Tuesday, September 4, 2012

The Shame of Gilead

by Terry Michael


Gilead Sciences, headquartered in Foster City, CA, is the world's number one purveyor of the chemotherapies known as "anti-retrovirals" (ARVs.) In 2011, the company (named for the Biblical "balm of Gilead") reported ARV sales of about $6.91 billion dollars. The trade names for their ARVs are: Truvada, Atripla, Viread, Complera and Emtriva--all of which they acknowledge have serious adverse "side" effects (as noted in the Gilead prescribing information for Truvada.) Gilead was way ahead of nearest competitor Bristol-Myers-Squibb, which sold about $3.05 billion of the chemo in 2011, according to year-end corporate reports I have reviewed.


Company sales reports from the HIV-AIDS ARV sector of the pharmaceutical industry support an estimation (mine) of roughly $17 billion dollars or more in sales during 2011, based on ARV gross revenues of the top six purveyors of the chemo: Gilead, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer [doing joint business as "ViiV"], Abbott, Merck, and Janssen Therapeutics (a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary.) [Company relationships to the drugs come-and-go. Just months ago, "Tibotec Therapeutics" was a subsidiary name for a Johnson & Johnson company.] That $17 billion is more than double the $8 billion ARV marketestimated by CNNMoney.com just five years ago, in 2007.
Gilead has been one of the politically best connected big pharma companies in America. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was chairman of its board, from which he resigned to be in George W. Bush's cabinet in 2001. Former Secretary of State George Shultz (Reagan) and former Special Trade Representative Carla Hills (George H. W. Bush) are directors (Shultz is "emeritus") of Gilead. The connection of Gilead to the Bush dynasty is likely at the root of the $50+ billion committed from George W. Bush's "PEPFAR" initiative, mostly to supply anti-retroviral drugs to Africa, approved by Congress during the last years of his Administration. Gilead generously agreed to provide its drugs to poor Africans--in return for the company's well-lobbied efforts to have their $12,000-to-$14,000 ARV drugs subsidized by U.S. taxpayers for American citizen prescriptions, through various government drug entitlement programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and "ADAP." The biggest supplier of campaign cash to politicians, drug companies have invented many clever ways to mine the deficit-funded U.S. Treasury for multi-billion dollar subsidies for their chemicals.

Gilead has scrambled to build its ARV sales because its other cash-cow, Tamiflu, has been judged nearly useless as a palliative for influenza, even though it continues to sell the product whenever the Centers for Disease Control attempts to scare the world with regular panics about bird, swine, H1N1 and other killer flu figments of the CDC's imagination (and its need to boost its budget.) Lots of Tamiflu was sold to the U.S. Defense Dept. when Rumsfeld was Secretary.
Gilead shamelessly promotes its chemotherapy with ubiquitous advertising in gay readership publications. In two recent past years (2007 and 2008), this writer counted over sixty full pages of ads for Truvada and another Gilead drug, Atripla, in just one gay weekly newspaper, The Blade. Several other makers of drugs began aggressive advertising in The Blade in the last half of 2008. Merck began running three-page ads for “Isentress;” Bristol-Myers Squibb bought two-page spreads for HIV medications "with a low risk of diarrhea;” and Tibotec (now Janssen) Therapeutics (the subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson) weighed in with four page spreads for "Prezista." The Blade folded in bankruptcy in November 2009, but came back under the name "dcagenda" a few weeks later. Its first edition, December 4, 2009, contained 40 pages--31 of which were advertising, and 13 (42 percent) of those ad pages were from The HIV-AIDS Industry, including Gilead, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, the DC Dept. of Health's "Ask for the [HIV] test campaign," and the [HIV-AIDS] Whitman Walker Clinic.
The Blade returned in 2010, and Gilead remained one of its biggest advertisers. The ARV Industry virtually owns and operates much of the gay press, just as manufacturers of "poppers" (nitrites) did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the week this article was written, the July 20, 2011 edition of The Bladecontained 4-page ads for Gilead's new "Complera," Bristol-Myers Squibb's "Reyataz" and "Prezista" from Janssen Pharmaceuticals, the division of Johnson & Johnson. That was in addition to full-page ads from affiliates of The HIV-AIDS Industry, including the Whitman Walker Clinic, the Human Rights Campaign, plus the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (Los Angeles), which has been advertising with two full pages in every single edition of The Blade for the past year or more. The total of 16 pages from those advertisers accounted for close to 40 percent of the display advertising in that issue of The Blade--where you will never read a word, not a news story, an editorial or an opinion column, that questions any aspect of The HIV-AIDS Industry's HIV-AIDS-DRUGS belief system.

Gilead also has tremendous power with the mainstream business press. A piece I wrote for TheStreet.com on December 7, 2009, which included a reference to Gilead and the toxicity of HIV drugs, lasted less than four hours on the site before it was erased--after the founder of the site, CNBC's "Mad Money" Jim Cramer, intervened to have it withdrawn.

