Putin vs. Big Pharma: The ultimate smackdown

Is Putin plotting to purge the pill peddlers? If so, we have some suggestions

By Riley Waggaman

Source: Off-Guardian

Is Vladimir Putin preparing to cleanse Russia of Big Pharma shills (his entire cabinet)? Some seem to think so and there is certainly evidence that some kind of anti-shill crackdown is coming.

Let’s explore this intriguing news item together.

Take the wheel, TASS:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has criticized foreign drug companies for pushing their products through local medical institutions and via doctors in Russia using their deep-pocketed resources.

“Unfortunately, foreign pharmaceutical companies attracted some heads of our medical institutions, and medical workers in 30 regions. And they pushed their medicines [on to the Russian market], paying quite a lot of money for it. We saw that under just one scheme they doled out 500 million [rubles],” he said at a meeting with Yury Chikhanchin, Head of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service.

Putin noted that such practice also exists in the EU and worldwide.

“They do it everywhere. They do it in Europe and overseas too. This is how they operate,” he said.

Chikhanchin responded by saying his agency was working with the FSB to root out gratuitous Big Pharma grifting.

First of all: At the very least Putin deserves a golf clap for saying rude things about Big Pharma. No one loses points for doing that. So we salute you, Vladimir Putin. Keep it up.

At the same time: talk is cheap. If you’re going to launch a Novichok rocket at Big Pharma for “pushing their products through local medical institutions” (as TASS summarized) in 30 regions… this doesn’t exactly sound like the cleansing enema that Russia so desperately needs.

If Putin is sincere about expelling degenerate pill pushers from Russia, how far is he willing to go? Because in order to have a meaningful impact he’ll have to go pretty far. All the way, actually.

You need to cut the head off the snake. And the snake lives in Moscow. The snake has wrapped its slimly reptile-bod around various federal ministries. The snake is suffocating Russia at the highest levels of government.

That’s just a fact.

Maybe it’s time for a “performance review” at the Ministry of Health? (source)

If tomorrow the FSB announces it bagged the deputy director of a village clinic in Potato-Patch, Yakutia, this will not qualify as a successful crackdown on Big Pharma’s nefarious influence in Russia. It will qualify as a massive fail.

So which Big Pharma Strumpets should be Gitmo’d by the FSB? We’re so glad you asked.

All of the Important Russians who partied with Tedros and Big Pharma at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — straight to the gulag for some desperately needed rehabilitation.

And of course, no Big Pharma smackdown would be complete without frog-marching Madame Arbidol to the most remote Siberian penal colony. Sorry, we don’t make the rules.

Russia’s largest pharmaceutical firms also need to be put in the crosshairs. As we saw with Sputnik V, Russian drug companies enthusiastically collaborate with western pharmaceuticals to create horrific poisons for the masses. And the Russian government is invested in this gross cooperation — which is slightly discouraging?

Furthermore, the worst medicine-related grifting involves government contracts. And also: a lot of the pill peddling and unethical contracting is done legally.

As Tsargrad explained in an article unpacking Putin’s comments:

Putin demanded action against Western pharmaceutical companies that bribe our doctors. Tsargrad examined the problem and found out that this bribery is most often completely legal. To change the situation, you need to change the laws. […]

The peculiarity of Russia lies in the active participation of the state in the market of medical services. It is more profitable to get a big contract and relax than to work painstakingly with doctors, although this is not neglected either. Therefore, our “favorite” form of illegal cooperation of pharmaceutical companies with the heads of institutions and officials is to ensure victory in the auction.

So, for example, at the end of 2019, the head doctor of the republican oncological dispensary of the Ministry of Health of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania was caught red-handed while receiving a bribe on an especially large scale. A few days before that, the head physician of the Penza Regional Oncology Center received a five-year sentence (as did the director of the pharmaceutical company who gave him the bribe). There are other precedents, many of them. […]

Of course, the problem raised by Chikhanchin and Putin concerns not only Western companies — the domestic pharmaceutical industry has adopted the worst habits of its “big brothers” and interacts with medical personnel no less successfully.

