The latest candidate for enriching Pfizer executives and investors is a seasonal virus, RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection) striking children (and the elderly) during the late fall and winter. It isn’t a killer virus, usually causing 100-500 deaths among children under five annually. So common is this virus that experts believe that most children have gotten an RSV infection by the time they are two years old. [NYT 10/30/2022] But that isn’t stopping Pfizer from turning on the propaganda machine courtesy of its good friends in the corporate media to stump for another money-making vaccine.
Is the U.S. really on the cusp of a second global health emergency? To answer that question we need to do a deep dive into the operation of the big business known as U.S. healthcare. The U.S. spends 20% of all the income it produces (GDP) on healthcare – a tidy sum of over $4 trillion dollars ($4.1 trillion in 2020). That means every American is $12,000 in the red to pay for the greed of the purveyors of the U.S. healthcare system. Adding insult to injury that’s more than double what citizens of any other advanced economy are forced to shell out. Are Americans twice as healthy? Not if you consider that a country with 4% of the world’s population has the highest number of Covid-related deaths (1.07 million, 20% of the world total), number one for monkey pox cases and has seen life expectancy drop for the second year in a row in 2021.
What this dismal performance makes clear is that American healthcare has strayed far from its roots as the healing profession to big business monolith. In the context of a profit-obsessed industry the appearance of a new virus (RSV) is the stuff of Albert Bourla’s (Pfizer CEO) next yacht. But wait RSV is not new but a seasonal flu affecting both young children and the elderly. According to one epidemiologist—“RSV pops up every year in the late autumn/winter. Then it disappears again for the spring/summer months…It’s very regular and predictable.”
No way subversive info that used to be called the truth was going to run Big Pharma’s gravy train off the rails. Pfizer earned about $80 billion from sales of 3.8 billion covid vaccines and Paxlovid, and the company expects an additional $15 billion by the end of 2022. Children are a profitable part of the mix. In all 1.6 million doses have been administered to children ages 6 months to 4 years-old. One-third of children (36.6%) ages 5-11 have also received at least one dose. While the actual number of children vaccinated is far below expectations, they still represent a significant piece of Pfizer’s revenue stream. The Pfizer executive suite is counting on RSV to become the next blockbuster.
Having successfully gulled the government into financing the industry’s Covid research in addition to paying an exorbitant price for each dose, the vaccine makers were confident their Covid fiddle would be the blueprint for manufacturing hype over other diseases. They didn’t count on a few honest scientists determined to rain on pharma’s parade. As early as May, 2020 when manufactured pandemic hysteria was gathering steam, many prominent scientists began insisting that the Covid death rate was not going to be greater than the seasonal flu and would be concentrated among the elderly, many with serious health issues. Even Dr. Fauci, a Covid whisperer, urging masking, social distancing, and lock downs after initially debunking these methods, had an epiphany (briefly). In an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (3/26/2020), he predicted that the fatality rate for coronavirus would turn out to be like that of a “severe seasonal influenza.”
There was a limit to how much truth-telling Fauci and his Pharma buddies would countenance. Harvard epidemiologist, Dr. Martin Kulldorf finally crossed the line when he announced — “since COVID-19 operates in a highly age specific manner, mandated counter measures must also be age specific. If not, lives will be unnecessarily lost.” His wasn’t the only sane voice. The truth-tellers came together and created the Great Barrington Declaration which criticized universal government inspired Covid measures especially lockdowns. The solution they insisted was to be found in more focused protection of vulnerable older people. They produced data demonstrating that the elderly were more than a thousand times more likely to die from Covid than the young.
To put the final nail in the coffin of truth-telling, pharma through its mouthpieces in the corporate media accused naysayers of not following the science pointing the finger at the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. They were so successful at bashing these scientists that anyone who dared join forces with them was deemed an anti-vaxxer, spreader of misinformation and subject to expulsion from social media.
To manufacture the same amount of public hysteria over RSV, even with pharma’s buddies in the media running daily stories of critically ill children and hospitals near collapse, several hurdles had to be overcome. RSV didn’t suddenly appear in the same way Covid did. RSV has been around since 1956 and is one of the most common causes of childhood illness. Each year in the U.S., RSV causes approximately 2.1 million non-hospitalizations and 58,00-80,000 hospitalization among children younger than 5 years old.
