Trump Unveils Plan That Would See Big Pharma Reap Massive Profits from COVID-19 Vaccine
Aformer
Big Pharma executive and a four-star General have just been appointed by
President Trump to lead a “Manhattan project-style effort to develop a
vaccine for the novel coronavirus.” The effort, called Operation Warp
Speed, has set a goal to create 300 million doses of a non-existent vaccine by January.
Moncef Slaoui, who used to run research and development for the world’s largest vaccine company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), oversaw the development of an Ebola vaccine in tandem with
the American National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a biotech firm the
company had acquired two years earlier, that was distributed in the
West African nation of Liberia in 2015. Slaoui joined the board of
directors
of the Human Vaccines Project in
2018; a public-private partnership that intends to “accelerate the
development of vaccines and immunotherapies against major global
diseases” and counts with the participation of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, including Sanofi Pasteur, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and, of course, GSK.
Joining him will be U.S. Army General Gustave F. Perna, commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC) –
the primary provider of materiel to the United States Army – since
2016. As such, Perna has been in charge of logistical management for the
Department of Defense’s (DoD) co-production agreements of American
weapons systems with foreign countries, in addition to the approximately
149 locations worldwide and over 70,000 military and civilian employees
who carry out the command’s motto: “If a Soldier shoots it, drives it,
flies it, wears it, communicates with it, or eats it – AMC provides it.”
The announcement comes two days after a press release by the Department of Defense revealed that a $138 million contract was awarded to ApiJect Systems America for
the production of millions of prefilled syringes as part of projects
“Jumpstart” and “RAPID” (Rapid Aseptic Packaging of Injectable Drugs).
The DoD claims that the contract will “dramatically expand U.S.
production capability” of injectable vaccines by October of this year.
Project Jumpstart, according to the press release, was coordinated with
their Joint Acquisition Task Force and HHS’s Office of the Assistant
Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), led by Dr. Robert
Kadlec, who has recently been the subject of intense scrutiny over some highly questionable ties to Big Pharma and curious past.
A tug of war for the SNS
The Trump administration’s ostensibly
independent program to develop and deploy a vaccine against COVID-19 had
been in the hands of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner and Trump advisor,
Peter Navarro, though Bloomberg reported
in April that HHS Secretary Alex Azar had been tasked by Trump to speed
up the development of a vaccine and had been meeting for at least a
month prior with White House officials.
The rollout is occurring as Congressional attention focuses on irregularities surrounding the supply of ventilators in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), a thousand of which were shipped to South Africa just the other day. In addition, yesterday’s so-called “whistleblower” testimony by
ousted Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority
(BARDA) chief, Rick Bright, is also spotlighting the issues at the SNS,
which is controlled by HHS’ ASPR, Robert Kadlec. BARDA is an office within ASPR that is tasked with sourcing pharmaceutical and medical supplies for the Strategic National Stockpile.
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More controversy surrounding the Strategic National Stockpile erupted after Kushner made remarks about
the role the SNS plays in emergency deployment situations. Kushner was
harshly criticized for implying that the SNS belonged to the federal
government and served only as a back-up for states, who should be
accumulating their own stockpiles. Despite being contradicted by well-established guidelines, which make clear that the SNS is in place to shore up any deficiencies in a public health emergency, the White House deliberately changed the language on its website to back up Kushner’s erroneous assertions about the stockpile.
What seems clear, however, is that
Kushner himself was not the mastermind behind the sudden policy tweak.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a spokesperson for the Office of
the ASPR told CNN they had been using such language “for weeks now.” Considering the history of
how the SNS came to be in the hands of the ASPR, this latest tweak to
how the SNS is managed might just be a new wrinkle in an old plan to
mass inoculate the population of the United States.
Mass involuntary vaccines and jostling for profits
Yesterday, President Donald Trump revealed that
a decision had been made to mobilize the U.S. military to deliver mass
vaccinations across the country. The “massive job,” however, still has
no discernable vaccine yet to inject into the American population “at
the end of the year.” Trump’s group of medical advisors, including NIAID
director, Anthony Fauci, are skeptical that any such vaccine can be
developed sooner than 12 to 18 months.
“Duplication only leads to infighting
and slowing people down,” said former U.S. ASPR, Nicole Lurie regarding
the creation of Operation Warp Speed. She decried the
spirit of marketplace competition, stating that the world “should be
engaged in this competition against the virus, not against one another.”
With over 110 COVID-19 vaccines in
development – only eight of which have entered human trials – the race
to be the vaccine chosen for deployment by the ASPR in the forthcoming
potentially compulsory vaccination of more than 300 million people has
many people seeing green.
Feature photo | President Donald Trump,
left, listens as Moncef Slaoui, a former GlaxoSmithKline executive,
speaks about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House, May
15, 2020, in Washington. Alex Brandon | AP
Article written by Raul Diego, for MintPress News where
it first appeared. Posted here with permission. Diego is a MintPress
News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and
documentary filmmaker.
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