«Teorias da
conspiração» ou lobbies à solta? (1)
“Conspiracy theories” or lobbies on
the loose? (1)
Cada vez vêm ao de cima mais factos e declarações de
responsáveis que lançam uma luz sinistra sobre as manobras imperiais, em
particular das grandes farmacêuticas neoliberais, no aproveitamento da
pandemia. Entre os factos, avulta a espantosa premonição revelada por um CEO
de uma grande farmacêutica americana de que tinham começado a desenvolver a
vacina contra o coronavírus meses antes da famosa simulação (o bem-conhecido Event201) de 18 de Outubro de 2019!!!
As peças do puzzle começam a encaixar-se.
Convidamos o leitor a ler aqui
sobre este tema o artigo António Abreu com o título supracitado publicado em
AbrilAbril, um site a não perder, com artigos feitos com responsabilidade que
quebram o silêncio e as fake news
da informação dominante. (Este artigo tem a anotação “(1)” pelo que devemos
estar atentos à sua continuação.)
|
More
and more facts and statements from officials are coming to the fore that shed
a sinister light on imperial maneuvers, in particular of the big neoliberal
pharmaceutical companies taking advantage of the pandemic. Among the facts, stands
out the amazing premonition revealed by a CEO of a large American
pharmaceutical company that they had started to develop the vaccine against the
coronavirus months before the famous simulation (the well-known Event201) of 18 October 2019!!! The pieces
of the jigsaw start fitting together.
We
present below a translation of an article on this topic by António Abreu,
with the aforementioned title. The article was published by AbrilAbril, a site that is an antidote
against the silence and the fake news of the mainstream information. (The title
bears the notation “(1)” so we’ll keep an eye on its continuation.)
|
“Conspiracy theories” or lobbies on the loose? (1)
By António
Abreu
AbrilAbril, June 7,
2020
Big Pharma, Big Data: powerful
lobbies that condition decisions by public or private institutions in
illegitimate ways. What if they had a monopoly on a vaccine against the new
coronavirus?
Big
Pharma, Big Data, are designations that refer to powerful lobbies that
condition decisions of public or private institutions in illegitimate ways.
Perhaps not paradoxically, the environmentalists who surrendered to the concubinage
with Wall Street gave their credit to Big Green. We will talk about them in the
second part of this work. Their decision-makers, in order to avoid the
legitimacy of their pressure operations on those institutions to suffer any
blemish, usually qualify their critics of indeed being the authors of
"conspiracy theories" with the intention of discrediting them. This
is not a new technique and was preceded by the ability of these and other Big
Ones to purely and simply silence the critical voices. Today this is more
difficult to carry out and hence the trick of the malicious
"theories".
Let
us start with Big Pharma, at European
level, on account of the fact that Lusa
[the largest news agency in Portugal ] divulged on May 25 two
reports from non-governmental organizations, Global Health Advocates (GHA) and
the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). These two bodies have now expressed
their indignation for having found evidence that the European pharmaceutical
industry lobby, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and
Associations (EFPIA), “not only did not consider bioprevention funding (that
is, to be prepared to respond to epidemics, such as the one caused by
SARS-CoV-2 at the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis), as it also opposed
to it being included in the work of the Medical Innovation Initiative (MII)
when this possibility was raised by the European Commission in 2018.”
According
to the two reports [1]:
--
the necessary research has always been "more private than public"
with the big pharmaceutical companies dominating the Medical Innovation
Initiative (MII);
--
the pharmaceutical industry received € 2.6 billion from the EU's public
research budget between 2008 and 2020 from the MII.
The
GHA and the CEO indicated that, among the disregarded areas that needed major
funding, were "the prevention of epidemics (including those caused by
coronaviruses), HIV / AIDS, and tropical poverty-related diseases", and
that, instead, "the pharmaceutical
industry mainly used the budget to finance projects in areas that were
commercially more profitable".
One
of the CEO's researchers, Martin Pigeon, considered that "it is time for the EU's research and
innovation policy to receive the political scrutiny and debates it deserves",
in the public interest. Also according to this researcher, "what is at stake
here is the capture, by large private companies, of large areas of EU research
policy and respective budgets, to the
detriment of public needs, our health and nature," he stressed.
Already
during the Ebola epidemic in 2014, the pharmaceutical industry only invested in
research after the epidemic was declared. It is well known, even before the
Ebola case, that interventions when an epidemic is already underway are much
less useful than the type of "bioprevention" that the industry has
been shirking from.
Donald Trump: taking out from WHO to give Big Pharma
With
regard to the United States ,
now that Trump decided to leave the
World Health Organization (WHO), where will go the annual state contribution of
around $ 450 million that he withdrew?
