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(back to "Special HIV-AIDS Report") Gilead Sciences, in Foster City, California, is the world's number one purveyor of the chemotherapies known as "anti-retrovirals" (ARVs.) In 2010, the company (named for the Biblical "balm of Gilead") reported ARV sales of about $6.3 billion dollars. The trade names for their ARVs are: Truvada, Atripla, Viread and Emtriva--all of which they acknowledge have serious adverse "side" effects (as noted in the preceding Gilead prescribing information for Truvada.) Gilead was way ahead of nearest competitor Bristol-Myers-Squibb, which sold about $2.8 billion of the chemo in 2010, according to year-end corporate reports I have reviewed. As of this August 2011 writing, my reviews of company sales reports from the HIV-AIDS ARV sector of the pharmaceutical industry support an estimation (mine) of roughly $15 billion dollars or more in sales during 2010, based on ARV gross revenues totaling $14.85 billion by the top six purveyors of the chemo: Gilead, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline Pfizer [doing joint business as "ViiV"], Abbott, Merck, and Tibotec Therapueutics (a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary.) That $15 billion is nearly double the $8 billion ARV market estimated by CNNMoney.com just four years ago, in 2007. Gilead has been one of the politically best connected BigPharma companies in America. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was chairman of its board, from which he resigned to be in George W. Bush's cabinet. Former Secretary of State George Shultz (Reagan) and former Special Trade Representative Carla Hills (George H.W. Bush) are directors (Shultz is "emeritus") of Gilead.The connections of Gilead to the Bush dynasty are likely at the root of the $50+ billion committed from George W. Bush's "PEPFAR" initiative, mostly to supply anti-retriviral drugs to Africa, approved by Congress during the last years of his Administration. Gilead has scrambled to build its ARV sales as its other cash-cow, Tamiflu, has been judged nearly useless as a palliative for influenza, even though it continues to sell the product whenever the Centers for Disease Control attempts to scare the world with regular panics about bird, swine, H1N1 and other killer flu figments of the CDC's imagination (and its need to boost its budget.) Gilead shamelessly promotes its chemotherapy with ubiquitous advertising in gay readership publications. In two recent past years (2007 and 2008), this writer counted over sixty full pages of ads for Truvada and another Gilead drug, Atripla, in just one gay weekly newspaper, The Washington Blade. Several other makers of drugs began aggressive advertising in the Blade in the last half of 2008. Merck began running three-page ads for “Isentress;” Bristol-Myers Squibb bought two-page spreads for HIV medications "with a low risk of diarrhea;” and Tibotec Therapuetics (the subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson) weighed in with four-and-one-half-page spreads for Prezista. The Blade folded in bankruptcy in November 2009, but came back under the name "dcagenda" a few weeks later. Its first edition, December 4, 2009, contained 40 pages--31 of which were advertising, and 13 (42 percent) of those ad pages were from The HIV-AIDS Industry, including Gilead, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, the DC Dept. of Health's "Ask for the [HIV] test campaign," and the [HIV-AIDS] Whitman Walker Clinic. The Blade returned in 2010, and Gilead remained one of its biggest advertisers. The ARV Industry virtually owns and operates much of the gay press, just as "poppers" (nitrites) did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Gilead also has tremendous power with the mainstream business press. A piece I wrote for TheStreet.com on December 7, 2009, which included a reference to Gilead and the toxicity of HIV drugs, lasted less than four hours on the site before it was erased--after the founder of the site, CNBC's Mad Money Jim Cramer, intervened to have it withdrawn. Sex and marketing sell Gilead's chemotherapy Now, chemotherapy for HIV Negatives!! Not satisfied with peddling its chemotherapy to "HIV positives," Gilead has now (as of late 2011) applied to the Food & Drug Administration to permit peddling its "Truvada" to HIV-negative gay men and black Africans for so-called "pre-exposure prophylaxis" (PrEP)--the latest craze in The HIV-AIDS Industry effort to drug the world, claiming that a daily pill for life can protect you from "infection" by the mysterious retrovirus. Multi-million dollar confirmation-biased "studies" claiming to demonstrate prophylaxis are mostly funded by the NIH bureaucrat Fauci, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control--with Truvada and other ARVs generously donated by Gilead. The PrEP lunacy is apparently the latest effort by The Industry to replace three decades of failure to find an "HIV vaccine." Of course, how can you vaccinate against a non-pathogenic antigen that has already stimulated anti-bodies that Luc Montagnier argues can rid the body of "HIV" in several weeks? Of course, that assumes a retroviral antigen you could call "HIV" actually exists. The Perth Group in Australia has argued for years that no "HIV" retrovirus has ever been isolated. Even the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) of Los Angeles, with all its clinics and pharmacies, has opposed Gilead's application to the FDA for use of Truvada as PrEP.
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