the answers — even when what they know is really just a bunch of bits and pieces.

And that’s never more apparent than when experts talk about how a hormone called vasopressin relates to autism.

Vasopressin controls numerous vital functions in your body — your blood pressure, your temperature, how much you pee, and even how well you sleep at night. And since the 1990s, researchers have been tinkering with the idea that levels of this hormone have something to do with social interactions — how well (or not) we relate to others — including having close relationships and falling in love.

Then there’s the fact that vasopressin seemed to work on rodents and help them with their “social functioning” (seriously, you can’t make this stuff up), so why not try it on kids and adults with autism?

But if you thought we didn’t know much about autism in general, we know even less about what fiddling with this hormone might do.

Because whatever researchers have found out about vasopressin and the social lives of animals isn’t so easily translated to people. One expert calls it “fragments of knowledge.”

That, however, hasn’t stopped drugmakers from forging ahead both by testing increased amounts of vasopressin in kids with autism (through a nasal spray) or, in the case of Roche’s new drug, blocking the hormone with a pill.

Either one of those roads can lead to disastrous effects.

For example, if you have too much vasopressin, your kidneys start retaining water and diluting sodium in the blood, which can be life-threatening. Too little? You’re in danger of dehydration and critically low blood pressure.

The bottom line is that we know next to nothing about how this experimental med will help those with autism have better “social interactions” and what kinds of disastrous side effects they’ll be risking in this experiment.

Perhaps before pharma jumps into unknown territory in attempting to “treat” autism, it should take a giant step back and look for clues as to what could be triggering it.

Right now, infants are pumped full of shots containing heavy metals, MSG, blood from fetal calves, and cell cultures from unborn guinea pigs. On top of that, many of these vaccines also contain human fetal cell cultures.

Then there are pesticides, drugs, and loads of toxic chemicals in our food, water, and air.

And the only thing that drugging up autistic kids appears to be doing is filling the pockets of drugmakers with even more money.

Seven years ago, a review published in Pediatrics found that meds currently given to autistic children (which include risperidone and aripiprazole, both heavy-duty schizophrenia drugs) have “strikingly little evidence” of benefit.

The last thing these kids need is another pharmaceutical concoction — most especially one that will be advertised non-stop on TV as “the first FDA-approved autism treatment.”

Autism is still very much a big puzzle, but turning kids with this condition into a new group of guinea pigs won’t bring us any closer to solving it.

“Roche bags breakthrough status for autism hope balovaptan” Phil Taylor, January 29, 2018, FierceBiotech, fiercebiotech.com