- WHO's 'Mr Flu' Holland's Albert Osterhaus
has deep ties to pharma industry
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- The WHO gets more money from private pharma and
related industry sources than from governments
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- The UK Pharma Giant GlaxoSmithKline is at the
heart
of the WHO scandals of influence peddling
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- The man with the nickname "Dr Flu", Professor
Albert Osterhaus, of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam Holland has been
named by Dutch media researchers as the person at the center of the worldwide
Swine Flu H1N1 Influenza A 2009 pandemic hysteria. Not only is Osterhaus
the connecting person in an international network that has been described
as the Pharma Mafia, he is THE key advisor to WHO on influenza and is intimately
positioned to personally profit from the billions of euros in vaccines
allegedly aimed at H1N1.
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- Earlier this year the Second Chamber of the Netherlands
Parliament undertook an investigation into alleged conflicts of interest
and financial improprieties of the well-known Dr. Osterhaus. Outside of
Holland and the Dutch media, the only note of the sensational investigation
into Osterhaus' business affairs came in a tiny note in the respected British
magazine, Science.
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- Osterhaus's credentials and expertise in his field were
not in question. What is in question, according to a short report published
by the journal Science, are his links to corporate interests that stand
to potentially profit from the swine flu pandemic. Science carried the
following brief note in its October 16 2009 issue about Osterhaus:
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- " For the past 6 months, one could barely switch
on the television in the Netherlands without seeing the face of famed virus
hunter Albert Osterhaus talking about the swine flu pandemic. Or so it
has seemed. Osterhaus, who runs an internationally renowned virus lab at
Erasmus Medical Center, has been Mr. Flu. But last week, his reputation
took a nosedive after it was alleged that he has been stoking pandemic
fears to promote his own business interests in vaccine development.Last
week, his reputation took a nosedive after it was alleged that he has been
stoking pandemic fears to promote his own business interests in vaccine
development. As Science went to press, the Dutch House of Representatives
had even slated an emergency debate about the matter."
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- On November 3, 2009 it appeared that Osterhaus emerged
with at least the damage somewhat under control. An updated Science blog
noted, "The House of Representatives of the Netherlands today rejected
a motion asking the government to sever all ties with virologist Albert
Osterhaus of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, who had been accused
of conflicts of interest in his role as a government adviser. But Dutch
health minister Ab Klink, meanwhile, announced a "Sunshine Act"
compelling scientists to disclose their financial ties to companies."
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- The Minister, Ab Klink, reportedly a personal friend
of Osterhaus, subsequently issued a statement on the ministry's website,
claiming that Osterhaus was but one of many scientific advisers to the
ministry on vaccines for H1N1, and that the Ministry "knew" about
the financial interests of Osterhaus. Nothing out of the ordinary, merely
pursuit of science and public health, so it seemed.
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- More careful investigation into the Osterhaus Affair
suggests that the world-renowned Dutch Virologist may be at the very center
of a multi-billion Euro pandemic fraud which has used human beings in effect
as human guinea pigs with untested vaccines and in cases now emerging,
resulting in deaths or severe bodily paralysis or injury.
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- The 'Bird Shit Hoax'
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- Albert Osterhaus is no small fish. He stands at the global
nexus of every major virus panic of the past decade from the mysterious
SARS deaths in HongKong, where current WHO Director Margaret Chan got her
start in her career as a local health official. According to his official
bio at the European Commission, Osterhaus was engaged in April 2003, at
the height of the panic over SARS (Severe Acquired Respiratory Syndrome)
in investigation of the Hong Kong outbreak of respiratory illnesses. The
EU report states, "he again showed his skill at moving fast to tackle
a serious problem. Within three weeks he had proved that the disease was
caused by a newly discovered coronavirus that resides in civet cats, other
carnivorous animals or bats."
