Rummy and Tamiflu

[katty]

cont'd at:

http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=1443

TAMIFLU GILEAD CHAIR WAS ... RUMMY

Friday, October 21, 2005 - FreeMarketNews.com

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Readers can be helpful, and one just wrote in to inform us of a link that we had never imagined - Donald Rumsfeld, until he resigned and joined the Bush Administration, was the chairman of something called Gilead which just happened to make something called Tamiflu.

Now anyone who hasn't been on Mars for the last month or two, knows that there were only two things that were going to stop the human version of bird flu. One was a bird flu vaccine (which probably would work better if you were a bird) and the other was something called Tamiflu. Yes, that Tamiflu. In such short supply that the hundreds of millions of orders that have been pouring into Gilead probably won't be filled for another 12 months or so. But everyone has got to have it because somehow or other it became established that Tamiflu really worked.

This was the party line, anyway, for about a week, until word began trickling back in that maybe Tamiflu didn't work. In fact, the word on Tamiflu has always been positive at first and then eventually negative. It's a kind of pattern. We even find corroboration of it here on the Democrats.com, in what appears to be either a chat room or news roundup as follows, "Rummy was CEO of Gilead Sciences until named to the Bush cabinet and, like Cheney, still has ties that bind to the 'old company.' Now isn't it an 'amazing coincidence' that the drug Tamiflu patented by Gilead Sciences is being pushed by the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases as the NUMBER ONE choice for flu, which, wonder of wonders, is sweeping through in one epidemic after another."

[Mme. Defarge]

1. This is what I found on Tamiflu

http://www.fda.gov/cder/consumerinfo/druginfo/tamiflu.htm

According to this, it is manufactured by Roche Laboratories, Inc. http://www.roche.com/home.html

Couldn't find a connection to Giliad Sciences.

[w8liftinglady]

3. here's a link

http://www.gilead.com/wt/sec/tamiflu

[Mme. Defarge]

4. Thanks!

[illflem]

2. My understanding

is that the main reason for Tamiflu's high price and scarcity is that it's main ingredient, the star anise plant, only grows in very limited specific mircoclimates in SE Asia.