{"id":933,"date":"2020-05-15T22:28:28","date_gmt":"2020-05-15T22:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/?p=933"},"modified":"2020-05-15T22:28:28","modified_gmt":"2020-05-15T22:28:28","slug":"trump-unveils-plan-that-would-see-big-pharma-reap-massive-profits-from-covid-19-vaccine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/?p=933","title":{"rendered":"Trump Unveils Plan That Would See Big Pharma Reap Massive Profits from COVID-19 Vaccine"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Raul Diego<\/a><\/p>\n

President Trump has revealed a plan to mobilize the US military to deliver mass vaccinations across the country, coupled with Operation Warp Speed, a \u201cManhattan project-style\u201d race to produce a COVID-19 vaccine.<\/i>\"trump_Slaoui.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Aformer Big Pharma executive and a four-star General have just been appointed by President Trump to lead a \u201cManhattan project-style effort to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.\u201d The effort, called Operation Warp Speed, has set a goal to create 300 million doses<\/a> of a non-existent vaccine by January.<\/p>\n

Moncef Slaoui, who used to run research and development<\/a> for the world\u2019s largest vaccine company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), oversaw the development of an Ebola vaccine in tandem<\/a> 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<\/a> in 2018; a public-private partnership that intends to \u201caccelerate the development of vaccines and immunotherapies against major global diseases\u201d and counts with the participation of the biggest pharmaceutical companies<\/a> in the world, including Sanofi Pasteur, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and, of course, GSK.<\/p>\n

Joining him will be U.S. Army General Gustave F. Perna, commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC)<\/a> \u2013 the primary provider of materiel to the United States Army \u2013 since 2016. As such, Perna has been in charge of logistical management for the Department of Defense\u2019s (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\u2019s motto: \u201cIf a Soldier shoots it, drives it, flies it, wears it, communicates with it, or eats it \u2013 AMC provides it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The announcement comes two days after a press release<\/a> by the Department of Defense revealed that a $138 million contract was awarded to ApiJect Systems America<\/a> for the production of millions of prefilled syringes as part of projects \u201cJumpstart\u201d and \u201cRAPID\u201d (Rapid Aseptic Packaging of Injectable Drugs). The DoD claims that the contract will \u201cdramatically expand U.S. production capability\u201d 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\u2019s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), led by Dr. Robert Kadlec, who has recently been the subject of intense scrutiny<\/a> over some highly questionable ties to Big Pharma and curious past.<\/p>\n

A tug of war for the SNS<\/h3>\n

The Trump administration\u2019s 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The rollout is occurring as Congressional attention focuses on irregularities<\/a> surrounding the supply of ventilators in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), a thousand of which were shipped<\/a> to South Africa just the other day. In addition, yesterday\u2019s so-called \u201cwhistleblower\u201d testimony<\/a> 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\u2019 ASPR, Robert Kadlec<\/a>. BARDA<\/a> is an office within ASPR that is tasked with sourcing pharmaceutical and medical supplies for the Strategic National Stockpile.<\/p>\n

More controversy surrounding the Strategic National Stockpile erupted after Kushner made remarks<\/a> 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<\/a>, 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<\/a> on its website to back up Kushner\u2019s erroneous assertions about the stockpile.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cfor weeks now<\/a>.\u201d Considering the history<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Mass involuntary vaccines and jostling for profits<\/h3>\n

Yesterday, President Donald Trump revealed<\/a> that a decision had been made to mobilize the U.S. military to deliver mass vaccinations across the country. The \u201cmassive job,\u201d however, still has no discernable vaccine yet to inject into the American population \u201cat the end of the year.\u201d Trump\u2019s group of medical advisors, including NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, are skeptical that any such vaccine can be developed sooner than 12 to 18 months.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuplication only leads to infighting and slowing people down,\u201d said former U.S. ASPR, Nicole Lurie regarding the creation of Operation Warp Speed. She decried<\/a> the spirit of marketplace competition, stating that the world \u201cshould be engaged in this competition against the virus, not against one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

With over 110 COVID-19 vaccines in development \u2013 only eight of which have entered human trials \u2013 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Raul Diego President Trump has revealed a plan to mobilize the US military to deliver mass vaccinations across the country, coupled with Operation Warp Speed, a \u201cManhattan project-style\u201d race to produce a COVID-19 vaccine. Aformer Big Pharma executive and a four-star General have just been appointed by President Trump to lead a \u201cManhattan project-style […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=933"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":934,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933\/revisions\/934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}