BIRD FLU SCAM TO COST US PLENTY
Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2006 12:41 am
BIRD FLU SCAM TO COST US PLENTY
"That's because this proposed legislation will strip Americans of the right
to a trial by jury if they are harmed by either an experimental or licensed
drug or vaccine they are forced by the government to take whenever federal
health officials declare a public health emergency.
This bill gives the HHS secretary the sole authority to decide if a drug
manufacturer violated laws that mandate drug safety, and it bans any
citizen from challenging the HHS head's decision in the civil court system.
Big Pharma has been pushing for protection like this for several years. In
this millennium, the angst and sense of loss following 9/11 was manipulated
to produce similar legislative efforts designed to protect drug and vaccine
makers even if they manufactured products that were not properly tested,
nor clinically proven safe.
"
http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/hanchette178.html
MOUNTAIN VIEWS: BIRD FLU SCAM TO COST US PLENTY
By John Hanchette
OLEAN -- The current U.S. Congress has many qualities that are not
endearing, but one of the worst is its addiction to hidden agendas. Case in
point:
In the middle of last week, one short day after the bill had been
introduced, the powerful Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
Committee -- by a quick, simple voice vote of the full panel -- passed
something called the "Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development
Act of 2005."
It will probably hit the Senate floor this week for a full vote of that
august chamber (and may have already done so by the time you read this). A
similar companion bill is expected to be introduced in the House of
Representatives before week's end. The lobbying lubrication needed in that
conservative chamber to ram it through passage will be even less than in
the Senate.
The Senate proposal (S.1873) -- authored and filed by North Carolina
Republican senator Richard Burr, an obedient favorite of the current Bush
administration -- sounds innocent and altruistic enough, right?
It would establish an efficient-sounding Biomedical Advanced Research and
Development Agency (BARDA) to speed up and "provide incentives and
protections" for the "domestic manufacture of medical countermeasures" --
vaccines and drugs -- that would help stop pandemic or epidemic sickness
within the United States.
Burr said in introducing the bill that it will simply give the
Cabinet-level Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) the "additional
authority and resources to partner with the private sector to rapidly
develop drugs and vaccines."
So, who could be against such a lofty goal? Well, I could, for one. This
bill is a slavering wolverine masquerading as a furry little lab rat.
First of all, whenever you -- as consumers, taxpayers and citizens -- hear
any federal government source saying it wants "to partner with the private
sector," you should grab your wallet with both hands and hold on tight. In
this case, you should also take your children into your arms. I'm not the
only one who's noticed the danger in this proposal.
Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center
(NVIC) -- a private, non-governmental advocacy group pushing for safer
vaccines -- calls the Senate bill "a drug company stockholder's dream and a
consumer's worst nightmare."
It is, simply put, a legislative genuflection to Big Pharma -- the
steamroller-powerful drug-making sector of the economy. The pharmaceutical
mega-firms contribute millions to the coffers of congressional members, but
if this is signed into law, they potentially could save billions.
That's because this proposed legislation will strip Americans of the right
to a trial by jury if they are harmed by either an experimental or licensed
drug or vaccine they are forced by the government to take whenever federal
health officials declare a public health emergency.
This bill gives the HHS secretary the sole authority to decide if a drug
manufacturer violated laws that mandate drug safety, and it bans any
citizen from challenging the HHS head's decision in the civil court system.
Big Pharma has been pushing for protection like this for several years. In
this millennium, the angst and sense of loss following 9/11 was manipulated
to produce similar legislative efforts designed to protect drug and vaccine
makers even if they manufactured products that were not properly tested,
nor clinically proven safe.
"This proposed legislation," said NVIC's Fisher, "like the power and money
grab by federal health officials and industry in the Homeland Security Act
of 2002 and the Project Bioshield Act of 2004, is an unconstitutional
attempt by some in Congress to give a taxpayer-funded handout to
pharmaceutical companies for drugs and vaccines."
Further, Fisher points out, the government, under this bill, "could force
all citizens to use these drugs and vaccines while absolving everyone
connected from any responsibility for injuries and deaths which occur" in
their wake.
Sen. Burr is himself the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on
Bioterrorism and Public Health Preparedness. In his bill, BARDA -- the new
R and D agency mentioned above -- would be established as the single point
of authority in the federal system for the advanced research and
development of vaccines and drugs in response to bioterrorism and outbreaks
of natural disease.
And BARDA would operate in secret.