When
he announced the leaving, he said that these funds would be "redirected to
other public health needs", to anyone who could use that money in a better
way than WHO was doing...
Days
earlier, he had already announced that the US government would support pharmaceutical
companies to guarantee supplies when a solution to the pandemic was discovered.
The
Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness
Innovations (CEPI) came then out on the stage to "federate" all applicants for
funding. CEPI was founded in August 2016 by the government of Norway , the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
the Wellcome Trust, the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the Department of
Biotechnology of India .
One
of the most paradigmatic cases of how the health business in the USA
works, was mentioned
on May 23 by the New York Times in connection with the desperate search for
treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. It reveals well how researchers,
regulators and pharmaceutical companies like Moderna, its investors and the journalism that serves their
interests, behave in this situation.
When
the company announced the positive results of a small preliminary test of its
coronavirus vaccine on the morning of the 18th, the company's medical director
described the news as a "triumphant day for us".
At
the same time, they triggered “information” in medical journals and in company
and university press releases, from “articles” published on so-called pre-print
websites of studies that are not reviewed and certified by specialists, unlike
articles in the main medical and scientific journals – the latter with another
credibility.
Moderna's stock price jumped up to
30%. The
announcement had leveraged the stock market and that was the subject of further
news, including from the New York Times itself.
Nine
hours after its initial press release, after the markets had closed, the
company announced an offer of shares with the aim of raising more than $ 1
billion to help finance vaccine
development. This offer had not been mentioned in Moderna's investor and
journalist briefings that morning, and the company's chairman said later that
it had been decided... just that afternoon.
Moderna's
preliminary results inspired confidence. However, the company did not provide essential details for public credibility,
such as graphs and values of several indicators. In spite of that, Trump allocated it $ 500 million (a sum
similar to what he withdrew from the WHO…).
In
the "race" are also other drug manufacturers such as Pfizer Inc,
Johnson & Johnson, or Sanofi, which are at various stages of vaccine
development.
The CEO from CEPI, Richard Hackett, confirmed that the
project to develop a vaccine started not only before the discovery and identification
of the coronavirus (January 2020), but several months before the October 18,
2019 simulation exercise... [2] And he stressed that it was important to have
large producers on the table.
The vaccine race and China 's
role
Trump
hinted that he wanted to guarantee exclusive access to a vaccine that would be
in development, under the auspices of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Dr. Anthony
Fauci, who has been part of a working group created at the White House to deal
with the pandemic.
Recalling
that the European Union (EU) has already made available up to 80 million euros
to CureVac AG, a company in Tübingen ,
Germany , Ursula
von der Leyen stated, in a video on Twitter, on 17 March, to hope that, with
this support, it is possible to have a vaccine on the market perhaps by the end
of the year.
On
the other hand, the American administration has accused China of stealing
information related to the research of its companies when… since the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, several Chinese
pharmaceutical companies have started, among other things, to develop a
vaccine. And at least three of them have already started clinical trials in
humans.
But
China has assured, through its
president, that if
any of the vaccines under development and testing in China becomes effective
against COVID-19, its country will make it available to the world as a public good, thus ensuring that it
becomes accessible and viable in the developing countries.
Currently, there are still no
approved vaccines or treatments for COVID-19, contracted with governments, drug
manufacturers and researchers working on around 100 vaccine programs. And experts continue to predict that a safe
and effective vaccine can take 12 to 18 months to develop.
As
for the treatment of the disease, Gilead announced on 29 April that it had "positive
data" about Remdesivir's
performance. A few hours later, in the Oval Office of the White House, Fauci,
who, as we said, also has his company, said that the drug could modestly speed
recovery in patients and that the drug could become a standard of treatment.
However,
Lusa reported that on 25
May, in Spain, an international trial with this medicine, coordinated by
the Hospital Can Ruti, in Badalona , Barcelona , revealed that
the antiviral Remdesivir is effective against COVID-19 only for patients who
need mechanical ventilation.
The
Cuban antiviral Iterferon Alfa 2B
was one of the drugs used in China
at the beginning of the pandemic, which motivated at least 15 countries in
South America, Africa and Asia to request
information or supply it.
Without
providing specific figures, the state drug group BioCubaFarma assured that it
had sufficient stock of retrovirals to cover demand inside and outside the
country.
On
the other hand, Cuba
is developing a version of the Kaletra
antiviral, with "satisfactory" preliminary results, with the aim of
eliminating imports and ensuring a stable supply of the drug, created to treat
HIV-AIDS and used now in COVID-19 patients.
