A Cautionary Tale About the WHO
By Larry Romanoff | Moon of Shanghai | May 10, 2020
There appears to be no shortage of claims from multiple informed and independent sources that the WHO has two primary functions, the first as a tool for world population reduction on behalf of its masters, and the second as a powerful marketing agent for big pharma, specifically the vaccine manufacturers. Many critics have pointed out that the ‘vaccination experts’ at the WHO are “dominated by the vaccine makers standing to gain from the enormously lucrative vaccine and antiviral contracts awarded by governments.” And indeed, the advisory and other committees involved with the WHO’s vaccine programs seem heavily populated with those who profit directly from those same programs.
Equally, the claims and concerns about population control and reduction are far from conspiracy theories today, with far too much evidence, some of it frightening, that this is indeed a major agenda of the WHO today. We have already seen too much hard evidence of this body’s involvement in both areas to justify dismissing the concerns as implausible fears. Moreover, there is a disturbing list of individuals closely associated with the WHO, who have had either population reduction or mass vaccinations as a pet project; individuals like David Rothschild, David Rockefeller, George Soros, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Gates, and many more, the list including national organisations like the CDC, FEMA, the US Department of Homeland Security, the Rockefeller and Carnegie Institutes, the CFR, and others.
It is not difficult, on the basis of all the evidence, to conclude the WHO is an international criminal enterprise under the control of a core group, one with European corporate dynasties at its center which, as one writer noted, “provides the strategic leadership and funds the development, manufacturing and release of synthetic, man-made viruses solely to justify immensely profitable mass vaccinations”. We have seen so many instances of an unusual and apparently laboratory-made virus appearing without warning, the onset followed immediately by urgent worried pronouncements from the WHO of yet another mandatory mass vaccination.
We have the rampant production of deadly viruses in secretive labs around the world, and the repeated “accidental” release of those into various populations (think ZIKA) – seemingly inevitably without explanation, apology or even a semblance of actual investigation, much less censure or criminal or civil charges. We also have the blanket legal immunity for all pharma companies in their creation and dissemination of deadly pathogens by vaccination. When we add into this mix the WHO’s history of criminality as with their now-famous tetanus/hCG international sterility program, the curious timing of the onset of AIDS, and the many occurrences of the WHO’s vaccination programs perfectly coinciding with a sudden outbreak of yet another unusual disease in the same areas and populations, one would have to be a hard-core ideologue to not become damned suspicious.
WHO Vaccinations and Population Control
During the early 1990s, the WHO had been overseeing massive tetanus vaccination campaigns in Nicaragua, Mexico, the Philippines, Tanzania and Nigeria. All tell a similar story, one that almost beggars belief but with the facts too clear to refute. Tetanus is a disease whose onset we often associate with stepping on a rusty nail or some such event. It should be clear that men would be at least as likely, if not more likely, to encounter this circumstance than would women, and perhaps careless children more than adults, but the WHO vaccination program was directed only to females from 15 to 45 years of age – in other words, child-bearing ages. In Nicaragua, the targets were females from 12 to 49 years of age.
Also, a single tetanus shot is universally accepted as sufficient to provide protective duration of ten years or more, but the WHO inexplicably insisted on vaccinating these women five times within several months. Shortly after the initiation of these programs, concerns began to emerge about spontaneous abortions and other complications arising exclusively within the vaccinated populations. On suspicion, a group in Mexico had the vaccination serum analysed and discovered it contained the Human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG) hormone. This hormone is critical to the female body during pregnancy. It causes the release of other hormones that prepare the uterine lining for the implantation of the fertilised egg. Without it, a woman’s body is unable to sustain a pregnancy and the fetus will be aborted. This hormone was injected into the subjects along with the tetanus serum, causing a female body to then recognise both as foreign agents and to develop antibodies to destroy either if they were to ever appear in the body in the future.
Upon becoming pregnant, a woman’s body would fail to recognize hCG as a friend and would produce anti-hCG antibodies, the prior vaccination now inducing her body’s immune system to attack the hormone that is needed to bring an unborn child to term, preventing subsequent pregnancies by killing the hCG which is necessary to sustain them. This means each woman who received the WHO inoculation was vaccinated not only against tetanus but also against pregnancy. (1) (2)
The WHO at first denied the facts and disparaged the results of the initial tests, but following this revelation each nation conducted extensive tests and in all cases the hCG hormone was identified as existing in the tetanus vaccination serum. The WHO eventually went silent and discontinued their program but by this time many millions of women had been vaccinated – and rendered sterile. One important fact is that the three different brands of tetanus vaccine being used in this project were developed, produced, and distributed in secrecy and that none had ever been tested or licensed for sale or distribution anywhere in the world. The companies that produced them were Connaught Laboratories and Intervex from Canada, and Australia’s CSL Laboratories. Connaught is the same firm that, along with the Canadian Red Cross, knowingly distributed AIDS-contaminated blood products for several years during the 1980s, a criminal organisation that should have been executed along with its owners. (3)
Further damning evidence that the Western media censored, was the fact that the WHO had been actively involved for more than 20 years prior in the development of an anti-fertility vaccine utilizing hCG tied to tetanus toxoid as a carrier – precisely the same combination as in these vaccines. According to the WHO’s own reports, they had spent nearly $400 million on this kind of “reproductive health” research. More than 20 research articles have been written on this subject, many of these by the WHO itself, that document in detail the WHO’s attempts to create an anti-fertility vaccine utilizing tetanus toxoid. And they aren’t alone; the UNFPA, the UNDP, the World Bank and of course – whenever we encounter secret efforts at population control – the ubiquitous Rockefeller Foundation, are all allied in this cause, as was the US National Institute of Health. The Government of Norway was also a partner in this travesty, contributing more than $40 million to develop this Tetanus-abortion vaccine.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been heavily funding the distribution of tetanus vaccine in Africa by UNICEF, which is the agency that provided Kenya with the vaccine laced with hCG. Gates said: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps ten or fifteen percent.” (4) The Rockefeller Foundation also heavily funded this vaccine research and distribution. (5) All this amounts to genocide on a planetary scale.
I examined in detail the WHO website and discovered there were dozens of articles, many written by WHO researchers, documenting in detail the WHO’s attempts to create an anti-fertility vaccine utilizing tetanus toxoid as a carrier. (6) Some leading articles included:
- “Clinical profile and Toxicology Studies on Four Women Immunized with Pr-B-hCG-TT,” Contraception, February, 1976, pp. 253-268.
- “Observations on the antigenicity and clinical effects of a candidate antipregnancy vaccine: B-subunit of human chorionic gonadotropin linked to tetanus toxoid,” Fertility and Sterility, October 1980, pp. 328-335.
- “Phase 1 Clinical Trials of a World Health Organisation Birth Control Vaccine,” The Lancet, 11 June 1988, pp. 1295-1298. “Vaccines for Fertility Regulation,” Chapter 11, pp. 177-198, Research in Human Reproduction, Biennial Report (1986-1987), WHO Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction (WHO, Geneva 1988).
- “Anti-hCG Vaccines are in Clinical Trials,” Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, Vol. 36, 1992, pp. 123-126.
As early as 1978, the WHO was actively exploring ways to eradicate much of the population of the Third World. A paper published by the WHO (7) was titled, “Evaluating … placental antigen vaccines for fertility regulation”; The paper acknowledged “substantial progress” in its worldwide eugenics program of culling non-whites, but yet identified “an urgent need for a greater variety of methods” of preventing fertility, and gushed over the fact that “immunisation as a prophylactic measure is now so widely accepted”, that the employment of sterilisation vaccines would be widely appealing (to those dispensing the vaccines) and would offer “great ease of delivery”.
If that isn’t clear, the WHO is saying that vaccinations for other purposes – protection against diseases – are so common and widely-accepted, inoculation is probably the easiest way to sterilise the populations of undeveloped countries. The paper then notes the accumulation of evidence that “there exist proteins specific to the reproductive system” which “could be blocked” by vaccinations and provide a new method of “fertility regulation”. Among the stated advantages of a sterilisation vaccine is that it could prevent or disrupt implantation of the fertilised egg onto the uterus wall, and thereby guarantee that every (non-white) conception would result in a miscarriage or spontaneous abortion, i.e., an anti-hCG vaccine. The paper continues:
“Testing … will reveal whether a single injection is sufficient to achieve the desired level of immunization, or whether several boosting injections will be required. The main desired effect is to achieve a degree of immunization sufficient to: (a) neutralize the hormonal activity of hCG in vivo; and (b) prevent or disrupt implantation at a very early stage of pregnancy. It is not yet established whether immunization with the β hCG peptide conjugate will cause an irreversible biological neutralization of hCG … This will probably vary from individual to individual. In the first case, the indication for immunization will be restricted to sterilization, whereas in the second eventuality … immunization may be considered as a long-lasting but reversible anti-fertility measure.”
