Sanofi-Aventis agreed to pay $109 million to resolve allegations that the company gave doctors free units of Hyalgan (an injection to relieve knee pain) to encourage those doctors to buy their product. Sanofi lowered the effective price by promising these free samples to doctors, but at the same time got inflated prices from government programs by submitting false price reports, alleged the United States. Medicare and other government health care programs “paid millions of dollars in kickback-tainted claims for Hyalgan,” according to the DOJ announcement.
9
Endo
FEB 2014
Endo Health Solutions Inc. and its subsidiary Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc. agreed to pay $192.7 million to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from Endo’s marketing of the prescription drug Lidoderm. As part of the agreement, Endo admitted that it intended that Lidoderm be used for unapproved indications and that it promoted Lidoderm to healthcare providers this way.
8
AstraZeneca
APRIL 2010
AstraZeneca was fined $520 million to resolve allegations that it illegally promoted the antipsychotic drug Seroquel. The drug was approved for treating schizophrenia and later for bipolar mania, but the government alleged that AstraZeneca promoted Seroquel for a variety of unapproved uses, such as aggression, sleeplessness, anxiety, and depression. AstraZeneca denied the charges but agreed to pay the fine to end the investigation.
7
Amgen
DEC 2012
Amgen agreed to pay a $762 million fine to resolve criminal and civil charges that the company illegally introduced and promoted several drugs including Aranesp, a drug to treat anemia. Amgen pleaded guilty to illegally selling Aranesp to be used at doses that the FDA had explicitly rejected, and for an off-label treatment that had never been FDA-approved.
6
Merck
NOV 2011
Merck agreed to pay a fine of $950 million related to the illegal promotion of the painkiller Vioxx, which was withdrawn from the market in 2004 after studies found the drug increased the risk of heart attacks. The company pled guilty to having promoted Vioxx as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis before it had been approved for that use. The settlement also resolved allegations that Merck made false or misleading statements about the drug’s heart safety to increase sales.
5
Eli Lilly
JAN 2009
Eli Lilly was fined $1.42 billion to resolve a government investigation into the off-label promotion of the antipsychotic Zyprexa. Zyprexa had been approved for the treatment of certain psychotic disorders, but Lilly admitted to promoting the drug in elderly populations to treat dementia. The government also alleged that Lilly targeted primary care physicians to promote Zyprexa for unapproved uses and “trained its sales force to disregard the law.”
4
Abbott
MAY 2012
Abbott was fined $1.5 billion in connection to the illegal promotion of the antipsychotic drug Depakote. Abbott admitted to having trained a special sales force to target nursing homes, marketing the drug for the control of aggression and agitation in elderly dementia patients. Depakote had never been approved for that purpose, and Abbott lacked evidence that the drug was safe or effective for those uses. The company also admitted to marketing Depakote to treat schizophrenia, even though no study had found it effective for that purpose.
3
Johnson & Johnson
NOV 2013
Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay a $2.2 billion fine to resolve criminal and civil allegations relating to the prescription drugs Risperdal, Invega and Natrecor. The government alleged that J&J promoted these drugs for uses not approved as safe and effective by the FDA, targeted elderly dementia patients in nursing homes, and paid kickbacks to physicians and to the nation’s largest long-term care pharmacy provider, Omnicare Inc. As part of the agreement, Johnson & Johnson admitted that it promoted Risperdal for treatment of psychotic symptoms in non-schizophrenic patients, although the drug was approved only to treat schizophrenia.
2
Pfizer
SEPT 2009
Pfizer was fined $2.3 billion, then the largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the United States. Pfizer pled guilty to misbranding the painkiller Bextra with “the intent to defraud or mislead”, promoting the drug to treat acute pain at dosages the FDA had previously deemed dangerously high. Bextra was pulled from the market in 2005 due to safety concerns. The government alleged that Pfizer also promoted three other drugs illegally: the antipsychotic Geodon, an antibiotic Zyvox, and the antiepileptic drug Lyrica.
GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay a fine of $3 billion to resolve civil and criminal liabilities regarding its promotion of drugs, as well as its failure to report safety data. This is the largest health care fraud settlement in the United States to date. The company pled guilty to misbranding the drug Paxil for treating depression in patients under 18, even though the drug had never been approved for that age group. GlaxoSmithKline also pled guilty to failing to disclose safety information about the diabetes drug Avandia to the FDA.
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DNA harvesting, mRNA technologies, mind-reading and more – this was the official race start signal at the Transhumanist Olympics, all the way back in 2013
The vision for the BRAIN Initiative is to combine these areas of research into a coherent, integrated science of cells, circuits, brain and behavior.
Not often mentioned, IARPA is CIA’s DARPA, an even more secretive, dark and psychopathic agency.
How The BRAIN Initiative® workS
Given the ambitious scope of this pioneering endeavor, it was vital that planning be informed by a wide range of expertise and experience. Therefore, NIH established a high level working group of the Advisory Committee to the NIH Director (ACD) to help shape this new initiative.
This working group, co-chaired by Dr. Cornelia “Cori” Bargmann (The Rockefeller University) and Dr. William Newsome (Stanford University) sought broad input from the scientific community, patient advocates, and the general public. Their report, BRAIN 2025: A Scientific Vision, released in June 2014 and enthusiastically endorsed by the ACD, articulated the scientific goals of The BRAIN Initiative® and developed a multi-year scientific plan for achieving these goals, including timetables, milestones, and cost estimates.
Of course, a goal this audacious will require ideas from the best scientists and engineers across many diverse disciplines and sectors. Therefore, NIH is working in close collaboration with other government agencies, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). Private partners are also committed to ensuring success through investment in The BRAIN Initiative®.
Five years ago a project such as this would have been considered impossible. Five years from now will be too late. While the goals are profoundly ambitious, the time is right to inspire a new generation of neuroscientists to undertake the most groundbreaking approach ever contemplated to understanding how the brain works, and how disease occurs. Source: NIH
Remarks by the President on the BRAIN Initiative and American Innovation
East Room 10:04 A.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT:
Thank you so much. (Applause.)
Thank you, everybody. Please have a seat. Well, first of all, let me thank Dr. Collins not just for the introduction but for his incredible leadership at NIH. Those of you who know Francis also know that he’s quite a gifted singer and musician. So I was asking whether he was going to be willing to sing the introduction — (laughter) — and he declined. But his leadership has been extraordinary. And I’m glad I’ve been promoted Scientist-in-Chief. (Laughter.)
Given my grades in physics, I’m not sure it’s deserving. But I hold science in proper esteem, so maybe that gives me a little credit. Today I’ve invited some of the smartest people in the country, some of the most imaginative and effective researchers in the country — some very smart people to talk about the challenge that I issued in my State of the Union address: to grow our economy, to create new jobs, to reignite a rising, thriving middle class by investing in one of our core strengths, and that’s American innovation. Ideas are what power our economy. It’s what sets us apart. It’s what America has been all about. We have been a nation of dreamers and risk-takers; people who see what nobody else sees sooner than anybody else sees it. We do innovation better than anybody else — and that makes our economy stronger.
When we invest in the best ideas before anybody else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anybody else. And because of that incredible dynamism, we don’t just attract the best scientists or the best entrepreneurs — we also continually invest in their success. We support labs and universities to help them learn and explore. And we fund grants to help them turn a dream into a reality. And we have a patent system to protect their inventions. And we offer loans to help them turn those inventions into successful businesses.
And the investments don’t always pay off. But when they do, they change our lives in ways that we could never have imagined. Computer chips and GPS technology, the Internet — all these things grew out of government investments in basic research. And sometimes, in fact, some of the best products and services spin off completely from unintended research that nobody expected to have certain applications.
Businesses then used that technology to create countless new jobs.
So the founders of Google got their early support from the National Science Foundation. The Apollo project that put a man on the moon also gave us eventually CAT scans. And every dollar we spent to map the human genome has returned $140 to our economy — $1 of investment, $140 in return.
Dr. Collins helped lead that genome effort, and that’s why we thought it was appropriate to have him here to announce the next great American project, and that’s what we’re calling the BRAIN Initiative.
As humans, we can identify galaxies light years away, we can study particles smaller than an atom. But we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears. (Laughter.) But today, scientists possess the capability to study individual neurons and figure out the main functions of certain areas of the brain. But a human brain contains almost 100 billion neurons making trillions of connections.
So Dr. Collins says it’s like listening to the strings section and trying to figure out what the whole orchestra sounds like. So as a result, we’re still unable to cure diseases like Alzheimer’s or autism, or fully reverse the effects of a stroke. And the most powerful computer in the world isn’t nearly as intuitive as the one we’re born with. So there is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. And that knowledge could be — will be — transformative. In the budget I will send to Congress next week, I will propose a significant investment by the National Institutes of Health, DARPA, and the National Science Foundation to help get this project off the ground.
I’m directing my bioethics commission to make sure all of the research is being done in a responsible way. And we’re also partnering with the private sector, including leading companies and foundations and research institutions, to tap the nation’s brightest minds to help us reach our goal. And of course, none of this will be easy. If it was, we would already know everything there was about how the brain works, and presumably my life would be simpler here. (Laughter.) It could explain all kinds of things that go on in Washington. (Laughter.) We could prescribe something. (Laughter.)
So it won’t be easy. But think about what we could do once we do crack this code. Imagine if no family had to feel helpless watching a loved one disappear behind the mask of Parkinson’s or struggle in the grip of epilepsy. Imagine if we could reverse traumatic brain injury or PTSD for our veterans who are coming home. Imagine if someone with a prosthetic limb can now play the piano or throw a baseball as well as anybody else, because the wiring from the brain to that prosthetic is direct and triggered by what’s already happening in the patient’s mind. What if computers could respond to our thoughts or our language barriers could come tumbling down. Or if millions of Americans were suddenly finding new jobs in these fields — jobs we haven’t even dreamt up yet — because we chose to invest in this project. That’s the future we’re imagining. That’s what we’re hoping for. That’s why the BRAIN Initiative is so absolutely important. And that’s why it’s so important that we think about basic research generally as a driver of growth and that we replace the across-the-board budget cuts that are threatening to set us back before we even get started.
A few weeks ago, the directors of some of our national laboratories said that the sequester — these arbitrary, across-the-board cuts that have gone into place — are so severe, so poorly designed that they will hold back a generation of young scientists. When our leading thinkers wonder if it still makes sense to encourage young people to get involved in science in the first place because they’re not sure whether the research funding and the grants will be there to cultivate an entire new generation of scientists, that’s something we should worry about. We can’t afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the world races ahead. We have to seize them. I don’t want the next job-creating discoveries to happen in China or India or Germany. I want them to happen right here, in the United States of America. And that’s part of what this BRAIN Initiative is about. That’s why we’re pursuing other “grand challenges” like making solar energy as cheap as coal or making electric vehicles as affordable as the ones that run on gas. They’re ambitious goals, but they’re achievable. And we’re encouraging companies and research universities and other organizations to get involved and help us make progress. We have a chance to improve the lives of not just millions, but billions of people on this planet through the research that’s done in this BRAIN Initiative alone.
But it’s going to require a serious effort, a sustained effort. And it’s going to require us as a country to embody and embrace that spirit of discovery that is what made America, America. They year before I was born, an American company came out with one of the earliest mini-computers. It was a revolutionary machine, didn’t require its own air conditioning system. That was a big deal. It took only one person to operate, but each computer was eight feet tall, weighed 1,200 pounds, and cost more than $100,000. And today, most of the people in this room, including the person whose cell phone just rang — (laughter) — have a far more powerful computer in their pocket. Computers have become so small, so universal, so ubiquitous, most of us can’t imagine life without them — certainly, my kids can’t. And, as a consequence, millions of Americans work in fields that didn’t exist before their parents were born. Watson, the computer that won “Jeopardy,” is now being used in hospitals across the country to diagnose diseases like cancer. That’s how much progress has been made in my lifetime and in many of yours. That’s how fast we can move when we make the investments.
