Waking Times
by Christina Sarich
Proteus Digital Health which recently changed their name from Proteus Biomedical has been given approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to dose you with a micro-chipped pill. The company has been working with the FDA since 2008, at its own admission, to ‘determine the regulatory pathway for this new technology.’ Just weeks ago, this ‘technology’ application was processed ‘in accordance with the de novo provisions of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act for low-risk devices that have no predicate on the market.’
While these initial observances of the micro-chip scanning pill seem fairly benign, there are people with concerns that these micro-chips will be used for more nefarious reasons.
Proteus Digital Health which recently changed their name from Proteus Biomedical has been given approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to dose you with a micro-chipped pill. The company has been working with the FDA since 2008, at its own admission, to ‘determine the regulatory pathway for this new technology.’ Just weeks ago, this ‘technology’ application was processed ‘in accordance with the de novo provisions of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act for low-risk devices that have no predicate on the market.’
While swallowing a micro-chip-filled pill which is approximately the size of a grain of rice may have no physical risk (though this is obviously debatable since the body usually tries to purge anything that doesn’t belong in it), it certainly brings up important ethical questions about the right to privacy and the valid concern that this precedent setting allowance by the FDA will allow other micro-chipped ‘medicines’ to be used to control the masses.
Proteus states, “this pill will contain a tiny sensor that can communicate, via our digital health feedback system, vital information about your medication-taking behaviors and how your body is responding.” The whole point of the pill is to verify patient compliance with taking their prescribed medicines.
As GreenMedInfo points out, there is a huge market in making sure we stay compliant in our drug taking. Just an 18% improvement in ‘taking our meds’ would translate to an additional $8000 per patient per year. Even more alarming is that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was prominently displayed as a partner on the Proteus Digital Health website, but have been recently removed. Other investors including Medtronic, Itochu, St. Jude Medical, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures have helped the company raise more than $170 million for just this type of research and development.
Along with the sensor pill, the company has developed a biometric sensor patch which you can peel and stick to your skin that can send information to a smart phone app. The patch records when a pill is ingested and even keeps track of sleep patterns and physical activity levels.
While these initial observances of the micro-chip scanning pill seem fairly benign, there are people with concerns that these micro-chips will be used for more nefarious reasons. Mandatory microchipping has been present in the Obama health bills but disguised with ambiguous language. Aldous Huxley once warned us of scientific dictatorship in his book Brave New World written in 1932, and it looks like he was spot on.
“Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science…as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb…or else one supra-national totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos…and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia.
All things considered, it looks as though Utopia were far closer to us than anyone, only fifteen years ago could have imagined. Today [in 1946] it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us in a single century.”
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