That sums up the situation pretty well, we think.

We welcome any and all efforts to make Russian healthcare less scammy and more healthy.

But let’s not forget that after two years of “public health measures” — two years of non-stop grifting and murderous lies — Russia now finds itself in a very, very deep hole — a hole dug by the Russian government. Go figure.

A population decline of more than 1 million people in 2021. The largest decline in decades. (source)

We should add that there are rumors on the Russian interwebz that several high ranking officials are under investigation as part of this alleged Big Pharma crackdown. We haven’t found anything substantial to support this claim but… fingers crossed?

Let’s see what the FSB cooks up. It’s 2022. Anything is possible.

Even atonement.

“I want to wish you success not only in the Russian market, but also in global markets, and express the hope that the new year will be favorable for your company and for solving the problems that we are now talking about,” Putin addressed the head of AstraZeneca.(source)
For those who don’t follow Riley on Telegram, he has recently been purged from PayPal – no doubt because he’s wrong about everything, and no threat to the establishment at all.
Riley Waggaman is your humble Moscow correspondent. He worked for RT, Press TV, Russia Insider, yadda yadda. In his youth, he attended a White House lawn party where he asked Barack Obama if imprisoned whistleblower Bradley Manning (Chelsea was still a boy back then) “had a good Easter.” Good times good times. You can subscribe to his Substack here, or follow him on twitter or Telegram.

“Planned Obsolescence”: The Push for Big Pharma’s Booster Covid Shots and Annual Vaccinations

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Last month, the CEO from Pfizer, Albert Bourla said that yearly Covid-19 vaccinations may need to become normalized just like the flu shot.   A New York Times article headlined with Booster shots and re-vaccinations could be needed. Drug companies are planning for it’ said that a single shot of the Covid-19 vaccine won’t be enough “Scientists have long said that giving people a single course of a Covid-19 vaccine might not be sufficient in the long term, and that booster shots and even annual vaccinations might prove necessary” but that was just a hypothetical scenario, however “that proposition has begun to sound less hypothetical.”  The article goes on to say that “Vaccine makers are getting a jump-start on possible new rounds of shots, although they sound more certain of the need for boosters than independent scientists have.”  The idea of getting a Covid-19 vaccine shot every year will be difficult task as more people are starting to refuse them because of the lack of trust.  Bourla said that “a third dose of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine was “likely” to be needed within a year of the initial two-dose inoculation — followed by annual vaccinations.”

But there seems to be a problem with these vaccines because people who got vaccinated eventually contracted Covid-19, but the vaccines are supposed to work against the virus, right?  Obviously, all of the vaccines from Pfizer-BioNtech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and Astra Zeneca do not work as they claim and because of that, you need to take them annually to protect yourself.  As we know from all of the evidence that has been provided since the launch of these experimental vaccines can cause serious reactions that can lead to a host of injuries and even death in some cases.  In fact, what they are telling you is that they don’t work as well as they expected, but that’s a good thing for them because it creates a population of ‘repeat customers’, sort of like planned obsolescence.  Planned obsolescence according to Wikipedia’s definition is “a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that it becomes obsolete after a certain pre-determined period of time upon which it decrementally functions or suddenly ceases to function, or might be perceived as unfashionable.”  Can we apply this definition to the new Covid-19 experimental vaccine market? “The rationale behind this strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as “shortening the replacement cycle”). It is the deliberate shortening of a lifespan of a product to force people to purchase functional replacements.”  What is revealing is how this can be described as a business model of Big Pharma’s pursuit of profits:

Planned obsolescence tends to work best when a producer has at least an oligopoly. Before introducing a planned obsolescence, the producer has to know that the customer is at least somewhat likely to buy a replacement from them (see brand loyalty). In these cases of planned obsolescence, there is an information asymmetry between the producer, who knows how long the product was designed to last, and the customer, who does not. When a market becomes more competitive, product life spans tend to increase

