Secretive agency proposed to develop vaccines, drugs

Secretive agency proposed to develop vaccines, drugs

Associated Press

December 3, 2005

WASHINGTON - By creating a federal agency shielded from public scrutiny, some lawmakers think they can speed the development and testing of new drugs and vaccines needed to respond to a bioterrorist attack or super-flu pandemic.

The proposed Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency, or BARDA, would be exempt from long-standing open records and meetings laws that apply to most government departments, according to legislation approved Oct. 18 by the Senate health committee.

Those exemptions would streamline the development process, safeguard national security and protect the proprietary interests of drug companies, say Republican backers of the bill. The legislation also proposes giving manufacturers immunity from liability in exchange for their participation in the public-private effort.


"We must ensure the federal government acts as a partner with the private sector, providing the incentives and protections necessary to bring more and better drugs and vaccines to market faster," Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said when the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions approved the bill.

The agency would provide the funding for development of treatments and vaccines to protect the United States from natural pandemics as well as chemical, biological and radiological agents.

But it is the secrecy and immunity provisions of the legislation that have alarmed patient-rights and open-government advocates.

The agency would be exempt from the Freedom of Information and Federal Advisory Committee acts, both considered crucial for monitoring government accountability.

"There is no other agency that I am aware of where the agency is totally exempt either from FOIA or FACA," said Pete Weitzel, coordinator of the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government. The coalition is an alliance of journalism groups, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors and Associated Press Managing Editors, that wrote to lawmakers seeking amendments to the bill. "That is a cause for major concern and should raise major policy concerns," Weitzel said.

Burr spokesman Doug Heye said the provisions would keep competitors from gaining proprietary information through FOIA. However, confidential business information already is exempt from FOIA.

"There's no secrecy involved in BARDA," Heye said. "That is absolutely false. This is an agency that will be putting out information daily."

Some Democrats question whether the public would accept drugs or vaccines developed in conjunction with the agency, citing the abortive 2003 effort to vaccinate 500,000 front-line health care workers against smallpox. Only about 40,000 workers ultimately received the vaccine amid concerns about the vaccine's safety, which health authorities initially downplayed.


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http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/12/03/build/nation/75-vaccines.inc

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Commentary:

I know it's hard to keep up with the insanity, but now we're being told we need a super-secret agency -- immune to the Freedom of Information Act and presumably shielded from any public scrutiny -- with "some unusually strong powers."

We're told that we need this agency, to hurry up and create a vaccine that may or may not protect Americans from some real or imagined threat of bioterrorism.

We're told we need a rush-rush vaccine that we may be 'required' to take, or that we may be merely pressured and coerced to take with threats of quarantine ... while the companies that develop or make these best-selling panic-driven vaccines are shielded from any and all liability, but soak up any and all possible profits.

And we're told that we need all this, for a mere billion bucks the first year, with (count on it) increases in its batty budget every year thereafter.

A billion bucks the first year .. to protect us ... by injection ... with no legal recourse ..

America, your nation is being run by lunatics. Bela Lugosi lives, he is the Republicans' Senate Majority Leader, and we're all living in a bad science fiction movie. I don't know whether it's LOGAN'S RUN or SOYLENT GREEN, but whatever it is I want my money back.

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Senate bill calls for secretive new bioterrorism research center
Some scientists fear resources set aside for a new anti-bioterrorism center will be taken away from existing agencies doing similar work


By Jeff Nesmith

WASHINGTON BUREAU

Saturday, November 5, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Legislation moving rapidly through the Senate would create a secretive national research center to respond to bioterror threats and natural disease outbreaks.

But some scientists cautioned Friday that the new agency could draw money away from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health and disrupt their work.

The measure, said to be a priority of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., would shift the main responsibility for developing bioterrorism countermeasures out of the Department of Homeland Security and into the Biological Advanced Research and Development Agency in the Department of Health and Human Services.

The agency would be given a first-year budget of $1 billion and some unusually strong powers:

* Authority to shield drug manufacturers from liability lawsuits if a drug used to counteract a bioterrorism event or disease outbreak caused death or injury.

* Exemption from the federal open records law, the Freedom of Information Act.

The legislation creating the agency was introduced by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., on Oct. 17 and approved the next day by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Frist is one of five Republican co-sponsors.

In a June speech at Harvard University, Frist warned that the world may soon face "a front of unchecked and virulent epidemics, the potential of which should rise above your every other concern."

"I propose an unprecedented effort, the creation of a Manhattan Project for the 21st century, not with the goal of creating a new destructive agent but to defend against infectious diseases and biological weapons."

Burr spokesman Doug Heye confirmed Friday that the Biological Advanced Research and Development Agency would carry out that project.

Heye said Burr's staff was negotiating with aides to Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., to get a bipartisan bill to the Senate floor as soon as possible.

Scientific groups, some of which have been critical of the slow response by the Department of Homeland Security in identifying and counteracting bioterrorism threats, warned that the bill could disrupt existing disease agencies.

The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology said in a letter to Burr that it was "troubled over the impact this new agency might have on existing programs at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, particularly in an era of limited funding for discretionary spending."

"Our concern is BARDA might duplicate, constrain or even eliminate these programs," said Bruce Bistrian, a Harvard Medical School researcher who is president of the federation.

jeffn@coxnews.com

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/auto/epaper/editions/saturday/news_34c6865c2355c1730078.html

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Tamiflu, Vistide and the Pentagon Agenda

Bigboys at the public trough and score one more for Corporations in their war on humanity?

?In 1948 the member countries of the United Nations adopted the so-called Nuremburg Code following the military trial in Nuremburg Germany in 1946 of 23 Nazi doctors for crimes against humanity and experimentation with drugs and viruses on human subjects. It was recognized as international common law guiding medical research. With the grant of legal immunity from lawsuits for effects of their drugs, pharmaceutical companies would succeed in rolling back not only the Nuremburg Code but also more than a Century of bitterly-fought gains in public safety in the regulation of drug manufacturing and promotion.?


http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/GMO/Tamiflu/tamiflu.html

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