The agency would be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and from the
Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires public public transparency
-- making it almost certain that no evidence of injuries or deaths caused
by drugs and vaccines labeled as "countermeasures" to bioterrorism or new
disease epidemics would ever become public. The bill would not only provide
Big Pharma impenetrable cover, it would exempt lots of federal cost
oversight requirements, and would forbid government purchases of generic
versions of such new drugs or vaccines, a current practice that saves
taxpayers millions of dollars.
The Burr bill means, notes vaccine safety advocate Fisher, "that if an
American is injured by an experimental flu or anthrax vaccine he or she is
mandated to take, that citizen will be banned from exercising the
constitutional right to a jury trial even if it is revealed that the
vaccine maker engaged in criminal fraud and negligence in the manufacture
of the vaccine."
Burr himself has acknowledged that "liability exposure" is one of the
factors that has left drug firms "reluctant to invest" in biodefense and
influenza countermeasures.
The timing of the new attempt at congressional protection for Big Pharma --
the Burr bill -- is exquisite.
The wording "natural outbreaks" of disease and "pandemics" mentioned by
Sen. Burr in his call for support of the bill are designed to make citizens
and fellow senators alike think of one thing -- avian flu.
This new biological "threat" is increasingly on the minds of Americans and
is reaching near-panic level in terms of public perception.
David Daigle, a spokesman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, said the CDC has been experiencing an incredible average of
447,000 hits a day on its bird flu information Web site. He pegged the
Internet traffic level "insane."
Americans are avalanching health officials, newspapers, TV stations, their
doctors and other public information sources with anxious questions about
keeping bird-feeders in their back yards, whether they can eat turkey this
Thanksgiving, and whether they should report sightings of dead birds along
the roadside. (You can, you can, you don't have to.)Worried patients are
asking their doctors for Tamiflu, designed to treat ordinary human flu --
not bird flu.
And guess the number of Americans who have died of avian flu already? Zero.
How many human cases of the bird flu have been reported in the United
States? Zero.
That's right, none. The bird flu, which originated in South Korea more than
two years ago, rarely spreads from birds to humans, and hasn't even been
shown to affect poultry yet in this country. Only 120 or so humans have
ever come down with this rare viral strain of influenza -- H5N1 -- and all
of them in Asia. Most of the 60 deaths so far -- 43 -- have occurred in
Vietnam. Thailand has the next largest number of deaths, 13.
The disease in birds is just now reaching eastern Europe through avian
migration. Turkey, Romania, and European Russia have cataloged the
dangerous strain.
The virus might be an eventual threat to the flocks of poultry farmers
here, but many scientists seem to think H5N1 influenza won't sicken or kill
humans on a mass basis unless its mutating properties change dramatically.
Can Senate Democrats stop the passage of Burr's bill? Not bloody likely.
Several Democrats in that chamber have criticized the Burr bill, but mostly
from the perspective that it would do little to provide any response to an
avian flu outbreak.
"I hope that people don't think this is going to solve the problem of the
possible avian flu pandemic that is on our doorstep," warned Sen. Tom
Harkin, an Iowa Democrat.
This legislation is obviously fast-tracked. Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist, the Tennessee Republican, is a co-sponsor, as is Senate Budget
Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, a Republican from New Hampshire.
They obviously don't care that if signed into law, this proposal would
eliminate both legal and regulatory safeguards, applied to vaccines and
drugs, that need strengthening, not weakening or elimination. They
obviously don't care if children or adults harmed by vaccines and drugs
will have to forfeit their right to present a case in front of a jury in a
civil court of law.
Don't think this never happens. The Food and Drug Administration is legally
responsible at present for regulating Big Pharma, and for ensuring that
vaccines and drugs released to the public are safe and effective. Drug
companies marketing pain-killer and anti-depressants that have injured
thousands are being held accountable in civil courts all the time. And the
FDA has come under intense criticism for keeping information from the
American public about drug dangers.
For almost two decades, vaccine makers have already been protected from
most liability in civil courts through the National Childhood Vaccine
Injury Act of 1986 and a concurrent compensation program that offers
victims an alternative to civil courts. That program has already awarded
almost $2 billion to injured victims of mandated vaccines -- yet two-thirds
of the plaintiffs are turned away from such compensation through vigorous
defense of the manufacturers by Justice Department lawyers.
"The drug companies and doctors got all the liability protection they
needed in 1986," says Fisher of the NVIC, "but they are greedy and want more."
She continues: "It's a sad day for this nation when Congress is frightened
and bullied into allowing one profit-making industry to destroy the Seventh
Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing citizens their day in court in
front of a jury of their peers."
Amen to that.
John Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University, is
a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a Pulitzer Prize-winning
national correspondent. He was a founding editor of USA Today and was
recently named by Gannett as one of the Top 10 reporters of the past 25
years. He can be contacted via e-mail at Hanchette6@aol.com.