RSV is not why the U.S. suddenly has so many sick children. The blame lies squarely at the feet of the government health agencies, their stenographers in the media and their enablers in Congress and the White House. By making the pandemic a full-on assault on children — closing schools, keeping children isolated at home, infrequently allowed a breath of fresh air swaddled in masks and not allowed to play with their friends — to prevent them from catching a virus that doesn’t particularly affect them to cause early onset of another virus with the same negligible effect.
A whole cadre of prominent scientists have challenged the “official” view that RSV is another epidemic — “Where these infections might have been spread out over time, they’re happening all at once now,” [Céline Gounder, senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation and infectious-disease specialist] Another scientist agrees — “The pandemic has made RSV and the flu present in new ways and at odd times of the year. It’s just that children were sheltered from it.” [William Schaffner, medical director for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine] “As a result [of the U.S. nationwide lockdown], there are still many children who are less than 3 years old who’ve never been exposed to R.S.V. The virus is now playing catch-up in all these kids” [Dr. James Antoon, assistant professor of pediatrics and pediatric hospitalist at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.]
Catch-up huh! Not a new deadly plague requiring the development of a profitable vaccine courtesy of Big Pharma to save our children from a virus that shows up every year with less than catastrophic results. In fact, almost all healthy children and infants recover from RSV on their own. According to the CDC, 100-500 RSV deaths occur every year among children 5 years or younger. This year promises to be no different. Despite months of hype, the first recorded death of a child from RSV was on November 2.
The overcrowded pediatric units at many U.S. hospitals is a direct result of the failure of the most expensive healthcare system in the world to make the right decisions when it counted. Children born during the pandemic were isolated along with their parents and siblings. Masked and social distanced, they never had the chance to build up immunity. Making matters worse, during the lockdown, the immunity of parents and older siblings waned. When people finally said no más and went back to their pre-pandemic lives, infants and very young children with no immunity interacted with parents and siblings whose immunity had waned. The result was inevitable. RSV exploded.
Let’s not make the same mistake again. Dr. Fauci,who has become a millionaire getting in bed with big pharma, seems determined we will — “NIAID conducts and supports basic research on RSV to improve understanding of the virus and how it causes disease… Research is also underway to develop vaccines to prevent RSV.” [Emphasis mine]
As if on cue, Pfizer announced another budget-busting vaccine to treat another virus that like Covid poses little threat to healthy children. This one is designed for pregnant women to protect newborns, although according to Pfizer it is only 69% effective in the first six months of life and after three months its effect weakens. “This is a major triumph for women and their babies.” [Dr. Phil Gruber, Pfizer VP and paid shill]. Other Pfizer doctors stepped up to the plate to praise this nothing-burger. “Maternal immunization takes advantage of the ability to protect the infant from day one… which is important because the peak of hospitalization in these infants due to RSV is around one to two months of age,” [Kena Swanson, Vice President of Viral Vaccines at Pfizer]. Scientists unconnected to Pfizer have remained strangely silent. But Pfizer obviously feels it’s on a roll, so convinced of its ability to fool the government a second time that it stopped the vaccine trial early and plans to ask the FDA for an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in a few short months.
On the heels of that announcement comes a warning from the FDA that supplies of an antibiotic used to treat RSV is in short supply giving Pfizer’s vaccine added allure. Curiouser and curiouser.
Moral of the story: In a for-profit health system, greed is baked into the cake. Pfizer just upped its prediction for total 2022 revenue to $34 billion. With all that filthy lucre going into the Christmas stockings of pharma executives and investors, it’s charitable outreach is limited to shipping less than 2% of its Covid vaccine to lower income countries that cannot afford the larcenous prices it charges. Moderna’s record is even more nauseating, delivering .2% of its vaccines to poor countries. Just what part of that democracy our leaders tell us is we must guard with our votes (to the democrats) makes us immune to the worldwide effects of American corporate plunder?
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