On August 17-18, 1992, the WHO produced a report titled “Fertility Regulating Vaccines”, resulting from a large meeting in Geneva of scientists and ‘womens’ health advocates’ “to review the current status of the development of fertility regulating vaccines.” The meeting was from a joint Special Program of research in reproduction of the UNDP, UNFPA, the WHO and the World Bank. The report stated, “… applied research on FRV’s (fertility-regulating vaccines) has been going on for more than twenty years …”, and discussed not only the anti-hCG vaccines already receiving clinical trials, but the development of other vaccines such as an anti-GnRH vaccine that would extend the temporary infertility due to breast-feeding.
This vaccine was also being field-tested at the time, with the possible intention of employing both antigens in the same vaccine on the assumption that a single vaccine might not sterilise all victims. They also recognised the dangers of administering such a vaccine to women who were already pregnant, and expressed awareness the antibodies would almost certainly be present in the milk and might therefore render the infants permanently sterile as well – with the massive understatement that this “might not be acceptable to all potential users …” From the outset, WHO planners realised that during mass vaccinations, many pregnant women would also be inoculated with the anti-hCG serum, which would inevitably result not only in sterilisation, miscarriages and spontaneous abortions but also incurable autoimmune disorders and birth defects.
The same paper went on to state, “In addition to women being immunized inadvertently during an established pregnancy, fetuses could be exposed to potential teratological effects of immunization …”. In other words, WHO staff would freely inoculate pregnant women, those embryos or fetuses not spontaneously aborting would experience pathological growth from which would result various undefined birth defects. The WHO is not researching ‘reproductive health’, but reproductive impossibility, and their tetanus-hCG vaccine is not in any sense ‘regulating’ the fertility of women but rendering their fertility biologically impossible, which is not quite the same thing. Their own paper stated the vaccination likely “will cause an irreversible biological neutralization of hCG”, which means the permanent sterilisation of innocent women who agreed to receive tetanus shots.
Try to understand what this means: the WHO was for decades receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for research and testing, to produce an antifertility vaccine that would make a woman’s immune system attack and destroy her own babies in the womb, a vaccine they would surreptitiously combine with a tetanus vaccination without informing the victims. To say their deceit was successful would be an understatement. The WHO inoculated more than 130 million women in 52 countries with this vaccine, permanently sterilising some very large percentage of them without their knowledge or consent. It was only when an enormous number of women in all countries experienced vaginal bleeding and miscarriages immediately after the vaccinations, that the hormone additive was discovered as the cause. Suspicions were aroused when the WHO selected only females of child-bearing age and further specified the unheard-of practice of five multiple injections over a three month period, but the health officials in these undeveloped countries still had faith in the white man’s medicine.
Upon the discovery of the hormone in the vaccine, Nigerian physicians reported WHO doctors telling them the hCG hormone “would have no effect on human reproduction”, statements they knew to be false. When this information reached the public, the WHO assumed an offensive and repugnant stand, mocking and ridiculing the nations that had performed the tests and revealed the contamination, condemning them as incompetent, having “unsuitable” testing laboratories, and using improper samples or procedures. WHO officials claimed these nations had “Not the right kind of lab to do the test. The labs know only how to test urine samples . . .” This is the standard response by Western agencies, governments, and corporations, when caught with adulterated products. When Coca-Cola’s drinks in China were found to contain frightening levels of pesticides and chlorine, the immediate accusation was that China’s biological laboratories were all incompetent. When Nestle’s noodles in India were found to contain dangerously toxic amounts of lead, India’s laboratories were all incompetent. The next step is to carefully produce a few samples known to be uncontaminated, provide them to an “independent” laboratory that inevitably pronounces them clean, then move the story off the front page.
When the discovery was made, many nations enacted immediate legal restraining orders against WHO and UNICEF vaccine programs. WHO and UNICEF officials said the “grave allegations” were “not backed up by evidence”, which was nonsense. UNICEF, USAID and the WHO refused to address the evidence like vaginal bleeding, miscarriages and spontaneous abortions. They also refused to discuss the reasons for a series of five closely-spaced vaccinations when one had always been sufficient, ignoring the content of their own published papers stating that multiple injections of a tetanus-hCG vaccine would be necessary for effective sterilisation.
When faced with documented results, WHO officials admitted the hormone did indeed exist “in small amounts” in “some” of the vaccine material, but that this was an inconsequential result of “accidental contamination”. Nobody at the WHO attempted to explain the source of the hCG hormone in sufficient volume to contaminate 130 million doses of a vaccine, nor how that “contamination” could “accidentally” have inserted itself into all those vaccines. The Lancet reported that the US National Institute of Health supplied much of the hCG hormone for WHO experiments and testing. The Western media were of course too busy at the time telling us how evil Iran was, to notice the small issue of 130 million women having been deliberately vaccinated against pregnancy, without their knowledge. As I’ve often mentioned elsewhere, the Western media are excessively fond of demonising Hitler, but Hitler didn’t sterilise 130 million women without their knowledge or consent, so where is the moral outrage against the WHO? The outrage is buried in the fact that none of those 130 million sterilised women were white.
The WHO went silent for a while, but in 2015, Vatican Radio charged that the UN organisations WHO and UNICEF were again executing vast international programs of depopulating the earth by using vaccines to surreptitiously sterilise women in Third World countries, this time in Kenya. It stated that “Catholic Bishops in Kenya have been opposed to the nationwide Tetanus Vaccination Campaign targeting 2.3 million Kenyan women and girls of reproductive age between 15-49 years, terming the campaign a secret government plan to sterilize women and control population growth”. (8) In May of 2018, it was reported that fertility-regulating vaccines were being used in India. (9)
And Polio, Too
In 2009, there was a spreading outbreak of Polio in Nigeria, a direct result of yet another WHO vaccination program, this time directly linked to the vaccine which was made from a live polio virus which always carries a risk of causing polio instead of protecting against it – as the Americans learned to their chagrin many years ago. Today in the West, polio vaccines are made from a killed virus that cannot cause polio. This latest WHO-sponsored outbreak actually began several years prior, which the WHO blamed on the live virus in their vaccines that had somehow “mutated”. So once again, the WHO is causing polio in the undeveloped world, amid evidence that for every case of identified polio there are hundreds of other children who don’t develop the disease but remain carriers and pass it on to others. It has long been recognised that the live oral vaccine used by the WHO can easily cause the very epidemics it pretends to be eliminating, and of course there is no published evidence that the polio virus had in fact “mutated”. The same occurred in Kenya, this time using the hCG hormone tied to polio vaccinations, with the same tragic results. (10)
In late 2013, Syria experienced a sudden outbreak of polio, the first in that country in about 20 years, and in an area that had been under the control of US-backed revolutionary mercenaries. The Syrian government claimed to have evidence that these foreigners brought the disease into the country from Pakistan, from Western (US) agencies. The WHO was active in Pakistan in yet another of its “humanitarian vaccination programs” that strangely coincided in geographic area with a severe outbreak of polio, and Syrian authorities were adamant that the West transmitted it to their nation when 1.7 million doses of polio vaccine were purchased by UNICEF, in spite of the fact that no cases of polio had been seen since 1999. After the mass vaccination program started, cases of polio began to reappear in Syria.
UNICEF began a similar mass vaccination program with 500,000 doses of live oral polio vaccine in the Philippines in spite of the fact there were no reported cases of polio in the Philippines since 1993. This would fit the pattern from other instances of sudden disease emergencies. I have not managed yet to reconstruct the WHO’s vaccination and other programs in all locations, but sudden outbreaks of viruses are always suspicious since they cannot be created from nothing and must be introduced into a population, and with surprising regularity appear on the heels of some WHO vaccination program. The sudden and inexplicable appearance of the Bubonic plague in Peru and Madagascar are two such events and, increasingly often, the pathogens do not appear to be natural in origin. In particular, the SARS-related camel virus in the Middle East had some obvious signs of human engineering as did the SARS coronavirus itself. There are many other such cases which are far too often linked with the presence of some program of the WHO.
The WHO is also becoming active in China with alarming potential for disaster. As one example, in late 2013, a number of newborn Chinese babies died immediately after being inoculated by the WHO against hepatitis B. The WHO China representative, Dr. Bernhard Schwartlander, called China’s program “very successful”, but I find myself with gnawing suspicions about his definition of ‘success’. The infant deaths may indeed have been an unfortunate accident, but I was not encouraged by Schwartlander’s comment that it is “difficult to establish a causal link between the vaccines and the babies’ deaths”. Knowing the past history of the WHO and their infectious inoculations, the ‘difficulty of establishing a causal link between the WHO vaccinations and civilian deaths’, may have been the part that was ‘successful’.
