Sunanda K Datta-Ray: The Tamiflu 'mafia'

WHERE MONEY TALKS

Who else, but President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and friends seem to be behind it.

Shepherds are dangerous. Sheep even more so. George W Bush will have to strike again at the axis of evil.

Afghanistan came first. Then Iraq. The next battleground will not be Iran, but Cornwall's pastoral idyll where present and constant danger lurks amidst thyme and rosemary.

No revolutionary cell was ever as lethal as the West Cornwall Small Shepherds Club; no samizdat more subversive than its newsletter. Its tentacles spread across the globe, recalling in the tranquillity of the Cornish village of Gwithiam, the bird flu that ravaged an obscure pocket of Maharashtra. Fearing that the disease might spread to humans, the Indian government reportedly bought up all the Tamiflu tablets it could lay hands on. The original being so expensive, it also sought licensed manufacture in India.

Sheila Sexton of Tregarne, stalwart of the West Cornwall Small Shepherds Club, and Tess Nash who edits its monthly newsletter, knew then they would have to fight to save Animal Farm going the way of Iraq. It was in the rambling farmhouse of Charles and Joyce Sanderson's Reskajeage Farm, cunningly designed to withstand siege and fox the invader with its unsuspected corridors, tucked away rooms and innocent clusters of medieval outhouses that I chanced upon the clarion call against Bush's neo-conservatives.

Until then I had missed the telltale resistance preparations. Screeching seagulls drown the manufacture of a new generation of weapons of mass destruction "" murderous spades and pitchforks and man-traps like Elizabethan stocks cunningly disguised as instruments for treating sheep with rotten feet. Rabbits dart out of hawthorn hedges to lay red herrings across the trail. Silent as the foreign hand, lamas scan the horizon for the enemy. Miniature ouessant are ready to savage them on arrival.

Sexton's message, published as a question-and-answer article in the newsletter's June edition and punctuated with the editor's pungent comments, deserves reproduction in full. So here goes, with apologies to Nash.

"Bird Flu"
"Do you know that 'bird flu' was discovered in Vietnam nine years ago?

Do you know that barely 100 people have died in the whole world in all that time?

Do you know that it was the Americans who alerted us to the efficacy of the human antiviral drug, TAMIFLU, as a preventative?

Do you know that TAMIFLU barely alleviates some symptoms of the common flu?

Do you know that its efficacy against the common flu is questioned by a great part of the scientific community?

Do you know that to date, Avian Flu affects birds only?

Do you know that against a SUPPOSED mutant virus such as H5N1, TAMIFLU barely alleviates the illness?"

The coup de grace follows.

"Do you know who markets TAMIFLU?

Answer: Roche Laboratories.

Do you know who bought the patent for TAMIFLU from Roche Laboratories in 1996?

Answer: Gilead Sciences Inc

Do you know who was the then president of Gilead Sciences Inc and remains a major shareholder?

Answer: Donald Rumsfeld, the present Secretary of Defence of the USA.

Do you know that the base of TAMIFLU is crushed aniseed?

Do you know who controls 90 per cent of the world's production of this tree?

Answer: Roche Laboratories.

Do you know that sales of TAMIFLU were over $254 million in 2004 and more than $1,000 million in 2005?

Do you know how many more millions Roche can earn in the coming months, if the business of fear continues?"

Nash intervenes, "Neither do we, but it's an awful lot!"

The article continues:

"So the summary of the story is as follows:

Bush's friends decide that the medicine TAMIFLU is the solution for a pandemic that has not yet occurred, and that has caused only a hundred deaths worldwide in nine years.

This medicine doesn't so much cure the common flu, let alone anything as reportedly virulent and lethal to humans as the H5N1 virus.

In normal conditions, the H5N1 virus does not affect humans."

Another Nash intervention, "And as yet, is showing no signs of mutating to infect human to human, either".

Sexton continues:
"Rumsfeld sells the patent for TAMIFLU to Roche for which they pay him a fortune.

Roche acquires 90 per cent of the global production of crushed aniseed, the base for the antivirus.

The governments of the entire world threaten a pandemic, and then buy industrial quantities of the product from Roche.

So we, the taxpayers, end up paying huge sums for an ineffective medicine, while Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush do 'The Business'."

Nash has the last word. "Shades of Mafia, perhaps?"

No, that's not Calcutta's Coffee House speaking. It's the whisper that can be heard among Stone Age barrows in Cornwall's placid fields and the ruins of Victorian tin mines where Bush's mission to bring freedom and democracy to the world faces severe resistance. Small shepherds are obviously in cahoots with Al Qaeda, the Taliban and even Saddam Hussein since they object to his neocon cronies making money.

Sound the trumpets. Muster the next coalition of the willing. It matters not whether Nash or Sexton is Osama bin Laden in drag. Cornwall must be liberated. America will not be savaged by sheep or shepherds.