SPEAKING
FREELY Rummy's bird flu
bonanza By F William Engdahl
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Pleaseclick hereif you
are interested in contributing.
No
sooner are indictments being handed down to I
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff of the vice
president of the United States for lies and
coverup regarding 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.
The world population is
being whipped into a fear frenzy by irresponsible
public health officials from the US administration
to the World Health Organization (WHO) to the
United States Centers for Disease Control. They
all warn about the imminent danger that the bird
flu virus might mutate into a malicious strain
that is transmissible between humans,
contaminating the 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 George W
Bush visited the National Institutes of Health in
Bethesda, Maryland, to announce his
administration's strategy for preparing for the
next flu epidemic, whether from bird flu or some
other strain. The plan has been a year in the
making. It was no small presidential photo op. The
secretaries of state, homeland security,
agriculture, health and human services,
transportation, and veteran affairs, as well as
the director general of the World Health
Organization, who flew in from Geneva for the
event, were at the president's side.
Bush
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
..."
He 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 all this, the
president called on Congress to immediately pass a
new US$7.1 billion in emergency funding to prepare
for that not-imminent not-pandemic danger. Now
that's precaution. Prominent among his list of
emergency measures was a call for Congress to
appropriate another $1 billion for Tamiflu.
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."
If a meteorite doesn't hit Washington, DC,
in the next days, someday it might ... 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 firm, Roche Holdings of Basle.
The only medicine, we are told, which
reduces the symptoms of avian flu is a drug called
Tamiflu. Today Roche holds the sole license to
manufacture Tamiflu. Due to the panic, the order
books at Roche are filled to overflowing.
However, the real point of interest is the
company in California which developed Tamiflu and
gave the marketing rights for 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-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 Pentagon
chief, Donald 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 1997 company press release.
Rumsfeld holds a Gilead stake valued at
between $5 million and $25 million, according to
his federal financial disclosures. In the past six
months, the global rush to buy Tamiflu has sent
Gilead's stock from $35 to $47 - amounting to a
windfall of at least $1 million for Rumsfeld. And
now, with Gilead collecting royalties averaging
10% from Roche's sales of Tamiflu, he is poised to
reap more gains for a flu panic his administration
has done everything it can to promote.
Gilead Sciences is no small-time biotech
startup. Its board today includes Bechtel Corp
director and former secretary of state George
Shultz (Bechtel is right up there with Halliburton
in contracting to rebuild Iraq), Gordon Moore of
Intel, and Viscount Etiene Davignon, a Belgian who
seems to be involved in everything big and
Atlanticist, whether it be Bilderberg meetings or
trilateral commissions.
The Gilead model
suggests a parallel to the brazen corruption of
Halliburton, 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. And Cheney's closest political
friend is Don Rumsfeld.
It's another
example of what someone has called the principle
of modern US corrupt special interest politics:
'"Concentrate the benefits; diffuse the costs."
Bush had ordered the US government to buy $2
billion worth of Tamilflu - that was before his
November 1 speech calling for another $1 billion
worth.
Small pox, big bucks It
appears that the defense secretary is quite an
accomplished hand at getting the government to buy
vaccines from companies in which he has a direct
financial interest. Recall the scare just after
September 11, 2001 when the Bush administration
was talking loudly about the "possible" danger of
Osama bin Laden (for those of you who may have
forgotten who he was, he was the man who was cited
as the reason the Bush administration launched its
"war on terror") releasing a deadly smallpox
attack that would devastate the American
population.
Fortunately, the
administration was equally vigilant then as it is
today against bird flu pandemics. Rumsfeld at that
time ordered members of the armed forces to be
inoculated against smallpox, an inoculation with
horrendous side effects. The package also included
injection with a drug named Vistide, to treat
side-effects of smallpox infection should it
occur.
Vistide was also a product of
Gilead Sciences, and Rumsfeld was the person who
signed off on the decision to give US troops
Vistide. We can be sure that the men and women of
the US armed forces will be among the first this
time, as well, to get Tamiflu from their
ever-vigilant chief. Curious that the Washington
Post doesn't investigate this prima facie conflict
of interest involving the defense secretary, at a
time the media seem to have discovered
administration lies about Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction are finally worth reporting. Perhaps
they think readers can only handle one scandal at
a time.
GMO chickens come home to
roost But Tamiflu conflicts of interest are
perhaps just the tip of the iceberg of the avian
flu story. There is high-level biological research
under way 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.
Laurence Tiley of
Cambridge University and Helen Sang of the Roslin
Institute in Scotland are involved in developing
"transgenic chickens" that would involve genetic
material inserted into 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 (genetically modified
organisms) 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.
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 hiswebsite.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Pleaseclick hereif you
are interested in contributing.
