I attended as a sociologist, seeking to understand how these people think and how their organizations work.
It was immediately apparent that this was a business meeting, not an academic conference. Dozens of booths were set up in the main exhibit hall. People were giving away chachkas and were eager to talk about their products.
The opening keynote speech was delivered not by a scientist or policy wonk — but by Dr. Alan Dunton, chief medical adviser and non-executive director of Recce Pharmaceuticals, an uber-successful Australian biotech startup.
Dunton boasted about Recce 327, a synthetic broad-spectrum antibiotic designed to kill every kind of bacteria. All of them, instantly. With no side effects. None. Not only that, the bacteria were completely unable to develop resistance. The company did an exhaustive search for escaped and mutated bacteria and didn’t find any. Not a single one. In a full 30 days.
This is a good thing? Does Dunton know that there are far more commensal bacteria than infectious? That we need our microbiomes to be healthy?
The high point of my day was when someone (besides me) asked about the gut microbiota. “We have no data,” Dunton responded.
Of course not. Why would they collect data that could only be harmful to product sales?
Carolyn Reynolds, co-founder of Pandemic Action Network, told us there are dozens of new outbreaks every day, all over the world, every one a pandemic just waiting to explode. Danger! Danger! Monkeypox has reached Antarctica, she said.
The good news is that there is consensus on how to prevent the next one. Spend more money. Lower bureaucratic barriers for drug approval. And vaccinate, don’t hesitate.
Dr. Bruce Gellin, president of Global Immunization at the Sabin Vaccine Institute in Washington, D.C., spoke to us about how to stop the next pandemic in its tracks. The key is to analyze wastewater. Every city in the world should be testing its sewage for viral proteins so we can get a jump on the pandemic. Before it’s a pandemic.
“Diagnostics,” he called it.
When the mike opened for audience questions, I asked Gellin, “What is the probability the next pandemic will come from a bioweapons lab, as opposed to a zoonotic event?”
He answered that yes, he knew about “theories” concerning the Wuhan lab. “But what does it matter where they come from? We have to prepare for both.”
What I learned from this is that this man thought it was a reasonable and practical goal to test a billion tons of sewage in cities around the globe with PCR analysis — but halting bioweapons research was beyond the pale.
The scary part is that he is in touch with political reality. I’m the one who is out of the loop.
One of the conference themes was establishing rights and protocols for surveillance. To you and me, “surveillance” may conjure stories of Stasi spy networks, Snowden revelations and violations of Fourth Amendment rights. But here, the word was used unabashedly as a synonym for “data acquisition.”
“We need more data,” was the refrain. Surely they mean biochemical data and not health data. Health data inevitably lead to “vaccine hesitancy.”
The 2010 Lazarus study told us that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is capturing only 1% of vaccine injuries. In other words, VAERS, run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has been 99% effective at preventing vaccine injuries from reaching the public eye — and 99% effective in suppressing the reports that lead to vaccine hesitancy.
But there is a bigger problem with the most serious injuries. VAERS has been only about 90% effective in hiding these. How can they do better? Surely more surveillance, more staff and a much larger budget will be needed.
Catherine Bertrand-Ferrandis, a veterinarian and public health communication specialist, was visiting from Paris to help us strategize about the “infodemic.” People are reading the wrong information. What can we do about it? She spoke to a roomful of people, all of whom agreed that there was a problem.
Bertrand-Ferrandis didn’t address the question, “How do we know what we know?” or “Who is best qualified to make judgments about which public health strategies are best?” or even “What motivates anti-vaxxers to post their crazy ideas?” Everyone nodded in agreement that government proclamations were authoritative and that the problems (from her slide) were “Questions, Concerns, and Mistrust” in that order.
The central focus of the meeting was antibiotic resistance, but “antibiotic” is a trigger word — almost everyone at the conference was making money from antibiotic sales, in one way or another. So it is now called “antimicrobial resistance,” or AMR.
Funny that hand sanitizer was everywhere, and even the soap in the bathroom was antimicrobial.
A full 70% of the antibiotics sold in America go to factory farms. Shutting down factory farms would solve 70% of the problem, and it would have a host of other benefits — healthier foods, less animal suffering and an end to rivers of pigshit running through Iowa. But this approach is outside the Overton window. It’s not open for discussion.
I was gratified to see that the breakout session on the Pandemic Treaty was suitably despairing about the political obstacles to passage. They fully acknowledged the wall of opposition from Third World countries but did not think to ask why that might be.
So, when the mike opened for questions, I asked them. “Given that Nigeria and Congo had low vaccine uptake and less than 1/100 the death rate from COVID that we had in America, why would we expect them to follow our lead, to do things the way we do them in the West?”
Of course, Kevin Klock, senior vice president of the Foundation for the National Institute of Health, dodged the question, and reiterated his concern about the subject most dear to him: How can we make vaccines more affordable for low-income countries?
The lunchtime plenary was about antibiotic resistance, and the invited expert was Boumediene Soufi, global head of antimicrobial resistance for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. Sandoz (formerly part of Novartis) is the world’s leader in selling cheap, off-patent antibiotics in bulk.
Sandoz profits twice from antibiotic resistance — once when it serves the world’s demand for cheap antibiotics, and again when bacteria develop resistance and require ever larger doses.
But there was no irony in featuring Soufi on stage, no acknowledgment that he might have a conflict of interest. What a smooth talker! “We can all agree that we need a product to solve a problem” and “Of course, we must find a balance between too much use and too little use.”
“Leave no country behind,” was his mantra. I was reminded of meetings I attended as a public health advocate in the 1990s, where sanctimonious representatives of Reynolds Tobacco spoke about individual freedoms and the need to protect minorities.
The take-home message is that we have created a huge class of people who have a financial interest in the spread of disease and, even more, in fear of disease. There is a highly successful business model selling products that make people sick, and other products that treat the symptoms.
The last pandemic was so insanely profitable that we are sure to have another one, even bigger, real soon.
What can we do about this culture of disease?
The core problem is that the Sick-Care model is immensely profitable. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” Upton Sinclair, author of “The Jungle,” a best-selling novel about the plight of workers in the meatpacking industry.
But the last pandemic was economically devastating to many. There were far more losers than winners. Small businesses, airlines, hotels, restaurants and retail businesses don’t want another pandemic psyop. These are our natural allies.
The Pharma-Industrial Complex is the brainchild of the Sackler Brothers, conceived as a long-range plan back in the 1950s, and patiently brought to fruition with shrewd investments in universities, medical schools, scientific journals and continuing education for doctors. Drug ads on TV are their way to ensure that the mainstream media, too, are beholden to Big Pharma.
Pharma owns “The Science™,” and we must take it back from them. We can do it. Money is powerful, but truth is more powerful.
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Alan
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When anybody at a pharmaceutical company types pandemic it will appear as ££££££££.
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