Thursday, March 5, 2009

Big Drug Companies Fund Groups Behind Plot to Regulate Nano-Silver (Opinion)

Big Drug Companies Fund Groups Behind Plot to Regulate Nano-Silver

Our good friend Tony Isaacs, author, investigative journalist and well-known natural health advocate has discovered what may well be the smoking gun in the campaign by radical environmental groups to have the EPA start regulating products containing silver nano-particles – including dietary colloidal silver products – as "pesticides."

See his brilliant article below to learn how the charitable organizations connected to big drug companies have for years been funding some of the very same environmental groups now responsible for the petition to have silver nano-particles regulated.

As we stated in our previous blog post, "The environmental groups behind the petition to regulate silver particles as ‘pesticides’ get the bulk of their funding, to the tune of millions of dollars a year, from donations from corporate and individual sponsors, as well as from government grants. Our best guess is that Big Pharma is funding these groups through one or more surreptitious pathways to pursue this avenue of silver regulation. After all, who stands to benefit more than Big Pharma from restricting silver’s availability to the general public?"

Boy did we hit the nail on the head. It now appears that at least two big drug companies -- Merck and Pfiizer -- have for many years been using charitable foundations to pour tens of thousands of dollars, and in some cases even millions of dollars worth of funding into some of the very environmental groups now actively engaged in promoting the petition to have "nano-silver" products regulated as "pesticides."

Be sure to note the section in Tony's article below on the Tides Foundation and Tides Center. These are non-profit groups which apparently have been set up to allow Big Pharma and other donors to secretly fund groups the donors don't want the public to know they are funding.

We’ll let Tony’s article speak for itself. Keep in mind, however, that his article only demonstrates that a number of the environmental groups behind the petition to have silver regulated as a "pesticide" have indeed received huge amounts of funding from foundations associated with big drug companies. We will leave it up to you to decide if this massive funding of environmental groups by the major drug companies is what's behind the environmentalist's campaign to put silver nano-particles -- including dietary colloidal silver -- under the EPA's regulatory thumb.

-- Spencer

Merck, other Pharma Companies Funding Activist Groups behind the EPA Petition to Regulate Silver

by Tony Isaacs

Recently it was revealed that a handful of the activist agencies behind the petition to the EPA to regulate nano-silver as a pesticide have received funding from pharmaceutical giant Merck, which annually has hundreds of billions of dollars in profits from patented antibiotics which many believe are less effective, less safe and far more expensive than colloidal nano-silver products.

Now, further investigation has discovered that the initial revelations may just be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Merck and other pharmaceutical companies' funding of the groups who support the EPA petition.

The actual source of the funding that was first revealed in emails and colloidal silver blogsites was the John Merck Fund was set up in 1970 by Serena Merck, the widow of Merck Pharmaceuticals CEO George W. Merck, in honor of their short-lived son John.

The recipients of funding who are signees on the petition to the EPA were identified as:

Funding To Activist Groups, Total Donated, Time Frame

Center for Food Safety $1,305,000.00 1999 – 2005

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy $490,000.00 1992 – 2003

International Center for Technology Assessment $247,500.00 1999 – 1999

Consumers Union of the United States $90,000.00 2000 – 2001

Greenpeace $80,000.00 2000 – 2002

Friends of the Earth $45,000.00 1992 – 2000

The Center for Food Safety (CFS) which along with its sister organization the International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA), initiated the EPA petition and enlisted the other groups which signed off on the petition, received the second largest amount of funding of any group from the John Merck Fund -- second only to the huge total of the Tides Center/Tides Foundation, whose total funding of almost $2.7 Million dwarfs the combined total of $1.75 Million given to the CFS and the ICTA and CFS.

Tides Foundation & Tides Center $2,693,000.00 1989 – 2005

http://www.activistcash.com/foundation.cfm?did=138

As it turns out, the top funding recipient Tides Foundation and Tides Center are also actively involved in the petition to regulate silver, as well as the source of funding and support to several of the other groups who signed the EPA petition.

When one goes to the Tides Center website, their position is apparent to one and all with the posting of a press release urging support of the EPA petition:

http://www.tidescenter.org/news-resources/news-releases/single-press-release/article/epa-petitioned-to-stop-sale-of-260-products-containing-nanosilver/index.html

Information on Tides Center's website and other web searches found the following Tides Center/Tides Foundation connections to groups involved in the nanosilver petition, but who are not listed as Merck funding recipients:

• Center for Environmental Health (a project of the Tides Center)

• Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (previous funding and connections with the Tides Foundation)

• Clean Production Action (a Tides Center project)

• Food and Water Watch (receives donations from the Tides Foundation)

• The Loka Institute (has no current offices but was previously provided office space and a mailbox in Washington. DC by the International Center for Technology Assessment in their offices)

In addition, a $200,000 grant for 2006-2007 from a second Merck Foundation, the Merck Family Fund to another petitioner, Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, was discovered.