But we can’t predict what that next big thing will be. We don’t know what life will be like 20 years from now, or 50 years, or 100 years down the road. What we do know is if we keep investing in the most prominent, promising solutions to our toughest problems, then things will get better. I don’t want our children or grandchildren to look back on this day and wish we had done more to keep America at the cutting edge. I want them to look back and be proud that we took some risks, that we seized this opportunity. That’s what the American story is about. That’s who we are.
That’s why this BRAIN Initiative is so important. And if we keep taking bold steps like the one we’re talking about to learn about the brain, then I’m confident America will continue to lead the world in the next frontiers of human understanding. And all of you are going to help us get there.
So I’m very excited about this project. Francis, let’s get to work. God bless you and God bless the United States of America. Thank you. (Applause.)
A LITTLE EARLIER, AT DARPA’S
DARPA Fold F(x) Program to Advance Synthetic Biomedical Polymers
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting proposals for advancing “Folded Non-Natural Polymers with Biological Function” under a new Broad Agency Announcement for the Fold F(x) program.
While the biopharmaceutical industry has realized many outstanding protein and oligonucleotide reagents and medicines by screening large biopolymer libraries for desired function, significant technical gaps remain to rapidly address the full suite of existing and anticipated national security threats in DoD medicine (e.g., diagnostics and remediation strategies for chemical/biological warfare agents and infectious disease threats).
The objective of Fold F(x) is to develop processes enabling the rapid synthesis, screening, sequencing and scale-up of folded, non-natural, sequence-defined polymers with expanded functionality. The program will specifically address the development of non-natural affinity reagents that can bind and respond to a selected target, as well as catalytic systems that can either synthesize or degrade a desired target.
While non-natural folding polymers (e.g., foldamers) are known, broad utilization of these systems is currently limited because there is no available approach for rapidly developing and screening large non-natural polymer libraries. Fold F(x) will address this technical gap to create new molecular entities that will become future critical reagents in sensor and diagnostic applications, novel medicine leads against viral and bacterial threats, and new polymeric materials for future material science applications.
DARPA anticipates that successful efforts will include (1) novel synthetic approaches that yield large libraries (>109 members) of non-natural sequence-defined polymers; (2) flexible screening strategies that enable the selection of high affinity/specificity binders and high activity/selectivity catalysts from the non-natural libraries; (3) demonstration that the screening approach can rapidly (<4 days) yield affinity reagents or catalysts against targets of interest to the DoD; and (4) demonstration of scalability and transferability to the DoD scientific community.
DARPA seeks proposals that significantly advance the area of non-natural polymer synthesis, screening and sequencing for DoD-relevant threats. Proposals that simply provide evolutionary improvements in state-of-the-art technology will not be considered.
A Proposers’ Day Webinar for the Fold F(x) Program will be held on January 28, 2014. Further details are available under Solicitation Number: DARPA-BAA-14-13. White papers are due by February 6, 2014.
Source: FBO.gov
They deleted this from their website, but not from Internet
Health threats often evolve more quickly than health solutions. Despite ongoing research in the government and the biopharmaceutical industry to identify new therapies, the Department of Defense currently lacks the tools to address the full spectrum of chemical, biological, and disease threats that could impact the readiness of U.S. forces. DARPA created the Folded Non-Natural Polymers with Biological Function program (Fold F(x)) to give DoD medical researchers new tools to develop medicines, sensors, and diagnostics using new libraries of synthetic polymers.
The human body contains natural, folded polymers such as DNA, RNA, and proteins. These are made up of strings of specific biological molecules, or monomers, with the potential for massive variation in sequence, structure, and function. The body’s library of natural polymers is massive, but ultimately limited by the number of naturally present monomers. Through Fold F(x), DARPA is looking to expand the body’s biomolecular arsenal using non-natural, sequence-dictated polymers built from lab-created monomers.
Broad use of folded, non-natural polymers has been limited because no approach yet exists for rapidly developing large libraries of such sequence-dictated polymers. However, recent advances in the theory for predicting folds in polymer structure enable a more targeted search for polymers with specific attributes. Additionally, new, high-throughput analytical chemistry tools may enable researchers to efficiently screen massive subsets of polymers to essentially find the needle in the haystack to confront a given health threat. Finally, recently developed tools for determining polymer structure, function, and in vivo effects can further accelerate the characterization of promising non-natural polymers once they have been identified.
To achieve its objective, Fold F(x) seeks to develop the following capabilities: 1) processes that enable rapid, high-fidelity synthesis of monomers and polymer libraries at scale; 2) automated screening of polymers against a target; and 3) automated sequencing and characterization of successful polymers. The capabilities developed will need to be generalized and extendable so they can be applied to a broad range of potential applications.
If Fold F(x) is successful, synthetic polymers, produced at low cost in libraries containing trillions of combinations, would give scientists vastly more molecules to work with in the search for new health solutions and greatly increase the likelihood that a molecule can be found to combat a given health threat. Synthetic polymers would also offer other benefits over natural polymers including greater lifetime in the blood and less immunogenicity.
LATER…
DOES THIS REMIND YOU OF ANY PARTICULAR IMPLANT: SRI Biosciences DARPA Fold F(X) Synthetic Polymers Contract
SRI Biosciences, a division of SRI International, has been awarded a $10 million contract under a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program to reimagine how proteins are constructed and to develop novel medicines and diagnostics as countermeasures to chemical and biological threats.
The new contract is part of DARPA’s Folded Non-Natural Polymers with Biological Function program, known as Fold F(x). The initial goal of the program will be to develop biologically active non-natural polymers that are structurally similar to naturally occurring proteins, but without their limitations, such as sensitivity to heat denaturation or chemical degradation.
To develop the new polymers, SRI is combining its expertise in medicinal chemistry and biopolymer design with a breakthrough approach to screening vast numbers of compounds. The novel polymers are being made from entirely new types of monomer structures based on drug-like scaffolds with high functional group densities.
SRI’s compound screening innovation is based on its proprietary Fiber-Optic Array Scanning Technology (FASTcell™). Originally developed to identify circulating tumor cells in a blood sample, FASTcell can distinguish a single tumor cell among tens of millions of healthy ones in a few minutes.
With DARPA support, SRI is expanding this technology to screen 25 million compounds in just one minute.
“Our goal is to develop a method that can enable rapid, large-scale responses to a bioterrorism threat or an infectious disease epidemic,” said Peter Madrid, Ph.D., program director in SRI Biosciences’ Center for Chemical Biology and co-principal investigator and leader of the chemistry effort of the project. “We are looking for non-natural polymers to detect or neutralize identified chemical or biological threats. Once we find potent molecules, we will be able to produce them at mass scale.”
The overall goal of the Fold F(x) program is to expand on the utility of proteins and DNA, and to overcome their limitations byre-engineering their polymer backbones and side chain diversity—creating new molecules with improved functionality such as stability, potency and catalytic function in environments usually hostile for biopolymers.
The knowledge to design new functional molecules from first principles doesn’t exist yet. The alternative is to synthesize enormous libraries of non-natural polymers and screen for sequences that have a desired action. Finding a single effective compound, such as one that can block a virus, may require screening hundreds of millions of compounds.
“We are taking a full departure from how nature does things to come up with new ways of mimicking protein function in a highly tailored and controlled way,” said Nathan Collins, Ph.D., executive director of SRI Biosciences’ Discovery Sciences Section and principal investigator of SRI’s Fold F(x) project. “Our breakthrough has been to adapt SRI’s FASTcell technology to screen libraries of non-natural polymers. It’s very exciting to be doing such novel research.”
Initially the program will focus on screening massive numbers of non-natural polymers for potential uses against security threats.
As a proof of concept, the team will design, synthesize and screen chemically unique libraries of 100 million non-natural polymers for activity against a variety of agents, including toxins such as ricin and viruses such as the H1N1 bird flu strain of influenza.
As the program evolves it may progress to include a range of possibilities, such as how to synthesize molecules to fold such that they emit light, have enhanced levels of strength or elasticity, or store power.
Sources: SRI International, DARPA
Stargate Project
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stargate Project was the 1991 code name for a secret U.S. Army unit established in 1978 at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and SRI International (a California contractor) to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications. The Project, and its precursors and sister projects, originally went by various code names—GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, PROJECT CF, SUN STREAK, SCANATE—until 1991 when they were consolidated and rechristened as “Stargate Project”.
Stargate Project work primarily involved remote viewing, the purported ability to psychically “see” events, sites, or information from a great distance.[1] The project was overseen until 1987 by Lt. Frederick Holmes “Skip” Atwater, an aide and “psychic headhunter” to Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, and later president of the Monroe Institute.[2] The unit was small-scale, comprising about 15 to 20 individuals, and was run out of “an old, leaky wooden barracks”.[3]
The Stargate Project was terminated and declassified in 1995 after a CIA report concluded that it was never useful in any intelligence operation. Information provided by the program was vague and included irrelevant and erroneous data, and there was reason to suspect that its project managers had changed the reports so they would fit background cues.[4] The program was featured in the 2004 book and 2009 film, both titled The Men Who Stare at Goats,[5][6][7][8] although neither mentions it by name.
THE LIST OF RESEARCHES THEY FUNDED MIGHT BLOW YOUR BRAIN
Key private sector partners have made important commitments to support the BRAIN Initiative, including:
The Allen Institute for Brain Science: The Allen Institute, a nonprofit medical research organization, is a leader in large-scale brain research and public sharing of data and tools. In March 2012, the Allen Institute for Brain Science embarked upon a ten-year project to understand the neural code: how brain activity leads to perception, decision making, and ultimately action. The Allen Institute’s expansion, with a $300M investment from philanthropist Paul G. Allen in the first four years, was based on the recent unprecedented advances in technologies for recording the brain’s activity and mapping its interconnections. More than $60M annually will be spent to support Allen Institute projects related to the BRAIN Initiative.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute: HHMI is the Nation’s largest nongovernmental funder of basic biomedical research and has a long history of supporting basic neuroscience research. HHMI’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Virginia was opened in 2006 with the goal of developing new imaging technologies and understanding how information is stored and processed in neural networks. It will spend at least $30 million annually to support projects related to this initiative.
Kavli Foundation: The Kavli Foundation anticipates supporting activities that are related to this project with approximately $4 million dollars per year over the next ten years. This figure includes a portion of the expected annual income from the endowments of existing Kavli Institutes and endowment gifts to establish new Kavli Institutes over the coming decade. This figure also includes the Foundation’s continuing commitment to supporting project meetings and selected other activities.
Salk Institute for Biological Studies: The Salk Institute, under its Dynamic Brain Initiative, will dedicate over $28 million to work across traditional boundaries of neuroscience, producing a sophisticated understanding of the brain, from individual genes to neuronal circuits to behavior. To truly understand how the brain operates in both healthy and diseased states, scientists will map out the brain’s neural networks and unravel how they interrelate. To stave off or reverse diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, scientists will explore the changes that occur in the brain as we age, laying the groundwork for prevention and treatment of age-related neurological diseases.
“National Institutes of Health chief Francis Collins says the brain initiative builds on recent advances in attaching electronic implants to brain cells. That was demonstrated last year in dramatic scenes of fully paralyzed patients manipulating robot arms to sip coffee and grasp rubber balls. And through increased computer power, scientists are now better able to collect data from the 86 billion vastly interconnected cells within the 3-pound human brain.”
April 2, 2013, 12:00 PM CESTBy Peter Alexander and Alastair Jamieson, NBC News and Maggie Fox, Senior Writer
President Obama pitched a human brain research initiative on Tuesday that he likened to the Human Genome Project to map all the human DNA, and said it will not only help find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and autism, but create jobs and drive economic growth…
It’s not clear just what the initiative will do. Obama and collins said they’d appointed a “dream team” of experts to lay out the agenda — they should report back before the end of the summer. They are led by neurobiologists Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University and William Newsome of Stanford University.
The public-private initiative, with money from groups such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s brain mapping project, aims to find a way to take pictures of the brain in action in real time.
“We want to understand the brain to know how we reason, how we memorize, how we learn, how we move, how our emotions work. These abilities define us, yet we hardly understand any of it,” said Miyoung Chun, vice president of science programs at The Kavli Foundation, which is taking part in the initiative and which funds basic research in neuroscience and physics.