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- Then Osterhaus moved on as SARS cases vanished from view,
this time publicizing dangers of what he claimed was H5N1 Avian Flu. In
1997 he had already began sounding the alarm following the death in Hong
Kong of a three-year-old who Osterhaus learned had had direct contact with
birds. Osterhaus went into high gear lobbying across Holland and Europe
claiming that a deadly new mutation of avian flu had jumped to humans and
that drastic measures were required. He claimed to be the first scientist
in the world to show that H5N1 could be transferred into humans.
- In a BBC interview in October 2005 on the danger of Avian
Flu, Osterhaus declared, "if the virus manages indeed to, to mutate
itself in such a way that it can transmit from human to human, then we
have a completely different situation, we might be at the start of the
pandemic." He added, "there is a real chance that this virus
could be trafficked by the birds all the way to Europe. There is a real
risk, but nobody can estimate the risk at this moment, because we haven't
done the experiments." It never did manage to mutate, but he was ready
to "do the experiments," presumably for a hefty fee.
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- To bolster his frightening pandemic scenario, Osterhaus
and his lab assistants in Rotterdam began assiduously assembling and freezing
samples of, well, bird shit, in an attempt to build a more scientific argument.
He claimed that at certain times of the year up to 30% of all European
birds acted as carriers of the deadly avian virus, H5N1. He also claimed
that farmers working with hens and chickens were then exposed. Osterhaus
briefed journalists who dutifully noted his alarm. Politicians were alerted.
He wrote papers proposing that the far away deaths in Asia from what he
termed H5N1 were coming to Europe, presumably on the wongs or in the innards
of deadly sick infected birds. He claimed that migratory birds were carrying
the deadly new disease as far west as Rügen and Ukraine. He conveniently
ignored the fact that birds do not migrate east to west but rather north
to south.
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- Osterhaus' Avian Flu alarm campaign really took off in
2003 when a Dutch veterinary doctor became ill and died. Osterhaus claimed
the death was from H5N1. He convinced the Dutch government to order slaughter
of millions of chickens. Yet no other infected persons died from the alleged
H5N1. Osterhaus claimed that that was simply proof of the effectiveness
of the preemptive slaughter campaign.
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- Osterhaus claimed that bird feces were the source, via
air bombardment or droppings, onto populations and birds below. That was
the vehicle for the spread of the deadly new Asian strain of H5N1 he insisted.
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- There was only one problem with the now voluminous frozen
samples of diverse bird excrement he and his associated had collected and
frozen at his institute. There was not one single confirmed example of
H5N1 virus found in any of his samples. At a May 2006 Congress of the World
Organization for Animal Health (OIE), Osterhaus and his Erasmus colleagues
were forced to admit that in testing 100,000 samples of their assiduously
saved bird feces, they had discovered not one single case of H5N1 virus.
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- At a WHO conference in Verona in 2008 titled "Avian
influenza at the Human-Animal Interface," in a presentation to scientific
colleagues undoubtedly less impressed by appeals to pandemic emotion than
the non-scientific public, Osterhaus admitted that "A proper risk
assessment of H5N1 as the cause of a new pandemic cannot be made with the
currently available information." By then, however, his sights were
already firmly on other possible pandemic triggers to focus his vaccination
activities.
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- Swine Flu and WHO corruption
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- When no mass wave of human deaths from Avian Flu materialized
and after Roche, maker of Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline had banked billions
of dollars in profits from worldwide government stockpiling of their dangerous
and reportedly ineffective antiviral drugs, Tamiflu by Roche, and Relenza
by GlaxoSmithKline, Osterhaus and other WHO advisers turned to other greener
pastures.
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- By April 2009 their search seemed rewarded as La Gloria,
a small Mexican village in Veracruz, reported a case of a small child ill
with what had been diagnosed as "Swine Flu" or H1N1. With indecent
haste the propaganda apparatus of the World Health Organization in Geneva
went into gear with statements from the director-general Dr Margaret Chan,
about a possible danger of a global pandemic.
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- Chan made such irresponsible statements as declaring
"a public health emergency of international concern." The further
cases of outbreak at La Gloria Mexico were reported on one medical website
as, "a 'strange' outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led
to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident,
symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm."