Pfizer Case Study – The Perfectly-Timed Epidemic
It is by now well-known that many new drugs are accompanied by serious side-effects such as irreversible liver damage, and are often fatal to children. In 1996 Pfizer developed a new antibiotic called Trovan to treat a variety of infections – meningitis being one example. Many of these new antibiotics are very powerful and with side effects that normally make them too dangerous to use for children, often causing permanent liver damage, joint disease and many other debilitating complications. Inexplicably, Pfizer decided to perform test trials on infants. However, Pfizer had the standard problem that FDA certification in the US required clinical trials on humans, and these are almost impossible to conduct in developed countries because no parents are willing to allow their children to take part in such risky clinical trials, to say nothing of the lawsuits resulting from trials gone bad. Therefore these pharma companies tend almost universally to take their trials to poor countries in Africa, Asia and South America where the laws are unprepared and the people don’t understand the risks of untested and unapproved drugs. The American (and European) pharma companies therefore transformed the developing world into an enormous test laboratory that carries no financial liability.
As luck would have it, at precisely the moment when Pfizer was ready to commence clinical trials of this new drug, Nigeria was suddenly and inexplicably hit with one of the worst meningitis epidemics in history. And of course, Pfizer was there to help the Nigerian government deal with the outbreak. But Pfizer didn’t exactly deal with the outbreak; what it did was to conduct a reprehensible clinical trial for its new medication, on a group of victims unlikely to complain. Rather than “helping” as it claimed, Pfizer gathered a trial group and a control group, giving one group Pfizer’s new medication and a competitor’s product to the other. It quickly became obvious that the Americans were not on a humanitarian mission but were saving the expense of live trials. After experimenting on about 200 victims, they gathered their test information and left – right in the middle of the meningitis epidemic, without having saved any lives. The Nigerian government tallied the deaths at about 11,000.
That would have been the end, except that a controversy erupted soon after about the relationship between Pfizer’s need for test trials and the meningitis outbreak. As it happened, the WHO was in Nigeria immediately prior to that time on another of its “life-saving” vaccination programs, this time for polio, and the timing and location of the meningitis outbreak apparently matched perfectly the WHO’s polio vaccination program. And of course it perfectly matched Pfizer’s need for large numbers of test subjects. There were lawsuits and payments, accusations and denials, but to this day Nigeria refuses WHO entry into the country and will not participate in any further “humanitarian” aid from the UN or the WHO. We cannot definitively say that the WHO deliberately created the meningitis epidemic for the benefit of Pfizer’s tests, but it’s the only theory that fits all the known facts and it’s the kind of thing the WHO appears to do on a regular basis. We should note Pfizer’s intention to market Trovan in the US and Europe after its trials on these African children, but the FDA refused to approve Trovan for American children due to the severe dangers.
Pfizer’s behavior after these “field trials” ended was, if anything, even more reprehensible. The lawsuits were based on claims that Pfizer did not have proper consent from parents to use an experimental drug on their children, the use of which not only left many children dead but others with brain damage, paralysis or slurred speech. Pfizer eventually reached a settlement with the Nigerian state government to pay $75m in damages and to create a fund of $35m to compensate the victims. This, after what the Guardian described as “a 15-year legal battle against Pfizer over a fiercely controversial drug trial”. Pfizer not only resisted to the end, forcing the poor families through 15 years of hell before finally relenting, but resorted to extortion and blackmail of Nigerian government officials in attempts to avoid making any payments to the families of the tiny victims of its illegal drug trial. The UK Guardian reported that leaked US government diplomatic cables revealed that “Pfizer hired investigators to look for evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in an effort to persuade him to drop the legal action”, with the apparent full knowledge and possibly assistance of the US State Department.
The Guardian stated the diplomatic cables recorded meetings between Pfizer’s country manager, Enrico Liggeri, and US officials at the Abuja embassy on 9 April 2009, stating, “According to Liggeri, Pfizer had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to federal attorney general Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases. He said Pfizer’s investigators were passing this information to local media.” The Guardian also reported there was no suggestion or evidence Nigeria’s attorney general was swayed by this pressure. Pfizer of course claimed the entire notion was “preposterous”, but we can assume the cables – which were classified as “Confidential” – didn’t lie.
It seems Pfizer was dissembling in all its statements, not only with claims of government approval and parental knowledge, but their claim a Nigerian doctor was in charge and directed the experiments. The government’s study found the local doctor was the director “in name only” and most often was not even informed of the procedures of the study and was typically “kept in the dark”. As well Pfizer used the fake letter from a non-existent department to obtain FDA approval for these clinical trials. Pfizer finally admitted the forged letter was “incorrect”, but I’m not sure that is the most appropriate adjective to use. Pfizer also made the infuriatingly dishonest claim that its antibiotic “Trovan demonstrated the highest survival rate of any treatment at the hospital. Trovan unquestionably saved lives.” Well, maybe, but the data on which Pfizer based this claim were the fact that in one location five patients died after using Pfizer’s drug while six patients died after using another medication, with no data as to infection severity or anything else. At best, an empty and fundamentally dishonest claim.
To deflect the issue of Pfizer’s Trovan being lethal to children, the company claimed that the international body Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières) were administering Pfizer’s drug in their own large treatment program, a claim MSF vehemently denied, saying, “We have never worked with this family of antibiotic. We don’t use it for meningitis. That is the reason why we were shocked to see this trial in the hospital.” It was Pfizer’s Liggeri who claimed the lawsuits against Pfizer “were wholly political in nature”, and Liggeri as well who concocted the accusation that MSF had administered Pfizer’s Trovan to children.
In 2006 the Washington Post reported on a lengthy Nigerian government study that concluded Pfizer violated international law by testing its unapproved drug on children with brain infections. The Post apparently obtained a copy of the confidential report which had been hidden away for five years, and which stated Pfizer had never received authorisation from the government for its clinical trial, the apparent authorisation letter having been forged on the letterhead of a non-existent department and backdated to a date prior to the study. According to the Post’s article, the government claimed Pfizer’s ‘humanitarian effort’ was “an illegal trial of an unregistered drug, and a clear case of exploitation of the ignorant.” (11)
The American response was not one of shame for participating in this fraud, nor did the State Department condemn Pfizer for either conducting the drug trials or attempting the extortion and blackmail. Instead, the US ambassador condemned the leak of US embassy cables, as if publicly revealing the crime constituted a worse action than the crime itself. The State Department rushed the high moral ground to condemn “endangering innocent people” and “sabotaging peaceful relations between nations”, ignoring the facts that Pfizer’s trials did far more to ‘endanger innocent people’ and ‘sabotage relations’ than could be done by the revelation of a crime. But in the eyes of the US government, Americans do not commit crimes, and in any case the victims weren’t white. The cables further claimed Pfizer settled only because legal and ‘investigative’ fees had been costing the company more than $15 million per year, which leads one to wonder what occurs in the minds of these people who will spend $15 million a year for 15 years, to avoid paying half that sum to compensate lives they destroyed.
And there is still more. We have seen so many documented examples of the US courts assuming jurisdiction where they have none, agreeing to try cases without any US involvement that occurred wholly outside the US, in flagrant violations of international law, and indicative only of imperial arrogance. But when Nigeria attempted to file claims against Pfizer in the US, the American courts refused to hear the cases, oddly claiming they had no jurisdiction. And this isn’t the first time the US government, the State Department and the US courts have circled the wagons to protect a US multinational by closing the courts.
In 2004 and 2007, the Nigerian media carried reports which were heavily suppressed in US and Western media that the country was refusing to permit UN health authorities to carry out further administration of polio vaccines, blaming the WHO for having initiated the meningitis epidemic in 1996 that resulted in Pfizer’s highly questionable drug trial in that country. Nigerian leaders were also concerned that polio and other foreign vaccines were deliberately contaminated with sterilising and other agents, as occurred in the Philippines and other nations at around the same time. In much of Africa, there appears to be little remaining of the trust that once existed in international agencies and US and European pharma companies. Today, they are viewed primarily as imperial predators with a distinctly anti-human agenda, or at least an agenda that is anti non-white. The portions of Nigeria and other African nations that do still permit vaccinations now insist these be prepared in a trusted non-Western country with no involvement of the WHO or other Western agencies.
Many nations today insist the WHO is a tool to reduce Muslim populations, a claim that is increasingly difficult to dismiss as simple paranoia, and in fact Nigeria also discovered sterilants in WHO vaccines in that country that were clearly capable of lowering fertility in women. The Western media steadfastly ignore the body of evidence supporting these claims and suspicions, and focus instead on a moralistic concern that “the world might be slipping in its efforts to wipe out polio”, categorising the valid concerns of so many nations as ignorant and uninformed suspicion. The Western media of course are all reading from the same page as the perpetrators of this outrage.