The project has some big money and some big science to build on. Allen pumped another $300 million into his institute’s brain mapping initiative a year ago, and has published freely available maps of the human and mouse brains. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute built a whole research campus devoted to brain science, called Janelia Farm, in Virginia.
Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) pointed to a project that allowed a quadriplegic woman to control a robot arm with her thoughts alone.
“There is nothing like a project to inspire people to go to that next level,” Collins told a telephone briefing.
Not everybody is happy about a centralized, administration-led project. Michael Eisen, a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, said earlier this year that grand projects in biology such as Project ENCODE for DNA analysis were emerging as the “greatest threat” to individual discovery-driven science.
“It’s one thing to fund neuroscience, another to have a centralized 10-year project to ‘solve the brain,'” Eisen wrote in a Twitter update in February.
“It’s great to see the president supporting basic neuroscience research. And the amount of money is enough to seed new initiatives, which is the way to start something,”
An MRI scan reveals the gross anatomical structure of the human brain. (Image credit: Courtesy FONAR Corporation)
The initial funding for a major new brain research initiative will come largely from the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), with contributions from the National Science Foundation and private foundations, officials said today (April 2).
After President Obama announced the launch of the BRAIN Initiative this morning, the directors of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and DARPA took public questions via the Internet about specific plans for the project and who will pay. The agencies expect about $100 million in 2014 to start the initiative.
BRAIN stands for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. In it’s planning stages, the project was called the Brain Activity Map, because the goal is to understand how neural networks function. Currently, researchers can detect the activities of single brain cells; they can also measure brain activity on the macro level using technology such as functional magnetic resonance imaging. But the middle level — the actions of hundreds and thousands of neurons working together in circuits — remains largely mysterious.
“This initiative is an idea whose time has come,” NIH director Francis Collins said in the White House Q&A session. He called the human brain the “greatest scientific frontier you could think of.” [Gallery: Slicing Through the Brain]
Funding the brain map
President Obama announced this morning that the Fiscal Year 2014 budget would include about $100 million in seed funding for the BRAIN Initiative. Collins broke those numbers down: The NIH will provide about $40 million, much of that from the Neuroscience Blueprint, an NIH collaboration with a rolling investment fund for nervous system research. Some NIH discretionary funds will also go toward the project, Collins said.
The National Science Foundation will provide about $20 million in funding, Collins said, and DARPA will contribute about $50 million. Private foundations, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Kavli Institute, will also provide funds.
DARPA’s interest in the project stems largely from concerns about “wounded warriors,” said director Arati Prabhakar. The agency hopes the BRAIN Initiative will provide answers about how to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, brain injuries and other neurological problems for injured soldiers. The project may also inspire new computing processes as scientists learn how the brain works and use that as inspiration for artificial circuits, Prabhakar said.
Bumps ahead?
Federal funding for research has been flat in recent years, and the federal budget sequester has further squeezed agencies such as the NIH and NSF with 9 percent cuts across the board. The BRAIN Initiative is projected to last more than a decade, with no guarantee the fiscal situation will bounce back. Some neuroscience researchers, including Donald Stein of the Emory School of Medicine, have argued that funding is a “zero-sum game” and that the BRAIN Initiative will take resources from other worthy brain research causes.
Collins acknowledged the budget challenge.
“One might well ask, ‘Is this the wrong time to be starting something new and innovative?'” he said.
But with the technology needed to measure large neural networks just coming into its own, delaying would be counterproductive, Collins argued.
“If you could see the opportunity for the next big advance … it would be very hard to say we’re going to hunker down for awhile and wait until the budget gets better,” he said.
2019: Around min 11, they present the tech that they hope to develop into a brain recording implant for humans
Magnetic nanoparticles used to make massive advancements in brain imaging.
A $4.5 Billion Price Tag for the BRAIN Initiative?
The price of President Barack Obama’s BRAIN may have just skyrocketed. Last year, the White House unveiled a bold project to map the human brain in action, the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, and commanded several federal agencies to quickly develop plans to make it reality. To kick-start the project, the president allocated about $100 million this year to BRAIN, spread over the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Now, after more than a year of meetings and deliberations, an NIH-convened working group has fleshed out some of the goals and aspirations of BRAIN and tried to offer a more realistic appraisal of the funding needed for the agency’s share of the project: $4.5 billion over the course of a decade.
Neuroscientist Cornelia Bargmann, of Rockefeller University in New York City, who led the working group, sought to put that cost in perspective at a press conference today, saying it amounted to “about one six-pack of beer for each American over the entire 12 years of the program.”
NIH, which provides $40 million of BRAIN’s current funding, doesn’t have a plan in place for where to get extra money called for in the new report, NIH Director Francis Collins told reporters. “It won’t be fast, it won’t be easy, and it won’t be cheap,” he says. Regardless, Collins, who commissioned the new report to guide his agency’s role in the initiative, embraced the plan wholeheartedly:
86 billion neurons take note: I’ve accepted a scientific vision for #BRAINI that will transform neuroscience: http://t.co/12xluad54U#NIH
The report lays out a 10- to 12-year plan for investing $300 million to $500 million per year to develop new tools to monitor and map brain activity and structure, beginning in fiscal year 2016. It suggests focusing on tool development for the first 5 to 6 years, then ramping up funding as new techniques come online. A key goal is to produce cheaper, more accessible tools that all researchers can use without needing special training, so that the overall cost of doing neuroscience research goes down over time, Bargmann says.
The panel acknowledges the uncertainty of their cost estimate. “While we did not conduct a detailed cost analysis, we considered the scope of the questions to be addressed by the initiative, and the cost of programs that have developed in related areas over recent years. Thus our budget estimates, while provisional, are informed by the costs of real neuroscience at this technological level,” the group writes.
The first round of requests for NIH grant applications already went out last fall, and awardees will be announced in September, according to Collins. Additional opportunities to apply for NIH funding will open up by fall, based on this new, more detailed report, he says. Researchers planning to apply “may now consider that [the report] is a blueprint of where we want to go,” Collins added.
*Correction, 10 June, 12:17 p.m.: This article has been corrected to reflect that the $4.5 billion proposed price tag for the BRAIN initiative refers only to NIH’s portion of the project, not all funding. – Science Mag.
Advisory Committee to the Director, Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative Working Group
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) convened a BRAIN Working Group of the Advisory Committee to the Director, NIH, to develop a rigorous plan for achieving this scientific vision. This report presents the findings and recommendations of the working group, including the scientific background and rationale for The BRAIN Initiative® as a whole and for each of seven major goals articulated in the report. In addition, we include specific deliverables, timelines, and cost estimates for these goals as requested by the NIH Director. Read more in the BRAIN 2025 Report.
As the NIH BRAIN Initiative rapidly approached its halfway point, the ACD BRAIN Initiative Working Group 2.0 was asked to assess BRAIN’s progress and advances within the context of the original BRAIN 2025 report, identify key opportunities to apply new and emerging tools to revolutionize our understanding of brain circuits, and designate valuable areas of continued technology development. Alongside, the BRAIN Neuroethics Subgroup was tasked with considering the ethical implications of ongoing research and forecasting what the future of BRAIN advancements might entail, crafting a neuroethics “roadmap” for the Initiative. Read more in the BRAIN 2.0 companion reports (BRAIN Initiative 2.0 report and Neuroethics report).
Wireless linkage of brains may soon go to human testing
Wireless communication directly between brains is one step closer to reality thanks to $8 million in Department of Defense follow-up funding for Rice University neuroengineers.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the team’s proof-of-principle research toward a wireless brain link in 2018, has asked for a preclinical demonstration of the technology that could set the stage for human tests as early as 2022.
“We started this in a very exploratory phase,” said Rice’s Jacob Robinson, lead investigator on the MOANA Project, which ultimately hopes to create a dual-function, wireless headset capable of both “reading” and “writing” brain activity to help restore lost sensory function, all without the need for surgery.
MOANA, which is short for “magnetic, optical and acoustic neural access,” will use light to decode neural activity in one brain and magnetic fields to encode that activity in another brain, all in less than one-twentieth of a second.
“We spent the last year trying to see if the physics works, if we could actually transmit enough information through a skull to detect and stimulate activity in brain cells grown in a dish,” said Robinson, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and core faculty member of the Rice Neuroengineering Initiative.
Jacob Robinson (Photo by Tommy LaVergne/Rice University)
“What we’ve shown is that there is promise,” he said. “With the little bit of light that we are able to collect through the skull, we were able to reconstruct the activity of cells that were grown in the lab. Similarly, we showed we could stimulate lab-grown cells in a very precise way with magnetic fields and magnetic nanoparticles.”
Robinson, who’s orchestrating the efforts of 16 research groups from four states, said the second round of DARPA funding will allow the team to “develop this further into a system and to demonstrate that this system can work in a real brain, beginning with rodents.”
If the demonstrations are successful, he said the team could begin working with human patients within two years.
Ethics in a void of regulation? No probs, we self regulate, we’re used to that, we’re the Government!
“Most immediately, we’re thinking about ways we can help patients who are blind,” Robinson said. “In individuals who have lost the ability to see, scientists have shown that stimulating parts of the brain associated with vision can give those patients a sense of vision, even though their eyes no longer work.”
The MOANA team includes 15 co-investigators from Rice, Baylor College of Medicine, the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital, Duke University, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale’s John B. Pierce Laboratory.
The project is funded through DARPA’s Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program. – RICE University
The BRAIN Initiative has never been concluded. We’re living it now.
Silview.media
UPDATE JULY 25, 2021
My conclusion above just got fully confirmed a few days ago, more so, BRAIN went woke, if you can imagine that:
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We gave up on our profit shares from masks, if you want to help us, please use the donation button! We think frequent mask use, even short term use can be bad for you, but if you have no way around them, at least send a message of consciousness. Get it here!
Imagine Jewish company Ben&Jerry went like: “People who don’t eat our ice-cream are anti-food and anti-semitic”. That’s exactly what Pharmafia does, amplified by their presstitutes and mass-mediots. But facts don’t care about fake Semites impersonating a victim while caring out a worldwide genocide.
Btw. Times of Israel deleted its most popular post of 2012, last one in my collage, but not quite every trace of it.
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One of the most maleficent characters in Trump’s menagerie is this psychopath he named as leader of Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui, former GSK and Moderna boss having a bigger body count than the Spanish Flu. Actually Kushner picked him in Trumps name, but anyway, after we wrote extensive viral exposes on his past, a team of “specialists” brushed up his online presence and then he laid low for a while. But his silence is over and his newest interviews confirm everything we’ve wrote about him and Covid-19.
For the best understanding of this article, you have to read it as a follow up to four previous pieces that are anyway essential readings:
“If you take the first Operation Warp Speed vaccine you will get an unexpected surprise: micromanaged tracking by Big Tech for up to two years, who will know more about you than you know about yourself. There is no guarantee that tracking will stop after two years.” writes Technocracy News
” It should become apparent that the military/industrial complex that is running Warp Speed is functionally merged with Big Tech like Google and Oracle. And then, there is the federal government itself that is driving the entire vaccination program”, adds TN and they’re not wrong.
Moncef Slaoui, the official head of Operation Warp Speed, told the Wall Street Journal last week that all Warp Speed vaccine recipients in the US will be monitored by “incredibly precise . . . tracking systems” for up to two years and that tech giants Google and Oracle would be involved.
Another high from Slaoui’s career that looks more like a bloodbath.
Last week, a rare media interview given by the Trump administration’s “Vaccine Czar” offered a brief glimpse into the inner workings of the extremely secretive Operation Warp Speed (OWS), the Trump administration’s “public-private partnership” for delivering a Covid-19 vaccine to 300 million Americans by next January. What was revealed should deeply unsettle all Americans.