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- Notably those were symptoms which would make sense in
terms of the proximity of one of the world's largest pig industrial feeding
concentrations at La Gloria owned by Smithfield Farms of the USA. Residents
had picketed the Smithfield Farms site in Mexico for months complaining
of severe respiratory problems from the fecal waste lagoons. That possible
cause of the diseases in La Gloria apparently did not interest Osterhaus
and his colleagues advising the WHO. The long-awaited "pandemic"
that Osterhaus had predicted ever since his involvement with SARS in the
Guandgong Province of China in 2003, was now finally at hand.
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- On June 11, 2009 Margaret Chan of WHO made the declaration
of a Phase 6 "Pandemic Emergency" regarding the spread of H1N1
Influenza. Curiously in announcing it, she noted, "On present evidence,
the overwhelming majority of patients experience mild symptoms and make
a rapid and full recovery, often in the absence of any form of medical
treatment." She then added, "Worldwide, the number of deaths
is smallwe do not expect to see a sudden and dramatic jump in the number
of severe or fatal infections."
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- It later was learned that Chan acted, following heated
debates inside WHO, on the advice of the scientific advisory group of WHO,
or SAGE, the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts. One of the members of
SAGE at the time and today was Dr. Albert "Mr Flu" Osterhaus.
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- Not only was Osterhaus in a key position to advocate
the panic-inducing WHO "Pandemic emergency" declaration. He was
also chairman of the leading private European Scientific Working group
on Influenza (ESWI), which describes itself as a "multidisciplinary
group of key opinion leaders in influenza [that] aims to combat the impact
of epidemic and pandemic influenza." Osterhaus' ESWI is the vital
link as they themselves describe it, "between the World Health Organization
(WHO) in Geneva, the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin and the University
of Connecticut, USA."
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- What is more significant about the ESWI is that its work
is entirely financed by the same pharma mafia companies that make billions
on the pandemic emergency as governments around the world are compelled
to buy and stockpile vaccines on declaration of a WHO Pandemic. The funders
of ESWI include H1N1 vaccine maker Novartis, Tamiflu distributor, Hofmann-La
Roche, Baxter Vaccines, MedImmune, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur and
others.
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- Not to lose the point, the world-leading virologist,
official adviser on H1N1 to the governments of the UK and Holland, Dr Albert
Osterhaus, head of the Department of Virology at the Erasmus Medical College
of Rotterdam, also sat on the WHO's elite SAGE and served as chairman at
the same time of the pharma industry-sponsored ESWI, which in turn urged
dramatic steps to vaccinate the world against the grave danger of a new
Pandemic they insisted could rival the feared 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.
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- The Wall Street bank, JP Morgan, estimated that in large
part as a result of the WHO pandemic decision, the giant pharma firms that
also finance Osterhaus' ESWI work, stand to reap some ¤7.5 to ¤10
billion in profits.
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- A fellow member of WHO's SAGE is Dr Frederick Hayden,
of Britain's Wellcome Trust and reportedly a close friend of Osterhaus.
Hayden also receives money for "advisory" services from Roche
and GlaxoSmithKline among other pharma giants involved in producing products
related to the H1N1 panic.
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- Chairman of WHO's SAGE is another British scientist,
Prof. David Salisbury of the UK Department of Health. He also heads the
WHO H1N1 Advisory Group. Salisbury is a robust defender of the pharma industry.
He has been accused by UK health citizen health group One Click of covering
up the proven links between vaccines and an explosive rise in infant autism
as well as links between the vaccine Gardasil and palsy and even death.
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- Then on September 28, 2009 the same Salisbury stated,
"There is a very clear view in the scientific community that there
is no risk from the inclusion of Thiomersal." The vaccine being used
for H1N1 in Britain is primarily produced by GlaxoSmithKlilne. It contains
the mercury preservative Thiomersol. Because of growing evidence that Thiomersol
in vaccines might be related to autism in children in the United States,
in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Public Health Service
called for it to be removed from vaccines.