A quick internet search reveals that Merck is not the only pharmaceutical company which provides funding to the Tides Foundation and Tides Center, as this listing of the top funding recipient from the Pfizer Foundation demonstrates:

Funding To Activist Groups, Total Donated, Time Frame

Tides Foundation & Tides Center $300,000.00 2003 – 2004

The Tides Foundation is described by Activistcash.com as quickly becoming "the 800 pound gorilla for activist funding."

As reported on ActivistCash:

The Tides foundation was established in 1976 by California activist Drummond Pike. Tides does two things better than any other foundation or charity in the U.S. today: it routinely obscures the sources of its tax-exempt millions, and makes it difficult (if not impossible) to discern how the funds are actually being used.

In practice, “Tides” behaves less like a philanthropy than a money-laundering enterprise (apologies to Procter & Gamble), taking money from other foundations and spending it as the donor requires. Called donor-advised giving, this pass-through funding vehicle provides public-relations insulation for the money’s original donors. By using Tides to funnel its capital, a large public charity can indirectly fund a project with which it would prefer not to be directly identified in public. Drummond Pike has reinforced this view, telling The Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with.

Due to the efforts of many foundations to keep their funding activities anonymous, it is difficult to determine the true scope of pharmaceutical company funding for the Tides group as well as the individual activist groups.

Given the information outlined above, one can only wonder what other pharmaceutical funding is linked to these groups and shudder to think of how many activist groups have been corrupted by funding from Big Pharma and other companies with agendas that are anything but in the public interest.

It is easy to see how such subterfuge can corrupt decision making, the same as can paid lobbyists and political funding. Obviously it would be in the distinct public interest to require full disclosure of funding sources for every organization which petitions a government agency or legislative body to see where there might be funding sources who would stand to benefit as a result of the desired action or legislation.

Similarly, it would also be in the public interest to require full details of all the activities and efforts of lobbyists, including expenses and the details of each meeting held by lobbyists with government officials. While we are at it, we would also be a better informed and better served citizenry if every elected official’s vote on any measure included donations and links to any companies or other entities affected by such legislation.

Granted, such reforms are a tall order, but until we see such altruistic change all the talk about true transparency in government is merely lip service - and the words from our own lips will continue to have little chance of reaching those whose ears are captured by the special interests who have bought off and otherwise rigged the process in their favor.

See Also: "Action Alert: Stop EPA from Eliminating Access to Colloidal Silver"

Notes:

The complete list of groups who signed the petition to the EPA is:

The International Center for Technology Assessment
The Center for Food Safety (the sister organization of the CTA)
Beyond Pesticides
Friends of the Earth
Greenpeace
ETC Group
Center for Environmental Health
Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Clean Production Action
Food and Water Watch
The Loka Institute
The Center for Study of Responsive Law, and Consumers Union

Sources included:

http://www.silvermedicine.org/nano-silver.html
http://www.activistcash.com/
http://www.tidescenter.org/
Important Links:

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Steve,

Your stuff is great ,and you're doing well, and I'm on your side, and I'm a dedicated environmentalist.

I would like to request that you stop saying that we all have rabies. We are not rabid.

We are fine good caring intelligent responsible people.

We love nano silver and many of us are making it with our own little devices from Silver Edge. You speak of us as rabidenvironmentalists as though this were one word. That's unfair.

The Pharmaceutical folks (who probably don't have rabies but act as though they do,) have inserted their self-serving fiction into the mouths of their opposition in order to make it sound as though it came from caring, intelligent and responsible people.

Pharma folks are putting all that gibberish into an arena that is calculated to sound legitimate to average unaware people.

The Pharma folks are clever, malicious beyond belief, without any awareness of the impact of their actions. They could pass as high-functioning autistics, but I think that what they have is a psychiatric illness called "lucid dementia" where they appear to be bright articulate people, incredibly believable, except that what they say has no relevance to what's true, or what's happening.

They sound as though they are making sense until you give it double take, and then you say Hey! Wait a minute! What did they just say? Did I hear that right?

The environmentalist groups have not defended themselves nor spoken up, which is amazing to me. The EPA has been infiltrated and corrupted by you know who. The agency and the people who are pressuring to ban nanosilver probably wouldn't really have an agenda around it unless they had been paid. I assume that they have been paid quite well, for them to push this so violently. These are shills, not environmentalists.

Pharma is in huge fear that silver works incredibly well, and is safe, so might cut into $$ drug-pushing. The reason for my assumption that the EPA is not concerned about the environment is because it has said nothing about the impact of Round-Up-saturated GM crops, or the impact of toxic GM crops upon organic crops and wild plants in the environment.

Oddly enough, even when presented with that potentiallyplanet-threatening disaster,environmental impact studies were apparently not required. Or, if they were required and were delivered, they have been concealed.

