The most recent in a long list of government bureaucrats to leave the public dole and take up the high-paying cause of Big Pharma is none other than former head of the CDC Julie Gerberding. One year and one day from the date of departure from the Taxpayer payroll, Ms. Gerberding takes the reins as president of the vaccine division of the principle descendant of I.G. Farben: Merck Pharmaceuticals.
The revolving door between the Department of Health and Human Services and the pharmaceutical industrial complex is legend – and it swings both ways. Current head of the FDA, Margaret Hamburg, served on the board of directors for Henry Schein, Inc., manufacturer of mercury dental amalgams, in between her stints with the Clinton and now Obama administrations. Therefore it should surprise no one that the FDA, despite mercury’s known neurotoxicity, in 2009 ruled that mercury amalgams are really not so bad.
While Hamburg’s return to the federal bureaucratic oligarchy has already paid dividends to the industry she left, Gerberding’s departure should raise conflict-of-interest concerns for anyone wanting a CDC free of undue influence from Merck and other vaccine manufacturers.
A long time proponent of drug and vaccine intervention, Dr. Gerberding earned the nickname “Chicken Little” during her tenure at CDC for claiming that each successive flu season might be the one that puts the 1918 Spanish Influenza to shame. Yet there has always been a strange cognitive dissonance in her message.
In between vaccine promotional efforts during the H5N1 Bird Flu hype of 2006, The News Tribune in Tacoma Washington caught her admitting on April 15 of that year:
“There is no evidence it will be the next pandemic,” Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said of avian flu. There is “no evidence it is evolving in a direction that is becoming more transmissible to people.”
One wonders, is it fringe to ask why mainstream medical reporters find it uninteresting to follow up on such statements from the head of the CDC? Especially considering this statement, specifically, contradicted most of her other official pronouncements that stressed potential end-of-the-world influenza scenarios. Even paid vaccine advocate Paul A. Offit (Children’s Hospital Philadelphia) admitted at the time that H5 viruses have been around for 100 years and never caused a pandemic and likely never will.
Two newer drugs benefit the most from the annual CDC-sky-is-falling-pronouncements: Tamiflu and Relenza. Due to CDC’s unwavering allegiance to the products of Big Pharma, billions of dollars in Taxpayer funds have been transferred to the drug industry for stockpiling these medicines that may only shorten duration of viral infection by ½ to 1 day. Warnings about delirium and other abnormal behavior (some resulting in fatal outcomes) coupled with limited data proving effectiveness seem to have been ignored by CDC’s leadership.
Outside of those two blockbuster drugs for influenza, it had become apparent that the future profitability of the pharmaceutical industry rests heavily on the growth of its vaccine divisions. Increasingly, that growth had grown incredibly dependent upon government health organizations and their ability to foment fear in the lay populace.
Why would Merck want to hire someone so schizophrenic on the issue of annual influenza outbreaks? One likely scenario has Gerberding helping institutionalize the annual flu hype, which became quite the bonanza for vaccine manufacturers at a time when the new drug pipeline had stalled out. With very few blockbuster drugs on the horizon, existing, more profitable drugs were all too close to having to compete with generics.
Julie Gerberding serves her future master well
Gerberding’s January 2004 Report to Congress “Prevention of Genital Human Papillomavirus Infection” paved the way for eventual approval for Merck’s Gardasil vaccine, guaranteeing billions in profits for her future employer. Perhaps the vaccine presidency is Julie’s reward for cementing the relationship between government and Merck via the CDC, the agency that behaves as the de facto marketing arm of the vaccine industry.
Another gift to Merck under Gerberding’s management has been the CDC’s continual denial that there is any link between the mercury-based preservative, thimerosal, and autism on the small scale; and vaccinations and autism on the large scale. Recent CDC reports place the incidence of autism at 1 in 110 children, four times higher than previous estimates. A major key to the viability of future vaccines in the pipeline is the tacit denial of any link of autism to the heavy metal, or vaccines in general, now or in the future.
Julie Gerberding holds a medical degree and a Masters in Public Health, yet she can’t seem to do the math coinciding with a four-fold increase in the number of mandated childhood vaccines since the time autism estimates were ¼ of what they are now. Although she would likely not qualify for a job requiring statistically relevant analysis, her ability to look away from that which is reasonable in assessing vaccine safety is evidently a vital prerequisite for the presidency of Merck vaccines.
Personnel within federal agencies under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services, rather than protecting the public, behave as if they work on behalf of the interests of BIG PHARMA.
Now that she is out of the vaccine closet since Merck’s hiring, will Julie Gerberding come clean about her unconscionable denials regarding any link between vaccines and autism, much less the link between the CDC and Merck? Or does she believe that the over-two-billion dollars paid out to families of injured and killed children since passage of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Act is mere coincidence as well?
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