Bird Flu: A Corporate
Bonanza for the Biotech Industry
Tamiflu, Vistide and the Pentagon
Agenda
On November 1, President George W. Bush went to the National
Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland to hold a high profile press
conference, to announce a 381-page plan, officially called the Pandemic
Influenza Strategic Plan.
It was no ordinary Bush photo opportunity. This one was meant
to be a big splash event. The President was surrounded by almost half his
cabinet, including Secretary of State Condi Rice, joined by the Secretaries of
Homeland Security, Agriculture, Health & Human Services, Transportation and,
interestingly enough, Veteran Affairs. And, just to underscore that this was a
big deal, the White House invited the Director-General of the World Health
Organization, who flew in from Geneva for the occasion.
The President began his remarks with the now-obligatory
scare-story from 1918: ?At this moment, there is no pandemic influenza in the
United States or the world. But if history is our guide, there is reason to be
concerned. In the last century, our country and the world have been hit by three
influenza pandemics -- and viruses from birds contributed to all of them. The
first, which struck in 1918, killed over half-a-million Americans and more than
20 million people across the globe??
He was remarkably candid about the imminent danger to the
American people: ?Scientists and doctors cannot tell us where or when the
next pandemic will strike, or how severe it will be, but most agree: at some
point, we are likely to face another pandemic. And the scientific community is
increasingly concerned by a new influenza virus known as H5N1 -- or avian flu??
Mr. Bush went on to stress, ?At this point, we do not have
evidence that a pandemic is imminent. Most of the people in Southeast Asia who
got sick were handling infected birds. And while the avian flu virus has spread
from Asia to Europe, there are no reports of infected birds, animals, or people
in the United States. Even if the virus does eventually appear on our shores in
birds, that does not mean people in our country will be infected. Avian flu is
still primarily an animal disease. And as of now, unless people come into
direct, sustained contact with infected birds, it is unlikely they will come
down with avian flu.?
Despite the admission of absence of a clear and present danger
to the American public, the President called on Congress to immediately pass a
new $7.1 billion in emergency funding to prepare for that not-imminent,
not-pandemic, possible-in-the-future danger. The speech was an exercise in the
Administration?s now-famous ?pre-emptive war,? this one against Avian Flu. As
with the other pre-emptive wars, there is a multiple agenda?one might say,
killing two birds with one stone, were it not so tasteless.
Prominent among the President?s list of emergency measures was
a call for Congress to appropriate another $1 billion explicitly for
Tamiflu.
Conflict of interest or insider trading?
The saga of Tamiflu is just the tip of a big iceberg. As we
noted in an earlier article, the real point of interest is the company in
California who developed Tamiflu, Gilead Sciences, listed on the NASDAQ as
(GILD). As we also noted, US Secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, was
Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences from 1997 until early 2001 when he
became Defense Secretary. Rumsfeld had been on the board of Gilead since 1988,
some thirteen years.
A as-yet-unconfirmed report is that Rumsfeld recently purchased
additional stock in his former company, Gilead Sciences, worth $18 million,
making him one of its largest if not the largest stock owners today. Whether
that is true or not, earlier this year, when the Bird Flu scare was just heating
up, according to a report in the November 14 Fortune magazine, the
Defense Secretary decided not to sell his many shares in Gilead so as to ?avoid
being accused of insider trading.? If true, that means Mr. Rumsfeld, apparently
not one to shy away from turning a fast buck, has bagged an eye-popping
windfall, as demand for Tamiflu worldwide explodes. Today it is the hottest drug
in the world market. On October 6, the Pentagon announced it had stockpiled
quantities of Tamiflu for members of the military.
Since early 2001 when Rumsfeld left the board of Gilead
Sciences to become Defense Secretary, Gilead?s stock price has gone from around
$7 per share to just a hair above $50 a share today. The future price direction?
The stratosphere, especially since the President made it an explicit goal of the
US ?flu defense pre-emptive war? on November 1. Gilead, which signed over the
world marketing rights to Hoffmann-LaRoche, gets 10% of every dose of Tamiflu
sold. Gilead is presently in a legal battle to retake 100% marketing control as
well.