During an interview with the Wall Street Journal published last Friday, the “captain” of Operation Warp Speed, career Big Pharma executive Moncef Slaoui, confirmed that the millions of Americans who are set to receive the project’s Covid-19 vaccine will be monitored via “incredibly precise . . . tracking systems” that will “ensure that patients each get two doses of the same vaccine and to monitor them for adverse health effects.” Slaoui also noted that tech giants Google and Oracle have been contracted as part of this “tracking system” but did not specify their exact roles beyond helping to “collect and track vaccine data.”
The day before the Wall Street Journal interview was published, the New York Times published a separate interview with Slaoui where he referred to this “tracking system” as a “very active pharmacovigilance surveillance system.” During a previous interview with the journal Science in early September, Slaoui had referred to this system only as “a very active pharmacovigilance system” that would “make sure that when the vaccines are introduced that we’ll absolutely continue to assess their safety.” Slaoui has only recently tacked on the words “tracking” and “surveillance” to his description of this system during his relatively rare media interviews.
While Slaoui himself was short on specifics regarding this “pharmacovigilance surveillance system,” the few official documents from Operation Warp Speed that have been publicly released offer some details about what this system may look like and how long it is expected to “track” the vital signs and whereabouts of Americans who receive a Warp Speed vaccine.
This is basically what we meant by “It’s about data and vaccines” in our headline above. And 5G will follow Covid around because all this data needs carried by a medium and many antennas. Which, while doing their work, can also produce Covid-like symptoms, as a bonus benefit for the Covidiocracy orchestrators.
Stuff that no one mentions in Slaoui’s romanced biographies
The Last American Vagabond takes it from here into finer details in one of his latest posts, demonstrating we’re guinea pigs and this is how they will study us:
The Pharmacovigilantes
Two official OWS documents released in mid-September state that vaccine recipients—expected to include a majority of the US population—would be monitored for twenty-four months after the first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine is administered and that this would be done by a “pharmacovigilance system.”
In the OWS document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Defense (DOD) stated that, because Warp Speed vaccine candidates use new unlicensed vaccine production methods that “have limited previous data on safety in humans . . . the long-term safety of these vaccines will be carefully assessed using pharmacovigilance surveillance and Phase 4 (post-licensure) clinical trials.”
It continues:
The key objective of pharmacovigilance is to determine each vaccine’s performance in real-life scenarios, to study efficacy, and to discover any infrequent and rare side effects not identified in clinical trials. OWS will also use pharmacovigilance analytics, which serves as one of the instruments for the continuous monitoring of pharmacovigilance data. Robust analytical tools will be used to leverage large amounts of data and the benefits of using such data across the value chain, including regulatory obligations.
In addition, Moncef Slaoui and OWS’s vaccine coordinator, Matt Hepburn, formerly a program manager at the Pentagon’s controversial Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), had previously published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that stated that “because some technologies have limited previous data on safety in humans, the long-term safety of these vaccines will be carefully assessed using pharmacovigilance surveillance strategies.”
The use of pharmacovigilance on those who receive the vaccine is also mentioned in the official Warp Speed “infographic,” which states that monitoring will be done in cooperation with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) and will involve “24 month post-trial monitoring for adverse effects.”
In a separate part of that same document, OWS describes one of its “four key tenets” as “traceability,” which has three goals: to “confirm which of the approved vaccines were administered regardless of location (private/public)”; to send a “reminder to return for second dose”; and to “administer the correct second dose.”
Regarding a Covid-19 vaccine requiring more than one dose, a CDC document associated with Operation Warp Speed states:
For most Covid-19 vaccine products, two doses of vaccine, separated by 21 or 28 days, will be needed. Because different Covid-19 vaccine products will not be interchangeable, a vaccine recipient’s second dose must be from the same manufacturer as their first dose. Second-dose reminders for vaccine recipients will be critical to ensure compliance with vaccine dosing intervals and achieve optimal vaccine effectiveness.
The CDC document also references a document published in August by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, associated with the Event 201 and Dark Winter simulations, as informing its Covid-19 vaccination strategy. The Johns Hopkins paper, which counts Dark Winter co-organizer Thomas Inglesby as one of its authors, argues that existing “passive reporting” systems managed by the CDC and FDA should be retooled to create “an active safety surveillance system directed by the CDC that monitors all [Covid-19] vaccine recipients—perhaps by short message service or other electronic mechanisms.”
Despite the claims in these documents that the “pharmacovigilance surveillance system” would intimately involve the FDA, top FDA officials stated in September that they were barred from attending OWS meetings and told reporters they could not explain the operation’s organization or when or with what frequency its leadership meets. The FDA officials did state, however, that they “are still allowed to interact with companies developing products for OWS,” STAT news reported.
In addition, the FDA has apparently “set up a firewall between the vast majority of staff and the initiative [Operation Warp Speed]” that appears to drastically limit the number of FDA officials with any knowledge of or involvement in Warp Speed. The FDA’s director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Janet Woodcock, is the only FDA official listed as having any direct involvement in OWS and appears to be personally managing this “firewall” at the FDA. Woodcock describes herself as a long-time advocate for the use of “big data” in the evaluation of drug and vaccine safety and has been intimately involved in FDA precursors to the coming Warp Speed “pharmacovigilance surveillance system” known as Sentinel and PRISM, both of which are discussed later in this report.
Woodcock is currently on a temporary leave of absence from her role as the director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which allows her to focus her complete attention on overseeing aspects of Operation Warp Speed on behalf of the FDA’s Office of the Commissioner. Her temporary replacement at the FDA, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is “very aligned with Janet and where the agency is going,” according to media reports. Cavazzoni is a former executive at Pfizer, one of the companies producing a vaccine for OWS. That vaccine is set to begin testing in children as young as 12 years old.
The extreme secrecy of Operation Warp Speed has affected not only the FDA but also the CDC, as a CDC expert panel normally involved in developing the government’s vaccine distribution strategies was “stonewalled” by Matt Hepburn, OWS’s vaccine coordinator, who bluntly refused to answer several of the panel’s “pointed questions” about the highly secretive operation.
More Secret Contracts
While Moncef Slaoui and Warp Speed documents provide few details regarding what this “tracking system” would entail, Slaoui did note in his recent interview with the Wall Street Journal that tech giants Google and Oracle had been contracted to “collect and track vaccine data” as part of this system. Neither Google nor Oracle, however, has announced receipt of a contract related to Operation Warp Speed, and the DOD and HHS, similarly, have yet to announce the awarding of any Warp Speed contract to either Google or Oracle. In addition, searches on the US government’s Federal Register and on the official website for federally awarded contracts came up empty for any contract awarded to Google or Oracle that would apply to any such “pharmacovigilance” system or any other aspect of Operation Warp Speed.
Given my previous reporting on the use of a nongovernment intermediary for awarding OWS contracts to vaccine companies, it seems likely that Warp Speed contracts awarded to Google and Oracle were made using a similar mechanism. In an October 6, 2020, report for The Last American Vagabond, I noted that $6 billion in Warp Speed contracts awarded to vaccine companies were made through Advanced Technology International (ATI), a government contractor that works mainly with the military and surveillance technology companies and whose parent company has strong ties to the CIA and the 2001 Dark Winter simulation. HHS, which is supposedly overseeing Operation Warp Speed, claimed to have “no record” of at least one of those contracts. Only one Warp Speed vaccine contract, which did not involve ATI and was awarded directly by HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, was recently obtained by KEI Online. Major parts of the contract, however, including the section on intellectual property rights, were redacted in their entirety.
If the Warp Speed contracts that have been awarded to Google and Oracle are anything like the Warp Speed contracts awarded to most of its participating vaccine companies, then those contracts grant those companies diminished federal oversight and exemptions from federal laws and regulations designed to protect taxpayer interests in the pursuit of the work stipulated in the contract. It also makes them essentially immune to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Yet, in contrast to the unacknowledged Google and Oracle contracts, vaccine companies have publicly disclosed that they received OWS contracts, just not the terms or details of those contracts. This suggests that the Google and Oracle contracts are even more secretive.
A major conflict of interest worth noting is Google’s ownership of YouTube, which recently banned on its massive multimedia platform all “misinformation” related to concerns about a future Covid-19 vaccine. With Google now formally part of Operation Warp Speed, it seems likely that any concerns about OWS’s extreme secrecy and the conflicts of interest of many of its members (particularly Moncef Slaoui and Matt Hepburn) as well as any concerns about Warp Speed vaccine safety, allocation and/or distribution may be labeled “Covid-19 vaccine misinformation” and removed from YouTube.
From the NSA to the FDA: The New PRISM
Though the nature of this coming surveillance system for Covid-19 vaccine recipients has yet to be fully detailed by Warp Speed or the tech companies the operation has contracted, OWS documents and existing infrastructure at the FDA offer a clue as to what this system could entail.
For instance, the Warp Speed document “From the Factory to the Frontlines” notes that the pharmacovigilance system will be a new system created exclusively for OWS that will be “buil[t] off of existing IT [information technology] infrastructure” and will fill any “gaps with new IT solutions.” It then notes that “the Covid-19 vaccination program requires significant enhancement of the IT that will support enhancements and data exchange that are critical for a multi-dose candidate to ensure proper administration of a potential second dose.” The document also states that all data related to the OWS vaccine distribution effort “will be reported into a common IT infrastructure that will support analysis and reporting,” adding that this “IT infrastructure will support partners with a broad range of tools for record-keeping, data on who is being vaccinated, and reminders for second doses.”
Though some Warp Speed documents hint as to the existing IT systems that will serve as the foundation for this new tracking system, arguably the most likely candidate is the FDA-managed Sentinel Initiative, which was established in 2009 during the H1N1 Swine flu pandemic. Like Operation Warp Speed itself, Sentinel is a public-private partnership and involves the FDA, private business, and academia.
According to its website, Sentinel’s “main goal is to improve how FDA evaluates the safety and performance of medical products” through big data, with an additional focus on “learning more about potential side effects.” Media reports describe Sentinel as “an electronic surveillance system that aggregates data from electronic medical records, claims and registries that voluntarily participate and allows the agency to track the safety of marketed drugs, biologics and medical devices.”
One of Sentinel’s main proponent at the FDA is Janet Woodcock, who has aggressively worked to expand the program as director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, with a focus on Sentinel’s use in “post-market effectiveness studies.” As previously mentioned, Woodcock is the only FDA official listed among the ninety or so “leaders” of OWS, most of whom are part of the US military and lack any health-care or vaccine-production experience.
Woodcock’s temporary replacement at the FDA, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is also very active in efforts to expand Sentinel. STAT news reported earlier this year that Cavazzoni previously “served on the sterling committee of I-MEDS, an FDA-industry partnership which allows drug makers to pay for use of the FDA’s real-world data system known as Sentinel to complete certain safety studies more quickly.”
Sentinel has a series of “collaborating partners” that “provide healthcare data and scientific, technical, and organizational expertise” to the initiative. These collaborating partners include intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, tech giant IBM, and major US health insurance companies such as Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield, among many others. In addition, Sentinel’s Innovation Center, which it describes as the program’s “test bed to identify, develop, and evaluate innovative methods,” is partnered with Amazon, General Dynamics, and Microsoft. Sentinel also has a Community Building and Outreach Center, which is managed by Deloitte consulting, one of the largest consultancy firms in the world that is known for seeking to fill its ranks with former CIA officials.
The Sentinel system’s specific surveillance program aimed at monitoring vaccine effectiveness is known as the Post-licensure Rapid Immunization Safety Monitoring Program, better known as PRISM. Sentinel’s PRISM was “developed to monitor vaccine safety, but [to date] has never been used to assess vaccine effectiveness.” PRISM was initially launched alongside the Sentinel Initiative itself in 2009 “in response to the need to monitor the safety of the H1N1 influenza vaccine” after it was licensed, marketed, and administered. Yet, as previously mentioned, PRISM has yet to be used to assess the effectiveness of any vaccine while quietly expanding for nearly a decade, which implies that the stakeholders in the Sentinel Initiative have a plan to implement this “safety surveillance system” at some point.