Gilead has worked behind the scenes to promote what has become a "test-the-world" effort by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an agency headed for an unprecedented 28 years by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief propagandist for The HIV-AIDS Industry, who is coming close to J. Edgar Hoover's record as the U.S. government's most influential un-elected bureaucrat in history. Fauci has awarded tens of billions of dollars for HIV-AIDS "research" or the past quarter-century, without ever granting a dollar to any investigator questioning the single pathogen theory of AIDS. In the last several years, Fauci has funded the confirmation-biased clinical trials, on almost-always Third World gay men, black Africans, south and southeast Asians, and Latin Americans, making use of "generously donated" Truvada from Gilead--which led to the FDA's approval of Truvada for HIV negatives, on the theory that it would "protect" them from "infection" with HIV. That would be comparable to a physician who would prescribe a regimen of powerful anti-biotics to protect you from a potential bacterial infection--which would constitute malpractice.

Non-profits and non-governmental organizations around the world, along with state and local government agencies in the U.S., have engaged in an epidemic of testing, with an antibody assay designed to detect a set of blood proteins that Dr. Robert Gallo claimed were specific to "HIV." Those proteins can be foundfrom cross reactions to almost 100 well identified bodily conditions. These serological (blood) tests are incorrectly labeled "HIV tests" in popular media, though in no way are they assays for an active virus (whether or not that virus is pathogenic, or simply a harmless passenger.) In fact, Dr. Luc Montagnier, 2008 Nobel prize winner for "discovering" HIV, has clearly stated that someone with a good immune system can rid his body of HIV in several weeks.

Every time a new "HIV positive" is found, Gilead and the other pharmaceutical companies have captured another potential victim for their toxic drugs, which are destroying the health and the lives of tens of thousands of mostly gay men and now millions of black Africans.
Sex and marketing sell Gilead's chemotherapy

COPY FROM THIS GILEAD ADVERTISEMENT USING SEX TO SELL ITS POISON:
"Talk with your doctor about ways to help protect your immune system. HIV treatment is now recommended for everyone with a T-cell count of 500 or less and should be considered when T-cells are higher than 500, according to the DHHS* and the IAS-USA†, along with other factors. Starting treatment early may help protect your immune system and vital organs. Today’s medicines may have fewer, more manageable side effects. They may help you live a longer, healthier life. Receive helpful information about living with HIV that you should know. Call toll free 1-888-497-9638, or visit TREATHIVNOW.COM. *DHHS = Department of Health and Human Services †IAS-USA = International AIDS Society USA. ©2011 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. UN8448 03/11"
MY OBSERVATION: Look at how many times Gilead uses “may” in its claims. I’ll add two more: the drugs may damage your liver, your kidneys and your heart. They may kill you. And it is an outrage to suggest that anyone should even consider taking the toxic chemo with perfectly normal T-cell counts above 500!

PHOTOGRAPH OF GILEAD CHEWING GUM PACKETS CHEMOTHERAPY PROMOTION.
"GET TESTED. PROTECT YOURSELF. SEEK TREATMENT.
 REDEFINEHIV.COM
Go to "REDEFINEHIV.COM" and you'll be invited to "join us" (Gilead) at Gay Pride celebrations this summer (2011) in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Atlanta. Go to the "Seek Treatment" page, and you will be advised: "HIV treatment is recommended for everyone with a CD4 (T-cell) count of 500 or less. For people with CD4 counts higher than 500, HIV treatment should be considered." I found the gum packet at the restaurant at which I eat lunch most days in Washington--just a week after I discovered that Gilead donated $100,000 in 2011 to a non-profit called "Metro TeenAIDS" in DC, with offices about a half-block down the street. Never too young, I guess, to become a customer for their health-destroying "anti-retrovirals."
Now, chemotherapy for HIV Negatives.
Not satisfied with peddling its chemotherapy to "HIV positives," Gilead has now (as of July 2012) received approval from the Food & Drug Administration to peddle its Truvada to HIV-negative gay men and black Africans for so-called "pre-exposure prophylaxis" (PrEP)--the latest craze in The HIV-AIDS Industry effort to drug the world, claiming that a daily pill for life can protect you from "infection" by the mysterious retrovirus. Multi-million dollar confirmation-biased "studies" claiming to demonstrate prophylaxis are mostly funded by the NIH bureaucrat Anthony Fauci, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control--with Truvada generously donated by Gilead. The PrEP lunacy is the latest effort by The Industry to replace three decades of failure to find an "HIV vaccine." Of course, how can you vaccinate against a non-pathogenic antigen that has already stimulated anti-bodies that Luc Montagnier argues can rid the body of "HIV" in several weeks? Of course, that assumes a retroviral antigen you could call "HIV" actually exists. The Perth Group in Australia has argued for years that no "HIV" retrovirus has ever been isolated. Even the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) of Los Angeles, with all its clinics and pharmacies, opposed Gilead's application to the FDA for use of Truvada as PrEP.


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