Rumsfeld's growing stake in Tamiflu
lc
http://cnnmoney.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Defense+Secretary+Rumsfeld+sees+growth+in+Gilead+stake+-+Oct.+31%2C+2005&expire=&urlID=16080875&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmoney.cnn.com%2F2005%2F10%2F31%2Fnews%2Fnewsmakers%2Ffortune_rumsfeld%2F&partnerID=2200
Defense Secretary, ex-chairman of flu treatment rights holder, sees
portfolio value growing.
October 31, 2005: 10:55 AM EST
By Nelson D. Schwartz, Fortune senior writer
NEW YORK (Fortune) - The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be
panicking people around the globe, but it's proving to be very good
news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically
connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company
that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that's now the
most-sought after drug in the world.
Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s chairman from 1997 until he
joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead
stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to
federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.
The forms don't reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but
in the past six months fears of a pandemic and the ensuing scramble
for Tamiflu have sent Gilead's stock from $35 to $47. That's made the
Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush
cabinet, at least $1 million richer.
Rumsfeld isn't the only political heavyweight benefiting from demand
for Tamiflu, which is manufactured and marketed by Swiss pharma giant
Roche. (Gilead receives a royalty from Roche equaling about 10% of
sales.) Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is on Gilead's
board, has sold more than $7 million worth of Gilead since the
beginning of 2005.
Another board member is the wife of former California Gov. Pete
Wilson.
"I don't know of any biotech company that's so politically well-
connected," says analyst Andrew McDonald of Think Equity Partners in
San Francisco.
What's more, the federal government is emerging as one of the world's
biggest customers for Tamiflu. In July, the Pentagon ordered $58
million worth of the treatment for U.S. troops around the world, and
Congress is considering a multi-billion dollar purchase. Roche expects
2005 sales for Tamiflu to be about $1 billion, compared with $258
million in 2004.
Rumsfeld recused himself from any decisions involving Gilead when he
left Gilead and became Secretary of Defense in early 2001. And late
last month, notes a senior Pentagon official, Rumsfeld went even
further and had the Pentagon's general counsel issue additional
instructions outlining what he could and could not be involved in if
there were an avian flu pandemic and the Pentagon had to respond.
As the flu issue heated up early this year, according to the Pentagon
official, Rumsfeld considered unloading his entire Gilead stake and
sought the advice of the Department of Justice, the SEC and the
federal Office of Government Ethics.
Those agencies didn't offer an opinion so Rumsfeld consulted a private
securities lawyer, who advised him that it was safer to hold on to the
stock and be quite public about his recusal rather than sell and run
the risk of being accused of trading on insider information, something
Rumsfeld doesn't believe he possesses. So he's keeping his shares for
the time being.
lc
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/911TruthAction/message/26644
Nexus: Anthrax, Zack, Gilead, Rumsfeld
On the 9/11 anthrax attacks, the mainstream media went from 24x7
anthrax hysteria to complete amnesia that the attacks ever occurred.
The amnesia began as soon as all the evidence for the source of the
attacks began to point in the wrong direction. It is, of course,
absolutely verboten to mention the name of Philip Zack ever in
discussing this glaringly obvious false flag op.
I missed this one: Philip Zack of 911 anthrax fame was employed by
Rumsfeld's biotech firm Gilead:
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2006/1/23/20949/8628
Nexus: Anthrax, Zack, Gilead, Rumsfeld
By mu tau | bio
One needn't wear tinfoil, dwell on grassy knolls, or fly black
helicopters to marvel at life's coincidences, at not so random degrees
of separation, at fate's recurring benevolence to administration
principals, cronies, sympathizers seemingly at or near the center of
so many calamaties since 2001.
Consider: anthrax, Zack, Gilead, Rumsfeld; or, for that matter, war,
Iraq, Halliburton, Cheney; bird flu, panic, Gilead, Rumsfeld;
Conspiracy? Prove it. Serendipitous? Absolutely.
