JACQUELINE BROOK
I used to work in advertising, and I've never seen a more brilliant advertising campaign than this whole bird flu terror pitch. Think: WMDs, Part II. And a fascinating group of people are becoming even more obscenely wealthy as a result of the incessant media drumbeat over just "tens of deaths," as National Geographic reported in its October 2005 issue.
This currently nonexistent yet so-called "pandemic flu" is an utterly shameless ad campaign for a drug called T2amiflu and a vaccine that we as yet know nothing about and that we may nonetheless all be forced to take by law. The interrelationships between government agencies, politicians, and pharmaceutical companies have never been more transparent. But bully for Bush. He's making everything so transparent. I love it.
The article in National Geographic titled "Tracking the Next Killer Flu" was peppered with big, bold, scary subheads, running across page spreads. Early on, it relates this story: "Tran Tinh Hien, a doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City [in Vietnam]... and his staff ... sustained patients with oxygen masks and ventilators and treated them with oseltamivir, or Tamiflu, an expensive antiviral drug that can fight H5N1 .... .
"He and his staff did everything they could for their nine bird-flu patients. 'Unfortunately,' he says, 'we could not save any lives.'"
In other words, Tamiflu was ineffective.
Later in the same article, we read: "Because Tamiflu can protect against H5N1 as well as treat it, governments are building up stockpiles, and drug maker Roche is hard-pressed to keep up with demand. The U.K. has ordered enough for 15 million people, a quarter of its population, and France almost as much. The U.S. has opted for a smaller stockpile — just 2.3 million treatments so far."
Clearly, given the previous story, the statement that Tamiflu can treat bird-flu is false advertising. This is not the only example of shoddy journalism on the part of National Geographic in this article. Continually referring to the flu outbreak of 1918 as the Spanish flu — even after explaining that the descriptive "Spanish" is false and misleading — was the other thing that I found to be inexplicable. If you are Spanish, you should be highly offended that blame is still being laid at your feet for a flu that first broke out at a U.S. army base in Kansas. One would think that National Geographic, in particular, would have more finely tuned sensibilities.
Anyway, on Nov. 2, Boy-Bush announced that he's going to order states to buy 31 million treatment courses of the drugs Tamiflu and Relenza — while only offering to foot the bill for one-quarter of the cost.
How convenient for people like Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and Bilderberg Group chairman Etienne Davignon. Rumsfeld used to be chairman of Gilead Sciences, the company that developed Tamiflu, and he still has a stake in the company that's worth between $5 million and $25 million — as finally confirmed and reported by a responsible journalist at Fortune magazine. The other two gentlemen sit on Gilead's amazingly "politically well-connected" board. In fact, according to the Fortune article, the Pentagon ordered $58 million worth of Tamiflu in July — an order which directly benefits the bottom line of the secretary of defense.
Oddly enough, Mr. Rumsfeld was also secretary of defense in 1976 when a single army recruit at Fort Dix, N.J., died of swine flu. A national immunization program was whipped up in no time and then-President Ford was enlisted to urge all Americans to roll up their sleeves for the shots.
Unfortunately, several people dropped dead shortly after being vaccinated and many others ended up with something called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which causes paralysis. The vaccination program was quickly halted. The only casualty of swine flu was that single army recruit.
Donald Rumsfeld: The man who brought us torture and the highly controversial sweetener aspartame. The man who serves both pharmaceutical companies and the military-industrial complex.
Jacqueline Katz at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control CDC is heading up a team that's actually working on making the H5N1 bird-flu transmissible between humans. Let's all hope that Mr. Rumsfeld doesn't send someone over to her lab to fetch some of the new virus — and make the whole scare real.
In the meantime, if you want to avoid bird flu, don't go to any afflicted bird farms and, if you do, don't handle the birds.