How many people are out there, in charge of our lives, and our food, and our health, who suffer from lucid dementia? All too many.

Bless our wonderful Barack. He is doing a terrific job, but I think that he is not up to speed on agriculture, water and food safety, or health issues. It sounds as though he thinks "health" is about having more insurance, and more exercise. I think it's about providing full public access to natural remedies, clean water and sustainable agribiz, less herbicides/pesticides/irradiation, no fluoride, no MSG and no aspartame.

I'm afraid that Vilsak, as Sect'y of Agrabiz, is unlikely to do well with this. He's a Monsanto man, so is either planning to quietly defy his friends, or will obey them and push their stuff on us. Obviously he can't state either one of those intentions, so all we can do is to visualize best case, and write him a barrage of informative letters.

Sincerely,
Priscilla

Steve Barwick said...

Hi Priscilla,

Thanks for your great comment. 

When I say “rabid environmentalists” I am speaking of the bureaucratic hierarchy of these environmental groups that want to micro-manage every aspect of people’s lives in the name of “environmentalism.”  I am not speaking of the sincere members of these groups who believe, as you and I do, that we have an obligation to preserve nature rather than poison it. 

If you check the blog for my latest blog post, titled Big Drug Companies Fund Groups Behind Plot to Regulate Nano-Silver, you’ll see that the environmental groups have for years been taking huge “contributions” from big drug companies like Merck (Vioxx scandal; Gardasil vaccine scandal) and Pfizer (Bextra scandal; numerous other scandals).  These drug companies are directly responsible for the fact that 46 million Americans now have a cocktail of pharmaceutical drugs in their drinking water.  But rather than investigating these drug companies, the environmental groups behind the plot to regulate silver as a “pesticide” are taking millions of dollars in donations from them.

As I stated in Saturday’s blog post, “The fact that the environmental groups basically ignore a real problem (potentially dangerous drugs in the drinking water of 46 million U.S. homes) in order to focus so heavily on a fabricated problem (tiny particles off silver going back into the environment they originally came from) pretty much tells you who they are working for.

You are not going to convince them of anything.  It is all about the money, and power. 

You are spot on target about the “lucid dementia” syndrome. The Big Pharma execs are sociopaths who care only about the almighty dollar.

Regards,
Steve

Anonymous said...

Just an idea Steve,

If you really want this to get out, Email the Sun Spotters Club @ sun@amlink.com

This is the Sun Rag Magazine that is always in the grocery stores... but they would love to get a hold of a story like this where the EPA is trying to screw over the public...

What could it hurt...They just might publish it...

Thanks,Jan Kirke

Millions of people read this magazine...Just an idea!!!!

Steve Barwick said...

Hi Jan,

Thanks for your email, and for your suggestion to bring the EPA/colloidal silver issue to the attention of the Sun Spotters Club.

I’ve sent them a brief overview, and a link to the blog at www.ColloidalSilverSecrets.blogspot.com.

My only fear is that a lot of these publications get millions of dollars a year in ad revenue from the big drug companies to advertise everything from cholesterol-lowering drugs to Viagra. In such cases, the publications are more likely to publish anti-silver articles, rather than pro-silver articles. They know which side their bread is buttered on. You have to remember that it is advertising revenue these publications depend upon to survive, not subscription revenue. So they are not going to step on the toes of their major advertisers.

Nevertheless I’ve emailed them as you suggested. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Regards,
Steve

Anonymous said...

Nivea have now launched a deodorant, "Nivea Silver Protect", which contains "silver dihydrogen citrate" (SDC). No-one seems to worry too much about that leaching into the water supply. See also the recent news item "Orchem Corporation ... has launched a nationwide rollout of its Spectrum 24 Disinfectant targeted at the healthcare industry" at http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_(A_to_Z)/Stocks_P/threadview?m=tm&bn=40645&tid=13448&mid=13459&tof=19&rt=2&frt=2&off=1

Quote: "Spectrum 24 is based on a patented new molecule, silver dihydrogen citrate (SDC), comprised of silver ions and citric acid. The silver ion deactivates structural and metabolic membrane proteins, halting the microbe’s ability to replicate and leading to its death." (Isn't that exactly how colloidal silver works? No-one seems to worry about this getting into the water supply either).

See also the weaselly slur against colloidal silver at http://www.naturalingredient.org/Articles/mulhaupt.html (quote: "It is a silver salt of citric acid and can't cause silver poisoning like colloidal silver.")

Hope this helps.

BJW

Anonymous said...

The first commenter ("Anonymous") wrote: "The Pharma folks are clever, malicious beyond belief, without any awareness of the impact of their actions. They could pass as high-functioning autistics...". Speaking as a high-functioning autistic myself (Asperger's Syndrome) I resent this implication that we're all callous and uncaring -- some may be, but by no means all. Please be more careful how you aim your words: they could be loaded.

BJW