Bayer and others sell AIDS infected products?

The argument that Bayer's misconduct was in response to extreme market pressures does not hold up completely. A report in the New York Times suggests that the company has a long culture of deception and a disregard for the lives of its customers. A Bayer subsidiary Cutter Biological was one of a number of companies that extracted clotting factors for treating haemophiliacs from pooled plasma. In 1992 the first cases of AIDS in haemophiliacs due to the medication appeared. The matter came to the attention of the Food and Drug Administration. The companies agreed to withdraw the product from the market which they did in the USA but not internationally. The administration went along with the companies in keeping the extent of the problem from the public. When they learned of the continuing international trading they also remained silent.

Bayer had already paid for donors and for preparation of the products. It had US $4 million of concentrate in stock. In spite of their undertaking to withdraw the product these companies did not stop selling internationally. Most countries in Europe read the literature and switched to the heated product. France was the only exception and those responsible were subsequently imprisoned for not acting responsibly.

Bayer and the other companies continued to sell to the East, to South America and probably other developing countries for at least a year. They even continued manufacturing the old product, possibly because it was cheaper to produce.

Bayer failed to adequately warn patients of the risks and played them down to its agents and to doctors. It asked them to use up stocks. Figures from Hong Kong and Singapore suggest that close to 50% of patients developed AIDS and many have died. Across the world it is likely that thousands were infected and died.

That this had happened was only exposed when reporters independently sifted through material disclosed in US legal actions taken by infected patients against Bayer. The foreign documents had been ignored by prosecutors.

The documents reveal the culture, the denials and the rationalisations which were used to justify continued use, the reassurances given to agents, and the inadequate responses to those who questioned.

The same information was not available about Armour Pharmaceutical, Baxter International and Alpha Therapeutic. Reports suggest they also continued to sell untreated stock internationally.

In the USA thousands of patients have developed AIDS and the three companies have paid out US $600 million in settlements. The company has continued to deny and justify its actions in selling this material internationally.

A division of the pharmaceutical company Bayer sold millions of dollars of blood-clotting medicine for hemophiliacs - medicine that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS - to Asia and Latin America in the mid-1980's while selling a new, safer product in the West, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

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"These are the most incriminating internal pharmaceutical industry documents I have ever seen," said Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, who as director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group has been investigating the industry's practices for three decades.

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Federal regulators helped keep the overseas sales out of the public eye, the documents indicate. In May of 1985, believing that the companies had broken a voluntary agreement to withdraw the old medicine from the market, the Food and Drug Administration's regulator of blood products, Dr. Harry M. Meyer Jr., summoned officials of the companies to a meeting and ordered them to comply. "It was unacceptable for them to ship that material overseas," he said later in legal papers.

Even so, Dr. Meyer asked that the issue be "quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community and the public," according to Cutter's account of the 1985 meeting.

----------------------------

Whether Cutter was behaving ethically became an issue in internal company discussions. "Can we in good faith continue to ship nonheat-treated coagulation products to Japan?" a company task force asked in February 1985, fearing that some of its plasma donors might be H.I.V. positive. The decision, records show, was yes.

Taken together, the documents provide an inside view of Cutter's bottom-line strategizing and efforts to manage the flow of information amid growing public anxiety about the safety of its product.

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Fearing a loss of customers, Cutter conceived a marketing plan that stopped well short of full disclosure. - - - - - - -

Several weeks later, Cutter tried to minimize the danger hemophiliacs faced when using blood products. "AIDS has become the center of irrational response in many countries," the company said in a June 1983 letter to distributors in France and 20 other countries. "This is of particular concern to us because of unsubstantiated speculations that this syndrome may be transmitted by certain blood products."

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The new product, meanwhile, was selling briskly, leaving Cutter with a problem: "There is excess nonheated inventory," the company noted in minutes of a meeting on Nov. 15, 1984.

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At the November meeting, the minutes show, Cutter said it planned to "review international markets again to determine if more of this product can be sold."

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"It appears there are no longer any markets in the Far East where we can expect to sell substantial quantities of nonheat-treated," a Cutter official wrote in May 1985. Bayer said Cutter stopped shipping unheated concentrate in July 1985.

23 Oct 2004 http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2004/10/23/phillip-johnson-and-aids/

Kevin Keith has written an absolutely devestating fisking of Phillip Johnson’s latest bit of nonsense. In addition to being the Grand Poobah of the Intelligent Design movement, Johnson is also on the lunatic fringes of the AIDS issue (though as a law professor, he is profoundly ignorant of both subjects and therefore makes extremely silly errors of reasoning when discussing them). It’s the standard Johnson screed. I think he just takes the same article and changes the enemy du jour from “the Darwinian establishment” to “the HIV establishment” or “the AIDS establishment”. Phil Johnson is nothing if not a consistent tilter-against-windmills. Whoever he’s against, it’s a grand conspiracy to hide the truth and, naturally, he’s got the Truthtm that the hidebound orthodoxy won’t let you hear. Which would be a lot more convincing if his writings did not betray a rank ignorance of the issues involved.