We also have the ever-present corporate apologists, weaving their tapestries of misinformation attempting to irreversibly confuse an issue with irrelevancies and so as to place doubts in the minds of the public. One perennial favorite is a claim that “these attacks on pharmaceutical companies could encourage countries to enact legislation that would lower drug profits, which in turn could hamper the development of new medications”. This foolish statement from Roger Bate, a “fellow” at the International Policy Network, which is a lobby group for big pharma, funded by the usual Foundations and corporations, and dutifully reported by London’s Daily Telegraph in its campaign to confuse the uninformed public. The statement is actually rather clever, suggesting that our condemnation of the atrocities and illegalities of big pharma are somehow unjustified violent “attacks” on undeserving corporations. In the case of Pfizer and its Nigerian Trovan trials, The Telegraph gives us an added incentive to sympathise with big pharma by telling us – without evidence or documentation – that “the Nigerian government’s motives (in condemning Pfizer) have also been questioned”, the issue being morphed from reprehensible drug trials resulting in death of children into one of an untrustworthy government with questionable political motives. Thus will the Western media will spin and weave until truth in all its forms disappears from the landscape forever.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes:
(1) Tetanus vaccine laced with anti-fertility drug; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12346214
(2) HCG found in WHO tetanus vaccine in Kenya; https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/human-rights/hcg-found-in-who-tetanus-vaccine-in-kenya/
(3) Vaccines and Population Control: A Hidden Agenda; https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/are-new-vaccines-laced-with-birth-control-drugs/
(4) Bill Gates and the anti-fertility agent in African tetanus vaccine;
(5) Rockefeller-Funded Anti-Fertility Vaccine Coordinated by WHO; https://www.globalresearch.ca/rockefeller-funded-anti-fertility-vaccine-coordinated-by-who
(6) One need only search the WHO website for hCG to find the reports.
(7) Clin. exp. Immunol. (1978) 33, (360-375); February 8, 1978
(8) Vatican: UNICEF and WHO are sterilizing girls through vaccines
(9) Fertility-Regulating Vaccines are Being Tested in India; https://vactruth.com/2018/05/30/fertility-regulating-vaccines-india/
(10) Polio Vaccines Laced with Sterilizing Hormone Discovered in Kenya – WHO is Controlling Population?
(11) Panel Faults Pfizer in ’96 Clinical Trial In Nigeria; www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/06/AR2006050601338.html
(12) Drugs companies fund patient groups which attack NHS; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/3112841/Drugs-companies-fund-patient-groups-which-attack-NHS-decisions.html
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
Pharmaceuticals can be a license to print money
By Pete Dolack | Systemic Disorder | October 11, 2107
It’s no secret that the United States suffers from by far the world’s highest costs for health care. As the most market-oriented health care system among advanced capitalist countries, this is no surprise. Health care in the U.S. is designed to deliver corporate profits, not health care.
On that score, the U.S. system is quite successful. Pharmaceutical companies are at the head of the class in this regard, frequently justifying the spiraling costs of medications by citing large research and development costs that include the costs for drugs that don’t make it to market. There are many drugs that fail to survive testing and become a cost that will never be compensated, that is true. But are these failures really so high to justify the extreme costs of successful drugs?
It would seem not. Firmer proof of that lack of justification has been published by the JAMA Internal Medicine journal, which found that revenue for cancer drugs far outstrips spending on research and development. The article, “Research and Development Spending to Bring a Single Cancer Drug to Market and Revenues After Approval,” prepared by Drs. Vinay Prasad and Sham Mailankody, found that revenue from 10 drugs (one by each of 10 companies) exceed those companies’ total research and development costs by more than seven times.
The total revenue hauled in from these 10 drugs did vary considerably. Two of them earned more than US$20 billion after approval. Both of these high performers cost less than $500 million in research and development costs. The revenue from each of the 10, however, exceeded costs, with widely varied margins. Still profitable: The median revenue of these 10 drugs was $1.7 billion, more than double the median development cost of $648 million, the JAMA Internal Medicine authors report.
The authors write that the median cost to develop a cancer drug represents “a figure significantly lower than prior estimates,” adding that their analysis “provides a transparent estimate of R&D spending on cancer drugs and has implications for the current debate on drug pricing.”
To obtain these figures, the authors analyzed U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissions filings for pharmaceutical companies with no drugs on the U.S. market that received approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a cancer drug from January 1, 2006, through December 31, 2015. Cumulative R&D spending was estimated from initiation of drug development activity to date of approval. Earnings were tracked from the time of approval to March 2017.
The sky’s the limit for pharmaceutical prices
The increase in pharmaceutical prices (blue) versus the general increase in commodities prices (red).
Another way of looking at this would be to examine the increases in the cost of pharmaceuticals against other products. Here again the numbers stand out. Using data gathered by the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve Bank, the consumer price index for pharmaceutical preparation manufacturing for the first quarter of 2017 was 747.8, with January 1, 1980, as the benchmark of 100. In other words, the price of pharmaceuticals is seven and half times higher than they were at the start of 1980. (See graph above.)
How does that compare with inflation or other products? Quite well — for pharmaceutical companies. That more than sevenfold increase in drug prices is an increase nearly two and half times greater than inflation for the period, and nearly four times that of all commodities.
So, yes, unconscionable price-gouging is the cause here. By the industry as a whole, not simply individuals like “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, who might be an outlier in his brazenness but not in his profit-generation plan.
Although not the entire picture, this snapshot of corporate extortion plays a significant role in why the cost of the United States not having a universal health care system is more than $1.4 trillion per year.
Among 19 broadly defined “major” industrial sectors in the U.S., health technology is again expected to be found the most profitable for 2016, with a profit margin of 21.6 percent. Higher even than finance at 17 percent. When narrowing to more specific, narrowly defined industry categories, generic pharmaceuticals sit at the top with an expected 30 percent profit margin for 2016. Major pharmaceuticals rank fourth at 25.5 percent on a list in which health products and finance claim nine of the top 10 spots.
The sky’s the limit for pharmaceutical profits
That’s a repeat of 2015, when health technology had the highest profit margin of 19 broadly defined industrial sectors, at 20.9 percent, topping even finance, the second highest. When a separate study broke down profit margins by more specific industry categories, health care-related industries comprised three of the six most profitable.
Nothing new there, either. A BBC report found that pharmaceuticals and banks tied for the highest average profit margin in 2013, with five pharmaceutical companies enjoying a profit margin of 20 percent or more — Pfizer, Hoffmann-La Roche, AbbVie, GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly. The world’s 10 largest pharmaceutical corporations racked up a composite US$90 billion in profits for 2013, according to the BBC analysis. As to their expenses, these 10 firms spent far more on sales and marketing than they did on research and development.
If those facts and figures aren’t enough, here’s another way of looking at excessive profits — a 2015 study found that, of the 10 corporations that have the highest revenue per employee among the world’s biggest corporations, three are health care companies. Two of the three, Amerisourcebergen and McKesson, both distribute pharmaceuticals, and the other, Express Scrips, administers prescription drug benefits for tens of millions of health-plan members. Each of these primarily operates in the United States, the only advanced-capitalist country without universal health coverage.
The extra layers represented by those three companies demonstrate that there are ample opportunities for corporate profiteering that contribute to extraordinarily high health care costs in the U.S., beyond drug manufacturing and insurance.
And because corporations have the ear of politicians and other government officials, it’s no surprise that one of the primary ongoing goals of the U.S. government for so-called “free trade” agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is to impose rules that would weaken the national health care systems of other countries. This was done in TPP negotiations at the direct behest of U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies, incensed that countries like New Zealand make thousands of medicines, medical devices and related products available at subsidized costs.
By far the most expensive system while delivering among the worst outcomes and leaving tens of millions uninsured, where tens of thousands die from lack of health care annually. That is the high cost of private profit in health care. Or, to put it more bluntly, allowing the “market” to decide health outcomes instead of health care professionals.
Universal Vaccinations for Children will be Overseen by Committee which Accepts Vaccine Manufacturer Monies
By Janet Phelan – New Eastern Outlook – 10.12.2015
A House of Representatives Bill, short titled “Vaccinate All Children Act of 2015,” has been referred to the Subcommittee on Health and is awaiting committee action.
HR 2232 was introduced by Frederica Wilson, Democrat from Florida and is largely modeled on the California student vaccination act, which was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown in June of this year.
Like the California Act, HR 2232 removes all previous exemptions from vaccination, other than a medical exemption, supported by a medical doctor’s statement that a particular vaccination would be hazardous to a specific child’s well- being. Gone are the religious exemptions and philosophical exemptions.