The name PRISM may remind readers of the National Security Agency (NSA) program of the same name that became well known throughout the United States following the Edward Snowden revelations. Given this association, it is worth noting that the NSA, as well as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), are now officially part of Operation Warp Speed and appear to be playing a role in the development of Warp Speed’s “pharmacovigilance surveillance system.” The addition of the NSA and the DHS to the initiative, of course, greatly increases the involvement of US intelligence agencies in the operation, which itself is “dominated” by the military and sorely lacking in civilian public health officials.
CyberScoop first reported in early September that members of the NSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate were involved in Operation Warp Speed, with their role—as well as that of DHS—being framed mainly as offering “cybersecurity advice” to the initiative. However, the NSA and DHS are also offering “guidance” and “services” to both the other federal agencies involved in Warp Speed as well as OWS contractors, which now include Google and Oracle.
Google is well known for its cozy relationship with the NSA, including its PRISM program, and they have also backed NSA-supported legislation that would make it easier to surveil Americans without a warrant. Similarly, Oracle is a longtime NSA contractor and also has ties to the CIA dating back to its earliest days as a company, not unlike Google. Notably, Oracle and Google remain locked in a major legal battle over copyright issues that is set to be heard by the Supreme Court in the coming weeks and is expected to have major ramifications for the tech industry.
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For most of its history, GSK has been headed by the current “US Vaccine Czar“, the head of Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui, handpicked by Jared Kushner in Trump’s name.
If anyone claims it’s not good, how could’ve they known that in Februaty or in March, when the virus was “novel” and “the data was scarce”?
Can we expect to find more examples of either drug patents that don’t work or hidden medical and science advancements, whatever the case might be here?
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Written while prisoner in Moncef Slaoui’s home-town, Agadir, Morocco
In 2013, the Chinese authorities branded the international pharma giant GSK a “criminal godfather”, accusing it of running a £320m slush fund to bribe doctors and hospital officials with cash payments and visits to prostitutes. – The Guardian American public couldn’t care much, but those events built up to Moncef Slaoui‘s nomination as Trump’s “vaccine czar”
If corruption was a company, it would be GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) with “Trump’s new vaccine czar”, Moncef Slaoui, at the helms of Research and Vaccines departments. It all peaked in 2010-2015 with some of the most sordid scandals people have ever ignored. Many will pay attention now, when things escalated to truly painful levels.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) can trace its roots back to a small apothecary in 18th Century London. Through multiple corporate mergers, GSK found its current form in 2001. It is well-known for its asthma inhalers like Advair and Breo. They have been constantly embroidered in scandals long before 2001. Suffice for now to mention a case of actual officially-recorded conspiracy, as reported by New York Times: In 1996 SmithKline Beecham was one of 15 drug companies that together agreed to pay more than $408 million to settle a class action lawsuit charging them with conspiring to fix prices they charged to thousands of independent pharmacies. In addition to contributing $30 million to the financial settlement, SmithKline agreed to supply the plaintiffs with a quantity of the generic version of its Tagamet ulcer medication worth $20 million.
Moncef Slaoui’s colleague was pointing at genetic drugs as a solution. Source
We’re not going to review every GSK case in this investigation, just the truly spectacular and relevant ones from the more recent times, when the Research & Development and Vaccines departments were under Moncef Slaoui’s command. A new name to most, the Moroccan scientist has been dubbed by US media “Trump’s vaccine czar”, a few days back, when the US president made him co-chief of Operation Warp Speed, the coronavirus mass-vaccination campaign about to start in US.
GSK has began to break records with its penalties and settlements in 2006, when it promised “it would pay $3.1 billion to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to resolve a 17-year dispute over the tax treatment of transactions between the company’s U.S. operation and the parent company. The settlement, the largest in IRS history, focused on the issue of transfer pricing—a method by which transnational corporations artificially reduce their tax liabilities”, as New York TImes reported
Anthony Faucci, Trump’s Vaccine Czar Moncef Slaoui and WHO collaborated on the H1N1 scamdemic of 2009, a rehearsal for the Plandemic of 2020. Their vaccine destroyed thousands of children
“As chief of vaccines at GSK, Slaoui oversaw the development of the disastrous Pandemrix vaccine for swine flu, a shot that was rushed to market without proper testing in the midst of a 2009 epidemic, during which public health officials were shrieking about enormous death tolls that never materialized, with some claiming the death toll would rival the 1918 influenza pandemic (sound familiar?).” RT reported recently in a quite superficial review of the H1N1 scandal of 2009. Let me give you the full picture.
A couple of recent articles by Prof Michel Chossudovsky for Global Research make a great review of the H1N1 2009 scamdemic, greatly completing my work. Chossudovsky practices practices the same old-school document-based style of journalism I was trained too, so I will copiously quote his work in this chapter, with regards and acknowledgements :
“In 2009, hundreds of thousands of pigs were executed Worldwide, despite the fact that the WHO had confirmed that there was no danger of transmission from pigs to humans. And then what happened, an authoritative study by the John Hopkins School of Public Health was released saying that humans could infect the pigs. Putting Meat on the Table Industrial Farm Animal Production in Americas, see also Washington Post, May 9 2009).
Based on incomplete and scanty data, the WHO Director General nonetheless predicted with authority that: “as many as 2 billion people could become infected over the next two years — nearly one-third of the world population.” (World Health Organization as reported by the Western media, July 2009).
It was a multibillion bonanza for Big Pharma supported by the WHO’s Director-General Margaret Chan,(wife of a high Chinese government official – Silview’s note).
In June 2009, Margaret Chan made the following statement:
“On the basis of … expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met. I have therefore decided to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from Phase 5 to Phase 6. The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic. … Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), Press Briefing 11 June 2009)
Millions of doses of swine flu vaccine had been ordered by national governments from Big Pharma. Millions of vaccine doses were subsequently destroyed: a financial bonanza for Big Pharma, an expenditure crisis for national governments.(Global Research)
The media went immediately into high gear (without a shred of evidence). Fear and Uncertainty. Public opinion was deliberately misled
“Swine flu could strike up to 40 percent of Americans over the next two years and as many as several hundred thousand could die if a vaccine campaign and other measures aren’t successful.” (Official Statement of Obama Administration, Associated Press, 24 July 2009).
“The U.S. expects to have 160 million doses of swine flu vaccine available sometime in October”, (Associated Press, 23 July 2009)
Wealthier countries such as the U.S. and Britain will pay just under $10 per dose [of the H1N1 flu vaccine]. … Developing countries will pay a lower price.” [circa $40 billion for Big Pharma?] (Business Week, July 2009)
What was most governments’ vaccine of choice? Pandemrix, elaborated by Moncef Slaoui and GlaxoSmithKline
But the H1N1 pandemic never happened. There was no pandemic affecting 2 billion people…
The H1N1 scamdemic was endorsed in US by the CDC and the NIAID headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. NIAID Director Fauci also endorsed Moncef Slaoui’s Pandemrix vaccine, which turned out to be a multi-billion dollar life-ruining scam:
The Pandemrix vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) was given to 6 million people in Britain and millions more across Europe during the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic, but was withdrawn when doctors noticed a rise in narcolepsy cases among those who received the jab.
Narcolepsy is a permanent condition that can cause people to fall asleep dozens of times a day, even when they are in mid-conversation. Some suffer from night terrors and a problem with muscular control called cataplexy that can lead them to collapse on the spot. (Guardian, September 25, 2015)
In UK, the result of the hasty approval process was an unsafe, ineffective shot that left over a thousand recipients permanently brain-damaged, some 80 percent of them children. Forty percent of NHS staffers were vaccinated under false pretenses, told the shot was safe and effective. The UK government was forced to pay out millions of pounds in compensation, as GSK had refused to supply the drug to governments until it was indemnified against lawsuits.
“The Pandemrix vaccine, made by GlaxoSmithKline, was given to high-risk groups, including children and those with asthma, diabetes and heart disease at the height of the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic. Across Europe, around 31 million people received the jab. The vaccine was made specifically to tackle pandemics and is very different to the normal seasonal flu vaccine which has not been linked to narcolepsy.
The condition is a rare but serious neurological disorder that affects about 31,000 people in Britain. The condition can cause massive sleep disruption. The worst hit are often young people who face enormous learning difficulties at school and university. The disorder can destroy self-esteem, and bullying is common. Adults can lose their jobs, their driving licences, and can have difficulties with relationships. Some narcoleptics have another condition called cataplexy, a total loss of muscle control.” – The Guardian 2013
In June, a 12-year-old boy was awarded £120,000 by a court that ruled he had been left severely disabled by narcolepsy caused by Pandemrix. The win ended a three-year battle with the government that argued his illness was not serious enough to warrant compensation.
The increased risk of narcolepsy after vaccination with ASO3 adjuvanted pandemic A/H1N1 2009 vaccine indicates a causal association, consistent with findings from Finland. – British Medical Journal
A Department of Health spokesperson said: “Pandemrix was developed specifically for use in a flu pandemic when the number of lives lost and serious cases could have been enormous.” “The decision to recommend that children got this vaccine during the flu pandemic was based on evidence available at the time, along with the advice from the European Medicines Agency which approved its use.
According to International Business Times UK in a 2014 report Patients who suffered brain damage as a result of taking a swine flu vaccine are to receive multi-million-pound payouts from the UK government.
The government is expected to receive a bill of approximately £60 million, with each of the 60 victims expected to receive about £1 million each.
Peter Todd, a lawyer who represented many of the claimants, told the Sunday Times: “There has never been a case like this before. The victims of this vaccine have an incurable and lifelong condition and will require extensive medication.”
Following the swine flu outbreak of 2009, about 60 million people, most of them children, received the vaccine.
It was subsequently revealed that the vaccine, Pandemrix, can cause narcolepsy and cataplexy in about one in 16,000 people, and many more are expected to come forward with the symptoms.
Across Europe, more than 800 children are so far known to have been made ill by the vaccine.
In a bitter irony, it was the UK Government (rather than GSK) that paid for the Vaccine Brain Damages in Children.
But the Brain Damage impacts documented in the UK and EU was but the tip of the iceberg.
Thousands of people got sick from the H1N1 Vaccine (reported and unreported cases).
GSK’s ArepanrixTD applied in Canada
The WHO’s H1N1 pandemic was declared in June 11, 2009. GSK was on contract to the Canadian government. The GSK’s ArepandrixTM vaccine was delivered to Canadian health authorities within less than four months.
“As a result, an impressive 45% of Canadians received protection from the H1N1 virus by being vaccinated with GSK’s ArepanrixTM” according to GSK’S President-CEO Paul Lucas in a statement on October 9 2009 to Canada’s Senate Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology.
Within four months?. Does that give them Time to Test????
Lots of people in Canada fell sick after receiving the H1N1 ArepanrixTD vaccine.
And that vaccine killed a little girl called Amina Abu, which then led to a ten year lawsuit against GSK.
A vaccine was rushed to market, and the five year old was among millions of Canadians to get the shot, amid widespread fears about the new pathogen.
Five days later, Amina’s older brother found her lying unconscious in the bathroom of the family’s east-end Toronto home. She was dead.
Her devastated parents came to blame the flu shot itself and sued the vaccine’s manufacturer, Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK), for $4.2 million. The little-noticed trial of that lawsuit drew toward a close on Tuesday, a rare judicial airing in Canada of a vaccine’s alleged side effects.
The parents’ lawyer, Jasmine Ghosn, alleged the preventive drug was brought out quickly and without proper testing during a chaotic flu season, as the federal government exerted “intense pressure” on Canadians to get immunized. (National Post, November 2019)
It took ten years for a judgment. The Family lost. GSK declined responsibility for her death. And the Canadian government reimbursed GSK’s legal expenses.
That lawsuit against GSK should be reopened. Canada’s government bears the burden of responsibility.
ArepanrixTD (2009) vs PandemrixTM (2009)
GSK has casually acknowledged that the ArepanrixTD which was used in Canada is “similar” to the GSK’s PandemrixTM applied in the UK and the EU, which led to brain damage in Children. It was subsequently withdrawn. But ArepandrixTD applied in Canada prevailed. An ArepandrixTD (2010) was subsequently released the following year (and compared to PandemrixTD (2009)
GSK acknowledges that PandemrixTD (2009) causes narcolepsy, which is categorized as “a chronic neurological disorder that affects the brain’s ability to control sleep-wake cycles.”
