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Follow the money: Is this why they are pushing boosters?
So, today, two of the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulators, Marion Gruber and Phil Krause called it quits by announcing their pending retirements in October and November, respectively.
Luciana Borio, a former top FDA scientist, said on Twitter the agency is “losing two giants who helped bring us many safe and effective vaccines over decades of public service.”
So, is this a big deal? Actually, YES, it is a very, very BIG deal. To quote The World News…
Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research & Review and 32-year veteran of the agency, will leave at the end of October, and OVRR deputy director Phil Krause, who’s been at FDA for more than a decade, will leave in November. The news, first reported by BioCentury, is a massive blow to confidence in the agency’s ability to regulate vaccines.
The bombshell announcement comes at a particularly crucial moment, as boosters and children’s shots are being weighed by the regulator. The departures also come as the administration has recently jumped ahead of the FDA’s reviews of booster shots, announcing that they might be available by the week of Sept. 20.
A former senior FDA leader told Endpoints that they’re departing because they’re frustrated that CDC and their ACIP committee are involved in decisions that they think should be up to the FDA. The former FDAer also said he’s heard they’re upset with CBER director Peter Marks for not insisting that those decisions should be kept inside FDA. What finally did it for them was the White House getting ahead of FDA on booster shots.
Translation: They were tired of vaccines being directed by politics, rather than science; so they left. Axios reported on this very thing on August 23, 2021. To quote…
The Biden administration said booster doses for everyone would begin the week of Sept. 20, pending a “thorough review of the evidence” from the FDA and the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
Yes, but: The review has barely begun. Pfizer just submitted its application for a third vaccine dose to the FDA, and Moderna has yet to do so.
Further down the article it reads…
The whole point of expert drug committees is to help shape policy without political or industry influence, but those committees are neutered if their recommendations are ignored or if decisions are made before they even have a chance to say anything.
It seems to me that the Biden Administration has soured relations with the science community. While the world will suffer from the intellectual and moral absence of Gruber and Krause, I salute the courage of their convictions. They saw something wrong and took a positive action to protest it. I wish I saw more of this type of courage from the science community. If so, a lot of harm could have been avoided. For example, imagine the effect of saying “no” to profit incentives linked to Covid-19 vaccinations. I firmly believe that the moment hospitals could profit from Covid-19 vaccinations was the moment, vaccine hesitancy began to spike. After all, how many people wondered if the vaccine push was more about money than the public good?
Hmm… Let’s consider the money angle for a moment.
To quote The Christian Post from August, 2020…
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield acknowledged during a House hearing Friday that COVID-19 data could be inflated because hospitals receive a monetary gain by reporting COVID-19 cases.
Republican Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri questioned Redfield during a House Oversight and Reform subcommittee hearing on coronavirus containment. He asked about the “perverse incentive” for hospitals to classify deaths as being coronavirus related when the virus didn’t cause the death.
Luetkemeyer voiced concern about how an automobile accident-related death could be recorded as a COVID-related death. In this scenario, the death was recorded as COVID-related because the virus was in the victim’s system, even if the car accident was the major factor.
“As long as you have COVID in your system you get to claim it as a COVID death, which means you get more money as attending physician, hospital, whatever,” Luetkemeyer said during the hearing. “Would you like to comment on that, about the perverse incentive? Is there an effort to try and do something different.”
Redfield responded by telling the congressman, “I think you’re correct in that and we’ve seen this in other disease processes too.”
It certainly did not help matters when doctors were cancelled on social media for sharing how they were being pressured to list Covid-19 on death certificates. Consider this quote from the Foundation for Economic Education.
“Hospital administrators might well want to see COVID-19 attached to a discharge summary or a death certificate. Why? Because if it’s a straightforward, garden-variety pneumonia that a person is admitted to the hospital for—if they’re Medicare—typically, the diagnosis-related group lump sum payment would be $5,000,” said Jensen, whose claim was fact-checked by USA Today. “But if it’s COVID-19 pneumonia, then it’s $13,000, and if that COVID-19 pneumonia patient ends up on a ventilator, it goes up to $39,000.”
The Coronavirus pandemic was unprecedented to be sure and major steps had to be taken to secure the safety of the public. However, there was (and is) a big incentive to keep it going – money. It should not be a surprise to anyone that pharmaceutical companies are making billions from Covid-19 vaccines and I am not arguing against that. I am a Capitalist at heart. Nevertheless, I think too many people are turning a blind eye to the potential for abuse. Rather than point the finger at today, I will direct us to a few examples from the past.
Is greed good?
Natural News reported this in 2010:
A stunning new report reveals that top scientists who convinced the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare H1N1 a global pandemic held close financial ties to the drug companies that profited from the sale of those vaccines. This report, published in the British Medical Journal, exposes the hidden ties that drove WHO to declare a pandemic, resulting in billions of dollars in profits for vaccine manufacturers.
The Guardian reported this in 2009:
Baxter, the US pharmaceutical giant, reached at least seven huge settlements over the past 12 months, some of them for millions of dollars. The company had been accused of fraud amid allegations that it had overpriced medicines by as much as 1,300%.
The disclosure comes days after Baxter’s vaccine, Celvapan H1N1, was given approval by the European Medicines Agency and will raise fears about the growing costs of the swine flu pandemic. Vaccines are expected to cost the government £155m over the next four years.