Keith points out numerous flaws in both his factual claims and his reasoning, but he also points out that Johnson relies on crackpots for his support:

You have to be reasonably well up on AIDS politics to recognize this name, and how frightening it is. (Even a novice might wonder, however, why the personal interpretation of the scientific literature by the elected president of South Africa carries any weight in this debate. Note that Mbeki – like Johnson, for that matter – has no scientific background at all. Would you trust your AIDS diagnosis to him?) Mbeki holds a racially-inspired conspiracy theory to the effect that AIDS does not exist as a distinct disease, and that the connection between HIV (the virus) and AIDS (the disease) was a myth promulgated by drug companies to allow them to conduct racist experiments on blacks. When he was elected President of South Africa, he turned his party officially against standard treatments for AIDS, and blocked distribution of AZT and other retroviral drugs in South Africa for years. He also invited members of the AIDS conspiracy fringe to advise the South African government and sit on an AIDS study panel there.

More importantly, he points out the danger of it all. Pseudo-science is not just an academic concern; the theologically and politically motivated attacks of people like Phillip Johnson, whether it is on the science of evolution, which provides the theoretical basis for modern medicine, particularly anti-viral and anti-bacterial medicine, or directly on AIDS research, puts lives at risk:

As a digression, I note that this points up the dangers of pseudo-science. Johnson’s AIDS conspiracy theorizing is not conceptually related to his creation-science beliefs, but both obviously flow from a deep conceptual difficulty with science, and a tendency to imagine that mainstream science is riddled with organized conspiracies to promote falsehoods. I don’t understand how anyone pretends creationism or AIDS conspiracy theories make sense, but I can easily see how someone who believes in the former would believe in the latter – and claim the same “we must look at the data in a new way” pseudo-intellectual rationalization for both. This is just what Johnson, playing true to form, has done – only this time, other people’s lives hang in the balance.

At any rate, Johnson’s invocation of Mbeki makes his true aims clear – he is not just criticizing methodological difficulties in AIDS monitoring, he is laying the groundwork for a claim that HIV is not the AIDS virus at all (and presumably that AIDS efforts aimed at treating HIV replication – i.e., all of them – should be discontinued). This is not just ignorant (the “HIV does not cause AIDS” claim has been debunked many, many times – like all conspiracies, it refuses to die), it is dangerously insane. It is irrationality that literally threatens the lives of everyone it affects – just as Mbeki allowed AIDS to go untreated for thousands upon thousands of the poorest South Africans.

Phillip Johnson is not just wrong, he’s dangerously wrong. And if he is successful in tearing down science, we will all suffer for it.

Ralph Torello mailto:rtorello38@hotmail.com

AIDS as a weapon of war

Thu Jun 28 10:59:13 2001

While I do believe that AIDS is a weapon being used by the Federal Fraud Machine (FFM) and its allies, I disagree that it is a contagious disease caused by a little retrovirus, many types which exist in the normal human system. There are hundreds of well known doctors, microbiologists, professors, laymen who have proved that AIDS is not caused by HIV but by drugs end/or other immuno suppresive factors. AIDS is really a psyop weapon that actually gets "the AIDS victim" to kill him or herself. Rather than go into a lengthy and detailed explanation, I suggest you visit www.duesberg.com or aidsmyth.com or virusmyth.com. The AIDS dissidents like Dr. Duesberg, Professor of Microbiology at UC, Kerry Mullis, Noble Prize winner for the PCP test, Walter Gilbert of Harvard, Dr. Charlie Thomas formally at John Hopkins and Harvard, and many others get almost no publicity for their views. Dr. Duesberg has paid for his views by losing a $3 million research contract plus almost all of his other non professor revenues. As he told me "If I would come out and say that maybe HIV is partially responsible for AIDS, I could be paid like an NBA star, like Gallo (who stole the HIV virus from Montagnier) is currently. Now I'll just have to get by on my tenured professor salary." Most of the biological research at Fort Detrick has been bogus and led nowhere. Yet, a lot of people and companies continue to get rich with such research.