3. To date, how many people/children in Canada have reported developing narcolepsy after getting vaccinated with Arepanrix? What provinces do they reside in Canada?
GSK reports all cases of adverse events which the company is aware of in accordance with national and regional regulations. We respectfully defer to the Public Health Agency of Canada to address this question in more detail.
4. We read that there is currently a Canadian study sponsored by GSK to assess the risk of occurrence of narcolepsy following the administration of Arepanrix – Why did you sponsor that study? When will the results of that study be published?
We are currently supporting a study that is being conducted in Quebec where Arepanrix™ (H1N1) was used. Further research is needed to evaluate the potential association between GSK`s adjuvanted H1N1 pandemic flu vaccine and narcolepsy in a country where a similar vaccine to Pandemrix™ (H1N1) was used, and where a more robust assessment of the potential association could be conducted, using a design aimed at limiting the impact of biases. The preliminary results of this study are anticipated to be published by early 2014.
There was no investigation into who was behind this multibillion fraud. Several critics said that the H1N1 Pandemic was “Fake”
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), a human rights watchdog, is publicly investigating the WHO’s motives in declaring a pandemic. Indeed, the chairman of its influential health committee, epidemiologist Wolfgang Wodarg, has declared that the “false pandemic” is “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century.” (Forbes, February 10, 2010)
The World Health Organization’s handling of the swine flu pandemic was deeply marred by secrecy and conflict of interest with drug companies, a top medical journal said Friday.
The British Medical Journal, or BMJ, found that WHO guidelines on the use of antiviral drugs were prepared by experts who had received consulting fees from the top two manufacturers of these drugs, Roche and GlaxoSmithKline, or GSK.
In apparent violation of its own rules, the WHO did not publicly disclose these conflicts when the guidelines were drawn up in 2004, according to the report, jointly authored by the London-based non-profit Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
The WHO’s advice led governments worldwide to stockpile vast quantities of antivirals, and its decision to declare a pandemic in June 2009 triggered the purchase of billions of dollars worth of hastily manufactured vaccines.
Much of these stocks have gone unused because the pandemic turned out to be far less lethal than some experts feared, fueling suspicion that Big Pharma exerted undue influence on WHO decisions.
The report also reveals that at least one expert on the secret, 16-member “emergency committee” formed last year to advise the WHO on whether and when to declare a pandemic received payment during 2009 from GSK.
Announcing that swine flu had become a global pandemic automatically triggered latent contracts for vaccine manufacture with half-a-dozen major pharmaceutical companies, including GSK. The WHO has refused to identify committee members, arguing that they must be shielded from industry pressure. “The WHO’s credibility has been badly damaged,” BMJ editor Fiona Godlee said in an editorial.
In 2010, after 8 years of legal battles, it’s sentenced to pay $96 to a whistle-blower. who exposed serious contamination problems at GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) pharmaceutical manufacturing operations.
“Cheryl Eckard’s payment is thought to be the biggest ever handed to a US whistleblower. It was awarded after an eight-year fight, which ended yesterday, when GSK agreed to pay the US government $750m to settle civil and criminal charges that it manufactured and sold adulterated drug products.” – The Guardian
One may argue the cases above may speak volumes about GSK, but this not Slaoui’s department, he probably had nothing to do with it. Yes, he may have not had his own hands in these particular scandal, but wait for it, as you will see, corruption is the norm at GSK, not something you can easily overlook, so unless he was forced to work for this corruption galore, he was an accomplice, at least ethically and morally, as all his colleagues are. We get to Slaoui’s departments shortly.
Year 2012 finds GSK experimenting on Argentina’s poorest babies. Moncef Slaoui’s people were going to Argentina’s most disparaged areas, tracking and tricking the poorest and most illiterate people to allow vaccine trials on their kids and babies. 14 deaths ensued. “The firm failed to get proper consent from the children’s parents before injecting Synflorix, one of its bestselling vaccines, according to a judge in Buenos Aires. GSK was also criticised for keeping inadequate records of the children’s ages, medical histories and previous jabs. Evidence from Argentina’s medical regulator said that, in a few cases, scientists working for GSK relied on permission from under-age parents or illiterate grandparents, The Times reported. GSK and two of the scientists who led the trial have been fined a total of one million pesos (£150,000). Jorge Yabkowsky, president of the Argentine Federation of Health Professionals, told The Times: “These are people who depend entirely on the state apparatus and who are most often illiterate.” – The Telegraph
Al Jazeera’s report on the GSK Argentina scandal
“The Argentinian Federation of Health Professionals accuses 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.”They recruited children in an irregular manner. … They did not do what they were supposed to. They did not inform. There were not independent witnesses. They pressured the mothers of poor children,” said Jorge Yabkowsky, the federation’s director.” – CNN
The trial, known as Compas, involved 15,000 Argentine babies and 9,000 in Colombia and Panama. It started five years before this scandal and continued long after, despite the fine, because that’s just “cost of business” on Planet Pharma.
But that was peanuts to GSK’s budget. considering same year, 2012, they paid a $3bn (£1.8bn) fine for misselling drugs in the US, “Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement in U.S. History” in the words of US Department of Justice. DOJ further stated: <<GSK agreed to plead guilty to a three-count criminal information, including two counts of introducing misbranded drugs, Paxil and Wellbutrin, into interstate commerce and one count of failing to report safety data about the drug Avandia to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Under the terms of the plea agreement, GSK will pay a total of $1 billion, including a criminal fine of $956,814,400 and forfeiture in the amount of $43,185,600. The criminal plea agreement also includes certain non-monetary compliance commitments and certifications by GSK’s U.S. president and board of directors. GSK’s guilty plea and sentence is not final until accepted by the U.S. District Court.
GSK will also pay $2 billion to resolve its civil liabilities with the federal government under the False Claims Act, as well as the states. The civil settlement resolves claims relating to Paxil, Wellbutrin and Avandia, as well as additional drugs, and also resolves pricing fraud allegations.
“Today’s multi-billion dollar settlement is unprecedented in both size and scope. It underscores the Administration’s firm commitment to protecting the American people and holding accountable those who commit health care fraud,” said James M. Cole, Deputy Attorney General. “At every level, we are determined to stop practices that jeopardize patients’ health, harm taxpayers, and violate the public trust – and this historic action is a clear warning to any company that chooses to break the law.”>>
Rewind that: A Deputy Attorney General said in a DOJ press release that GSK “jeopardized patients’ health, harmed taxpayers, and violated the public trust“.
You think that’s bad? Reading further in the DOJ press release we find out that Bill Corr, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) really called it out:
“cheaters who thought they could make an easy profit at the expense of public safety, taxpayers, and the millions of Americans who depend on programs like Medicare and Medicaid”
“GSK, one of the world’s largest healthcare and pharmaceuticals companies, admitted to promoting antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin for unapproved uses, including treatment of children and adolescents. The illegal practice is known as off-label marketing. The company also conceded charges that it held back data and made unsupported safety claims over its diabetes drug Avandia. It agreed to resolve civil liability for promoting asthma drug Advair and two lesser-known drugs for unapproved uses.
In addition, GSK has been found guilty of paying kickbacks to doctors.” – BBC
“The sales force bribed physicians to prescribe GSK products using every imaginable form of high-priced entertainment, from Hawaiian vacations [and] paying doctors millions of dollars to go on speaking tours, to tickets to Madonna concerts”
The public hardly got scandalized and mostly by the bribes, but the most serious crime is the one committed by Slaoui’s department, Forbes being one of the very few media that nailed this: “Keeping safety data secret: Federal investigators say that between 2001 and 2007, GlaxoSmithKline failed to disclose safety data from certain studies of Avandia to the Food and Drug Administration. This is, ethically, perhaps the most serious of the charges. Glaxo’s handling of the Avandia matter was fraught with bad disclosure bordering on deceit. During that time period, Avandia became the best-selling diabetes drug in the world. Now it not only bears warnings that it might cause heart attacks, its use has been so restricted that the drug has nearly vanished off Glaxo’s ledgers. To the extent that Glaxo kept Avandia’s heart risk from being recognized, that means that patients were exposed to added risks. For this, Glaxo is paying a fine of $243 million.”
As part of the settlement, GSK agreed to be monitored by US government officials for five years. Only to see the company embroiled in another humongous scandal within a year, as they re-based their corruption in China.
The 2013 scandal “started with sex tapes of the company’s China head, Mark Reilly and his Chinese girlfriend at a Shanghai department, which were sent to several senior executives of the company. The company’s investigations into the sex tapes made the paid investigator Peter Humphrey and his wife Yu Yingzeng in jail in China due to their breach of privacy law. With the bribery scandal made public by the Chinese police since June 2013, GSK had to admit its pervasive corruption in China. After tried in Changsha in September 2014, the company apologized to the Chinese people, and paid one of the biggest fines in Chinese history worth ¥3bn (£300m; €350m; $490m).4 executives of the company, including Mark Reilly, the only foreign citizens involved, were sentenced to jail. Reilly was deported from China as well. The sequent US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation was settled by GSK with a $20 million civil penalty in 2016, yet the UK Serious Fraud Office failed to finish the expensive investigation which was officially ended in 2019.” Wikipedia
The corruption at GSK was multi-levelled and ubiquitous, it wasn’t just bribes for sales, that’s why the scandal needed about 5 years to find closure, more or less. GSK board received an email in January 2013 where how China’s branch committed fraud in its operations was detailedly described in 5,200 words. The email was well written in English. The email said that GSK China disguised tourist travel in the disguise of international academic meetings. The company paid for the airline tickets and hotel rooms for such meetings to bribe Chinese medical professionals. The email continued by accusing GSK China of falsifying its books and records to illegally market drugs in China. The whistleblower made examples by the drug Lamictal, which was approved in China only for treating epilepsy, but was marketed as a drug for bipolar disorder aggressively. The drug killed a patient due to false marketing, but GSK chose to pay around 9,000 US dollars to silence the patient.
From 2013’s ScienceMag we find out that “accusations of data fabrication at GlaxoSmithKline’s China research site are quite real. That’s what we get from the latest developments in the case, as reported by BioCentury, Pharmalot, and the news section at Nature Medicine. Jingwu Zang, lead author on the disputed paper and former head of the Shanghai research site, has been dismissed from the company. Other employees are on administrative leave while an investigation proceeds, and GSK has said it has begun the process of retracting the paper itself. As for what’s wrong with the paper in question, BioCentury Extra has this:
GSK said data in a paper published in January 2010 in Nature Medicine on the role of interleukin-7 (IL-7) in autoimmune disease characterized data as the results of experiments conducted with blood cells of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients “when, in fact, the data reported were either the results of experiments conducted at R&D China with normal (healthy donor) samples or cannot be documented at all, suggesting that they well may have been fabricated.”
The pharmaceutical giant’s head of global research & development at the time, Moncef Slaoui, received a total remuneration package of $8.4m for his work in 2013, up from $6.6m in 2012.“
Moncef Slaoui was very close to the Chinese GSK division because, as I pointed out in my previous article, in 2007, he announced plans to establish a neurosciences research group in Shanghai that would employ a thousand scientists and cost $100 million. This was one of his biggest projects at GSK, so much of his time and energy were spent through at the China branch. Slaoui’s megalomaniac plans failed miserably and ceased operations in August 2017, which is the most probable cause of his departure from GSK same year.
The following year, 2014, “the pay packets of finance boss Simon Dingemans and vaccines head Moncef Slaoui also took a hit last year. Mr Dingemans received £1.9m, down from £3.3m the year before. Dr Slaoui got $4.3m (£2.8m), compared with his $8.4m remuneration in 2013.”, reported The Telegraph. GSK had to recover from one of the biggest fines in history!