"That's because this proposed legislation will strip Americans of the right
to a trial by jury if they are harmed by either an experimental or licensed
drug or vaccine they are forced by the government to take whenever federal
health officials declare a public health emergency.
This bill gives the HHS secretary the sole authority to decide if a drug
manufacturer violated laws that mandate drug safety, and it bans any
citizen from challenging the HHS head's decision in the civil court system.
Big Pharma has been pushing for protection like this for several years. In
this millennium, the angst and sense of loss following 9/11 was manipulated
to produce similar legislative efforts designed to protect drug and vaccine
makers even if they manufactured products that were not properly tested,
nor clinically proven safe.
"
http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/hanchette178.html
MOUNTAIN VIEWS: BIRD FLU SCAM TO COST US PLENTY
By John Hanchette
OLEAN -- The current U.S. Congress has many qualities that are not
endearing, but one of the worst is its addiction to hidden agendas. Case in
point:
In the middle of last week, one short day after the bill had been
introduced, the powerful Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
Committee -- by a quick, simple voice vote of the full panel -- passed
something called the "Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development
Act of 2005."
It will probably hit the Senate floor this week for a full vote of that
august chamber (and may have already done so by the time you read this). A
similar companion bill is expected to be introduced in the House of
Representatives before week's end. The lobbying lubrication needed in that
conservative chamber to ram it through passage will be even less than in
the Senate.
The Senate proposal (S.1873) -- authored and filed by North Carolina
Republican senator Richard Burr, an obedient favorite of the current Bush
administration -- sounds innocent and altruistic enough, right?
It would establish an efficient-sounding Biomedical Advanced Research and
Development Agency (BARDA) to speed up and "provide incentives and
protections" for the "domestic manufacture of medical countermeasures" --
vaccines and drugs -- that would help stop pandemic or epidemic sickness
within the United States.
Burr said in introducing the bill that it will simply give the
Cabinet-level Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) the "additional
authority and resources to partner with the private sector to rapidly
develop drugs and vaccines."
So, who could be against such a lofty goal? Well, I could, for one. This
bill is a slavering wolverine masquerading as a furry little lab rat.
First of all, whenever you -- as consumers, taxpayers and citizens -- hear
any federal government source saying it wants "to partner with the private
sector," you should grab your wallet with both hands and hold on tight. In
this case, you should also take your children into your arms. I'm not the
only one who's noticed the danger in this proposal.
Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center
(NVIC) -- a private, non-governmental advocacy group pushing for safer
vaccines -- calls the Senate bill "a drug company stockholder's dream and a
consumer's worst nightmare."
It is, simply put, a legislative genuflection to Big Pharma -- the
steamroller-powerful drug-making sector of the economy. The pharmaceutical
mega-firms contribute millions to the coffers of congressional members, but
if this is signed into law, they potentially could save billions.
That's because this proposed legislation will strip Americans of the right
to a trial by jury if they are harmed by either an experimental or licensed
drug or vaccine they are forced by the government to take whenever federal
health officials declare a public health emergency.
This bill gives the HHS secretary the sole authority to decide if a drug
manufacturer violated laws that mandate drug safety, and it bans any
citizen from challenging the HHS head's decision in the civil court system.
Big Pharma has been pushing for protection like this for several years. In
this millennium, the angst and sense of loss following 9/11 was manipulated
to produce similar legislative efforts designed to protect drug and vaccine
makers even if they manufactured products that were not properly tested,
nor clinically proven safe.
"This proposed legislation," said NVIC's Fisher, "like the power and money
grab by federal health officials and industry in the Homeland Security Act
of 2002 and the Project Bioshield Act of 2004, is an unconstitutional
attempt by some in Congress to give a taxpayer-funded handout to
pharmaceutical companies for drugs and vaccines."
Further, Fisher points out, the government, under this bill, "could force
all citizens to use these drugs and vaccines while absolving everyone
connected from any responsibility for injuries and deaths which occur" in
their wake.
Sen. Burr is himself the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on
Bioterrorism and Public Health Preparedness. In his bill, BARDA -- the new
R and D agency mentioned above -- would be established as the single point
of authority in the federal system for the advanced research and
development of vaccines and drugs in response to bioterrorism and outbreaks
of natural disease.
And BARDA would operate in secret.
The agency would be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and from the
Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires public public transparency
-- making it almost certain that no evidence of injuries or deaths caused
by drugs and vaccines labeled as "countermeasures" to bioterrorism or new
disease epidemics would ever become public. The bill would not only provide
Big Pharma impenetrable cover, it would exempt lots of federal cost
oversight requirements, and would forbid government purchases of generic
versions of such new drugs or vaccines, a current practice that saves
taxpayers millions of dollars.