The Federal Fraud Machine loves the idea that people think that HIV was a deadly virus concocted at Fort Detrick, since that reinforces the mainstream idea that AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease. The HIV antibody test will show positive if you have a weakened immune system, regardless of whether you have the relatively harmless HIV virus in your system. Since no one has ever isolated this retrovirus, but have confirmed its existence through antibodies, the AIDs test checks for a protein that normally shows up in your blood when you have the flu. Just thonk of all those poor Africans that have been fed the deadly chemotherapy AIDS cocktails that destroy the immune system. Thank heaven for people like Mbeki of South Africa who are not buying the attempted genocide of Africa by the FFM and its allies

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=3584

http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2007/04/27/verdict-back-in-hiv-denial-app/

Richard Jefferys

April 27, 2007

The decision is now online: http://www.courts.sa.gov.au/judgments/Judgments2007/0427-SASC-143.htm

I learned a lot about the “Perth Group.”

“Ms Papadopulos-Eleopulos has no formal qualifications in medicine, biology, virology, immunology, epidemiology or any other medical disciplines. She has never treated or been directly involved in clinical trials of any kind relating to any disease. Her duties at the Royal Perth Hospital are to test people for sensitivity to ultraviolet radiation.

Ms Papadopulos-Eleopulos claims that she conducts research in the area of HIV/AIDS in her private time. It became clear that, when she spoke about research, she meant reading various medical papers about the research of others. Her experience with the HIV virus and with AIDS is limited to reading and critiquing the work of researchers involved in various studies. She purports to have expertise to speak on the subject of virology, epidemiology, electron microscopy, biology and immunology. She has no practical experience in any of these areas. She has no formal qualifications in these disciplines.

The evidence given by Ms Papadopulos-Eleopulos about the Perth group demonstrates that she is promoting a cause. She is not independent. She is motivated to create a debate about her theory. The Perth Group will use whatever means available to promote that debate, including encouragement of persons such as the applicant, to promote their theories in courts of law.

Dr Turner’s knowledge of the subject matter is limited to reading. He has no formal qualifications to give expert opinions about the virus. He has no practical experience in the treatment of viral diseases. He has no practical experience in the disciplines of virology, immunology or epidemiology.

His opinions are based on reading scientific literature, studying of scientific literature, and spending a considerable amount of time thinking.

I conclude that Dr Turner is not qualified to advance expert opinion about virus isolation, antibody tests, viral load tests, or sexual transmission of the virus. His knowledge of these subjects is limited to having read a number of publications. He relies entirely on his interpretation of various studies in the specialised disciplines of virology, epidemiology, microbiology, immunology, pathology or infectious diseases, in none of which he has qualifications beyond his medical degree. He has no practical experience, and has performed no research which has been published.”

KEYCODE BAYER 479 [Copied Feb 23, 2015 http://www.cbgnetwork.de/3678.html]

January 26: news agencies AFP and dpa confirm the following report; and here´s an article by the Alliance for Human Research Protection

Press Release, January 24, 2010

Coalition against Bayer Dangers (Germany)

Bayer, Baxter pay multimillion indemnity to haemophiliacs

Settlement in the US with victims from 22 countries / HIV infections were preventable / “why is BAYER concealing the payments?

The pharmaceutical companies BAYER, Baxter, Behring and Alpha are paying a multimillion dollar compensation to haemophiliacs from 22 countries who were infected with HIV or hepatitis C through use of blood plasma products in the 1980ies. This is the outcome of a settlement that became effective late in 2010. The settlement prohibits the victims or their lawyers from speaking about the arrangement. Several thousand haemophiliacs had taken part in lawsuits against the corporations.

Philipp Mimkes from the Coalition against Bayer-Dangers, which has been monitoring the company for more than 30 years, welcomes the settlement and characterizes it as a “late guilty plea from the corporations involved. However, Mimkes criticizes the imposed secrecy: “Why is BAYER concealing these payments? Why are the media not able to report on this precedent? It is outrageous that the companies who knowingly infected thousands of haemophiliacs are blackmailing the victims not to talk about this important development!

So far only Italian media reported on the settlement in which 443 Italian haemophiliacs are participating. “This is a historic result, says Luigi Ambroso, president of the Comitato 210/92 which has been championing for compensations for many years, “even though we would prefer that the guilt of those responsible is legally determined. Italian state tribunals are investigating the companies for “multiple manslaughter. Due to procedural problems the trial was not opened yet.

Internal documents revealed that Bayer´s daughter company Cutter, world market leader for blood plasma products in the 1980ies, continued to sell contaminated preparations when it had already introduced a safer, heat-treated version. Already in January 1983, Cutter managers acknowledged: “There is strong evidence to suggest that HIV is passed on to other people through . . . plasma products". In August 1983 Cutter employees foresaw in confidential papers a “gigantic epidemic" among haaemophiliacs. Nevertheless Cutter continued to produce non-heat-treated plasma products until August 1984 and sold these until 1985. More than 10 thousand haemophiliacs paid with their lives.

