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EBOLA AND THE PHARMACEUTICAL-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX


A woman in my neighbourhood told me she went to the Ward Office to get her Depo Provera shot. The health worker there said: Have you had the medicine for elephantitis yet? She replied: No, we got some but my husband threw it away. So the woman gave her a dose of elephantitis vaccine, right then and there. Note this incident occurred in an urban area of Kathmandu. The woman in question resides miles away from the tropical area where elephantitis occurs.

Why was the Ward coercing people in Kathmandu to take elephantitis vaccines? According to the same woman, she went home and walked to the water tap, and she felt so dizzy and strange she “couldn’t recognize anybody.” Besides the side effects that nobody’s talking about, its also clear there are incentives for health workers to give unnecessary and inappropriate vaccines to people. These health workers are unknowing “marketers” in a chain of social marketing set up by a million dollar pharmaceutical company in some faraway country which has managed to exploit a public health crisis for its own benefit.

In much the same way, the ebola crisis is clearly a cash-cow for Western companies, some of them established pharmaceutical companies but oftentimes newly-minted front companies that seem to do nothing but offer ebola vaccines, all in their very early stages of development, and in a few cases, only on paper. The GM people were the first on board to publicly announce they already had a vaccine—and also to share the astonishing news that genetically modified tobacco was the panacea for this aweful killer disease. The stocks soared for companies that appear to be operating with a website and not much history--- they too claimed miracle results for their untested vaccines. These companies, it appeared, had big backing from the US military industrial complex.

Here is a “Stocks to buy” recommendation from Market Watch:

Stocks to Buy
All small Ebola-related stocks are highly speculative and carry extremely high risk of loss. Most promising are companies that are working on vaccines. If a vaccine is successfully developed, it may quickly become a sustainable big business. Two companies of note are NewLink Genetics NLNK, +3.71% and Inovio Pharmaceuticals INO, +1.62%
A company such as Tekmira Pharmaceuticals TKMR, +2.32%   carries a very high risk because its Ebola drug may or may not work and its other programs are in very early stages while the stock price has rocketed on speculation.
Companies such as BioCryst Pharmaceuticals BCRX, +2.63% Sarepta Therapeutics SRPT, +4.06% and Chimerix CMRX, +2.66% carry less risk than Tekmira because their programs are more advanced.
In general, buying stocks based on their potential Ebola drugs may be a good trade but likely to be a bad investment because even if there is a successful drug, after the initial stockpiling the market size is limited.
More Pumps
Whenever there is a crisis, unfortunately pumpers and dumpers take advantage of it. Investors are well advised to carefully study SEC filings, especially balance sheets and accompanying notes of the new wave of pumps on Ebola-related companies such as Dynatronics DYNT, +0.18% iBio IBIO, +6.74% Hemispherx Biopharma HEB, -2.72% Sharps Compliance SMED, +1.14% NanoViricides NNVC, +1.27% Sanomedics International Holdings SIMH, -9.76% American Heritage International AHII, +7.14% and PositiveID PSID, +0.00% For the most part, astute investors after reading SEC documents will stay away from these stocks.


More MarketWatch news on Novavax:
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Novavax's stock NVAX, +4.11% surged 12% in premarket trade Monday after the drug maker said it expects to initiate a Phase 1 clinical trial of its Ebola vaccine in December. The company said it had recently initiated a non-human primate study of its vaccine candidate, named EBOV GP. Novavax said EBOV GP, modified with its Matrix-M adjuvant, helped induce neutralizing antibody levels within ranges reported to protect against Ebola viruses in rodent and non-human primate models. The stock was up 0.2% so far this year through Friday, compared with a 6.3% gain in the S&P 500.





The Motley Fool, a website that gives advice on investing, has this interesting tidbid:

Now what: If you've ever wondered what emotional trading looks like, you've found it! Not a single Ebola vaccine drugmaker is anywhere close to bringing a drug to market, yet all are soaring as if the potential patient pool just skyrocketed.
Although Tekmira Pharmaceuticals just over a week ago worked out the clinical and regulatory framework to allow its experimental TKM-Ebola treatment to be given to infected and suspected-to-be-infected patients, this study is merely in the ramping up of phase 1 studies. Similarly, Sarepta Therapeutics (NASDAQ: SRPT  ) noted earlier this morning that it has about 100 doses worth of its Ebola vaccine, yet its experimental drug is also in early stage development. NewLink Genetics announced the start of Ebola vaccine trials less than four weeks ago. Finally, BioCryst Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: BCRX  ) , also up as much as 6% today, hasn't even gotten its Ebola vaccine development off the ground yet!

