Pandemic — The Next Big Thing

The Sting Revisited

When Dr. Kory testified before the U.S. Senate on December 8, 2020, the message was clear: Ivermectin might well be able to bring the COVID-19 virus to a spectacular halt. Studies were cited that should have convinced expert and layman alike. Dr. Kory's testimony appeared on YouTube, but—no surprise—it was soon removed by the platform for being "dangerous and misleading". So why did the pharmaceutical industry, the NIH, CDC, NIAID and FDA ignore Dr. Kory?

Everyone knows why, or at least the obvious reason why: a cheap, safe and effective treatment would torpedo Big Pharma's plans to make $$$illions from their rushed-to-market experimental mRNA treatments. The problem, not buried in the fine print, but nonetheless not widely trumpeted at the time: An Emergency Use Authorization for a medical product, such as the EUA sought by Big Pharma for mRNA gene therapy, cannot be granted if there exists a viable and safe treatment for the disease that the experimental product has targeted:

"FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products...when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives."

There it is: Ivermectin accepted as a treatment, no EUA for mRNA, no Big Bucks for Big Pharma. As a truly humanitarian gesture, the Senate Committee could have insisted, or at least recommended that an EUA be immediately issued for Ivermectin, but nooooo. A behind-the-scenes eight-hundred-pound gorilla effect?

If one refers back to a 2004 article in the New York Review of Books by Marcia Angell, formerly editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, (New York Review of Books JULY 15, 2004 ISSUE) we clearly see a few key facts about Big Pharma that provide important background for understanding the present Big Pharma Phiasco. (Bold type emphasis added in the following excerpt.)

"Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.

"What does the eight-hundred-pound gorilla do? Anything it wants to.

"What’s true of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla is true of the colossus that is the pharmaceutical industry. It is used to doing pretty much what it wants to do. The watershed year was 1980. Before then, it was a good business, but afterward, it was a stupendous one. From 1960 to 1980, prescription drug sales were fairly static as a percent of US gross domestic product, but from 1980 to 2000, they tripled. They now stand at more than $200 billion a year. Of the many events that contributed to the industry’s great and good fortune, none had to do with the quality of the drugs the companies were selling.

"As their profits skyrocketed during the 1980s and 1990s, so did the political power of drug companies. By 1990, the industry had assumed its present contours as a business with unprecedented control over its own fortunes. For example, if it didn’t like something about the FDA, the federal agency that is supposed to regulate the industry, it could change it through direct pressure or through its friends in Congress.

"When I say this is a profitable industry, I mean really profitable. It is difficult to conceive of how awash in money big pharma is. Drug industry expenditures for research and development, while large, were consistently far less than profits. For the top ten companies, they amounted to only 11 percent of sales in 1990, rising slightly to 14 percent in 2000. The biggest single item in the budget is neither R&D nor even profits but something usually called “marketing and administration”—a name that varies slightly from company to company. In 1990, a staggering 36 percent of sales revenues went into this category, and that proportion remained about the same for over a decade. Note that this is two and a half times the expenditures for R&D.

"[But] the industry [now] faces ... problems. It happens that, by chance, some of the top- selling drugs—with combined sales of around $35 billion a year—are scheduled to go off patent within a few years of one another. This drop over the cliff began in 2001, with the expiration of Eli Lilly’s patent on its blockbuster antidepressant Prozac. In the same year, AstraZeneca lost its patent on Prilosec, the original “purple pill” for heartburn, which at its peak brought in a stunning $6 billion a year. Bristol-Myers Squibb lost its best-selling diabetes drug, Glucophage. The unusual cluster of expirations will continue for another couple of years. While it represents a huge loss to the industry as a whole, for some companies it’s a disaster. Schering-Plough’s blockbuster allergy drug, Claritin, brought in fully a third of that company’s revenues before its patent expired in 2002. Claritin is now sold over the counter for much less than its prescription price. So far, the company has been unable to make up for the loss by trying to switch Claritin users to Clarinex—a drug that is virtually identical but has the advantage of still being on patent.

"Even worse is the fact that there are very few drugs in the pipeline ready to take the place of blockbusters going off patent. In fact, that is the biggest problem facing the industry today, and its darkest secret. All the public relations about innovation is meant to obscure precisely this fact. The stream of new drugs has slowed to a trickle, and few of them are innovative in any sense of that word. Instead, the great majority are variations of oldies but goodies—“me- too” drugs.