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- Yet another SAGE member at WHO with intimate financial
ties to the vaccine makers that benefit from SAGE's recommendations to
WHO is Dr. Arnold Monto, a paid consultant to vaccine maker MedImmune,
Glaxo and ViroPharma.
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- Even more, the meetings of the "independent"
scientists of SAGE are attended by "observers" who include, yes,
the very vaccine producers GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Baxter and company.
One might ask if the SAGE are supposed to be the world's leading experts
on flu and vaccines, why they would ask the vaccine makers to sit in.
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- In the past decade the WHO, in order to boost funds at
its disposal entered into what it calls "public private partnerships."
Instead of receiving its funds solely from member United Nations governments
as its original purpose had been, WHO today receives almost double its
normal UN budget in the form of grants and financial support from private
industry. The industry? The very drug and vaccine makers who benefit from
decisions like the June 2009 H1N1 Pandemic emergency declaration. As the
main financiers of the WHO bureaucracy, naturally the Pharma Mafia and
their friends receive what has been called "open door red carpet treatment"
in Geneva.
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- In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in Germany,
epidemiologist Dr. Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration, an organization
of independent scientists evaluating all flu related studies, noted the
implications of the privatization of WHO and the commercialization of health:
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- "one of the extraordinary features of this influenza
-- and the whole influenza saga -- is that there are some people who make
predictions year after year, and they get worse and worse. None of them
so far have come about, and these people are still there making these predictions.
For example, what happened with the bird flu, which was supposed to kill
us all? Nothing. But that doesn't stop these people from always making
their predictions. Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole
industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.
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- SPIEGEL: Who do you mean? The World Health Organization
(WHO)?
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- Jefferson: The WHO and public health officials, virologists
and the pharmaceutical companies. They've built this machine around the
impending pandemic. And there's a lot of money involved, and influence,
and careers, and entire institutions! And all it took was one of these
influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding...
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- When asked if the WHO had deliberately declared the Pandemic
Emergency in order to create a huge market for H1N1 vaccines and drugs,
Jefferson replied,
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- "Don't you think there's something noteworthy about
the fact that the WHO has changed its definition of pandemic? The old definition
was a new virus, which went around quickly, for which you didn't have immunity,
and which created a high morbidity and mortality rate. Now the last two
have been dropped, and that's how swine flu has been categorized as a pandemic."
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- Conveniently enough, the WHO published the new Pandemic
definition in April 2009 just in time to allow WHO, on advice of SAGE and
others like Albert "Dr Flu" Osterhaus and David Salisbury, to
declare the mild cases of flu dubbed H1N1 Influenza A to be declared Pandemic
Emergency.
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- In a relevant footnote, the Washington Post on December
8 in an article on the severity, or lack of same, of the world H1N1 "pandemic"
reported that, "with the second wave of H1N1 infections having crested
in the United States, leading epidemiologists are predicting that the pandemic
could end up ranking as the mildest since modern medicine began documenting
influenza outbreaks."
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- Russian Parliamentarian and chairman of the Duma Health
Committee, Igor Barinow has called on the Russian Representative to WHO
in Geneva to order an official investigation into the growing evidence
of massive corruption of the WHO by the pharmaceutical industry. "There
are grave accusations of corruption within the WHO," said Barinow.
"An international commission of inquiry is urgently required."
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- Endnotes
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- Martin Enserink, In Holland, the Public Face of Flu
Takes a Hit,
- Science, 16 October 2009:
- Vol. 326. no. 5951, pp. 350 351; DOI: 10.1126/science.326_350b.
-
- Science, November 3, 2009, Roundup 11/3 The Brink Edition,
accessed on
- http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/panay.jpg
- &imgrefurl=http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/11/roundup-113-the.html&usg=___
- pt_M2p5uuWJw2outvX-U8SbR9E=&h=168&w=250&sz=21&hl=en&start=3&tbnid=MnfYxYJ9Q_
- EqPM:&tbnh=75&tbnw=111&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dalbert%2Bosterhaus%2Bscience
- %2Bmagazine%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den.