The Coalition against Bayer-Dangers demands full compensation for haemophiliacs all over the world on the basis of the concessions BAYER made in Japan. Whereas Japanese victims received $450.000 each as well as a monthly pension, haemophiliacs in most other countries were put off with minor sums, if at all. The Coalition also demands the punishment of the responsible persons at BAYER and other companies.

Obama To Announce New Steps To Combat AIDS By JULIE PACE

Posted: 12/01/2011 8:31 am EST Updated: 01/31/2012 5:12 am EST

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama set an ambitious goal Thursday for significantly increasing access to life-saving AIDS drugs for people in the U.S. and around the world, as he announced a renewed American commitment to ending a pandemic that has killed 30 million people.

"We can beat this disease," Obama declared during a World AIDS Day event in Washington. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also participated via satellite.

Obama pledged U.S. support to help 6 million people in countries hardest hit by the virus get access to antiretroviral drugs by the end of 2013, increasing the original U.S. goal by 2 million. And he announced plans to boost spending on HIV treatment in the U.S. by $50 million.

"The rate of new infections may be going down elsewhere, but it's not going down here in America," he said. "There are communities in this country being devastated still by this disease. When new infections among young, black, gay men increase by nearly 50 percent in three years, we need to do more to show them that their lives matter."

As part of Obama's new overseas initiatives, the U.S. will also aim to get antiretroviral drugs to 1.5 million HIV-positive pregnant women to prevent them from passing the virus to their children; distribute more than 1 billion condoms in the developing world in the next two years; and fund 4.7 million voluntary medical male circumcisions in eastern and southern Africa over the next two years. Research shows circumcisions reduce the risk of female-to-male HIV transmission by more than 60 percent.

The new global goals build on the work of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which focuses on prevention, treatment and support programs in 15 countries hit hardest by the AIDS pandemic, 12 of them in Africa. Bush launched the $15 billion plan in 2003, and in 2008, Congress tripled the budget to $48 billion over five years.

Obama praised Bush for his leadership on AIDS relief, saying the program will be one of the former president's greatest legacies.

"That program – more ambitious than even leading advocates thought was possible at the time – has saved thousands and thousands and thousands of lives, spurred international action, and laid the foundation for a comprehensive global plan that will impact the lives of millions," Obama said. "And we are proud that we have the opportunity to carry that work forward."

Despite Obama's more ambitious goals, the relief program's budget is not expected to increase. Instead officials said the expanded targets would be funded through savings achieved by making the program more efficient and cutting the costs of treatment.

The president urged other wealthy nations to fulfill their financial pledges to a global fund to fight HIV and AIDS, and jabbed those who have not contributed money.

"Countries that haven't made a pledge need to do so," he said. "That includes China and other major economies that are now able to step up as major donors."

Obama also announced new initiatives to combat HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in the U.S. The White House said there are 1.2 million Americans living with HIV, and 50,000 new infections each year. Officials said he would direct the Department of Health and Human Services to increase funding for domestic treatment by $50 million

The bulk of the new funding – $35 million – will go to state programs that help people living with HIV and AIDS get access to medicine. There are currently more than 6,500 Americans living with the virus on waiting lists for medication, according to the White House.

The rest of the domestic funds will go to HIV medical clinics across the country, with an emphasis on areas where infections have increased and care and treatment are not readily available. Officials said the additional clinic funding would give 7,500 more patients access to treatment.

The $50 million is already part of the HHS budget, and officials said Obama does not need congressional approval to reallocate the funds.

The HIV virus has infected an estimated 60 million people worldwide since the deadly pandemic began 30 years ago. More than 33 million people are currently living with the virus.

While the failure to find an effective HIV vaccine continues to frustrate the medical community, experts say scientific research in recent years has led to substantial progress in preventing and treating the virus.

Obama ordered his staff to reevaluate both their international and domestic approaches to HIV and AIDS this summer after being briefed on the scientific advancements.

Members of both parties praised the new initiatives and commended Democratic and Republican leaders for coming together.

"Here's what we can do when we work together. We've got leaders of both political parties standing behind something that works," said Gayle Smith, Obama's senior director for development and democracy at the National Security Council.

Tony Fratto, a former Bush spokesman, urged both parties to avoid making the fight against AIDS a political issue.

"The only way to undermine this historic undertaking is if it becomes a partisan issue," he said. "The reasons a Barack Obama and a George W. Bush can support America's leading role in addressing this disease may be very different, but what's important is they've sought the same goal."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/01/obama-to-announce-new-steps-to-combat-aids_n_1122796.html

20150308 http://www.avert.org/origin-hiv-aids.htm

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