"Of the seventy-eight drugs approved by the FDA in 2002, only seventeen contained new active ingredients, and only seven of these were classified by the FDA as improvements over older drugs. The other seventy-one drugs approved that year were variations of old drugs or deemed no better than drugs already on the market. In other words, they were me-too drugs. Seven of seventy-eight is not much of a yield. Furthermore, of those seven, not one came from a major US drug company.

"For the first time, in just a few short years, the gigantic pharmaceutical industry is finding itself in serious difficulty. It is facing, as one industry spokesman put it, “a perfect storm.” To be sure, profits are still beyond anything most other industries could hope for, but they have recently fallen, and for some companies they fell a lot. And that is what matters to investors...

"...Nevertheless, the industry keeps promising a bright new day. It bases its reassurances on the notion that the mapping of the human genome and the accompanying burst in genetic research will yield a cornucopia of important new drugs.

"The industry is also being hit with a tidal wave of government investigations and civil and criminal lawsuits. The litany of charges includes illegally overcharging Medicaid and Medicare, paying kickbacks to doctors, engaging in anticompetitive practices, colluding with generic companies to keep generic drugs off the market, illegally promoting drugs for unapproved uses, engaging in misleading direct-to-consumer advertising, and, of course, covering up evidence. Some of the settlements have been huge. TAP Pharmaceuticals, for instance, paid $875 million to settle civil and criminal charges of Medicaid and Medicare fraud in the marketing of its prostate cancer drug, Lupron. All of these efforts could be summed up as increasingly desperate marketing and patent games, activities that always skirted the edge of legality but now are sometimes well on the other side.

"How is the pharmaceutical industry responding to its difficulties? One could hope drug companies would decide to make some changes—trim their prices, or at least make them more equitable, and put more of their money into trying to discover genuinely innovative drugs, instead of just talking about it. But that is not what is happening. Instead, drug companies are doing more of what got them into this situation. They are marketing their me-too drugs even more relentlessly. They are pushing even harder to extend their monopolies on top-selling drugs. And they are pouring more money into lobbying and political campaigns. As for innovation, they are still waiting for Godot.

"This is an industry that in some ways is like the Wizard of Oz—still full of bluster but now being exposed as something far different from its image. Instead of being an engine of innovation, it is a vast marketing machine. Instead of being a free market success story, it lives off government-funded research and monopoly rights. Yet this industry occupies an essential role in the American health care system, and it performs a valuable function, if not in discovering important new drugs at least in developing them and bringing them to market. But big pharma is extravagantly rewarded for its relatively modest functions. We get nowhere near our money’s worth.

"Clearly, the pharmaceutical industry is due for fundamental reform. Reform will have to extend beyond the industry to the agencies and institutions it has co-opted, including the FDA and the medical profession and its teaching centers." [end of excerpt, posted without permission under the "Fair Use" rulings regarding the 1976 Copyright Act for NON-profit academic, research, and general information purposes.]

And clearly, the evidence so diligently exposed by Marcia Angell demonstrates that the pharmaceutical industry—even by the turn of the century—had itself become a systemic chronic disease typical of the capitalist extreme, needing a cure that the patient resists at every turn for there is only one way to cure such a disease. "Reform"? It is a lesson as old as capitalism itself: when an industry grows and grows beyond all reasonable bounds, acquires the means to control its future through big money, bribes, kickbacks, dirty tricks, cheating, murder, crimes against humanity ...and then unforseen circumstances begin to erode the cash-flow.... I need hardly say what the cure is.

All that exposed in 2004! What, then, is the situation today?

Let's go back to the original topic here: already in the early years of the century the pharmaceutical industry was in trouble, looking for "new ways" to keep the big bucks flowing. And now we see Dr. David Martin's patent research evidence, showing that Big Pharma was patenting everything they could dream up, why not? They all surely have big teams of patent lawyers et al., and who knows, if they came to own every conceivable new idea from medical—especially genetic—research, it might all fall into place. "It"?

Patents for mRNA technology, COVID viruses and modifications such as "gain-of-function"—as revealed by Dr. David Martin—were amassed by Big Pharma through the Noughties and Teenies, including patents on the spike protein itself, and eventually arrived to the attempt to patent a general-purpose accepted-by-all remedy for avoiding seasonal flu if not the entire range of such possible viruses. As Marcia Angell notes, vaccines, whether they be classic ones, or the new mRNA techolgy-based injections (technically they are not "vaccines"), remain one of the biggest money-makers for Big Pharma. So we can deduce the mRNA technique was supposed to finally save the industry and restore growth and profitability.