-
- Article from Dutch, De Farma maffia Deel 1 Osterhaus
BV, 28 november 2009, accessed in
- http://hetonderzoek.blogspot.com/2009/11/de-farma-maffia-deel1-osterhaus-bv.html.
-
- Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport, Financiële
belangen Osterhaus waren bekend
- Nieuwsbericht, 30 september 2009, accessed in
- http://www.minvws.nl/nieuwsberichten/pg/2009/osterhaus.asp.
-
- European Commission, "Research", Dr Albert
Osterhaus, accessed in
- http://ec.europa.eu/research/profiles/index_en.cfm?p=1_osterhaus.
- Ibid.
-
- Jane Corbin, Interview with Dr Albert Osterhaus, BBC
Panorama, 4 October, 2005.
-
- Karin Steinberger, Vogelgrippe: Der Mann mit der Vogelperspektive,
Seuddeutsche Zeitung, 20 October, 2005, accessed in
- "http://www.seuddeutsche.de" www.seuddeutsche.de
panorama/8/373818/text/.
- Ibid.
-
- Schweinegrippe-Geldgieriger Psychopath Auslöser
der Pandemie?, accessed in
- http://polskaweb.eu/vater-der-neuen-grippen-wahrscheinlich-wahnsinnig-673756422645.html.
-
- Ab Osterhaus, External factors influencing H5N1 mutation/reassortment
events with pandemic potential, OIE, 7-9 October 2008, Verona, Italy, accessed
in
- http://www.oie.int/eng/info_ev/en_verone.htm.
-
- WHO Health Advisory, April 2009, accessed in HYPERLINK
"http://www.swine-flu-vaccine.info/" http://www.swine-flu-vaccine.info/.
-
- Biosurveillance, Swine Flu in Mexico- Timeline of Events,
April 24, 2009, accessed in
- http://biosurveillance.typepad.com/biosurveillance/2009/04/swine-flu-in-mexico-timeline-of-events.html.
-
- Cited in Louise Voller, Kristian Villesen, Stærk
lobbyisme bag WHO-beslutning om massevaccination , Information, Copenhagen,
15 November 2009 accessed in http://www.information.dk/215355.
-
- Jane Bryant, et al, The One Click Group Response: Prof.
David Salisbury Threatens Legal Action, 4 March, 2009, accessed in
- http://www.theoneclickgroup.co.uk/documents/vaccines/
- David%20Salisbury%20Threatens%20One%20Click.pdf.
-
- Prof. David Salisbury cited in, Swine flu vaccine to
contain axed additive, London Evening Standard, 28 September 2009, accessed
in .
- http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/printArticle.asp?cu_no=2&item
- _no=316888&version=1&template_id=38&parent_id=20
-
- Bert Ehgartner, Schwindel mit der Schweinegrippe Ist
die Aufregung ein Coup der Pharmaindustrie? Accessed in
- http://www.profil.at/articles/0944/560/254615/schwindel-
- schweinegrippe-ist-aufregung-coup-pharmaindustrie.
-
- Tom Jefferson, Interview with Epidemiologist Tom Jefferson:
'A Whole Industry Is Waiting For A Pandemic' Der Spiegel, 21 July 2009,
accessed in
- http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,637119,00.html.
-
- Ibid.
-
- Louise Voller, Kristian Villesen, Mystisk ændring
af WHO's definition af en pandemi,Copenhagen Information, 15 November 2009,
accessed in
- http://www.information.dk/215341.
-
- Rob Stein, Flu Pandemic Could Be Mild, Washington Post,
December 8, 2009.
-
- Polskanet, Russland fordert internationale Untersuchung,
5 December 2009, accessed in
- http://polskaweb.eu/vater-der-neuen-grippen-wahrscheinlich-wahnsinnig-673756422645.html
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