From $7 to $50 translates into a neat 720% profit for Mr.
Rumsfeld?s Gilead stock holdings since he went to Washington four-and-a-half
years ago. Since the start of the carefully orchestrated current Bird Flu
hysteria this March, Rummy?s Gilead stocks have gained a neat 56% alone.
That might explain why, instead of dumping his shares as one
might expect from an honest government official wanting to avoid a conflict of
interest, he instead opted to buy another $18 million worth. Curiously, the
Secretary waited until October 26, 2005 before issuing an official Department of
Defense press statement that he had ?recused? himself from involvement in any
future Pentagon decisions involving Gilead Sciences. By then, of course, the
horse had long burst out of the barn door and the price of Gideon was racing at
full gallop as the Pentagon and the Administration had already decided to
stockpile millions of doses of Tamiflu.
In March the reliable Washington friend, Britain?s Tony Blair,
ordered the UK Government to buy enough Tamiflu drugs to supply 25% of the 56
million British citizens. Mr Blair seems always ready to help his friends in
Washington whether backing Washington?s war against WMD in Iraq or Tamiflu. In
Washington it?s called the ?Anglo-American Special Relationship.?
The Secretary of Defense, the man who allegedly supported the
use of contrived intelligence to justify the war on Iraq, who oversaw billions
of dollars in Pentagon no-bid contracts to Bechtel and Halliburton corporations,
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 bio-warfare
that is evidently behind the current Avian Flu panic. An enterprising
Congressional committee in ordinary times would already be looking into the
entire subject of plausible conflicts of interest regarding Secretary Rumsfeld,
except for the fact the Congress is controlled by Mr Rumsfeld?s own party.
Gilead Sciences is no small-time biotech startup, either.
Helped by the propaganda from its friends in Washington and other high places,
today Gilead has a total market capitalization of $ 22 billion. Its board today
includes Bechtel Corporation director and former Secretary of State, George P.
Shultz. According to Fortune, Shultz turned a neat $7 million profit
earlier this year in insider selling of some of his Gilead stock.
Bechtel is right up there with Halliburton in grabbing the
lion?s share of Pentagon sweetheart contracts to rebuild Iraq. Most certainly it
did not hurt Bechtel?s business that Shultz and Rumsfeld knew each other from
their common days on the board of Gilead. The Gilead Sciences board also
includes Gordon Moore of Intel, and Viscount Etienne Davignon, the Belgian Count
who seems to be involved in everything big and Atlanticist, whether it be
Bilderberg meetings or Trilateral Commissions, and now, profiting from the Bird
Flu panic.
The Gilead model also suggests a parallel to the 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. Is it just a coincidence that Cheney?s closest political friend is
Defense Secretary and Avian Flu beneficiary, Donald Rumsfeld?
Vistide, Small Pox, Big Bucks
The Defense Secretary is an accomplished hand at getting the
government to buy vaccines from companies in which he has a direct financial
interest. Recall the scare just following the events of September 11, 2001. One
of the terror scenarios discussed widely by the Administration was a possible
release of a deadly smallpox attack that would devastate the American
population.
In November 2001 the Administration reversed a two decade
policy. On the advice of the Pentagon and others in the Administration, the
President ordered that the US? remaining stock of smallpox microbes, stored at
the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, not be destroyed as he world
community had been urging, but be kept until new vaccines were developed. The
United States and Russian Governments at the time held the only known smallpox
microbe stocks known. The disease had long since been eradicated.
The Administration announced at the time it was backing
development of a new vaccine for smallpox that could be given the entire
population. The major media from Judith Miller in the New York Times, to
more widely read papers, carried horror stories. Typical was one from
Knight-Ridder which began, ?When counterterrorism officials compare notes on
what keeps them awake at night, the weapon they most fear is not a nuclear bomb
or poison gas, but a disease that was wiped off the planet 20 years ago. They
worry about smallpox, a lethal, super-contagious virus that, if unleashed, would
spread quickly??