Baxter became involved in prolonged litigation after being accused of fraudulently overcharging Medicaid, the US health programme that provides a safety net for the poorest families. Executives from the company paid out $2m to the Kentucky state government this year. Jack Conway, the Kentucky attorney general, said: “All of this could have been easily avoided if Baxter… had done what the law requires: report truthful prices.
“Taxpayers are footing the bill for these inflated drug prices, and my office is seeking to recover the money the Medicaid programme lost as a result of this deception and overpayment.”
ABC News reported this in 2009:
Americans are still debating whether to roll up their sleeves for a swine flu shot, but companies have already figured it out: vaccines are good for business.
Drug companies have sold $1.5 billion worth of swine flu shots, in addition to the $1 billion for seasonal flu they booked earlier this year. These inoculations are part of a much wider and rapidly growing $20 billion global vaccine market.
“The vaccine market is booming,” says Bruce Carlson, spokesperson at market research firm Kalorama, which publishes an annual survey of the vaccine industry. “It’s an enormous growth area for pharmaceuticals at a time when other areas are not doing so well,” he says, noting that the pipeline for more traditional blockbuster drugs such as Lipitor and Nexium has thinned.
As always with pandemic flus, taxpayers are footing the $1.5 billion check for the 250 million swine flu vaccines that the government has ordered so far and will be distributing free to doctors, pharmacies and schools. In addition, Congress has set aside more than $10 billion this year to research flu viruses, monitor H1N1’s progress and educate the public about prevention.
So, am I arguing that the Covid-19 pandemic is a grand money making scheme engineered by pharmaceutical companies? No, not at all. I am saying that it is a real phenomenon that pharmaceutical companies are leveraging to their full financial advantage; maybe even to the detriment of their customers. Come to think of it, maybe Covid-19 is not so unprecedented. Perhaps, for pharmaceutical companies, leveraging pandemics for big profits is just business as usual. After all, pandemics are nothing new.
2003
2004
2005
2009
2014
2016
Okay, this sounds like a conspiracy theory…
Pandemics represent HUGE profits for pharmaceutical companies. Maybe, just maybe, money is the reason why some are pushing booster shots based on “hope” rather than scientific data.
But for a government agency to push profits over public health so blatantly, would be beyond belief. Right? Well, let’s not overlook human nature and the fact that (according to Lawfirms.com) CDC members own more than 50 patents connected to vaccinations. Here are a few quotes…
The CDC Immunization Safety Office is responsible for investigating the safety and effectiveness of all new vaccinations; once an investigation is considered complete, a recommendation is then made to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) who then determines whether the new vaccine will be added to the current vaccination schedule. Members of the ACIP committee include physicians such as Dr. Paul Offit, who also serves as the chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Offit and other CDC members own numerous patents associated with vaccinations and regularly receive funding for their research work from the very same pharmaceutical companies who manufacturer vaccinations which are ultimately sold to the public. This situation creates an obvious conflict of interest, as members of the ACIP committee benefit financially every time a new vaccination is released to the market.
And another quote…
Unfortunately, a significant number of ACIP committee members receive direct financial returns when more vaccinations are added to the current schedule. Many own vaccination related patent(s) and/or stock shares of the pharmaceutical companies responsible for supplying new vaccines to the public. Others receive research grant money, funding for their academic departments, or payments for the oversight of vaccine safety trials.
Annndddd… this…
When prompted with questions pertaining to their financial connections with pharmaceutical companies, most ACIP members claim they are able to remain unbiased despite the rewards they receive every time a new vaccination is recommended to the public. In numerous instances, vaccines released to the market are later removed after serious side effects are documented. The rotavirus vaccine was one such example; it was pulled from the market in 1999, a year after its initial approval. In 2001, the House Government Reform Committee found that four out of the eight ACIP members who voted to approve the vaccine had direct financial ties to one or more of the pharmaceutical companies who produced the vaccine for public use. Similar situations involving many other vaccinations have been independently documented over the course of nearly 20 years.
So, is your mind blown yet?
The website GreenMedInfo did some extensive research on the CDC’s patents and found this…
There are CDC patents applicable to vaccines for Flu, Rotavirus, Hepatitis A, HIV, Anthrax, Rabies, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, Group A Strep, Pneumococcal disease, Meningococcal disease, RSV, Gastroenteritis, Japanese encephalitis, SARS, Rift Valley Fever, and chlamydophila pneumoniae.
CDC also has several patents for administering various ”shots” via aerosol delivery systems for vaccines.
There’s a CDC patent on a process for vaccine quality control by “quantifying proteins in a complex preparation of uni- or multivalent commercial or research vaccine preparations.”
There’s a CDC patent on a method “for producing a model for evaluating the antiretroviral effects of drugs and vaccines.”
CDC has a patent for companies who want to test their respiratory system applicable vaccine on an artificial lung system.
And that was only a partial list of CDC patents.
So, I said a lot. Let’s recap.
Vaccines = Money for hospitals
Vaccines = BIG money for pharmaceutical companies
Vaccines = Money for (some of the) people who approve vaccines because of the patents they own.
All that to say…
Are the CDC and people like them thinking of the public health? Yes.
Are the CDC and people like them also thinking about the money? OH YES!
THANK YOU!
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