Previously, forty-eight states had laws on the books honoring religious exemptions and nineteen states allowed philosophical exemptions.
This Act would override any state law governing vaccine exemptions, making it mandatory for all students at public elementary and secondary schools to be vaccinated. The bill would amend the Public Health Services Act to require students “to be vaccinated in accordance with the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.” (ACIP)
The bill does not, however, reveal which vaccinations would be mandatory nor does it place a cap on vaccinations.
The above cited Advisory Committee, which will be making the decisions concerning which shots are mandatory, is stacked with pro-vaccination heavyweights. Notable committee members include a Dr. Kelly Moore, Director, Tennessee Immunization Program, Dr. Edward Belongia, Director, Center for Clinical Epidemiology & Population Health at the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation and Dr. Kathleen Harriman, Chief, Vaccine Preventable Disease Epidemiology Section with the California Department of Public Health, to name a few. Also sitting on the Committee as Ex Officio members are Department of Defense (DoD) officials as well as FDA officials and members of the Department of Veterans Affairs, among representatives from other federal agencies.
Dollars for Docs
A close scrutiny of this Advisory Committee reveals that quite a number of its members are enriching themselves through vaccine industry “donations” or grants.
For example, some of these individuals have a history which includes industry sponsorship or employment. An example is Dr. Belongia, who has been listed as Co-Principal Investigator for an industry sponsored study of effectiveness of quadrivalent influenza vaccine in children.
According to Propublica, a number of these vaccine experts on the Advisory Committee are accepting large sums of vaccine company money. Dr. Gregory Poland, who is with the American College of Physicians and also the Mayo Clinic, has received a total of $17,351.00 from vaccine manufacturers Novartis Vaccines and Sanofi Pasteur. The money changed hands, according to Propublica, for activities by Dr. Poland listed as promotional speaking, consulting and travel and food expenses from November 2013 through December 2014.
Dr. Stanley Grogg, a “Liaison Member” of the Committee and with American Osteopathic Association (AOA), was rewarded for his “promotional speaking” activities, as well as “consulting,” “travel and lodging” and of course the ubiquitous “food and beverage” — to the tune of $60,391.00. These payments were made during the period of August 2013 through December 2014 and came from a buffet of pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Sanofi, Novartis Vaccines and GlaxoSmithKline, among others.
Dr. Kenneth Schmader is listed as a “Liaison Member” of the ACIP, due to his position with the American Geriatrics Society (AGS). He is a Professor of Medicine-Geriatrics and Geriatrics Division Chief at Duke University and Durham VA Medical Centers in Durham, NC. Dr. Schmader received $75,913.79 for research, paid by Merck, Sharp and Dohme Corporation during the program year 2014.
Dr. Carol Baker, a “Liaison member” and with Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) , also works as a Professor of Pediatrics with the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Dr. Baker was also found to have received $37,514.00 from August 2013-December 2014 for speaking, consulting, lodging and eating. The usual suspects pop up as the vaccine manufacturers who contributed to Dr. Baker—Novartis and Pfizer making the majority of the contributions.
Not to be left in the dust, Dr. William Schaffner, a “Liaison Member” from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID) and the Chairman, Department of Preventive Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, received a total payment of $26,208 in the two year period from Pfizer and Sanofi Pasteur. The total paid Dr. Schaffner for travel and lodging came to $13,653.00.
Committee member Dr. Ruth Karron, who is listed as Professor and Director at the Center for Immunization Research, Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, received $ $7,173 from GlaxoSmithKline for consulting from April-December, 2009, while Dr. Lee Harrison of Pittsburgh was paid a total of $27,663.00 by Glaxo and Pfizer, from 2009-2012.
Besides direct payments to pro- vaccine committee members from the pharmaceutical companies, there are other revenue streams gracing ACIP committee members. While this reporter did not find evidence that Advisory Committee member Dr. Arthur Reingold had received the above types of monies from Big Pharma, his name surfaced in connection with an effort to shut down a Professor whose work challenged the conventional wisdom that AIDS was mortally impacting large numbers of Africans. Reingold was assigned to “investigate” professor Peter Duesberg for “misconduct,” surrounding Duesberg’s findings that figures on AIDS deaths in Africa had been deliberately inflated.
As it turned out, Dr. Arthur Reingold had received over $37 million for AIDS research since 1988. Professor Duesberg was subsequently exonerated of the charges.
Dr. David Stephens, a voting member of the Committee, also did not show up on the Propublica list of doctors who took money from pharmaceutical companies. Stephens, whose bio states he has “led research initiatives in the School of Medicine” (at Emory University), is responsible for Emory researchers receiving “$521.8 million from eternal funding agencies in fiscal year 2014.”
Stephens also hobnobs with the Vaccine Dinner Club, which exists to “advance the practice of vaccine science by stimulating the intellectual potential and research productivity of the vaccine research community in the Southeast…”
Dinners and membership in the club are free, sponsored by Emory University and other organizations. I guess with a half billion dollars knocking around in your pocket, a free lunch for your fellow scientists wouldn’t be much of an issue.
Stephens also sits on the Board of Directors for Georgia Bio, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the growth of Georgia’s life sciences industry. Also represented on the Georgia Bio Board are vaccine manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies: Johnson and Johnson, Geovax, Arbor Pharmaceuticals, Immucor, Osmotica Pharmaceutical Company and Femasys.
Georgia Bio was contacted by this reporter, who wished to query what, if any, compensation Stephens received for his service on the Board. Jennifer Kauffman, Development Director, promptly hung up rather than answer.
Should HR 2232 be approved by the US Congress, it is this Advisory Committee which will decide which vaccinations American children must receive. The clear conflict of interest inherent in Committee members padding their wallets with money from the pharmaceutical industry realistically should disqualify the members from making these critical decisions.
Opaque Government
These conflicts of interest are not new for the ACIP. As reported over fifteen years ago by the National Vaccine Information Center, previous conflicts of interest ranged from the ACIP chairman owning stock in vaccine giant Merck, to other financial ties between committee members and vaccine companies. In addition, the National Vaccine Information Center reported that the mandated financial disclosures filed by committee members were incomplete, rendering a full accounting of their financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies difficult, if not impossible.
Regarding the compensation paid by the CDC to ACIP members, CDC reports that;“Appointments are not remunerated. However, members are compensated for expenses incurred by attendance at meetings. Such compensation, which includes the issuance of airline tickets, per diem to cover lodging, meals and incidental expenses will be in accordance with DHHS/CDC travel rules. An optional honorarium of $250/day for each day that a member attends an ACIP meeting is offered to voting members, who are designated as Special Government Employees during their tenure on the Committee.”
Radio show host (Wise Women Media) Anita Stewart contributed research to this report. This reporter requested that Stewart contact the CDC to query what sort of compensation the ACIP members received, as the CDC will no longer respond to public records or media requests from this reporter. This blacklisting took place following the publication of an article in Activist Post, indicating that the CDC was deflating the numbers of biological weapons labs.
Stewart, who located the above information on ACIP compensation online, was questioned by CDC media officer Sonny Dill, who kept insisting that Stewart was I. Dill also wanted to know who Stewart worked for, stating this information was necessary before answering any questions. Stewart, who was forthcoming in response, reports that Dill declined to supply the information requested.
TPP: Big Pharma’s Big Deal
By Joyce Nelson | CounterPunch | October 7, 2015
We still don’t know all the details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal tentatively agreed to on Oct. 5 by negotiators from 12 Pacific Rim countries, but already critics are slamming it for many reasons, including its generous concessions to the pharmaceutical industry.
Doctors Without Borders claims the TPP will “go down in history as the worst trade agreement for access to medicines in developing countries.” [1] That’s because the TPP will extend patent protection for brand-name drugs, thereby preventing similar generic drugs (which are far less costly) from entering the market. This will drive up the prices.
Judit Rius Sanjuan, legal policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders, told vox.com that TPP creates patent-related obligations in countries that never had them before. People in “Peru, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Mexico” will be especially affected, she said. “They’ll face higher prices for longer periods of time.” [2]
Ruth Lopert, a professor at George Washington University, told Bloomberg News that provisions in the TPP agreement will affect health-care budgets and drug access in all signatory countries, but especially the poorest. “She said as many as 40,000 people in Vietnam, the poorest country in the agreement, could stop getting drugs to fight HIV because of provisions that will boost the price of [pharmaceutical] therapy.” [3]
Other countries like Canada will also be hit with higher costs. The Council of Canadians says that if the TPP is ratified, “[p]harmaceutical patents will be extended, delaying the release of more affordable generic drugs and adding $2 billion to our annual public health care bill.” [4] In the U.S., many people already cannot afford to pay for the expensive medicines that could save their lives, and they try to access generics available elsewhere.