But, disaster!, Tony Fauci and Niaid were refused patents for mRNA "vaccines"! Oh dear me! What to do?

Tony and his Big Pharma pals were enraged they couldn’t get a patent on an all-purpose-general-use-mRNA-flu-shot, to be accepted by all good little boys and girls the world over so they wouldn't get the sniffles for Christmas and give a possibly fatal dose to grandma. A "remedy" not only for the sniffles and grandma but for big pharma too—the key to continue to maintain/expand their profits with a new, (patented) revolutionary miracle technique. So the light-bulb pops above Tony’s head as in a Beavis & Butthead classic, “Hey Beavis! Those fart-knockers won't give us a patent? Let’s INTRODUCE the disease we need to get such a vaccine launched. Yeah! he-he-he, huh-huh-huh. Cool!"

My reference here might be thought crude and insulting, but while there are surely many very clever people involved in the Big Pharma Phiasco, scientists, directors, politicians, et al., there appear to be few, if any, who might be thought of as wise. Under the circumstances, the clever be damned.

Now, it seems settled that the research that led to COVID-19 was bioweapon-oriented. But that does not prove it was released (also a near-certainty) intentionally as a bioweapon. That may have happened a little later, as a side-line of the big-money project when Big Pharma chatted with the Pentagon, and it was thought a cool idea to infect some Iranian leaders. Primarily, COVID was released so that Fauci, NIAID & Big Pharma could then demand an EUA and get eventual patents on all such mRNA treatments. But for COVID these people had research indicating they knew the spike protein that was generated by the injection did not remain localized but spread to many organs in the body. What if that should cause "spike protein disease"? It was probably thought that the problem would be minor, and if enough pressure and propaganda be applied, success in "vaccinating the world" could still be achieved, and collateral damage ignored. Unfortunately the spike protein complication resulted in a great many deaths and serious injuries, far, far outnumbering such negative outcomes which in previous incidences of introduction of vaccines, were sufficient to immediately force a withdrawal of the product from further testing.

But the push for world vaccination continues, with such force that one begins, or rather continues to wonder why. Some see a conspiracy to reduce world population. I'd need at least some extensive whistleblower hard data before I'd credit the long list of perpetrators as being that competent, to have planned this thing from the get-go. So far I have to see the whole thing as a Colossal Con Job for Big Bucks turned into a Colossal SNAFU for which the perps are trying very hard to cover their dorsal protuberances. The whole affair is typical of very clever but very unwise participants. Indeed, as a sequel to The Sting, it has been a rip-roaring success, one that you should be embarrassed for having fallen for. As a plan to reduce population, that's strictly sci-fi. If that's the case, the SNAFU is even bigger since the populations dying off most successfully seem to be we Westerners. But Indians, Mexicans, S. Americans... citizens of nations and regions taking the Ivermectin/HCQ route? Apparently they would be the preponderant survivors.

So now that everyone knows we have been mightily deceived, wouldn't there be some better course of action for Big Pharma, the NIH, CDC, NIAID and FDA that could admit error, preserve profit, avoid criminal charges, avoid all sorts of horrible (for Big Pharma) outcomes, and actually benefit society by combining everything we surely now know....

Well, since there is not the least hint from them that they know we know they have been caught out, perhaps we are in store for the next big thing—oh so clever!—whether dreamed up well in advance, or perhaps just recently appearing on the drawing boards: the next medical product that will seal the fate of humanity in partnership with an ever-expanding BIG PHARMA presence and profits-spree. If spike protein has caused problems, why not introduce (after a maximum have been mRNA'd of course) a spike protein cleaner-upper, a scavenger of spike protein residues in the body that will solve all the residual post-vaccination and post-COVID-19 disease problems. Come one, come all! One dose of this miracle oil will Hoover up all harmful COVID residues! Take a third mortgage on your house if necessary! Is such a drug possible? If so, you can bet your bottom dollar on it being even more expensive than Remdesivir, and available only for the privileged, the heavily insured, and third mortgagees.

As Yogi Berra once quipped, "Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future". However, I would certainly be surprised if the Big Pharma Phiasco is not destined for several more entertaining chapters. Be ready. Don't participate ! Stay well !!

Coffee is essential for good writing! Buy me One? Click the photo…