The Burr bill means, notes vaccine safety advocate Fisher, "that if an
American is injured by an experimental flu or anthrax vaccine he or she is
mandated to take, that citizen will be banned from exercising the
constitutional right to a jury trial even if it is revealed that the
vaccine maker engaged in criminal fraud and negligence in the manufacture
of the vaccine."
Burr himself has acknowledged that "liability exposure" is one of the
factors that has left drug firms "reluctant to invest" in biodefense and
influenza countermeasures.
The timing of the new attempt at congressional protection for Big Pharma --
the Burr bill -- is exquisite.
The wording "natural outbreaks" of disease and "pandemics" mentioned by
Sen. Burr in his call for support of the bill are designed to make citizens
and fellow senators alike think of one thing -- avian flu.
This new biological "threat" is increasingly on the minds of Americans and
is reaching near-panic level in terms of public perception.
David Daigle, a spokesman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, said the CDC has been experiencing an incredible average of
447,000 hits a day on its bird flu information Web site. He pegged the
Internet traffic level "insane."
Americans are avalanching health officials, newspapers, TV stations, their
doctors and other public information sources with anxious questions about
keeping bird-feeders in their back yards, whether they can eat turkey this
Thanksgiving, and whether they should report sightings of dead birds along
the roadside. (You can, you can, you don't have to.)Worried patients are
asking their doctors for Tamiflu, designed to treat ordinary human flu --
not bird flu.
And guess the number of Americans who have died of avian flu already? Zero.
How many human cases of the bird flu have been reported in the United
States? Zero.
That's right, none. The bird flu, which originated in South Korea more than
two years ago, rarely spreads from birds to humans, and hasn't even been
shown to affect poultry yet in this country. Only 120 or so humans have
ever come down with this rare viral strain of influenza -- H5N1 -- and all
of them in Asia. Most of the 60 deaths so far -- 43 -- have occurred in
Vietnam. Thailand has the next largest number of deaths, 13.
The disease in birds is just now reaching eastern Europe through avian
migration. Turkey, Romania, and European Russia have cataloged the
dangerous strain.
The virus might be an eventual threat to the flocks of poultry farmers
here, but many scientists seem to think H5N1 influenza won't sicken or kill
humans on a mass basis unless its mutating properties change dramatically.
Can Senate Democrats stop the passage of Burr's bill? Not bloody likely.
Several Democrats in that chamber have criticized the Burr bill, but mostly
from the perspective that it would do little to provide any response to an
avian flu outbreak.
"I hope that people don't think this is going to solve the problem of the
possible avian flu pandemic that is on our doorstep," warned Sen. Tom
Harkin, an Iowa Democrat.
This legislation is obviously fast-tracked. Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist, the Tennessee Republican, is a co-sponsor, as is Senate Budget
Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, a Republican from New Hampshire.
They obviously don't care that if signed into law, this proposal would
eliminate both legal and regulatory safeguards, applied to vaccines and
drugs, that need strengthening, not weakening or elimination. They
obviously don't care if children or adults harmed by vaccines and drugs
will have to forfeit their right to present a case in front of a jury in a
civil court of law.
Don't think this never happens. The Food and Drug Administration is legally
responsible at present for regulating Big Pharma, and for ensuring that
vaccines and drugs released to the public are safe and effective. Drug
companies marketing pain-killer and anti-depressants that have injured
thousands are being held accountable in civil courts all the time. And the
FDA has come under intense criticism for keeping information from the
American public about drug dangers.
For almost two decades, vaccine makers have already been protected from
most liability in civil courts through the National Childhood Vaccine
Injury Act of 1986 and a concurrent compensation program that offers
victims an alternative to civil courts. That program has already awarded
almost $2 billion to injured victims of mandated vaccines -- yet two-thirds
of the plaintiffs are turned away from such compensation through vigorous
defense of the manufacturers by Justice Department lawyers.
"The drug companies and doctors got all the liability protection they
needed in 1986," says Fisher of the NVIC, "but they are greedy and want more."
She continues: "It's a sad day for this nation when Congress is frightened
and bullied into allowing one profit-making industry to destroy the Seventh
Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing citizens their day in court in
front of a jury of their peers."
Amen to that.
John Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University, is
a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a Pulitzer Prize-winning
national correspondent. He was a founding editor of USA Today and was
recently named by Gannett as one of the Top 10 reporters of the past 25
years. He can be contacted via e-mail at Hanchette6@aol.com.