Smallpox: Obama's Latest Crony Sweetheart Deal

Smallpox: Obama's Latest Crony Sweetheart Deal
By Katie Pavlich
11/17/2011

No, I'm not talking about a dirty bomb here, I'm talking about the latest sweetheart deal given to a drug company from the Obama Administation that just so happens to be headed by a big Democratic donor. The donor also made direct monetary contributions to Obama's inaguration.

Apparently, the federal government has $1 billion worth of smallpox vaccine stock piled, enough for every American, just in case there is a terrorist attack involving smallpox. Because the government already has substantial stockpiles of the vaccine, eyebrows were raised when people learned the administration approved a loan worth nearly $500 million for the company Siga to manufacture....more smallpox pill vaccines.

The Obama White House has immersed itself in a new scandal with a major Democratic donor. A deal worth half-a-billion dollars has raised questions about the relationship between Washington and the makers of an experimental drug.

The Los Angeles Times reports that for the past year, the Obama administration has urged approval of a $433-million plan to give Siga Technologies Inc. of New York the lone rights to manufacturing a smallpox pill for the US government to keep in stockpiles in case of a biological war outbreak — despite officials agreeing that the disease has been eradicated for nearly 40 years. Citing a 2004 George W Bush administration doctrine that says a smallpox threat could reemerge, the Obama White House is hoping to have Siga provide 1.7 million doses of the drug to be kept on the shelves at a cost far above what officials agreed to.

In observance with FDA regulations, the drug has not — and most likely won’t — be tested on humans, calling to question whether the supposed effectiveness of the pill is even existent— at a price tag of nearly half a billion dollars.

As it happens, Ronald O. Perelman, the controlling shareholder of the pharmaceutical manufacturer, donated over $300,000 through a Siga affiliate to the Democratic cause during the 2008 and 2010 campaigns. Additionally, Perelman himself forked over around $50,000 towards Obama’s inauguration.

Coincidentally, the Obama administration guaranteed Siga rights to provide the pill for the government without seeking competition from any other companies, a move which caused the Small Business Administration to cry foul. The Times reports that the initial federal contract guaranteed the deal to go to a company with fewer than 500 employees, which would exclude Siga from the bidding. In response, the government withdrew its first call-for-proposals and penned a new submission form — one that was delivered to solely Siga.

Okay, so what's so bad about making sure we have plenty of smallpox vaccination on hand? There are no plans for the drug to be approved by the FDA and the drug made by Siga, can't be tested on humans.

The deal between the White House and Siga has aroused suspicious given that the government currently has around $1 billion worth of smallpox vaccinations on the ready — which The Times reports would be enough to inoculate the entire population of the country. Aside from trace samples of the disease kept in storage in the US and Russia, the rest of the world is believed to be free of the germ, which has around a one-in-three chance of destroying the infected. America’s current antidote has a shelf-life of decades and is proven to be effective — but only in the first four days of infection. ST-246, the antiviral pill in development from Siga, would be able to thwart outbreaks for those infected after that span — but FDA regulations bars the company from conducting test on humans. As a result, ST-246 will most likely never face approval from the FDA, let alone have its effectiveness proven. Regardless, the Obama administration has spent the last year attempting to ensure that Siga delivers the disease-killer to the American government at a price of $255 per dose — which would expire and lose potency in a matter of three-year’s time.

I wonder if the vaccine is covered in ObamaCare.
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Obama's Half-Billion-Dollar Crony Drug Deal
By Michelle Malkin
11/16/2011

What do you get when you mix Democratic fat-cat donations, Big Labor favors, pharmaceutical lobbying and Beltway business as usual? Answer: another toxic half-billion-dollar Barack Obama-approved crony deal. Move over, Solyndra. Here comes Siga-Gate.

This latest Chicago-style payoff on your dime involves a dubious smallpox drug backed by a liberal billionaire investor, along with a former union boss who was one of the White House's most frequent visitors. They're the "1 percent" with 100 percent immunity from the selectively outraged Occupier mobs that purport to oppose partisan government bailouts and handouts to privileged corporations.

Ronald Perelman is the New York City-based leveraged buyout wheeler-dealer who controls Siga Technologies. He has donated nearly $130,000 mostly to Democrats over the past two election cycles alone, and he forked over $50,000 to pay for the president's lavish inaugural parties. A Siga affiliate pitched in nearly half a million more in contributions -- 65 percent of which went to Democrats -- and the firms have spent millions on lobbying.

Perelman's pharma company makes an experimental antiviral pill used by smallpox patients who received diagnoses too late to be treated with the existing smallpox vaccine. Smallpox experts cast doubt on the need for the drug given ample vaccine stockpiles, the remoteness of a mass attack and questions about its efficacy. But over the objections of federal contract negotiators, competitors and scientists, the Obama administration approved a lucrative $433 million no-bid deal for Siga in May. No other manufacturers were able to compete for the "sole source" procurement, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The special arrangement was made after a competitor objected to the administration's violating small-business rules during a first call for bids. That's right: It's yet another rigged giveaway from a Hope-and-Change champion who vowed on the 2008 campaign trail to "end the abuse of no-bid contracts once and for all."

Intensifying the culture-of-corruption stench: the critical role of Andy Stern. He's the profligate, corruption-coddling former head of the powerful Service Employees International Union -- the 2.2 million-member public-employee union powerhouse that he left in April 2010 with a mountain of debt and eroding rank-and-file pensions.

After pouring some $60 million of workers' dues into Democratic coffers, Stern was rewarded by Obama with a cozy spot on the White House deficit panel and dozens of visits to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- including at least seven with the president, one with Vice President Joe Biden, and meetings with Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain, OMB Director Peter Orszag, health czar aide Jennifer Cannistra and Valerie Jarrett's former high-powered aide and Chicago fundraiser Tina Tchen.

In a classic access-buying maneuver, Siga placed Stern on its board of directors in June 2010. Four months later, Siga nabbed an estimated $3 billion contract. By January of this year, Siga's stock had skyrocketed. The House GOP has been investigating the deal for months, which comes amid separate allegations of insider trading and political profiteering by investigative journalist Peter Schweizer.

Stern and Perelman have been scratching each other's backs for years. In the fall of 2006, the SEIU backed off organizing protests against AlliedBarton, a security guard firm in Philadelphia owned by a Perelman interest -- and then remained quiet when the firm was bought out by a longtime SEIU nemesis, the Blackstone Group.

According to the L.A. Times, which exposed the scandal over the weekend, Obama's top biodefense bureaucrat Nicole Lurie railroaded a key dissenter at the Department of Health and Human Services who ridiculed Siga's inflated projected profit margins. Lurie soothingly reassured a whiny Siga executive that the "most senior procurement official" would take over and mollified him in a letter: "I trust this will be satisfactory to you."

Lurie falsely told the newspaper that she had never made contact with the official regarding the contract and deemed any such contact improper. When caught with documentation, her department spun the communication with Siga as a "national security" matter. Lurie, it should be noted, is a former Clintonite and Howard Dean health care consultant who was most recently in the headlines for pushing anthrax vaccine testing for children. According to the Labor Union Report, there have been market murmurs of a merger between Siga and the anthrax vaccine manufacturer, PharmAthene. Hard to trust Lurie's public health moral authority with the taint of pay-for-play wafting over the Siga deal.

As always, venture socialism backed by Big Labor muscle and White House wealth redistribution is hazardous to taxpayers' health.
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To read another article by Michelle Malkin, click here.