Chloroquine or a less toxic
derivative, hydroxychloroquine, is
being used to treat patients in Europe and North America .
The
result of one of the main investigations into the effectiveness of
hydroxychloroquine in treatment was published
on May 11, in the scientific journal JAMA (Journal of the American Medical
Association). The study, carried out by researchers at the University of Albany ,
in the state of New York ,
found no relationship between the use of
the drug and the reduction in mortality from the disease. 1,438
coronavirus-infected patients were analyzed in 25 New York hospitals.
As for pandemic vaccines, remember
the 2009 H1N1 swine flu case, when the Obama Council of Science and
Technology Advisers compared the H1N1 pandemic to the Spanish flu pandemic of
1918, assuring that it would be more deadly. Based on incomplete and scarce
data, the WHO Director-General then
predicted with her authority that: "up to 2 billion people could be
infected in the next two years" -- (ie, almost a third of the world
population ... ).
And
the Obama administration has assured
that "swine flu could reach 40% of the Americans in the next two years and
hundreds of thousands of people could die if a vaccine campaign and other
measures don't work" (Obama administration official statement, Associated
Press, 24 July 2009).
It
was a billion dollar bonanza for Big Pharma, supported by the then
Director-General of WHO, Margaret Chan.
But
the pandemic did not reach those 2 billion people and millions of doses of the vaccine, ordered by many governments from Big
Pharma, ended up being destroyed, including in Portugal .
According
to
recent data released on June 2 by the
World Health Organization (WHO), there were 133 potential vaccines against COVID-19 at that date (under
investigation around the world), and it was also revealed that 10 of them
already had received approval to proceed to clinical trials on humans.
During
the months of April to June, laboratory interventions have multiplied, with the
support of large pharmaceutical groups, which in turn sponsored journals that
were losing their scientific character and became direct or indirect supports
of the various projects, giving credibility or discrediting drugs being used to
treat the disease (Chloroquine, Remdesivir and others). Gilead
is one of the most powerful groups, known for producing the most expensive and
often the least effective drugs in the world. Donald Rumsfeld, a specialist in
wars and medicines, has been there for a time.
The
journal Lancet, for example, lost its
scientific credibility by fighting Didier Raoult's project -- which proved
highly successful with infected patients, from its avant-garde institute in
Marseille --, publishing a «study» paving the way for Gilead’s Remdesivir. Lancet is published by the largest
scientific, technical and medical editorial group in the world -- the Elsevier
group. It is not the first time that the giant ReeLX [3] has
been caught in reprehensible practices.
[See
on the Lancet scandal: O Arrependimento da Lancet (Lancet’s Expression of Concern); Rush to trash hydroxychloroquine
based on faulty Surgisphere data; A
Study Out of Thin Air; "A ciência fez uma viragem para o
obscurantismo" citing the Lancet’s
editor, Richard Horton, who in his article of the Lancet sates: “The case against science is straightforward:
much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue .
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory
analyzes, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for
pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn
towards darkness.” -- JMS]
And
it [Lancet --JMS] accepted [for its
“study” -- JMS] the "data" of an almost unknown Surgisphere company
that claims "to have one of the largest and fastest databases in the
world" ... and to have created its immense databases using artificial
intelligence. Leaving both Big Pharma and Big Data lobbies uncovered...
The
Guardian investigated and Público on 4 June provides clarifying
details. As a result, the WHO, which had suspended clinical trials based on
hydroxychloroquine, ended up reversing its decision. Our
interested readers can also find in Germinal
an interesting discussion about this.
What if Big Pharma had the monopoly
on selling a vaccine after it was patented? First, it would be necessary to
estimate the "needs" of each country (God knows how). Then it would
be a new big multimillion dollar business in which many governments would be
forced to pay a lot of money to guarantee stocks to be supplied to the
population at symbolic prices or free of charge. After China 's
declaration, there seems to be a consensus, among many countries, not to allow
this to happen again.
[1]
A summary of the reports, in English, French, Spanish and German, can be
obtained here.
[2]
This is the controversial Event 201,
described by the organizers as “a high level pandemic exercise” consisting of
the “simulation of an outbreak of a new coronavirus” worldwide in which, “as
the cases and deaths occur the consequences become more and more serious «due
to« the exponential growth week by week». See José Goulão, «The prophets of the
virus», in AbrilAbril, March 26,
2020.
[3]
Current designation of the group, as a result of successive mergers of the Dutch
company Elsevier, English company Reeds Publishing, and American company Lexis
Nexis. In 2018 it had a turnover of 5.28 billion US dollars, according to Books and Publishing.