Intelligent design? In the unteleological, Bushschadenfreudezeitgeist,
ubiquitous diabolical sense -- maybe
Rumsfeld's growing stake in Tamiflu
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.royalty/msg/39a58e74a310a7f9
[]
--
December 2000
Pharmaceutical Research Issue: Volume 17, Number 12 Pages:
1503 - 1510
Pharmacokinetics and Safety of an Anti-Vascular Endothelial
Growth Factor Aptamer (NX1838) Following Injection into the Vitreous
Humor of Rhesus Monkeys
Daniel W. Drolet1 , Joyce Nelson2, Christopher E. Tucker3,
Philip M. Zack3, Kerry Nixon2, Richard Bolin3, Mark B. Judkins2, James
A. Farmer2, Julie L. Wolf3, Stanley C. Gill3 and Raymond A. Bendele3
(1) Gilead Sciences Inc., 2860 Wilderness Place, Boulder, CO,
80301
(2) Sierra Biomedical, 587 Dunn Circle, Sparks, NV, 89431
(3) Gilead Sciences Inc., 2860 Wilderness Place, Boulder, CO,
80301
Abstract | Purpose.
The objective of this study was to determine the
pharmacokinetics and safety for NX1838 following injection into the
vitreous humor of rhesus monkeys.
--
January 20, 2002
Hartford Courant
Anthrax Missing From Army Lab
By Jack Dolan and Dave Altimari
Lab specimens of anthrax spores, Ebola virus and other
pathogens disappeared from the Army's biological warfare research
facility in the early 1990s, during a turbulent period of labor
complaints and recriminations among rival scientists there, documents
from an internal Army inquiry show.
The 1992 inquiry also found evidence that someone was
secretly entering a lab late at night to conduct unauthorized
research, apparently involving anthrax. A numerical counter on a piece
of lab equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery
researcher, who left the misspelled label "antrax" in the machine's
electronic memory, according to the documents obtained by The Courant.
--
Experts disagree on whether the lost specimens pose a
danger. An Army spokesperson said they do not because they would have
been effectively killed by chemicals in preparation for microscopic
study. A prominent molecular biologist said, however, that resilient
anthrax spores could possibly be retrieved from a treated specimen.
In addition, a scientist who once worked at the Army
facility said that because of poor inventory controls, it is possible
some of the specimens disappeared while still viable, before being
treated.
Not in dispute is what the incidents say about
disorganization and lack of security in some quarters of the U.S. Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases - known as USAMRIID
- at Fort Detrick, Md., in the 1990s. Fort Detrick is believed to be
the original source of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the mail
attacks last fall, and investigators have questioned people there and
at a handful of other government labs and contractors.
It is unclear whether Ames was among the strains of
anthrax in the 27 sets of specimens reported missing at Fort Detrick
after an inventory in 1992. The Army spokesperson, Caree Vander-
Linden, said that at least some of the lost anthrax was not Ames. But
a former lab technician who worked with some of the anthrax that was
later reported missing said all he ever handled was the Ames strain.
Meanwhile, one of the 27 sets of specimens has been found
and is still in the lab; an Army spokesperson said it may have been in
use when the inventory was taken. The fate of the rest, some
containing samples no larger than a pencil point, remains unclear. In
addition to anthrax and Ebola, the specimens included hanta virus,
simian AIDS virus and two that were labeled "unknown" - an Army
euphemism for classified research whose subject was secret.
A former commander of the lab said in an interview he did
not believe any of the missing specimens were ever found. Vander-
Linden said last week that in addition to the one complete specimen
set, some samples from several others were later located, but she
could not provide a fuller accounting because of incomplete records
regarding the disposal of specimens. "In January of 2002, it's hard to
say how many of those were missing in February of 1991," said Vander-
Linden, adding that it's likely some were simply thrown out with the
trash.
Discoveries of lost specimens and unauthorized research
coincided with an Army inquiry into allegations of "improper conduct"
at Fort Detrick's experimental pathology branch in 1992. The inquiry
did not substantiate the specific charges of mismanagement by a
handful of officers. But a review of hundreds of pages of interview
transcripts, signed statements and internal memos related to the
inquiry portrays a climate charged with bitter personal rivalries over
credit for research, as well as allegations of sexual and ethnic
harassment. The recriminations and unhappiness ultimately became a
factor in the departures of at least five frustrated Fort Detrick
scientists.
In interviews with The Courant last month, two of the
former scientists said that as recently as 1997, when they left,
controls at Fort Detrick were so lax it wouldn't have been hard for
someone with security clearance for its handful of labs to smuggle out
biological specimens.
Lost Samples
The 27 specimens were reported missing in February 1992,
after a new officer, Lt. Col. Michael Langford, took command of what
was viewed by Fort Detrick brass as a dysfunctional pathology lab.
Langford, who no longer works at Fort Detrick, said he ordered an
inventory after he recognized there was "little or no organization"
and "little or no accountability" in the lab. "I knew we had to
basically tighten up what I thought was a very lax and unorganized
system," he said in an interview last week.