So The Flu Shot Must Be Unprofitable

They needed a new product because demand for the flu shot was already in decline due to lack of trust.  An interesting article from August of last year by The National Interest, Flu Shot: Why Do So Many People Refuse to Get Vaccinated? the article is primarily based on doctors who were urging the public to get the annual flu shot. “Despite the touted benefits of getting a flu shot each year, the majority of U.S. adults and about 60% of children still refuse to roll up their sleeves for one, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2018-2019 data.”  Big Pharma needed a perfect storm to create a new product by first putting the fear in the people and making sure they will go and get their experimental Covid-19 vaccine shot.  The National Interest, a neoconservative foreign policy publication that went on to say that “In the United States, on average, between nine and forty-five million Americans catch the flu each year, which leads to anywhere between 12,000 to 61,000 deaths. Between October 2019 and April 2020, CDC’s data reveal that there were an estimated thirty-nine to fifty-six million influenza infections and 24,000 to 62,000 fatalities” continued “Still, perhaps many don’t see the point of getting vaccinated, especially when the shot’s effectiveness only ranges from 20% to 60% each season—depending on the types of strains circulating.” Then came Covid-19 and the rest is history.

The Covid-19 Experimental Shot is Profitable

According to a website dedicated to the health industry and medical innovations called the Managed Healthcare Executive (MHE) published ‘The Price Tags on the Covid-19 Vaccines’ said that “The race to find both novel and repurposed therapeutics and develop vaccines has been a multinational effort, although heavily funded by U.S. government dollars.” Realistically, government dollars means US taxpayer dollars “but should the vaccine developers profit off their efforts?” You know what the answer will be, but let’s continue “during a House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing last summer, manufacturers were asked whether they would sell the vaccine at cost.”  Merck did drop out of the vaccine race since no profits were to be made but hey, at least they were honest about their profit motives.  “Moderna and Merck (which announced in January that it was dropping out of the COVID-19 vaccine development race) said they would not sell their vaccines at cost.”  However, Pfizer, BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson have received US funding to develop and distribute the experimental Covid-19 vaccines to the public:  

The first vaccine pricing announcement came in July, when the U.S. government contracted with Pfizer and BioNTech to purchase enough vaccines for 50 million Americans. It’s no coincidence that the price of $19.50 per dose was similar to the pricing of the flu shots. Pfizer has said the research and development costs of its the vaccine approach $1 billion, and the company declined to take direct government funding.

But other companies have accepted huge government checks. AstraZeneca received up to $1.2 billion upfront, in exchange for at least 300 million doses. J&J is also receiving government money from the federal government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Early in the pandemic, BARDA agreed to provide $456 million toward the company’s research and development effort. In August, the federal government agreed to pay J&J $1 billion for 100 million doses of its vaccine, thus the $10-a-dose price.

As of mid-July, Boston-based Moderna had received $955 million in U.S. funding. The company said in August that it would charge between $32 and $37 per dose for its vaccine, although company officials also said the price would be adjusted depending on the amount ordered. That may explain the price of $15 per dose price charged to the U.S. for its order of 100 million doses. Still, the company has been criticized for its pricing, partly because it has received so much government research support. The Lown Institute in Boston gave Moderna one of its Shkreli Awards in January. The awards are for the ”worst examples of profiteering and dysfunction in health care”

In terms of profit-making motives plus adding insult to injury, any person who was injured or who had died from any of the experimental vaccines, the manufacturers will not be held liable according to ’42 U.S. Code § 300aa–22 – Standards of responsibility’ which clearly says the following:

No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings  

At the end of the day, Big Pharma is generating profits and in order to profit from a product, you need repeat customers.  How do you keep your customers?  By continuously spreading fear of an invisible enemy that is always lurking around you and that invisible enemy is Covid-19 and its army of new variants. 

Wake up people! Big Pharma is like every other corporate entity that seeks profits at whatever cost even if it means that people will die from a toxic experimental vaccine that does not protect you against any variant of Covid-19.  These so-called vaccines were produced in under one-year without sufficient human or animal testing, but that’s not important because all they want to do is to keep their corporate board members happy, and that’s all that matters to them at this point.