Not so long ago our website contained numerous blog articles on the beneficial characteristics of specific mushrooms and how the active compounds stimulate certain health supporting responses within the human body.
As a responsible company which genuinely cares, we made no claims to cure illnesses within these articles and were very mindful of sticking to the physiological facts of how the body responds to mushroom compounds and how this can relate to health maintenance and support.
However, in late 2022 we were instructed by the MHRA to remove all such blogs and were provided with a list of things we are prohibited from. These include:
- Links to or references to any research into the health benefits of mushrooms cannot be provided.
- Make no reference to mushrooms or mushroom supplements as ‘Medicinal’.
- Remove any testimonials that include/imply medicinal benefits.
- Graphics should not imply medicinal benefits.
- References to, or reproduction of information from any source cannot be provided.
- Juxtaposing with any examples of the above cannot be provided.
It is important to note that these all encompassing restrictions are not unique to Cotswold Mushrooms Ltd…
Over the past few years we have heard from an increasing number of natural health related businesses, including foragers, wild foodies, naturopaths, nutritionists and herbalists who are increasingly being reprimanded, silenced and shadow banned via internet searches and social media. After talking about the benefits of a certain wild plant on the immune system we know of one forager who had his entire Instagram account shut down!
Who are the MHRA?
The Medicines & Healthcare product Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is a collective group of independent committees that advise and regulate medicines and products produced for human health care on behalf of the government.
The equivalent agency in the USA would be the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in Australia it would be the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for Europe.
What is the role of the MHRA?
The role of each committee within the MHRA is to ensure that products being sold to the public, whether via medical corporations or independent commercial routes are safe and that false claims are not being made to market and sell products.
“We put patients first in everything we do, right across the lifecycle of the products we regulate. We rigorously use science and data to inform our decisions, enable medical innovation and to make sure that medicines and healthcare products available in the UK are safe and effective.”
https://www.gov.uk
In other words, the MHRA not only help make sure medicines and healthcare products are safe for human use but also ensure that snake oil salesmen and women are not preying on the public with remedies or therapies that are harmful or claim to cure illnesses.
I think we could all agree that such monitoring and regulation is necessary and vital.
However, there is a BIG problem….
Conflict of interest
Considering the MHRA has a duty to monitor and regulate BOTH medicines and healthcare products across ALL industries they would not be impartial or unbiased if a significant percentage of their funding came from big pharmaceutical companies or organisations with financial interests in such corporations. This would of course be a fundamental conflict of interest.
This would be similar to an employee being hired to monitor, regulate and report on the person who pays their salary. However, a recent report published by the British Medical Journal, entitled, Drug Regulators For Hire, breaks down the funding for the MHRA (as well as equivalent agencies in various countries) to show that a whopping 86% of MHRA funding comes from “industry” rather than government.
Are these “industries” the very same that mass produce medical products and corporations that the MHRA are supposed to monitor and regulate?
A recent Freedom of Information request (FOIR) to the MHRA asked for the disclosure of funding from any pharmaceutical corporations and if the Bill Gates Foundation (Bill Gates having huge financial investment in pharmaceutical companies) were also contributing.
This FOIM request shows that for the past 5 years the MHRA collectively received between £4m and £5m annually from all the “Big Five”: AsraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer.
There is no doubt that these companies have produced drugs that have saved countless lives over the years, however, many also have a track record of extremely unsafe and unscrupulous business practices that have caused horrendous harms resulting in multiple of billions being settled in court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_settlements
In the FOIR report the MHRA also stated that:
“The current level of grant funding received from the Gates Foundation amounts to approximately $3m and spans across several financial years”
Freedom of Information request
So, the question is, considering 86% of the MHRAs’ money comes from “industry” do you think we, like so many other natural health or nutraceutical related businesses, are being silenced and squeezed by the MHRA or by the Big Pharma hands that feed them?