The scare around smallpox and what to do was curiously similar
then as it is today against Bird Flu pandemics. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld at
that time ordered members of the Armed Forces to be inoculated against smallpox,
an inoculation with horrendous side-effects. Rumsfeld?s smallpox package also
included ordering Pentagon stockpiling of a drug named Vistide, supposedly to
minimize side-effects of smallpox infection should it occur.
The Bush Administration had made repeated attempts to convince
the public and above all, the health and medical profession to go with mass
inoculation against smallpox. In 2002 the CDC and certain high Administration
officials were calling for pre-emptive smallpox inoculation of broad sectors of
the population against threat of terrorists unleashing the pox. The Government
began stockpiling hundreds of millions of smallpox vaccine doses. It also
stockpiled Vistide.
With every official statement by members of the Administration,
population panic regarding smallpox threats grew. Fear was driving the debate.
Yet the reality was that, contrary to what was being said, smallpox was not a
highly contagious disease. As Dr. Kuritsky, MD, director of the National
Immunization Program and Early Smallpox Response and Planning at the CDC put it,
?Smallpox has a slow transmission and is not highly contagious.?
Even were someone exposed to a known bio-terrorist attack with
smallpox, it would not mean that he would contract smallpox, Kuritsky added. The
signs and symptoms of the disease would not occur immediately, and there was
time to plan.
Increasingly, experienced US health professionals began going
public with the dangers of the side effects from the smallpox immunization
itself. These included ?serious brain and heart diseases, autism, abnormal
chromosomal changes, diabetes, various cancers and leukemias, plus
demyelination of nerve tissue years after vaccination.? Many thought it
better to run the risk of a bio-terror attack than take the ?cure.? The
Administration mass vaccination campaign for smallpox was a flop. Yet in the
meantime millions of doses of Vistide were produced and sold to the US
government, to ?ease? the effects of smallpox should such an hypothetical attack
materialize. The Pentagon was one of the major purchasers of Vistide at the
time.
The smallpox terror scenario fear-mongering reached a peak in
the run-up to the February 2003 war in Iraq, with scare stories speculating that
Saddam Hussein may have been holding stolen Russian stocks of the smallpox virus
ready to unleash an attack on the American public. In his January 2003 State of
the Union Address, the President proposed creation of Project BioShield to
develop vaccines and drugs against bio-terror attack including anthrax and
smallpox.
On July 21, 2004 President Bush signed into law Project
BioShield, to provide ?new tools to improve medical countermeasures protecting
Americans against a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN)
attack.? The fiscal year 2004 appropriation for the Department of Homeland
Security included $5.6 billion over 10 years for the purchase of next generation
countermeasures against anthrax and smallpox as well as other CBRN agents.
Mr Rumsfeld knew well what he was prescribing for his soldiers.
Vistide was also a product of Gilead Sciences, Mr. Rumsfeld?s former company.
Rumsfeld was the person who signed off on the decision to give US Troops
Vistide. That decision was obviously not made out of benevolence, or concern for
the health of the troops on the part of the Defense Secretary, who had been
personally involved with the side-efects of Vistide at Gilead since the company
first developed it in the late 1990?s as an AIDS treatment. As Rumsfeld well
knew, Vistide had some pretty hefty side effects. According to Dr. Christopher J
Hogan, MD, Professor at the Department of Emergency Medicine, Medical College of
Virginia, complications of Vistide include renal toxicity, neutropenia, fever,
anemia, headache, hair loss, uveitis and/or iritis, and abdominal pain.
Yet, despite the fact of who is making millions on the fears
being stirred over smallpox or Avian Flu, it would be a dangerous diversion to
think the end of the story is personal or corporate greed. The alarming aspect
to this Tamiflu, Vistide and proposed new legal regimes for the ?vaccine
industry,? is the fact that it all fits, evidently, into a far larger strategy
that the Administration seems to have been developing for some time. During the
smallpox scare three years ago, the Administration got Republican Congressmen to
insert a paragraph into the Homeland Security bill that would give immunity for
liability to drug companies who manufacture smallpox vaccine.
Abolishing the Nuremburg Code on Human Rights in
Experimentation
Now the Bush Administration is seeking to vastly expand that
drug company immunity, using the climate of fear around Avian Flu.
