THE BIRD FLU SCARE & BILDERBERG PROFITS

By Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press

The corporate controlled media and the Bush administration have irresponsibly cultivated a global climate of fear about an "inevitable" bird flu pandemic that will kill millions, while international pharmaceutical corporations and their stockholders rake in record-breaking revenues.

Fear mongering has become the most conspicuous hallmark of the administration of President George W. Bush and the corporate controlled media that supports its agenda. The current hysteria about bird flu is being promoted by the same administration and controlled press who blatantly used fabricated evidence to spread fear of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction in order to launch an illegal war of aggression against Iraq.

"It's inevitable, say government officials," a recent ABC News article on the bird flu virus begins, "a pandemic will strike the United States and the impact will be profound.

"Schools and business will be closed. Hospitals and clinics, overwhelmed by the sheer number of patients, will force many of the sick and dying to be housed in gymnasiums and community centers," ABC News warns in the first paragraph of its Nov. 2 article, "And a severe shortage of drugs means many will go untreated."

The ABC article carries the alarming headline, "Pandemic is Inevitable, Government Officials Say." ABC News, it should be noted, is owned by the Walt Disney Company, which just released a film version of Chicken Little, who was also convinced the sky was falling.

"Against all scientific prudence and normal public health procedure, the world population is being whipped up into a fear frenzy by irresponsible public health officials from the U.S. administration to the World Health Organization to the U.S. Center for Disease Control," F. William Engdahl wrote in his recent article, "Is Avian Flu another Pentagon Hoax?"

"Pandemics happen," Secretary of the Dept. of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt said. "They happened before and they'll happen again. If it isn't the H5N1 virus, it'll be another virus."

Leavitt spoke the day after Bush called for $7.1 billion to be spent to combat the threat of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza, which has reportedly killed some 62 people in Southeast Asia during the past two years.

All of the 121 confirmed cases of bird flu in Asia occurred in people who worked closely with chickens and had been in contact with the birds' blood and feces, according to Gary Butcher, a veterinarian at the University of Florida who has a Ph.D. in poultry virology.

Two Vietnamese brothers became ill after eating a dish of chopped congealed raw duck blood and herbs. There have, however, been no proven cases of a human catching the virus from another human being nor have any cases been reported in the United States or Europe.

"Parents should not be worried about their kids catching bird flu this year unless they're planning on visiting a chicken farm in Vietnam," Dr. Bennett Kaye, a pediatrician at Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital, said.

"If anything is contagious right now, it's judgment clouded by fear," Dr. Marc Siegel, an internist and associate professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine, said about the bird flu scare.

"There is no certainty that H5N1 will mutate into a human-to-human transmissible virus," Leavitt said. As if to hedge his position, Leavitt added, "There will be another virus at another time."

"Realistically," Butcher told the Gainesville Sun, "avian influenza is not a threat to people, but everywhere you go, it has turned into a circus.

"The emphasis of all my work has changed to dealing with this madness," Butcher said about the many phone calls and e-mails he gets on the bird flu scare.

"For it to become dangerous to humans," Butcher said, "it has to go through a pretty significant genetic change. If you put this in perspective, it's not going to happen. For a person to be infected now, it appears that the exposure level has to be astronomical."

The Bush administration plan, however, has called for billions to be spent on building stockpiles of antiviral drugs, primarily Tamiflu (oseltamivir phosphate) and Relenza (zanamivir), although neither has been proven to be effective against avian flu in humans. Tamiflu is made from shikimic acid, which comes from star anise, the fruit of a small oriental tree.

The British-based GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) makes Relenza.

Tamiflu is produced by Hoffman-LaRouche, the pharmaceutical giant based in Basel, Switzerland. The patent, however, is owned by Gilead Sciences, Inc. of Foster City, California, and is protected until 2016. Donald H. Rumsfeld was chairman of Gilead before he became defense secretary in January 2001.

Rather than sell his considerable stock holdings in Gilead, Rumsfeld reportedly recused himself from government decisions concerning medications to prevent or treat avian flu on October 27.

Gilead reported a 51 percent increase in revenues for the third quarter of 2005, compared with 2004. The company received $12.1 million from Roche, more than a 700 percent increase, in quarterly royalties for global sales of Tamiflu.

Because Roche has worldwide commercial rights on the production of Tamiflu, the billions being spent on the flu medication will greatly increase corporate profits at Roche and Gilead.

Succeeding Rumsfeld as chairman of Gilead is another Chicagoan from Winnetka, James M. Denny. Denny is a generous donor to the Republican Party of Illinois and George W. Bush.

Two well-known Bilderbergers, Etienne F. Davignon and George P. Schultz, sit on Gilead's board of directors, while a third member of the secretive elite group, Lodewijk J.R. de Vink, is on the board of Hoffman-LaRoche (Roche).

De Vink, a Dutch-American, is a founding member of Blackstone Healthcare Partners, LLC, a corporate advisory service of the Blackstone Group, a global investment firm founded by Peter G. Peterson, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Stephen A. Schwarzman. Among other things, de Vink is a member of the European Advisory Council of Rothschild & Cie.

Dovetailing with the Bush bird flu plan is a controversial Senate bill (S. 1873) called the "Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005." The bill is authored and filed by Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), who was the third highest recipient of contributions from pharmaceutical industries in 2004 - after George W. Bush and John Kerry.

The Burr bill, which John Hanchette of the Niagara Falls Reporter calls "a slavering wolverine masquerading as a furry little lab rat," would allow federal health officials to purchase medicines and vaccines by simple fiat - without taking bids.

"In essence," Hanchette wrote, "it would force Americans to receive inoculations against a disease that has yet to kill one of them, while removing their constitutional right to seek redress in our courts in case of injury or death from the shots because of company negligence."

Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center - a private, non-governmental advocacy group pushing for safer vaccines - said the Burr bill is "a drug company stockholder's dream and a consumer's worst nightmare."

"This proposed legislation," Fisher said, "like the power and money grab by federal health officials and industry in the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and the Project Bioshield Act of 2004, is an unconstitutional attempt by some in Congress to give a taxpayer-funded handout to pharmaceutical companies for drugs and vaccines."

Under this bill, Fisher said, the government "could force all citizens to use these drugs and vaccines while absolving everyone connected from any responsibility for injuries and death which occur" as a result.

"It's a sad day for this nation," she added, "when Congress is frightened and bullied into allowing one profit-making industry to destroy the Seventh Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing citizens their day in court in front of a jury of their peers."