(NaturalNews) You've heard it before, how the pharmaceutical industry has a giant "revolving door" through which corporations and government agencies frequently exchange key employees. That reality was driven home in a huge way today when news broke that Dr. Julie Gerberding, who headed the CDC from 2002 through 2009, landed a top job with Merck, one of the largest drug companies in the world. Her job there? She's the new president of
the vaccine division.
How convenient. That means the former head of the
CDC was very likely cultivating a relationship with
Merck all these years, and now comes the big payoff: Heading up a $5 billion division that sells cervical cancer
vaccines (like Gardasil), chickenpox vaccines and of course H1N1
swine flu vaccines, too.
So what's the problem with all this? The problem is that
private industry and government health offices such as the CDC or FDA should never be so cozy. When they are, it creates
an environment of collusion between Big Government and
Big Pharma. We've already seen this with the government-led push for swine
flu vaccines that are manufactured (and sold) by drug
companies like Merck.
You might even say that the CDC already functions as the marketing division of the
pharmaceutical industry. It was the CDC that pushed so hard for
swine flu vaccines, even amid the obvious realization that swine
flu was no more dangerous than
seasonal flu. To this day, the CDC still hasn't bothered to recommend vitamin D for the prevention of either seasonal flu or swine flu. It remains heavily invested in the lucrative
vaccine approach -- an approach that just happens to financially benefit the very corporations that are hiring ex-CDC
employees like Dr. Gerberding.
How to triple your salary by selling out to industry
Getting a job offer from Big Pharma, by the way, is one of the most-desired career paths for many CDC employees (and FDA workers, for that matter). It's easy to accomplish it, too: Just operate in your government position as if you were a Big Pharma lackey. If you produce enough good
business for the drug industry, sooner or later they'll offer you a lucrative position that doubles or triples your government salary (or even better).
Now, I don't want to lump all CDC employees in this same pathetic group, because there are indeed a great many bright, honest scientists working at the CDC who do excellent work tracking pandemics and trying to save lives. They are overshadowed, however, by those ambitious profit seekers who see their CDC job as merely a stepping stone for a far better-paying job at a major
drug companies. And by any measure, Dr. Gerberding just cashed in big.
Her actual salary at Merck hasn't been publicly released yet, but given that she's heading up a $5 billion vaccine industry, it's probably not chump change. I'd bet she's now making at least ten times the salary of the President of the United States (and probably a lot more).
So now, Dr. Gerberding's new job involves the incessant promotion of yet more vaccines -- a job not very different from the one she held at the CDC, come to think of it. More vaccines for more diseases afflicting more people... it's just another day at Merck, where the world is never so healthy that it doesn't need one more mandatory vaccine.
As a special bonus to Merck in all this, Dr. Gerberding has a wealth of contacts not merely throughout the CDC, but also at the World Health Organization. When you're the former head of the CDC, the top
public health officials of the world are literally just one call away. But starting today, that call is a commercial, corporate-sponsored call, not a public
health call. There's a huge difference.
Does Dr. Gerberding suffer from an "ethics deficiency?"
My question in all this is whether Dr. Gerberding has any real
ethics when it comes to issues like vaccines and public health. If she does have such ethics, why would she accept a job with a company that has been engaged in outright scientific fraud? (
http://www.naturalnews.com/027582_Merck_Vioxx.html)
Why would she go to work for a company that maintained a "hit list" of
doctors to attack and "neutralize?" This is true -- it came out in recent court documents (
http://www.naturalnews.com/027116_Merck_doctors_vaccines.html).
Why would she take a job with a company that has a pattern of threatening doctors who speak out against its drugs? (
http://www.naturalnews.com/026420_Merck_Vioxx_doctors.html)
Why would she be okay with the idea of working for a company that commits
scientific fraud by hiding documents showing its
drugs to be dangerous? (
http://www.naturalnews.com/024072_Zetia_Merck_cholesterol_drug.html)
Why would she feel okay about working for a company that dumps
chemicals and vaccine waste products into the public water system? (
http://www.naturalnews.com/023124_water_Merck_chemicals.html)
Why would she want to collect a paycheck from a company that has been caught hiring ghost writers to pen "independent"
science papers submitted to science journals, when they were actually crafted by Merck? (
http://www.naturalnews.com/023052_Merck_scientific_fraud_America.html)
Why would she feel comfortable representing a company that committed blatant scientific fraud with its Vytorin
cholesterol drug study? (
http://www.naturalnews.com/022485_scientific_fraud_Merck_Vytorin.html)
Maybe Dr. Gerberding is fine with all this. Maybe she has really "flexible" ethics. Or maybe she suffers from an "ethics deficiency" -- an epidemic
disease for which Merck apparently has no vaccine at all.