“China has fined UK pharmaceuticals firm GlaxoSmithKline $490m (£297m) after a court found it guilty of bribery” – BBC, 2014
<<The record penalty follows allegations the drug giant paid out bribes to doctors and hospitals in order to have their products promoted. The court gave GSK’s former head of Chinese operations, Mark Reilly, a suspended three-year prison sentence and he is set to be deported. Other GSK executives have also been given suspended jail sentences.
Chinese authorities first announced they were investigating GSK in July last year (2013 – the year Slaoui was cashing big bonuses – Silview’s note), in what has become the biggest corruption scandal to hit a foreign firm in years. The company was accused of having made an estimated $150m in illegal profits.
GSK said it had “published a statement of apology to the Chinese government and its people”.
“Reaching a conclusion in the investigation of our Chinese business is important, but this has been a deeply disappointing matter for GSK,” said chief executive Sir Andrew Witty in a statement. “We have and will continue to learn from this. GSK has been in China for close to a hundred years and we remain fully committed to the country and its people,” he said. “We will also continue to invest directly in the country to support the government’s health care reform agenda and long-term plans for economic growth.”
Mick Cooper, analyst at Edison Investment Research in London, said: “GlaxoSmithKline will hope that this will draw a line under events in China, but it will take time for its Chinese commercial operations to recover.>> – BBC, 2014
US authorities then investigated whether GSK breached the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, while the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) launched a formal criminal investigation into its overseas practices in May. “The SFO criminal investigation into the commercial practices of GlaxoSmithKline and its subsidiaries continues,” a spokeswoman at the SFO told Reuters in 2014.
Funnily, this event is what changed Slaoui’s course of life and made him a candidate for Trump’s Operation Warp speed. Because the scandal shook GSK’s hierarchies, with Slaoui moving from R&D to heading the vaccines branch.
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has begun discussions with ministry of health officials in Nigeria about conducting a phase 1 safety study of the vaccine among healthy adults.
The Oxford study involved 60 healthy volunteers, while those in the Gambia and Mali will each involve 40.
Hill said: “The tragic events unfolding in Africa demand an urgent response. In recent years, similar investigational vaccines have safely immunised infants and adults against a range of diseases including malaria, HIV and Hepatitis C. We, and all our partners on this project, are optimistic that this candidate vaccine may prove useful against Ebola.”
The experimental vaccine is against the Zaire species of Ebola, which is the one circulating in west Africa and for which there is no cure. The vaccine was designed by Nancy J Sullivan, the head of the biodefence research section in NIAID’s Vaccine Research Centre (part of NIH), in collaboration with researchers at the Swiss-Italian biotech firm Okairos, acquired by GSK last May for €250m (£150m), The Guardian reported in 2014
Same Adrian Hill we find later co-authoring the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine under his own company Vaccitech.
Two scientists behind Oxford University’s coronavirus vaccine could pocket a hefty sum of money if the jab proves successful, it emerged today.
Several private investors, including the controversial Chinese firm Huawei, are also poised to profit if the vaccine — called AZD1222 — goes to market.
Oxford professors Sarah Gilbert and Adrian Hill co-founded Vaccitech in 2016. The start-up created the experimental jab — still in human trials — alongside experts at the university’s Jenner Institute.
Company House records show the experts own roughly 10 per cent of the company, which was valued at £65.8million last year before the pandemic hit. It means the pair will be entitled to their share of revenue if the Covid-19 jab makes it to market and is sold for profit.
For comparison, influenza vaccines make around £4billion profit for pharmaceutical companies every year, globally.
Several Chinese investors, including a Dutch arm of Huawei, also own shares in the company listed as Vaccitech’s biggest funder.
It means Huawei — which has been blacklisted by the UK and US amid fears it could use its tech to spy on the West — may also gain handsomely if the Covid-19 jab is proven to work and be safe over the next few months.
…
Eyebrows will also be raised about the fact Huawei, which was banned from operating the UK’s 5G mobile network last month amid spying fears – is in line to profit from the vaccine if it is proven to be successful.
The telecoms giant is a shareholder in Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), a venture capital company that seeks investment to fund new technologies and research projects.
Public records show Huawei Technologies Cooeperatief, a Dutch arm of the maligned firm, bought 4.1million shares in OSI last July, roughly a 0.7 per cent stake, the Financial Times reports.
OSI has raised £600m in four years from 70 shareholders, including Temasek Holdings, which is owned by the Singapore government, GV, an investment firm owned by Google, the Chinese drugmaker Fosun Pharma, and the Wellcome Trust, a research charity based in London.
OSI has a breadth of startup tech companies under its portfolio including Oxford Nanoimaging, a microscope manufacturer, Oxford Flow, which designs pressure control equipment for the oil and gas industry, and vaccine maker Vaccitech.
As Vaccitech’s biggest investor, OSI owns a 46 per cent stake in the company. The UK Government has also invested about £5million in the jab maker at the start of the pandemic.
Last month, the Government banned mobile providers from buying new Huawei 5G equipment amid fears the Chinese firm would use its tech to spy on the West.
UK companies using Huawei kit must strip it out of their networks by 2027, in a move that will slowdown the rollout of 5G in the UK by at least a year.
The move brought the UK closer in line with the US, where Huawei has been banished from selling even its smartphones to Americans.
Washington claims the firm poses a national security threat because it takes orders from China’s Communist Party.
The Oxford vaccine is one of the frontrunners to become the first jab against Covid-19.
But the researchers behind the trials have had to move their studies abroad to South Africa and Brazil — where Covid-19 is still rife — to speed up the so-called efficacy trials.
There has been growing concern not enough people are catching the virus in the public in the UK anymore, which makes it hard to test whether the jab actually protects people from catching it. – Daily Mail
Why do they always “speed up” trials in the poorest areas of Africa and South America? See below.
GlaxoSmithKline bribery scandal led to 13-fold increase in China whistleblower reports –The Telegraph 2015
Drug maker received 652 reports of misconduct in China in 2014, up from 48 in the previous year
GSK Whistleblower Attorney: China’s Pharmaceutical Bribery Scandal is ‘Tip of the Iceberg (2013)
Did a any of that slow the corruption machine down, did they ever stop? On 2014-15 they were also investigating other allegations that GSK paid incentives to secure sales of its products in countries including Romania, Syria, Poland, Iraq, Jordan, UAE and Lebanon.
Wall Street Journal, April 6th 2014: “Glaxo Investigates Bribery Accusations in the Mideast Emails to U.K. Drug Maker Allege Corrupt Practices in Iraq
GlaxoSmithKline PLC is investigating allegations of bribery by employees in the Middle East, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, opening a new front for the company as it manages a separate corruption probe in China.
A person familiar with Glaxo’s Mideast operations emailed the U.K. drug company late last year and earlier this year to report what the person said were corrupt practices in Iraq, including continuing issues and alleged misconduct dating from last year and 2012″
The Guardian, April 7th 2014: “GSK looking into claims that it hired 16 Iraqi government doctors and pharmacists to improperly boost its sales Details of the allegations, which are said to have originated in 2012 but continue to this day, were sent to company executives by a whistleblower, according to the Wall Street Journal. The emails claim the alleged malpractice breaches the UK’s Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which ban bribery of foreign officials.”
The Guardian, April 14th 2014 “GSK acknowledged the Polish allegations dating from 2010 after an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama programme GlaxoSmithKline, the British drug company embroiled in bribery scandals in China and Iraq, has been accused of bribing doctors in Poland in the latest corruption furore to hit the business. The company, which has made a series of public promises to “root out corruption wherever it exists” following allegations that it bribed doctors with £320m worth of cash and sexual favours in China, admitted on Monday that a GSK employee was disciplined in relation to the Polish allegations. GSK, which has repeatedly trumpeted its “zero tolerance” corruption policy as it battles to salvage its corporate reputation, only acknowledged the Polish allegations – which date back to 2010-12 – after an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama programme.”
The Guardian, April 16th 2014: “GlaxoSmithKline says it is investigating bribery claims in Jordan and Lebanon Allegations say GSK sales representatives bribed doctors by issuing free samples that they were then allowed to sell on”
Reuters, August 11th 2014: “Exclusive: GlaxoSmithKline faces fresh drug bribery claims in Syria Reuters last month reported allegations of corruption in GSK’s Syrian consumer business, which sells products including toothpaste and painkillers. The consumer operation was closed in 2012 due to the worsening civil war in the country. The Syrian prescription pharmaceuticals business remains operational, however, and GSK said it was committed to supplying safe and effective drugs and vaccines to patients in need. The new corruption claims involve alleged bribes paid to boost sales of various medicines, including ones to treat cancer and to prevent blood clots.”
Reuters, July 25th, 2015: “Exclusive: GSK faces new corruption allegations, this time in Romania The latest allegations say GSK paid Romanian doctors hundreds, and in one cases thousands, of euros between 2009 and 2012 for prescribing its medicines, including prostate treatments Avodart and Duodart and Parkinson’s disease drug Requip.
According to the email, the doctors were notionally paid for speaking engagements, but in three out of six cases, including the most highly paid one, they did not give any speech. The other three medics gave only one speech each, despite receiving multiple payments. GSK also provided doctors with many international trips and made payments to them under the guise of participation in advisory boards, the email said.”
Source: Reuters
Securities and Exchange Commission, September 30, 2016 (PDF): “GlaxoSmithKline plc (“GSK”) has agreed to pay $20 million to settle charges that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) when its China-based subsidiaries engaged in pay-toprescribe schemes to increase sales. An SEC investigation found that the schemes spanned a period of years and involved the transfer of money, gifts, and other things of value to health care professionals, which led to millions of dollars in increased sales of GSK pharmaceutical products to China’s state health institutions. The participants included certain complicit sales and marketing managers within GSK’s Chinabased subsidiaries. GSK failed to devise and maintain a sufficient system of internal accounting controls and lacked an effective anti-corruption compliance program to detect and prevent these schemes. As a result, the improper payments were not accurately reflected in GSK’s books and records. The SEC’s order finds that GSK violated the FCPA’s internal controls and books-and-records provisions. GSK consented to the order without admitting or denying the findings, and agreed to pay a $20 million civil penalty. GSK also agreed to provide status reports to the SEC for the next two years on its remediation and implementation of anti-corruption compliance measures.”
Moncef Slaoui leaves GSK in 2017, after having brought the company on the brink of disaster, together with the Chinese division. Together with GSK’s #1 through this period, the disgraced CEO Andrew Witty, one of the darkest figures in medicine’s history, Moncef Slaoui moves to become a Pharma investor aboard Medicxi Capital, a biotechnology venture capital firm in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. The rest is business as usual.
To be continued
LATER UPDATE:
The situation one week after publishing this article
This is impossible to occur without intervention from someone truly powerful
LATER UPDATE 2, For the giggles: This is how Dork Suckerborg of Fakebook fame is doing damage control for this investigation
And this is how I do Suckerborg control. Guess what? Five minutes after I posted the thing below, Suckerborg re-instated the original post and deleted this from the group, Of course I posted it back in the comments of the original. Take your time to enjoy the multilevel beauty here, then tell me about 3d chess…
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! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
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I’m reporting from captivity in Agadir, a Moroccan city which I’ve just found out it’s the birth-place of Moncef Slaoui, the newly appointed head of “Operation Warp Speed” , Trump’s mass-vaccination campaign. And the that’s the least disturbing thing I have to tell you. I probably need protection now, I’m warned, authorities here are not big fans of free speech, people have been arrested for much less. But this isn’t much of a life anyway; all worth it if you spread this knowledge like fire. May the public eye be my protection, if any.
US President Donald Trump selected Moroccan immunology expert Moncef Slaoui to be the head of his administration’s COVID-19 vaccine development team, working on “Operation Warp Speed.”
The Moroccan expert, 60, will serve as the US government’s “therapeutics czar” to help coordinate the development of vaccines and treatments. The role is shared between the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense.
Slaoui will be assisted by Army Gen. Gustave Perna, the commander of United States Army Materiel Command.
Trump’s new “Vaccine czar”, Dr. Slaoui’s appeal to open source vaccines (2015). Why just vaccines?
Slaoui earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and immunology from the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, and completed his postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School and Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston.