Extending patent rights for life-saving drugs is an obvious gift to Big Pharma. Conor J. Lynch at opendemocracy.net has called it “a clear corporate handout that would greatly affect international access and most definitely cause preventable deaths. The clear objective here is to increase industry profits, plain and simple. This is not surprising, that’s what private industry does, but there is a serious moral dilemma here.” [5] That moral dilemma is made even more apparent by recent findings.
Tax Cheats
In an ironic coincidence, the TPP agreement was reached on the same day that a damning report on corporate tax-avoidance – Offshore Shell Games 2015 – was released by Citizens for Tax Justice and the US Public-Interest Research Group Education Fund. The report reveals the extent to which top U.S. companies use tax havens like Bermuda, Luxembourg, Cayman Islands, and the Netherlands to set up “tax haven subsidiaries” that are usually little more than a post-office box.
Of the top 30 Fortune 500 companies with the most money held in offshore tax-havens, nine are pharmaceutical companies: Pfizer ($74 billion held offshore), Merck ($60 billion), Johnson & Johnson ($53.4 billion), Proctor & Gamble ($45 billion), Amgen ($29.3 billion), Eli Lilly ($25.7 billion), Bristol Myers Squibb ($24 billion), AbbeVie Inc. ($23 billion), and Abbott Laboratories ($23 billion). [6]
Concerning Pfizer, the world’s largest drug maker (declared profits of $22 billion in 2013), the report states: “The company made more than 41 percent of its sales in the U.S. between 2008 and 2014, but managed to report no federal taxable income for seven years in a row. This is because Pfizer uses accounting techniques to shift the location of its taxable profits offshore. For example, the company can transfer patents for its drugs to a subsidiary in a low- or no-tax country. Then when the U.S. branch of Pfizer sells the drug in the U.S., it ‘pays’ its own offshore subsidiary high licensing fees that turn domestic profits into on-the-books losses and shifts profit overseas.”
Overall, the study found that the 500 largest U.S. companies hold more than US$2.1 trillion in accumulated profits offshore. “For many companies, increasing profits held offshore does not mean building factories abroad, selling more products to foreign customers, or doing any additional real business activity in other countries,” but simply establishing a PO box.
Some companies use the money supposedly “trapped” offshore as “implied collateral” in order to borrow funds at negligible rates for investing in U.S. assets, paying dividends to shareholders, or repurchasing stock.
Of course, as the report makes clear, “Congress, by failing to take action to end this tax avoidance, forces ordinary Americans to make up the difference. Every dollar in taxes that corporations avoid by using tax havens must be balanced by higher taxes on individuals, cuts to public investments and public services, or increased federal debt.”
The report finds that, through a variety of tax-avoidance measures, an estimated US$620 billion in U.S. taxes is collectively owed by the 500 largest companies with headquarters in the U.S.
Corporate Coup
Now the TransPacific Partnership – which is being called “NAFTA on steroids” – would award Big Pharma and other multinationals even more corporate “rights” in more countries, including the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism by which they can sue signatory governments for regulatory changes that affect their profits.
As the Canadian website rabble.ca notes: “The Canadian government is currently being sued through NAFTA by Eli Lilly, an American pharmaceutical company, for invalidating the firm’s patent extensions on two mental health drugs. A Canadian Federal Court decided in 2010 that the patent extensions had not delivered the promised benefits and the drugs should therefore be opened up to generic competition. Generic drugs significantly reduce the cost for end users, but Eli Lilly cried foul and launched an ISDS claim against the government, demanding US$500 million in compensation for lost profits. The case is still in progress, but regardless of the outcome we can expect the TPP to lead to similar ISDS disputes. Powerful multinational pharmaceutical companies will use any available means to cling to over-priced drug monopolies. Greater intellectual property protections in the TPP will give these companies an even stronger quasi-legal basis to sue governments and crowd out generic [drug] competition.” [7]
The final text of the TransPacific Partnership agreement won’t be available for at least a month, likely weeks after the Canadian federal election on October 19. The details will undoubtedly reveal more generous concessions to the multinationals. It will be up to the elected legislators in all twelve countries to approve or reject the TPP. In Canada, NDP leader Tom Mulcair has pledged to scrap the deal if elected as Prime Minister, explaining that the Stephen Harper government had no mandate to sign it during an election campaign when it is merely a “caretaker” government.
The U.S. website zerohedge.com calls the Trans-Pacific Partnership “a Trojan horse” and “a coup by multinational corporations who want global subservience to their agenda.” In no uncertain terms, it adds: “Buyer beware. Citizens beware.” [8]
Footnotes/Links:
[2] Julia Belluz, “How the Trans-Pacific Partnership could drive up the cost of medicine worldwide,” Vox, October 5, 2015.
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/5/9454511/tpp-cost-medicine
[3] “Pacific Deal Rewrites Rules on Trade in Autos, Patented Drugs,” Bloomberg News, October 5, 2015.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-05/pacific-deal-rewrites-rules-on-trade-in-autos-patented
[4] Council of Canadians, “Tell party leaders: Reject the TPP,” October 6, 2015.
[5] Conor J. Lynch, “Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Big Pharma giveaway,” Open Democracy, February 14, 2015.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/conor-j-lynch/transpacific-partnership%E2/80%/99s-big-pharma-giveaway
[6] http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2015/10/orrshore_shell_games_2015.php//executive
[7] Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, “Trans-Pacific Partnership a big win for corporate interests,” Rabble.ca, October 6, 2015.
[8] Tyler Durden, “Trans-Pacific Partnership Deal Struck As ‘Corporate Secrecy’ Wins Again,” Zero Hedge, October 5, 2015.
http://www.zerohedge.com
Corporations shell out $1.2mn in Senate contributions to fast-track TPP
RT | May 28, 2015
Records from the Federal Election Commission show corporations have been donating tens of thousands of dollars to Senate campaign coffers, particularly to lawmakers who were undecided over a controversial trade deal involving Pacific Rim countries.
Using data from the Federal Election Commission, the Guardian studied donations from the corporate members of the US Business Coalition for TPP – the Trans-Pacific Partnership – to US Senate campaigns between January and March 2015, when debate over the trade deal was ramping up.
What the documents showed was that out of a total of nearly $1.2 million given, an average of $17,000 was donated to each of the 65 “yes” votes. Republicans received an average of $19,000 and Democrats received $9,700.
“It’s a rare thing for members of Congress to go against the money these days,” Mansur Gidfar, spokesman for the anti-corruption group Represent.Us, told the Guardian. “They know exactly which special interests they need to keep happy if they want to fund their re-election campaigns or secure a future job as a lobbyist.”
Fast-tracking the TPP means voting to allow President Barack Obama to negotiate a deal without permitting Congress to amend the final document. The Senate first voted to debate Trade Promotion Authority – the fast-track bill – by a 65-33 margin on May 14. On May 21, lawmakers voted 62-37 to bring the debate on TPA to a close and pass the bill.
Little is known about the specifics of the trade deal. According to a draft document leaked by WikiLeaks, the pact would grant broad powers to multinational companies operating in North America, South America and Asia, such as the ability to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings – federal, state or local – before tribunals organized under the World Bank or the United Nations.
Besides the United States, the accord would include Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Most business interests support the Pacific Rim deal while labor groups have said it will cost American jobs and suppress wages.
Just two days before the fast-track vote, when Obama’s trade deal lacked a filibuster-proof majority, six out of eight Democrats who were on the fence decided to vote in favor of fast-track. Senators Michael Bennett (Colorado), Patty Murray (Washington) and Ron Wyden (Oregon) all received contributions totaling $105,900 combined. Bennett alone received $53,700.
The other Democrats who voted in favor were Dianne Feinstein (California), Claire McCaskill (Missouri) and Bill Nelson (Florida), though it’s unclear if they received contributions.
“How can we expect politicians who routinely receive campaign money, lucrative job offers, and lavish gifts from special interests to make impartial decisions that directly affect those same special interests?” Gidfar told the Guardian. “As long as this kind of transparently corrupt behavior remains legal, we won’t have a government that truly represents the people.”
In comparison, almost 100 percent of Senate Republicans voted for fast-tracking the TPP, with “no” votes from Louisiana and Alaska. Seven of those Republicans are running for re-election in 2016 and received contributions to their campaigns – Senators Johnny Isakson (Georgia), Roy Blunt (Missouri) John McCain (Arizona), Richard Burr (NC), Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Tim Scott (SC).
According to the Federal Election Commission documents, most of the donations came from corporations like Goldman Sachs, Pfizer and Procter & Gamble.
Read more: EU drops controls on dangerous chemicals after TTIP pressure from US – report
Stop Corporate Welfare Kings
By Ralph Nader | CounterPunch | April 17, 2015
“Tax day” comes and goes each year, but unfortunately, the systemic issues that plague American taxpayers linger on without resolution well past the mid-April deadline.