A factor in Langford's decision to order an inventory was
his suspicion - never proven - that someone in the lab had been
tampering with records of specimens to conceal unauthorized research.
As he explained later to Army investigators, he asked a lab
technician, Charles Brown, to "make a list of everything that was
missing." "It turned out that there was quite a bit of stuff that was
unaccounted for, which only verifies that there needs to be some kind
of accountability down there," Langford told investigators, according
to a transcript of his April 1992 interview.
Brown - whose inventory was limited to specimens logged
into the lab during the 1991 calendar year - detailed his findings in
a two-page memo to Langford, in which he lamented the loss of the
items "due to their immediate and future value to the pathology
division and USAMRIID."
Many of the specimens were tiny samples of tissue taken
from the dead bodies of lab animals infected with deadly diseases
during vaccine research. Standard procedure for the pathology lab
would be to soak the samples in a formaldehyde-like fixative and embed
them in a hard resin or paraffin, in preparation for study under an
electron microscope. Some samples, particularly viruses, are also
irradiated with gamma rays before they are handled by the pathology
lab.
Whether all of the lost samples went through this
treatment process is unclear. Vander-Linden said the samples had to
have been rendered inert if they were being worked on in the pathology
lab. But Dr. Ayaad Assaad, a former Fort Detrick scientist who had
extensive dealings with the lab, said that because some samples were
received at the lab while still alive - with the expectation they
would be treated before being worked on - it is possible some became
missing before treatment. A phony "log slip" could then have been
entered into the lab computer, making it appear they had been
processed and logged.
In fact, Army investigators appear to have wondered if
some of the anthrax specimens reported missing had ever really been
logged in. When an investigator produced a log slip and asked Langford
if "these exist or [are they] just made up on a data entry form,"
Langford replied that he didn't know.
Assuming a specimen was chemically treated and embedded
for microscopic study, Vander-Linden and several scientists
interviewed said it would be impossible to recover a viable pathogen
from them. Brown, who did the inventory for Langford and has since
left Fort Detrick, said in an interview that the specimens he worked
on in the lab "were completely inert."
"You could spread them on a sandwich," he said.
But Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at
the State University of New York who is investigating the recent
anthrax attacks for the Federation of American Scientists, said she
would not rule out the possibility that anthrax in spore form could
survive the chemical-fixative process. "You'd have to grind it up and
hope that some of the spores survived," Rosenberg said. "It would be a
mess. It seems to me that it would be an unnecessarily difficult task.
Anybody who had access to those labs could probably get something more
useful."
Rosenberg's analysis of the anthrax attacks, which has
been widely reported, concludes that the culprit is probably a
government insider, possibly someone from Fort Detrick. The Army
facility manufactured anthrax before biological weapons were banned in
1969, and it has experimented with the Ames strain for defensive
research since the early 1980s.
Vander-Linden said that one of the two sets of anthrax
specimens listed as missing at Fort Detrick was the Vollum strain,
which was used in the early days of the U.S. biological weapons
program. It was not clear what the type of anthrax in the other
missing specimen was.
Eric Oldenberg, a soldier and pathology lab technician who
left Fort Detrick and is now a police detective in Phoenix, said in an
interview that Ames was the only anthrax strain he worked with in the
lab.
Late-Night Research
More troubling to Langford than the missing specimens was
what investigators called "surreptitious" work being done in the
pathology lab late at night and on weekends.
Dr. Mary Beth Downs told investigators that she had come
to work several times in January and February of 1992 to find that
someone had been in the lab at odd hours, clumsily using the
sophisticated electron microscope to conduct some kind of off-the-
books research.
After one weekend in February, Downs discovered that
someone had been in the lab using the microscope to take photos of
slides, and apparently had forgotten to reset a feature on the
microscope that imprints each photo with a label. After taking a few
pictures of her own slides that morning, Downs was surprised to see
"Antrax 005" emblazoned on her negatives.
Downs also noted that an automatic counter on the camera,
like an odometer on a car, had been rolled back to hide the fact that
pictures had been taken over the weekend. She wrote of her findings in
a memo to Langford, noting that whoever was using the microscope was
"either in a big hurry or didn't know what they were doing."
It is unclear if the Army ever got to the bottom of the
incident, and some lab insiders believed concerns about it were
overblown. Brown said many Army officers did not understand the
scientific process, which he said doesn't always follow a 9-to-5
schedule. "People all over the base knew that they could come in at
anytime and get on the microscope," Brown said. "If you had security
clearance, the guard isn't going to ask you if you are qualified to
use the equipment. I'm sure people used it often without our
knowledge."