In any case, she's now allied herself with a company engaged in so many repeated acts of
fraud that in my opinion all its executives should be arrested and prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Those executives will now include Dr. Gerberding, it seems.
Did the CDC cover Merck's back?
You might say, though, that she hasn't done anything yet for Merck. But check this out: As a previous
NaturalNews story explains, when a fourteen-year-old girl named Jessica died following a
cervical cancer vaccine injection (made by Merck), the CDC covered for Merck and pointed the finger at the girl's
birth control pills.
Care to guess who was heading the CDC at the time of this maneuver? Dr. Julie Gerberding, now a top Merck executive.
You pat my back and I'll pat yours.
For years, under the lead of Dr. Gerberding, the CDC has maintained a rather bizarre position that
Merck's vaccines are so safe that all side effects should be dismissed outright. This is explained in a Dallas Morning News article (
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-vac...), among other places.
The CDC, in other words, has been running defense for Merck for many years, downplaying vaccine side effects and insisting that Merck's vaccines are safe. Now that the president of Merck's vaccine division and the former chief of the CDC are one and the same, it brings up obvious questions of whether there was some level of ongoing collusion between the CDC and Merck and how deeply Dr. Gerberding might have been involved.
Some of the word games played by Dr. Gerberding demonstrate amazing Clintonian-like speech patterns designed to deflect blame from Merck's vaccines. Listen to this exchange where Dr. Gerberding indirectly admits that
vaccines can cause autism (or as she says, "Autism-like
symptoms," which is exactly the same thing, as the symptoms define the disease in the first place). Watch it yourself in this segment on
YouTube -- this is a
must see video segment on the link between vaccines and autism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh-nkD5LSIgWho else is on the Merck team at the CDC?
That the CDC's chief would be offered one of the very top jobs at Merck now makes me wonder just how deep the culture of collusion between Merck and the CDC really goes. How many other CDC employees are in line for future job offers from Merck -- and what might they do in order to win those jobs?
There's a solution to all this, of course: Pass a law that bans employees of the CDC, FDA,
FTC, EPA or USDA from ever working for pharmaceutical companies. The people who run the regulatory agencies and public health offices should never be allowed to leap into employment at the very same companies they were once regulating. There's just too much risk of cross-contamination of influence, which is why we have the corruption and collusion problems we're seeing today with the FDA, FTC and CDC, all of which seem to be operating as
marketing extensions of the pharmaceutical industry.
As long as the revolving door remains wide open between Big Pharma and Big Government, there will be a strong tendency towards corporate collusion that betrays the people whom government is supposed to serve. Instead of our government serving the People, in other words, it increasingly exists to serve the interests of
Big Business. And big business doesn't get much bigger than Big Pharma.
After all, inventing fictitious disease, creating pandemic panics, then selling questionable patented drugs to gullible consumers is a lucrative business model. And now the official job of the former head of the CDC is to make sure it all stays that way. So roll up your sleeves, folks: There's a vaccine with your name on it, and Dr. Gerberding is here to make sure Merck sticks it to ya.
Sources for this story include:http://www.naturalnews.com/023792_HPV_birth_control_CDC.htmlhttp://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-vac...http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BK2K520091221
About the author: Mike Adams is an award-winning journalist and holistic nutritionist with a passion for sharing empowering information to help improve personal and planetary health He has authored more than 1,800 articles and dozens of reports, guides and interviews on natural health topics, impacting the lives of millions of readers around the world who are experiencing phenomenal health benefits from reading his articles. Adams is an independent journalist with strong ethics who does not get paid to write articles about any product or company. In mid 2010, Adams produced NaturalNews.TV, a natural health video sharing website offering user-generated videos on nutrition, green living, fitness and more. He also founded an environmentally-friendly online retailer called BetterLifeGoods.com that uses retail profits to help support consumer advocacy programs. He's also a successful software entrepreneur, having founded a well known email marketing software company whose technology currently powers the NaturalNews email newsletters. Adams volunteers his time to serve as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and regularly pursues cycling, nature photography, Capoeira and Pilates.
Have comments on this article? Post them here:
people have commented on this article.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Email this article to a friend
Share this article on: 
Now Available from 