And not just Big Pharma but everyone from AFRICOM to suppliers of hazmat suits seem to be benefiting. Not to talk about the UN’s IOM which glibly Twittered about the shelter it had set up in Sierra Leone with the help of the “Department of Defense”—totally violating all norms of UN impartiality.

Yesterday, Obama asked for 6 billion to fight the ebola crisis—giving us the strange deja-vu, reminding us of the moment in which Bush asked for 60 billion to start a war after 9/11. President Obama was looking particularly jaunty as he went shopping for books for Christmas presents shortly around the same time—making you wonder if he got some Chrismas shopping pocket-money from Big Pharma.

 Most of this 6 billion will go to AFRICOM, where he’s sent 3000 troops to “fight ebola.” Even the Washington Post ran an article questioning whether this humanitarian intervention had ulterior motives. It may not go unnoticed that Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone are rich in resources, and that Chinese and other investors were partnering with the mining operations—before ebola came along and sunk the economy of these three West African countries. Read an article from The Economist that explains who was here, mining gold and iron. 

Perhaps not co-incidentally, there appears to be a patent on ebola that has been filed, and which appears to be linked to the US Center for Disease Control. This is publicly available for all to view on Google. The patent claims ebola is an invention, and that the CDC appears to be the institution that these "inventors" have deposited the virus in.  To me, the language of this patent also appears to have changed, ever so slightly, from what I remember reading six months before--I seem to remember the CDC being the direct inventor of this patent, and before there was no mention of this invention being invented to cure people. 

Biological warfare is not unknown in the history of Western civilization, but especially in America. White people knowingly gave Native Americans smallpox laden blankets which decimated the last remaining population. And in Africa itself, the polio oral vaccine distributed to Belgian controlled Africa in the late 50s had traces of maqaque monkey mitochondria—making observers wonder about how this mitchondria ended up in the vaccine. In 2000, the South African health minister went public with the belief that AIDS was invented by the West to depopulate Africa—and while he’s been criticized for causing misinformation and stopping people from accepting anti-retrovirals, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t examine, empirically, if there might be some truth to that statement. I would be interested to see a fact-sheet on the companies who’ve manufactured anti-retrovirals—and how many of those companies are linked directly or indirectly with people, agencies and corporations known to be part of the US’s military-industrial complex. 
The 2014 ebola epidemic in West Africa, and the history of people cured or killed after vaccine ingestion, is telling. Those who took the ZMapp vaccine haven’t always survived. And those who didn’t take the vaccine, but got oral rehydration therapy and good care, often did. So there’s no guarantee that untested vaccines are going to cure patients, and in addition they may have harmful side effects to kidneys, liver etc that at present we have no idea about.

Glaxo Smith Kline is on the point of announcing another new vaccine—coincidentally, just as its about to layoff thousands after a 1.57 billion cost cut.  

This follows the news that ZMapp maker Mapp Pharmaceuticals, with federal funding of course, is speeding up production of a vaccine made of genetically modified tobacco. Produced where? No other place than:

The drug is manufactured in tobacco plants at Kentucky BioProcessing, a unit of cigarette maker Reynolds American.


To  observers, it appears these public health crises are being used, especially by the most powerful country in the world, to extract profits through deliberate campaigns of biological warfare.

UNESCO has brought out a vague fact-sheet on ebola and ethics. But they fail to talk about what the consequences would be for these companies as well as the US military complex if it turned out there are clear and direct links between various actors. Serious investigations need to take place to see what exactly these connections are, and how much money was made by which companies.  The UN Office on Drugs and Crime need to investigate if this was a deliberate biological warfare campaign against West Africa in order for US pharmaceutical companies to gain financial benefits through the stock market.

Newspapers continue to run op-eds that raise noise about “ethics”. Should the drug be given to all? Do controlled drug trails leave out people whose lives could be saved from it? All of these pro-drug op-eds fail to even look at how ebola itself may be the tip of a genocidal biological warfare strategy. If we don’t question it this time, it may become a way of business--start an epidemic, then offer a vaccine-- for the ever-profit seeking companies and their parent body the military-industrial complex of the United States.




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