Is Avian Flu another Pentagon Hoax?

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Is Avian Flu another Pentagon Hoax?

F. William Engdahl,

 

October 31, 2005

 

No sooner are indictments being handed down to Scooter Libby, the

Chief of Staff of the Vice President of the United States for lies and

coverup of information used deliberately to suppress the fact the Bush

Administration had no 'smoking gun' to prove Saddam Hussein was

building a nuclear arsenal, but a new scandal is surfacing every bit

as outrageous and ultimately, likely also criminal.

 

Against all scientific prudence and normal public health procedure,

the world population is being whipped up into a fear frenzy by

irresponsible public health officials from the US Administration to

WHO to the United States Centers for Disease Control. They all warn

about the imminent danger that a malicious viral strain might spread

from infected birds, primarily in Vietnam and other Asian centers, to

contaminate the entire human species in pandemic proportions. Often

the flu pandemic of 1918 which is said to have killed 18 million

worldwide, is cited as an example of what 'might' lie in store for us.

 

On November 1, appropriately enough the day after Halloween, President

Bush is scheduled to visit the National Institutes of Health in

Bethesda Maryland to announce his Administration's strategy of how it

will prepare for the next flu epidemic, whether from Bird Flu or some

other strain. The plan has been a year in the making. On October 28

the Senate passed an $8 billion emergency funding bill to address the

growing Avian Flu panic. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike

Leavitt, in a moment of candor during the debate on the Senate bill

told the press, 'If it isn't the current H5N1 virus that leads to an

influenza pandemic, at some point in our nation's future, another

virus will.' In the meantime taxpayer billions will have gone to a

handful of pharmaceutical giants positioned to profit. None stands to

reap more lucre than the Swiss-US pharmaceutical giant Roche Holdings

of Basle.

 

The only medicine we are told which reduce the symptoms of general or

seasonal influenza and 'possibly' might reduce symptoms also of Avian

Flu, is a drug called Tamiflu. Today the giant Swiss pharmaceutical

firm, Roche, holds the sole license to manufacture Tamiflu. Due to the

media panic, the order books at Roche today are filled to overflowing.

Roche recently refused a request from the US Congress to lift its

exclusive patent rights to allow other drug manug´facturers to produce

Tamiflu with the improbable excuse that it was in effect, too complex

for others to rapidly produce.

 

However, the real point of interest is the company in California who

developed Tamiflu and gave the marketing rights to its patented

discovery to Roche.

 

'Rummy Flu'

 

Tamiflu was developed and patented in 1996 by a California biotech

firm, Gilead Sciences Inc. Gilead is a NASDAQ (GILD) listed stock

company which prefers to maintain a low profile in the current rush to

Tamiflu. That might be because of who is tied to Gilead. In 1997,

before he became US Secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld was named

Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences, where he remained until

early 2001 when he became Defense Secretary. Rumsfeld had been on the

board of Gilead since 1988 according to a January 3 1997 company press

release.

 

An as-yet-unconfirmed report is that Rumsfeld while Secretary of

Defense also purchased an additional stock in his former company,

Gilead Sciences Inc., worth $18 million, making him one of its largest

if not the largest stock owners today.

 

The Secretary of Defense, the man who allegedly supported the use of

contrived intelligence to justify the war on Iraq, is now poised to

reap huge gains for a flu panic his Administration has done everything

it can to promote. It would be useful to know whether the Pentagon's

successor to Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans developed the

strategy of biowarfare behind the current Avian Flu panic. Perhaps

some enterprising Congressional committee might look into the entire

subject of plausible conflicts of interest regarding Secretary Rumsfeld.

 

Rumsfeld stands to make a fortune on royalties as a panicked world

population scrambles to buy a drug worthless in curing effects of

alleged Avian Flu. The model suggests the parallel to the brazen

corruption of Halliburton Corporation whose former CEO is Vice

President Dick Cheney. Cheney's company has so far gotten billions

worth of US construction contracts in Iraq and elsewhere. Coincidence

that Cheney's closest political friend is Defense Secretary and Avian

Flu beneficiary Don Rumsfeld? It is another example of what someone

has called the principle of modern US corrupt special interest

politics: 'Concentrate the benefits; diffuse the costs' President Bush

has ordered the US Government to buy $2 billion worth of Gilead

Science's Tamilflu.

 

GMO Chickens come home to roost

 

But Tamiflu conflicts are perhaps just the tip of the iceberg of the

Avian Flu story. There is high-level biological research underway in

Britain and presumably also the United States to develop a genetic

engineering method to make chickens and other birds 'resistant' to

Avian Flu viruses.

 

British scientists are reportedly genetically engineering chickens to

produce birds resistant to the lethal strains of the H5N1 virus

devastating poultry in the Far East. Laurence Tiley, Professor of

Microular Virology at Cambridge University and Helen Sang of the

Roslin Institute in Scotland are involved in developing 'transgenic

chickens' which would have small pieces of genetic material inserted

into chicken eggs to allegedly make the chickens H5N1 resistant.

 

Tiley told the Times of London on October 29, 'Once we have regulatory

approval, we believe it will only take between four and five years to

breed enough chickens to replace the entire world (chicken)

population.' The real question in this dubious undertaking is which

GMO giants are underwriting the research and development of GMO

chickens and who will control their products. It is increasingly clear

that the entire saga of Avian Flu is one whose dimensions are only

slowly coming to light. What we can see so far is not at all pretty.

 

Global Research Contributing Editor William Engdahl is author of 'A

Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,

Pluto Press and the soon-to-be released book, 'Seeds of Destruction:

The Geopolitics of Gene-ocide'. He can be contacted through his

website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.