Mass Murderers and Poisoned Medicines

Scientia Est Potentia:
Mass Murderers and Poisoned Medicines

Interested in the ethics and business practices of one of the companies that makes your flu shot? Read on.

In February 2009 the Austrian division of Baxter International Inc. sent out samples of their latest vaccine to three neighboring countries: Germany, Slowenia and the Czech Republic. Diligent researchers in the Czech Republic discovered a problem with the batch when ferrets died after being inoculated with vaccine made from the samples. Baxter quickly backtracked and apologized for its mistake. It turns out that the “mistake” was actually a hybrid of the H3N2 seasonal flu and the deadly H5N1 bird flu. What makes Baxter’s “mistake” particularly dangerous is the 60% mortality rate of the Bird Flu. Up until that point the bird flu suffered from a relatively low airborne transmission rate and as such was not as dangerous. The only people that contracted it worked in bird farms and were literally up to their elbows in bird feathers, blood, and feces. This all changed with Baxter’s “mistake”. The hybrid cross between H3N2 and H5N1 massively increased the Bird Flu’s ability to spread and thus made it eminently more dangerous.

How does a “mistake” of this magnitude happen? The simplest answer is that it does not. Baxter adheres to a set of internationally recognized safety protocols known as Bio-safety Level 3. Bio-safety Level 3 is intended for highly deadly diseases for which there are known treatments. The only step higher in Bio-safety is taken for diseases for which there is no known treatment. Several types of deadly diseases covered by this level of safety are West Nile Virus, SARS, yellow fever etc… In labs such as these there are ample security measures taken in order to insure a colossal “accident” of Baxter’s magnitude will not occur.

The smoking bullet in this incident is that these labs didn’t simply receive a live form of the Bird flu virus…they received a mutated human hybrid form. Baxter has committed two unforgivable “accidents.” The first “accident” was creating the hybrid human/bird flu plague in the first place. The second “mistake” Baxter committed was in shipping the deadly virus from its home lab in Deerfield Illinois halfway around the world to Europe where a third “error” occurred when they shipped it again to three other countries.

Science is an expensive and exhausting process and rarely do such “accidents” occur. If such a virus exists, and it is in the possession of a pharmaceutical company, it is because they created it through millions of dollars spent on research and development. This begs the question: why would a vaccine company create a hybrid deadly pandemic disease? The answer is really quite simple: because they are in the business of selling vaccines! If the disease were to somehow make its way into the human population and started killing 3/5ths of the people who were infected with it, the company that was first to come up with a vaccine would stand to make a windfall profit!

Before you put down this paper and walk away in disbelief that any one could be so evil you must understand that there is precedent for this in the industry. In the 1980’s Bayer stopped selling a version of its blood clotting medicine for hemophiliacs to Americans when it was discovered that it was contaminated with HIV. So what did Bayer do? Burn the remaining inventory and cut its losses. No. As the New York Times reported in 2003, Bayer simply stopped selling the poisoned medicine in the US. They shipped the remaining inventory across the world and knowingly infecting thousands upon thousands of people with HIV. All in the name of the bottom line.

And it wasn’t just Bayer getting in on the action. It turns out that Baxter itself was involved. In 1996 Baxter and Bayer Yakuhin Ltd settled with 1,800 Japanese hemophiliacs who contracted AIDS from blood-clotting products sold by the companies in the 1980’s. At the time of the settlement nearly half of the claimants had already died of the disease and in the meanwhile had unwittingly infected thousands more.

So what does our government do to a company that has such a history of gross negligence?

Slap them on the wrist and offer them a big fat government contract.

***

In March of 2009 Mexico was on the verge of a civil war fueled by the booming drug trade. There were talks in the US of sending what few National Guard troops we still had stateside to help quell the burgeoning rebellion.

A month later providence intervened. The outbreak of the H1N1 virus had effectively shut down Mexico. All public events and places were closed and the government of Mexico no longer needed the military to enforce a curfew to quell the uprising. With nary a bullet spent, the Civil War was averted by a nasty case of the flu. Panic spread as tales of the tragedy seeped out of Mexico. The world braced itself for another possible pandemic. The US government quickly awarded contracts to pharmaceutical companies to create a vaccine to avert disaster. One of the first companies awarded a lucrative contract was Baxter International Inc.

In a move that would make fast tracking seem slow Baxter announced it was ready to mass produce a vaccine for the H1N1 virus a mere 12 weeks after it received its first sample of the disease. 12 weeks of research and development and a few band aid safety tests on ferrets, and the stuff was ready for your veins and Baxter’s bottom line. That is unless they already had a vaccine before they even got a sample of the flu.

On August 28th, 2007 Baxter filed for a provisional patent application for a vaccine for H1N1. This patent was approved on March 5th, 2009. The H1N1 flu was first identified a month later in Mexico. Thus Baxter held a patent for a vaccine for a disease which did not exist yet! Luckily for the stockholders they only had to wait a month before getting lucrative contracts with governments all over the world.

The question now becomes a personal one. Do you trust a corporation that willingly gave people AIDS and “accidentally” shipped a hybrid of the Bird flu, with anything you would put in your body? Would you trust them to inject you with a vaccine that was produced in record time and fast tracked through the FDA? Would you take a vaccine that has Thiomersal or Thimerosal in it? Would you change your mind if I told you that Thiomersal contains 49% mercury by weight? Would you change your mind if you found out that many parents believe it was Thiomersal that caused their child’s autism? Would you take a vaccine that had adjuvant? Would you change your mind if I told you that one such adjuvant, Squalene is linked to Gulf War Sickness through anthrax vaccines given to the troops? Would you change your mind if you read in the German newspapers how Chancellor Angela Merkel and High German officials are getting special “clean” vaccines that are free of adjuvants and Thiomersal while the German public is being given vaccines containing them? Why are they special? If these vaccines are safe for us why aren’t they safe for our leaders?

Finally why is it a crime to ship anthrax through the mail and not a crime to ship a plague form of the flu? Who are the real terrorists? By most accounts H1N1 has killed less people than the seasonal version of the flu, and yet you cannot watch television for more than 10 minutes without some overt or covert reference to the thing. President Obama even declared this “pandemic” a national emergency… yet there conveniently isn’t enough vaccine for his own children to get jabbed.

Corporations exist to sole benefit of the shareholders and as such are only beholden to them and their bottom line. Should a few people die on the glorious road to profit…who cares? As long as the profits come in stockholders look the other way. In the US corporations have for a century held the same rights as an individual with none of the ethical, legal, and moral responsibilities that come with being human. The time has come for that to change.

I think that it’s high time we start holding corporations accountable for the atrocities they commit. 750 million dollars to 2000 people in Japan is quite simply not enough. Corporate charters must be revoked and the companies must be held as accountable as a person would be for the deaths of so many people. What exactly do we do with convicted serial killers in this country?

WWW.SPINALFIRE.COM

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