The President, in his November 1 NIH pandemic speech, proposed
completely exempting drug makers from being sued for their products. Explicitly
he termed it ?liability protection for the makers of life-saving vaccines.?
Stripped of its nice-sounding noble rhetoric, it means drug makers can produce
and promote whatever they choose to foist on the public, whether it be Vistide,
Tamiflu or Thalidomide, and fear no legal consequences.
One need only think for a minute about the consequences of
removing the gains of more than a Century of bitter battles to establish even
minimal controls over what drugs can be sold to the public.
During the 1960?s in Germany, Dr. Heinrich Mueckter, an
infamous Nazi doctor, wanted by the Polish government for hideous experiments
using live Typhus on concentration camp inmates, founded a drug company in West
Germany where he developed a drug he marketed as a harmless sleeping tablet. His
product, Contergan, was advertised as so harmless that it could be sold
over-the-counter and one million Germans used it daily to sleep. He specially
marketed his drug for ?pregnant mothers? having sleep problems. The results were
soon clear in the form of tens of thousands of grotesquely deformed births. The
drug he developed contained Thalidomide. At that time, German law left
regulation of such drugs to the industry, a kind of self-policing, or to local
government.
Or consider the huge scandals surrounding the anti-arthritic
drug, VIOXX, which was being used by more than two million people around the
world when it was pulled from the market by Merck & Co. last September,
after serious studies indicated VIOXX users had a 400% increased risk of heart
attack or stroke. Threat of litigation was clearly a major factor leading Merck
to pull VIOXX.
Merck & Co. began in Germany in the late 1800?s by selling
products including morphine, codeine, quinine and strychnine as ?medications.?
There were no regulations on drug makers then. The German aspirin inventor,
Bayer Company, in 1898 sold heroin labelled as a ?superior cough suppressant.?
It probably was, but they also didn?t speak of side effects in those days. This
was before many such scandals and serious consequences on the public forced
governments to begin regulating what was sold as drugs.
In 1962, in response to the Thalidomide scandals, Senator Estes
Kefauver drafted and got passed the Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments of 1962,
tightening drug safety requirements and requiring pharmaceutical makers, or as
George Bush prefers to call it, ?the vaccine industry,? to prove a given drug is
effective before it can be sold to the public. Drugs were required to be
registered with the US Food and Drug Administration, and the FDA was given
?explicit authority to require compliance with good manufacturing practices.?
Safety and purity standards were defined. It also required drug makers
explicitly state risks in their products.
In 1948 the member countries of the United Nations adopted the
so-called Nuremburg Code following the military trial in Nuremburg Germany in
1946 of 23 Nazi doctors for crimes against humanity and experimentation with
drugs and viruses on human subjects. It was recognized as international common
law guiding medical research. With the grant of legal immunity from lawsuits for
effects of their drugs, pharmaceutical companies would succeed in rolling back
not only the Nuremburg Code but also more than a Century of bitterly-fought
gains in public safety in the regulation of drug manufacturing and promotion.
In promoting drug industry immunity from legal damage suits,
the President claims he is ?breaking down barriers to vaccine production.? In
reality he is taking steps to create an environment which not even the Nazi
doctors and drug companies during the Third Reich enjoyed?they had to be
secretive about their actions. This is a very alarming precedent should it
become law. The real question to ask is what could be so important to compel the
President of the United States to put his own population at risk in such an
unfettered drug environment?
That there exists a virulent viral strain affecting birds
especially in parts of Vietnam and China is not the issue at hand here. Rather
it is the politicization of such a condition to introduce a wholly other agenda,
one whose ultimate consequences on human life and well-being are potentially far
more damaging than any conceived damage from H5N1 or other virus strains
Global Research Contributing Editor F. 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.
Related article: Is Avian Flu another Pentagon Hoax? by F.
William Engdahl
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ENG20051106&articleId=1190
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Is Avian Flu another
Pentagon Hoax?
by F. William Engdahl
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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The
Avian Flu Fright is Politically Timed
A Public Health Warning and Political Essay - by Dr. Leonard
Horowitz - 2005-10-12