The U.S. tax code has long been manipulated by corporate lobbyists and their corporate tax attorneys. (President Jimmy Carter once called the loophole-ridden tax laws “a disgrace to the human race.”) A primary purpose of these perforations is to arrange the law and regulations so that certain categories of profit-rich companies can avoid paying their fair share to Uncle Sam.
In many states, it is a literal race to the bottom for elected officials to offer corporations sweeter tax deals to keep jobs in their locality — see the 2013 Boeing controversy in the state of Washington, in which the aerospace industry, much of which is made up of Boeing, was awarded $8.7 billion in tax breaks over 16 years to produce the 777X jetliner in-state. Notably, Boeing paid zero in federal income tax that year — along with many other major U.S. corporations such as GE and Verizon. Some of these Fortune 500 companies even get a rebate check!
According to Citizens for Tax Justice, “American Fortune 500 corporations are avoiding up to $600 billion in U.S. federal income taxes by holding more than $2.1 trillion” of retained profits offshore, which they designate as “permanently reinvested” to avoid a tax liability.
And of course, millionaires and billionaires often pay less in taxes than middle-class Americans do, taking full advantage of tax loopholes, deductions, deferrals and other forms of creative accounting. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives now intends to pass legislation to repeal the estate tax, which would see that “vast amounts of money that has never been taxed will be passed tax-free to the heirs of today’s billionaires,” according to Scott Klinger of the Center for Effective Government.
The end result is that, through a myriad of tax avoidance schemes, the wealthy 1 percent continue to profit using public resources, subsidies and infrastructure while the 99 percent disproportionately pay the bills for it — all while struggling to pay their own bills, mortgages, student loans, and more. And when Wall Street runs amok, it’s the taxpayers who have paid the bills for the catastrophic damage as a result of regulatory surrender. Millions of these taxpayers also lost their jobs and pensions in the 2008-2009 Wall Street collapse of our economy.
This brings us to the Internal Revenue Service — which has been made into a dirty word to many Americans. Those Americans might be surprised to learn, however, that the current IRS enforcement budget is $10.9 billion, after a cut of $346 million from the previous year. To put that in perspective, Apple Inc. spent $14 billion just to buy back its own stock last year, a move that only serves to provide a meager benefit, if that, to its shareholders, while nourishing executive compensation packages.
The IRS loses an estimated $300 billion a year due to tax evasion. A budget proposal by the Obama administration claimed that the IRS could bring in an additional $6 for every dollar it adds to the enforcement budget. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said that he pushes this very convincing point in Congress to little reception or reaction. “I say that and everybody shrugs and goes on about their business,” he told the AP in 2014. “I have not figured out either philosophically or psychologically why nobody seems to care whether we collect the revenue or not.”
The effects of these budgetary cuts are already being seen. Current staffing levels at the IRS are at 87,000 — the lowest since the early 1980s. The agency lost 13,000 employees from 2010 to 2014 and expects to lose another 3,000 this year. In the final stretch towards April 15, many taxpayers have experienced excruciatingly long waits on hold and long lines at local IRS offices as a result. Congress doesn’t care. (National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, who operates independently within the IRS, detailed this degradation of service in her annual report to Congress. (See taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov.)
Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz has gone so far as to publicly state his intention to abolish the IRS entirely, calling that radical course of action the “simplest and best tax reform.” It’s not clear how Senator Cruz intends the federal government to collect revenue to pay for his presidential salary, the White House budget and expanding his giant military budget if he should be elected and not recover his senses.
It is clear, however, that significant rational tax reform is necessary. What remains unclear is who will benefit the most from such reform. Americans must seriously ask why individual U.S. taxpayers are fronting the money for hugely profitable corporations. These are funds that could potentially be used to repair critical public infrastructure, create decently paying jobs, or simply reduce the tax burden on middle-income individuals.
One solution to ensure that the interests of small taxpayers are accounted for and protected is to establish taxpayer watchdog associations across the country. These organizations would work full-time in each state to make sure that individual taxpayers get the best deal possible. After all, big corporations can afford to support an army of tax accountants and attorneys to continually update the playbook of tactics to avoid having to pay their fair share. Most taxpayers don’t have this luxury. What they do have, however, is sheer force of numbers. Organization of such watchdog organizations could be facilitated by including a notice on the 1040 tax return inviting people to pay a small due and join these advocacy and educational nonprofit groups. These associations would be supported by membership dues and would receive no tax money. The members would elect a board of directors that could hire researchers, organizers, accountants and lawyers.
Such pressure from united citizen bodies would provide the organizational mechanism to enhance the influence of individuals in the tax-collection and policy-making process — something that is much-needed in our current American plutocracy.
A simple motto to consider when asking what we choose to tax is: “Tax what they burn, not what we earn.” Before we place the largest burdens of taxation on workers, we should tax areas that have the greatest potential negative or damaging influence on our economy and our society. Tax the polluters, the Wall Street speculators, the junk-food peddlers, and the corporate criminals. Consider that just a fraction of a 1-percent sales tax on speculation in derivatives and trading in stocks could bring in $300 billion a year! (See robinhoodtax.org.)
If taxpayers really want to protect their interests, they must organize and fight for them. The corporations certainly have the money — but they can’t match the manpower or votes of an organized citizenry.
In the meantime, big corporations on welfare like Walmart, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Pfizer, General Electric, Weyerhaeuser, and ExxonMobile should declare April 15 to be Taxpayer Appreciation Day. The corporate welfare kings should have the decency to, at least, thank smaller taxpayers who pay for all the freeloading that the corporatists have rammed through Congress. (See goodjobsfirst.org for much more on this issue.)
Follow Ralph Nader on Twitter : www.twitter.com/RalphNader
The Withering of Big Pharma?
By Martha Rosenberg | Dissident Voice | November 7, 2013
It used to be when a drug company settled illegal marketing charges that millions took its drugs under false pretenses, the news would be released on a Friday afternoon when no one would notice. That was then. Now almost all the drug companies have joined the Off label/Kickback club and the public doesn’t seem to notice or care.
On the surface, Johnson & Johnson’s $2.2 billion settlement this week for illegally marketing drugs to the elderly, children and the mentally disabled looks like a victory. J&J’s subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, will plead guilty to illegally promoting the antipsychotic Risperdal for “controlling aggression and anxiety in elderly dementia patients and treating behavioral disturbances in children and in individuals with disabilities,” reports Reuters. The promotions included a brazen kickback scheme to Omnicare Inc, a pharmacy supplying nursing homes, exposed by a whistleblower.
At least 15,000 elderly people in nursing homes die a year from drugs like Risperdal said FDA drug reviewer David Graham in Congressional testimony a few years ago. Eli Lilly who makes the similar drug Zyprexa and AstraZeneca who makes Seroquel have also settled charges that they churned the elderly drug market at the price of Grandma and Grandpa’s lives.
But it is not a victory. J&J made $24.2 billion off Risperdal from 2003 to 2010 and shareholders won’t even notice this week’s nano loss. J&J milked Risperdal for all it was worth and the patent had already run out by the time it was charged with illegal schemes. Other drug giants charged with illegal marketing schemes–Abbott for Depakote, Pfizer for Bextra, Eli Lilly for Zyprexa, AstraZeneca for Seroquel, GlaxoSmithKline for Paxil and Merck for Vioxx–also got their money’s worth before the trivial nuisance of suit. Many, like Pfizer who illegally marketed its seizure drug Neurontin while under probation for illegal Lipitor activities–are brazen and shameless repeat offenders.
Many say the only justice that will get Big Pharma’s attention is frog marching the CEOs off to prison and/or cutting them off from their lucrative public trough of Medicare, Medicaid and military health programs.
Still, Big Pharma’s audacious business plan of asking forgiveness not permission is winding down. Not because Pharma, prescribers, consumers, regulators and health officials have seen the light but because there are no more big drugs to pimp. An estimated 100,000 workers will be losing their jobs at Pfizer, Sanofi, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Merck reported Yahoo finance last month.
Only two new drug campaigns seem to be brewing and they require a major suspension of reality on the part of doctors and patients. One tries to convince people with low back pain they actually suffer from ankylosing spondylitis an arthritis-like condition that causes chronic inflammation of the spine. If your spine is stiff when you wake up in the morning you can take an immune suppressor like Humira which puts you at risk of tuberculosis and lethal viral, fungal and bacterial infections while costing you $12,000 to $17,000 a year. Line forms to the left.
The other, even more brazen campaign, tries to convince people with insomnia, tiredness during the day, moodiness and relationship problems that they actually suffer from Non-24-Hour Sleep–Wake Disorder, a disorder that affects mostly blind people. You don’t have to be blind to have the disorder, says the new Pharma message even though there have been fewer than 100 cases of sighted people with non-24 reported in the scientific literature. It sounds like a stretch but so did convincing people with job, money and marriage problems they really had depression or bipolar disorder.