He was the former head of the vaccines division at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), where he oversaw the development of various vaccines: Rotarix, Synflorix, and Cervarix. In 2007, he announced plans to establish a neurosciences research group in Shanghai that would employ a thousand scientists and cost $100 million; it failed miserably and ceased operations in August 2017.
In 2008, Slaoui led the $720 million acquisition of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, which folded in 2013. In 2012, he oversaw GSK’s purchase of Human Genome Sciences for over $3 billion. In 2015 he won European approval for the world’s first malaria vaccine (Mosquirix).
Trump’s “Vaccine Czar” sucking up to Joe Biden and foretelling our present! Rare interview 2016
When he retired from the drugmaker in 2017, GSK was still working on the vaccine for Ebola.
GSK is now working on a COVID-19 vaccine with Sanofi, the French multinational pharma giant.
“Not long after leaving GSK, the enthusiastic and outgoing Slaoui started joining biotech boards, with welcomes at SutroVax, mRNA player Moderna as well as the public outfit Intellia $NTLA, one of a handful of CRISPR/Ca9 gene editing startups dominating the field. Then, a little over a month ago, he dropped off the Intellia crew, citing a conflict but not explaining it.” – Endpoints
But his biggest business move was becoming a partner at Medicxi Capital, a biotechnology venture capital firm in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area.
Commenting on his new role as Partner at Medicxi, Dr Slaoui said: “I am looking forward to making an active contribution to selecting and leading investments, and to supporting ambitious entrepreneurs to develop medicines that ultimately make a difference to patients.”
Medicxi has built a highly experienced team and, through the scientific advisory boards (SABs) of each of its funds, has access to some of the most respected names in the pharma industry. As well as Medicxi’s senior team, now including Dr Slaoui, external members and observers on the SABs to Medicxi’s funds included (2017):
From Novartis:
Dr Vasant (Vas) Narasimhan, Global Head of Drug Development, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Executive Officer Elect
Dr Evan Beckman, Global Head of Translational Medicine at NIBR
Nigel Sheail, Head of Business Development and Licensing
From Verily Life Sciences:
Dr Andy Conrad, Chief Executive Officer
Dr Robert Califf, Advisor and former US FDA Commissioner
From GSK:
Dr Patrick Vallance President, R&D
Dr Paul-Peter Tak Senior Vice President R&D Pipeline, Global Development Leader and Chief Immunology Officer
From Johnson & Johnson:
Dr. Paul Stoffels, Executive Vice President, Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Bill Hait, Global Head, Janssen Research & Development
Dr Patrick Verheyen Global Head, Janssen Business Development
Michèle Ollier, co-founder and Partner at Medicxi, said: “Moncef has made a tremendous contribution through his role on our SABs and we look forward to his continued energetic and insightful contribution as a Partner at Medicxi. Our SAB meetings are challenging, insightful and inspiring, and contribute hugely to how we steer and advise our portfolio companies.”
Medicxi is based in London, Geneva and Jersey. The Company’s mission is to invest across the full healthcare continuum. Medicxi was established by the former Index Ventures life sciences team. Medicxi manages the legacy life science portfolio of Index Ventures as well as the new funds launched as Medicxi, Medicxi Ventures 1 (MV1) and Medicxi Growth 1 (MG1) focusing on early-stage and late-stage investments in life sciences.
GSK, Johnson & Johnson and Novartis, three of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies back Medicxi along with Verily, an Alphabet company. These companies, whilst participating in the SABs of the funds, do not receive any preferential rights to the portfolio companies.
Medicxi’s team has been investing in life sciences for over 20 years and has backed many successful companies, including Genmab (NASDAQ Copenhagen: GEN), PanGenetics (sold to AbbVie), Molecular Partners (SWX: MOLN), XO1 (sold to Janssen) Egalet (NASDAQ: EGLT), Minerva Neurosciences (NASDAQ: NERV) and Versartis (NASDAQ: VSAR).
Since 2017, Slaoui has been also sitting on the board of Moderna, a biotechnology company also pursuing a COVID-19 vaccine, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The other problem, because they always come in pairs: Trump awarded Moderna almost $0.5Billion from public money a few days before nominating Slaoui. CNN reported on May 18th:
“Valera’s efforts (Moderna subsidiary) have resulted in the demonstration of preclinical efficacy of Moderna’s mRNA-based vaccines in multiple viral disease models, Moderna said.
In the partnership with the Gates Foundation, Valera will apply its mRNA vaccine platform as well as Moderna’s drug platform Messenger RNA Therapeutics™. Designed to produces human proteins, antibodies, and entirely novel protein constructs inside patient cells, the therapeutics are secreted or active intracellularly.” – Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News
What, you think that’s bad? What if I told you this is the last one in a very long series of collaborations between the two?
I find most relevant this transhumanist project Slaoui worked on with Google from 2016, as reported by Bloomberg:
<<The recent partnership between GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Alphabet (Google) further opens the door for development in the biotechnology industry’s experimental “bioelectronics” segment. Chairman of Vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline Dr. Moncef Slaoui thinks the partnership could create an entirely new industry. “I think this is a whole new industry as big as the pharmaceutical industry … there’s a whole new world that we’re opening here which is dealing with electrical signals to connect with our biology and changes functioning,” Slaoui told CNBC’s Meg Tirrell on “Squawk Box” Monday morning. Calling Alphabet’s Verily Life Services a “really exciting partner,” Slaoui says GlaxoSmithKline shares “a very common vision of integrating electronics and big data analytics and technologies with medicines and biology.” “They bring to us the engineering capabilities, the electronics, the low power technologies and the wireless technologies that are critical to miniaturize these devices, power them and extract information from them,” Slaoui noted.>>
Trump’s new “Vaccine czar”, Dr Moncef Slaoui on bioelectronics, transhumanist medicine (2016)
“GSK has been interested in this field for years, and in 2013 announced a $1 million prize for innovative bioelectronics research. In a press statement, GSK’s Moncef Slaoui said: “Many of the processes of the human body are controlled by electrical signals firing between the nervous system and the body’s organs, which may become distorted in many chronic diseases.” He said bioelectronic seeks to “correct the irregular [electrical] patterns found in disease states, using miniaturized devices attached to individual nerves.” – The Verge
And having in mind the technological terror, the transhumanist/eugenicist obsessions brought by the coronavirus policy-makers today, one quote from the same source above hits home. This whole business falls right in the arms of anyone associating the coronavirus pandemic with human microchipping. Slaoui cited animal models as the indicator that bioelectronics can treat chronic diseases with a number of different devices.
The devices themselves are very small, about “the size of a rice grain”, and can “either stimulate or black the electric signals that our brains sense through our nerves to control the functioning of our organs… The limitations are around power as power requires energy and energy means heat and heat doesn’t go well with biology.
“High-Jacking our Biology with Electronics” – panel ft. Dr. Moncef Slaoui’s and more experts (2015)
It gets weirder
Slaoui rejected reports in late March of his involvement with a US government task force for COVID-19 vaccine development and denied as recently as May 11 any intention to work with the Trump administration. WHY?? Morocco World News reported in March 31st: “The doctor said he has no working arrangements with the US government in a statement to Moroccan French-language newspaper L’Economiste. Several local news outlets claimed that the former chairman of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is part of a task force that is researching a vaccine to clamp down on the spread of the virus. The international expert is currently a member of the board of directors of American biotechnology company Moderna. Slaoui explained that he is part of the company’s research and development committee. The committee has received support from federal organizations to help fund the development of a COVID-19 vaccine. “
White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Trump, was among the officials who interviewed Slaoui for the role.
Jared Kushner went there. Jared Kushner personally picked America’s new “Vaccine Czar” Moncef Slaoui precisely one year after the meeting. Jared Kushner is a Zionist. Jared Kushner is Trump’s son law.
To avoid a conflict of interest, Slaoui resigned from the board of the Massachusetts-based biotech firm Moderna, which had been developing a vaccine for the coronavirus. He stepped down but he didn’t give up his stakes in Moderna, as the Daily Beast reports:
“Slaoui’s ownership of 156,000 Moderna stock options, disclosed in required federal financial filings, sparked concerns about a conflict of interest. Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren called Slaoui out over the matter on Twitter: “It is a huge conflict of interest for the White House’s new vaccine czar to own $10 million of stock in a company receiving government funding to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Dr. Slaoui should divest immediately.” The company’s shares skyrocketed last month after news broke of the $483 million in federal funding to work on a coronavirus vaccine. Slaoui could not immediately be reached for comment on the matter.”
Slaoui also sits on the boards of SutroVax, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and the PhRMA Foundation
The Moroccan expert’s main contenders for the position of chief advisor at “Operation Warp Speed” were Algeria’s Elias Zerhouni and US’ Arthur Levinson.
Zerhouni, born in 1951, is an Algerian scientist, radiologist, and biomedical engineer. The expert has held several important positions in a number of institutions, ranging from medical schools to pharmaceutical companies and government task forces.
In 2009, under the Obama administration, Zerhouni served as the first science envoy in the US and worked towards fostering scientific and technological collaboration with other countries.
Between 2011 and 2018, as a final stage in his career, Zerhouni was the President for Global Research and Development at, well, Sanofi.
The third main candidate in the race for Trump’s COVID-19 operation, Arthur Levinson, is an American businessman specialized in biotechnology.
Levinson has served as senior advisor for several companies and institutions, including Swiss healthcare multinational Hoffmann-La Roche, Amyris Biotechnologies, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, and Princeton University.
The American businessman is currently the chairman of tech giant Apple and CEO of biotechnology company Calico.
“We will get to [vaccines] eventually, but we’re not there yet. If we want to lift the lockdowns, we need to fully respect them first”
Outlook on the pandemic
During an interview on April 12, Slaoui said he expects life to begin its return to normal at the beginning of 2021 after global leaders rein in the pandemic, adding that he considers his prediction “optimistic.”
He is confident “that due to the high number of COVID-19 cases, clinical studies will reach results quickly.” He believes that “by the end of May or by early June, we will know if some of these drugs work.”
“I am very optimistic that we’ll have several vaccines for COVID-19. However, the problem is not having a vaccine. The problem is producing enough to protect eight billion people,” he continued.
Which is weird, because US Government has just announced same day spending $138mil. to turbo-boost vaccine production, and I’ve published a massive investigation piece on that.
In another interview with Moroccan television channel 2M on April 13, Slaoui forecast that the COVID-19 pandemic will heavily scar the global population.
“I believe that by 2021 our reality will not be completely back to normal but it will be improved,” he argued.
Moncef Slaoui said if the virus continues to spread, there will be no way to control it other than to create a vaccine and administer it on a massive scale.
“We will get to [vaccines] eventually, but we’re not there yet. If we want to lift the lockdowns, we need to fully respect them first,” he explained.
He said countries can phase out lockdowns when there is a proven COVID-19 treatment.
Slaoui acknowledged that there are now hundreds of clinical studies underway in many countries.
He expressed optimism that due to the increasing number of COVID-19 cases, clinical studies will achieve preliminary results quickly. “I believe that by the end of May or by early June, we will know if some of these drugs work.”
Government watchdog Public Citizen on Thursday “condemned the Trump administration’s reported appointment of a former pharmaceutical executive to the White House’s task force aimed at swiftly developing a Covid-19 vaccine as another example of the White House putting management of the pandemic in the hands of private industry. “
“If the Trump administration approaches vaccine development as it has Covid-19 prevention, testing, and treatment, the world may be in for years of more extraordinary pain,” Maybarduk added. “The dangers of global vaccine rationing are profound. No one corporation has the capacity to deliver a vaccine to all the world’s people.”
In March, Trump’s FDA came under fire for awarding monopoly status to Gilead Sciences for Remdesivir, a drug it was developing for Covid-19 treatment. The company backed off its claim after a pressure campaign led by Public Citizen.
“The U.S. government must commit to sharing clinical trial data, patents, and know-how among manufacturers and with the world, to quickly achieve the mountainous scale of production that humanity needs,” the group said.
Everything makes even more sense if you also read the first part of this series of articles dedicated to the covid mafia and Operation Warp Speed
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