Documents from the inquiry show that one unauthorized
person who was observed entering the lab building at night was
Langford's predecessor, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who at the time no
longer worked at Fort Detrick. A surveillance camera recorded Zack
being let in at 8:40 p.m. on Jan. 23, 1992, apparently by Dr. Marian
Rippy, a lab pathologist and close friend of Zack's, according to a
report filed by a security guard.
Zack could not be reached for comment. In an interview
this week, Rippy said that she doesn't remember letting Zack in, but
that he occasionally stopped by after he was transferred off the base.
"After he left, he had no [authorized] access to the building. Other
people let him in," she said. "He knew a lot of people there and he
was still part of the military. I can tell you, there was no
suspicious stuff going on there with specimens."
Zack left Fort Detrick in December 1991, after a
controversy over allegations of unprofessional behavior by Zack,
Rippy, Brown and others who worked in the pathology division. They had
formed a clique that was accused of harassing the Egyptian-born
Assaad, who later sued the Army, claiming discrimination.
Assaad said he had believed the harassment was behind him
until last October, until after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He
said that is when the FBI contacted him, saying someone had mailed an
anonymous letter - a few days before the existence of anthrax-laced
mail became known - naming Assaad as a potential bioterrorist. FBI
agents decided the note was a hoax after interviewing Assaad. But
Assaad said he believes the note's timing makes the author a suspect
in the anthrax attacks, and he is convinced that details of his work
contained in the letter mean the author must be a former Fort Detrick
colleague.
Brown said that he doesn't know who sent the letter, but
that Assaad's nationality and expertise in biological agents made him
an obvious subject of concern after Sept. 11.
Jan 23, 2006 -- 09:09:49 PM EST
On Aug 4, 2:34 pm, lc <lol7...@msn.com> wrote:
> Rumsfeld's growing stake in Tamifluhttp://cnnmoney.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=De...
lc
The FBI's selective release of documents in the anthrax case
(updated below - Update II)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/06/fbi_documents/
Wednesday Aug. 6, 2008 16:11 EDT
The FBI's emerging, leaking case against Ivins
(updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/05/anthrax/index.html
Tuesday Aug. 5, 2008 06:54 EDT
Letters to the Editor
http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/05/anthrax/view/index.html?show=all&order=desc
Dr. Meryl Nass said the same thing today: "Let me reiterate: No matter
how good the microbial forensics may be, they can only, at best, link
the anthrax to a particular strain and lab. They cannot link it to any
individual."
http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/2008/08/pressure-grows-for-fbis-anthrax.html
Looking closer at Jean Duley's statements
http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/2008/08/looking-closer-at-jean-duleys.html
Sunday, August 3, 2008
On Aug 4, 2:47 pm, lc <lol7...@msn.com> wrote:
> August 01, 2006
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/911TruthAction/message/26644
> Nexus: Anthrax, Zack, Gilead, Rumsfeld
> On the 9/11 anthrax attacks, the mainstream media went from 24x7
> anthrax hysteria to complete amnesia that the attacks ever occurred.
> The amnesia began as soon as all the evidence for the source of the
> attacks began to point in the wrong direction. It is, of course,
> absolutely verboten to mention the name of Philip Zack ever in
> discussing this glaringly obvious false flag op.
>
> I missed this one: Philip Zack of 911 anthrax fame was employed by
> Rumsfeld's biotech firm Gilead:http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2006/1/23/20949/8628
> Nexus: Anthrax, Zack, Gilead, Rumsfeld
> By mu tau | bio
> One needn't wear tinfoil, dwell on grassy knolls, or fly black
> helicopters to marvel at life's coincidences, at not so random degrees
> of separation, at fate's recurring benevolence to administration
> principals, cronies, sympathizers seemingly at or near the center of
> so many calamaties since 2001.
> Consider: anthrax, Zack, Gilead, Rumsfeld; or, for that matter, war,
> Iraq, Halliburton, Cheney; bird flu, panic, Gilead, Rumsfeld;
> Conspiracy? Prove it. Serendipitous? Absolutely.
> Intelligent design? In the unteleological, Bushschadenfreudezeitgeist,
> ubiquitous diabolical sense -- maybe
> Rumsfeld's growing stake in Tamifluhttp://groups.google.com/group/alt.royalty/msg/39a58e74a310a7f9
> anthrax attacks...
>
> read more »