Still it is obvious the bloom has fallen off the Big Pharma rose and it is now paying the piper for the high-flying party with drug settlements like Johnson & Johnson’s this week. But that doesn’t mean shady marketing, hidden risks, kickbacks and outrageous prices are gone from the medical field. They have just moved to the Medical Device industry.
~
Martha Rosenberg is a columnist/cartoonist who writes about public health. Her first book, titled Born with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp the Public Health, has just been released by Prometheus Books. She can be reached at: martharosenberg@sbcglobal.net.
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Pfizer Pays $60 Million for Bribing Foreign Doctors
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | August 10, 2012
Foreign subsidiaries of Pfizer spent years bribing foreign doctors and healthcare officials to expand sales of the company’s pharmaceuticals, according to a $60 million settlement reached with the U.S. government.
The deal, brokered by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the U.S. Department of Justice, resolves charges of illegal activities that took place in about a dozen countries, including China, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
“Pfizer subsidiaries in several countries had bribery so entwined in their sales culture that they offered points and bonus programs to improperly reward foreign officials who proved to be their best customers,” Kara Brockmeyer, an SEC official, said in a news release. “These charges illustrate the pitfalls that exist for companies that fail to appropriately monitor potential risks in their global operations.”
In China, a subsidiary awarded doctors with points for every Pfizer prescription they wrote, allowing them to redeem the points for medical books, cell phones, and other gifts. In some cases, Pfizer’s China operation bribed physicians with free trips abroad.
Pfizer officials in the U.S. reportedly learned of the bribes in 2004 and began in internal investigation that kept federal regulators in the loop on what they discovered. The company insisted its executives knew nothing about the schemes before then.
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As “Blockbuster Drug” Bubble Bursts, Big Pharma Takes Jobs Overseas
By Martha Rosenberg | Dissident Voice | March 12th, 2012
It is no consolation to the roughly one out of 600 families who lost their homes in the U.S. but Wall Street made a lot of money slicing and dicing mortgages it knew would implode, while hiding risks. Financial giants, like AIG, are still buzzing along and neither penalties or new laws will prevent a future crash, say financial analysts, because the risky business models have not really changed.
A similar Big Pharma bubble, leavened with risky blockbuster drugs that also blew up, is now bursting. Like Wall Street’s bundled high risk loans, the “tide” created by Big Pharma’s high risk drugs raised many ships during the 2000s from advertising, public relations and medical communication agencies to TV and radio stations, medical journals and doctor/pitchmen who shoveled in its marketing budgets. But now the joy ride is over and Pharma is shedding jobs and settling billions in claims without changing its risky business model, like Wall Street.
In Europe, governments are no longer willing to pay the high prices for drugs that they once did say published reports and some countries are drafting laws making drug makers “prove their drugs are effective or risk having them dropped from the coverage list, or covered at a lower rate.” Imagine!
Germany has already saved 1.9 billion euros in 2011 by refusing to pay higher prices for drugs unless they are clearly superior to existing medicines, and Pharma worries that other countries will also get tough and want scientific proof for drug effectiveness instead of marketing and spin. In the U.S. and elsewhere, a drug only needs to be superior to no drug (placebo) to be approved by regulators — yet “new” is conveyed as “better than any drug to date” in advertising. Some clinicians say Haldol, an inexpensive antipsychotic, and lithium, a similar affordable bipolar drug are better than blockbuster antipyschotics and bipolar drugs that created Pharma’s 2000 bubble.
Before the Vioxx scandal and major settlements over blockbuster drugs like Zyprexa, Bextra, Celebrex, Geodon and Seroquel, being a Pharma rep was probably the next best thing to working on Wall Street. Direct-to-consumer advertising did your pre-sell for you, and all you had to do was show up with your snappy Vytorin tote bag and samples case. Some Pharma reps had their own reception room with ice water, swivel chairs, and laptop ports at medical offices, and most waltzed in to see the doctor right in front of waiting and sick patients. (It didn’t hurt that reps were usually “hotties,” both men or women).
But, by 2011, the bloom had fallen off Pharma reps’ roses. The number of prescribers willing to see most reps fell almost 20 percent, the number refusing to see all reps increased by half, and eight million sales calls were “nearly impossible to complete,” reported ZS Associates. Blockbuster drugs that were found to be unsafe after their big sales push or even withdrawn altogether, did not help the reps’ credibility with doctors. After the aggressively marketed hormone therapy was linked to high incidences of cancer, stroke and heart attack, Wyeth (now Pfizer) announced it was eliminating 1,200 jobs and closing its Rouses Point, New York plant where Prempro products were manufactured.
As government and private insurers increasingly say, “You want us to cover what?” about expensive, dangerous drugs that are not even proven effective, Pharma bubble jobs are evaporating. Almost 20,000 jobs have vanished at AstraZeneca, Novartis and Pfizer in the last 12 months alone. (AstraZeneca scrapped 21,600 more since 2007). Meanwhile, Pharma is outsourcing more of its operations to poor countries.
Workers and people willing to be trial subjects are both a bargain in poor countries where many can’t understand drug risks or refuse them if they did (and most can’t afford the very drugs they help sell). In January the Argentinian Federation of Health Professionals accused drug maker GlaxoSmithKline of misleading participants and pressuring poor families into joining a trial for the Synflorix vaccine, which the company says protects against bacterial pneumonia and meningitis, reported CNN. In 2010, 10 deaths occurred during Pfizer and AstraZeneca drug trials at the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre which was ironically built for survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, reports MSNBC. 3,878 workers perished in Bhopal when chemicals leaked at a Union Carbide pesticide plant.
Outsourcing drug manufacturing to cheap venues also contributes to Pharma’s cascade of “quality control” problems in which drugs are mislabeled, contaminated or otherwise made dangerous. It is speculated that Johnson & Johnson’s CEO William Weldon “was pushed to retire because of all of the quality issues at McNeil as well as with the company’s hip implant products, which have resulted in a raft of litigation,” reports FiercePharma.
Like the Wall Street bubble, the Pharma bubble was built on products that industry, but not the public, knew were risky, sold for quick profits. Now regulators are examining some of these “assets” more closely and with disturbing findings. The FDA now warns that bestselling statin drugs like Lipitor and Crestor, even approved for children, are linked to memory loss and diabetes associated with. The equally well selling proton pump inhibitors like Nexium and Prilosec for acid reflux disease (GERD) are now believed to increase the risk of bone fractures by 30 percent.
In March, the FDA even rejected a Merck drug that combines the active drug in Lipitor with the active drug in Zetia and Vytorin, a drug that Forbes calls Son of Vytorin. Vytorin (the father) was advertised to treat both food and family “sources of cholesterol” until results from a study that Merck and Schering-Plough appeared to withhold from regulators showed the drug had no effect on the buildup of plaque in the arteries (believed to correlate with heart attack and stroke). There was such a gap between marketing and science, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the General Accounting Office to investigate why the FDA was approving “drugs that appear to have little to no effect in protecting lives and increasing health.”
Yet even as clouds develop over Pharma’s top-selling drugs, some say the FDA is too hard on new drugs, not too easy. “The FDA is impeding useful innovations in the U.S.,” says former FDA deputy commissioner Scott Gottlieb in the a Wall Street Journal oped and lagging behind other countries. Former FDA commissioner Andrew Von Eschenbach, also writing in the WSJ, agrees. The FDA should improve U.S. drug competitiveness by allowing drugs “to be approved based on safety, with efficacy to be proven in later trials,” while the public is already taking the drugs. Isn’t that what’s happening now?
~
Martha Rosenberg is a columnist/cartoonist who writes about public health. Her first book, titled Born with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp the Public Health, will be published in April 2012 by Amherst, New York-based Prometheus Books. She can be reached at: martharosenberg@sbcglobal.net.
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America’s Benevolent Bombing of Serbia
By James Bovard | FFF | August 16, 2019
Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton commenced bombing Serbia in the name of human rights, justice, and ethnic tolerance. Approximately 1,500 Serb civilians were killed by NATO bombing in one of the biggest sham morality plays of the modern era. As British professor Philip Hammond recently noted, the 78-day bombing campaign “was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called ‘dual-use’ targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorise the country into surrender.”
Clinton’s unprovoked attack on Serbia, intended to help ethnic Albanians seize control of Kosovo, set a precedent for “humanitarian” warring… continue
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Three Mile Island, Global Warming and the CIA
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This article will examine some of the connections between the US and UK National Security apparatus and the appearance of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory beginning after the accident at Three Mile Island. … continue
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