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Is Avian Flu another Pentagon Hoax?: msg#00547
culture.discuss.cia-drugs
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Is Avian Flu another Pentagon Hoax? |
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20EN20051030&articleId=1169
Is Avian Flu another Pentagon Hoax?
by F. William Engdahl
October 30, 2005
GlobalResearch.ca
No sooner are indictments being handed down to Scooter Libby, the Chief
of Staff of the Vice President of the United States for lies and
coverup of information used deliberately to suppress the fact the Bush
Administration had no ‘smoking gun’ to prove Saddam Hussein was
building a nuclear arsenal, but a new scandal is surfacing every bit as
outrageous and ultimately, likely also criminal.
Against all scientific prudence and normal public health procedure, the
world population is being whipped up into a fear frenzy by
irresponsible public health officials from the US Administration to WHO
to the United States Centers for Disease Control. They all warn about
the imminent danger that a malicious viral strain might spread from
infected birds, primarily in Vietnam and other Asian centers, to
contaminate the entire human species in pandemic proportions. Often the
flu pandemic of 1918 which is said to have killed 18 million worldwide,
is cited as an example of what ‘might’ lie in store for us.
On November 1, appropriately enough the day after Halloween, President
Bush is scheduled to visit the National Institutes of Health in
Bethesda Maryland to announce his Administration’s strategy of how it
will prepare for the next flu epidemic, whether from Bird Flu or some
other strain. The plan has been a year in the making. On October 28 the
Senate passed an $8 billion emergency funding bill to address the
growing Avian Flu panic. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike
Leavitt, in a moment of candor during the debate on the Senate bill
told the press, ‘If it isn’t the current H5N1 virus that leads to an
influenza pandemic, at some point in our nation’s future, another virus
will.’ In the meantime taxpayer billions will have gone to a handful of
pharmaceutical giants positioned to profit. None stands to reap more
lucre than the Swiss-US pharmaceutical giant Roche Holdings of Basle.
The only medicine we are told which reduce the symptoms of general or
seasonal influenza and ‘possibly’ might reduce symptoms also of Avian
Flu, is a drug called Tamiflu. Today the giant Swiss pharmaceutical
firm, Roche, holds the sole license to manufacture Tamiflu. Due to the
media panic, the order books at Roche today are filled to overflowing.
Roche recently refused a request from the US Congress to lift its
exclusive patent rights to allow other drug manug´facturers to produce
Tamiflu with the improbable excuse that it was in effect, too complex
for others to rapidly produce.
However, the real point of interest is the company in California who
developed Tamiflu and gave the marketing rights to its patented
discovery to Roche.
‘Rummy Flu’
Tamiflu was developed and patented in 1996 by a California biotech
firm, Gilead Sciences Inc. Gilead is a NASDAQ (GILD) listed stock
company which prefers to maintain a low profile in the current rush to
Tamiflu. That might be because of who is tied to Gilead. In 1997,
before he became US Secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld was named
Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences, where he remained until early
2001 when he became Defense Secretary. Rumsfeld had been on the board
of Gilead since 1988 according to a January 3 1997 company press
release.
An as-yet-unconfirmed report is that Rumsfeld while Secretary of
Defense also purchased an additional stock in his former company,
Gilead Sciences Inc., worth $18 million, making him one of its largest
if not the largest stock owners today.
The Secretary of Defense, the man who allegedly supported the use of
contrived intelligence to justify the war on Iraq, is now poised to
reap huge gains for a flu panic his Administration has done everything
it can to promote. It would be useful to know whether the Pentagon’s
successor to Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans developed the
strategy of biowarfare behind the current Avian Flu panic. Perhaps some
enterprising Congressional committee might look into the entire subject
of plausible conflicts of interest regarding Secretary Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld stands to make a fortune on royalties as a panicked world
population scrambles to buy a drug worthless in curing effects of
alleged Avian Flu. The model suggests the parallel to the brazen
corruption of Halliburton Corporation whose former CEO is Vice
President Dick Cheney. Cheney’s company has so far gotten billions
worth of US construction contracts in Iraq and elsewhere. Coincidence
that Cheney’s closest political friend is Defense Secretary and Avian
Flu beneficiary Don Rumsfeld? It is another example of what someone has
called the principle of modern US corrupt special interest politics:
‘Concentrate the benefits; diffuse the costs’ President Bush has
ordered the US Government to buy $2 billion worth of Gilead Science’s
Tamilflu.
GMO Chickens come home to roost
But Tamiflu conflicts are perhaps just the tip of the iceberg of the
Avian Flu story. There is high-level biological research underway in
Britain and presumably also the United States to develop a genetic
engineering method to make chickens and other birds ‘resistant’ to
Avian Flu viruses.
British scientists are reportedly genetically engineering chickens to
produce birds resistant to the lethal strains of the H5N1 virus
devastating poultry in the Far East. Laurence Tiley, Professor of
Microular Virology at Cambridge University and Helen Sang of the Roslin
Institute in Scotland are involved in developing ‘transgenic chickens’
which would have small pieces of genetic material inserted into chicken
eggs to allegedly make the chickens H5N1 resistant.
Tiley told the Times of London on October 29, ‘Once we have regulatory
approval, we believe it will only take between four and five years to
breed enough chickens to replace the entire world (chicken)
population.’ The real question in this dubious undertaking is which GMO
giants are underwriting the research and development of GMO chickens
and who will control their products. It is increasingly clear that the
entire saga of Avian Flu is one whose dimensions are only slowly coming
to light. What we can see so far is not at all pretty.
Global Research Contributing Editor William Engdahl is author of ‘A
Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,
Pluto Press and the soon-to-be released book, ‘Seeds of Destruction:
The Geopolitics of Gene-ocide’. He can be contacted through his
website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
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