2016-12-09 Constant Gardener and Pfizer, my story, letter to LeCarre, Deaths (murder) of Nigerian children guinea-pigs, $US 75 million Out-of-Court Settlement with Govt of Nigeria, Pfizer at the University of Saskatchewan

The Constant Gardener  is the title of a novel by John le Carré.  It became a movie.

From: Sandra Finley
Sent: December 9, 2016
To: mysteries and more   at   gmail.com
Subject: Your blogged review of The Constant Gardener   TO MR. SELNES

Dear Mr. Selnes,

Today,  someone did an internet search on the words “Saskatchewan and Constant Gardener”.

They arrived on my blog – maybe yours, too.

Not many people know the connection between John le Carré’s novel and the University of Saskatchewan.

I was curious as to what an internet search on “Saskatchewan and Constant Gardener” would generate.   Your blog is one of them.   Hence this email to you.

To me there remains mystery around le Carré’s choice of the U of Saskatchewan.   He is known for his meticulous research.   He writes in the book’s  afterword, “By comparison with the reality, my story [is] as tame as a holiday postcard.”   His story is brutal!

As you may know,  in mid-2007  the Govt of Nigeria brought criminal charges against Pfizer.  News, 2009:  Pfizer settles Nigerian drug case out of court (criminal charges for death of children) $75 million.   I have thought that Le Carré’s novel (2001) may have been instrumental.

Serendipitous events led me to The Constant Gardener:

• 2005   I became quite sick, the eventual diagnosis (a shocker to me) was tuberculosis!  I had thought that TB had been eradicated  in Canada.  I remember the TB van that travelled even to rural communities in the 1950’s.
• 2005   The first day I was strong enough,  I walked across the bridge to downtown Saskatoon.   A movie caught my eye, The Constant Gardener.   I’m a gardener.  What a treat this would be on this glorious day.   Afterwards, I walked back into the day, reeling.  I seriously wondered whether I was experiencing some kind of deluded state of mind.  The movie is about tuberculosis and intrigue.
• 2007   There!  The Constant Gardener was back in my face.  This time it was the book, sitting on a small, tall table on the sidewalk in front of a used-things shop.  The book said,  “You have to read me.”  And I did.  Among eye-raising details >>  the movie, as I recall, doesn’t include events in the book that take place at a winter cold and dark northern University.  I knew of “VIDO” (Vaccine Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.  VIDO became INTERVAC) – – more below.

Now, here it is 2016:  I have completed the maximum 6 years (2 terms)  as an elected member of the U of Saskatchewan Senate.

Back to the mystery of why le Carré would use the U of S in his book.   (I am a longtime activist;  I know why he chose Germany as the location in which to set part of the story.  Encapsulated in one word.  Bayer pharmaceuticals.)

Perhaps the answer to the mystery will become known.   The starting place for me is VIDO which has morphed into Intervac.

Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization – International Vaccine Centre.   As I understand, things began in the College of Agriculture (Animal Health).  Veterinary Medicine for the prairie provinces (agricultural) was also centred at the U of S.   Animal and human immune systems are highly related.  Animal and human vaccines are related.  In high-school I worked part-time in the drugstore of my small-town home.  Drugs for animals were shelved in one corner.  Farmers and Ranchers came in for them.  From behind the drugstore counter, some of the same drugs, but designed for humans were dispensed by my employer, the pharmacist.   (I am reminded also, of the (off-topic!) link:   2009 – Rotavirus vaccine, contaminated with a pig virus, injected into more than a million kids in the U.S. alone.)

There is a VIDO-Intervac website, but my sense is of secrecy, limited transparency;  there is tight security,  I presume because of the highly-infectious organisms with which they work.

How did, and why did le Carre find out about the U of Saskatchewan’s role in vaccines? (I am reminded of the U of S’s role in the GMO (Triffid) flax debacle.  Not many people had any inkling that it would, or could be, a university, not a corporation, that was the culprit.)

While on Senate I hoped to help elevate the level of accountability and adherence to the Legislation that is supposed to govern the administration of the university.  I worked with other Senators.  We created Temporary tempests-in-a-teapot.  Maybe we caused even more of the malfeasance to go underground.

But enough!  You may be interested in skimming through some of following.

Best wishes,

Sandra

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EXCERPTS From the material on my blog  (links at bottom)

2009-11-19:

THE CONSTANT GARDENER.  VIDO (VACCINE INFECTIOUS DISEASES ORGANIZATION) AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN.

I advise people to read the real life comments in “The Constant Gardener“. Le Carré says the story in his book is a holiday card version of what the pharmaceutical corporations do in the real world. His books are well researched.

(Another internationally-famous author, Henning Mankell, lives back-and-forth between Sweden and Africa, and has written a book similar to “The Constant Gardener“.  Thanks to Howard for drawing “Kennedy’s Brain” to attention.  I haven’t read it.    http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task=view_title&metaproductid=1673 )

(2020-06  The preceding link takes you to The New Press.  A Search on their blog takes you to   https://thenewpress.com/search/Kennedy%E2%80%99s%20Brain)  by Henning Mankell.

I am very curious about what John le Carré  knew, or intuited.  In “The Constant Gardener” part of the search to uncover the truth about the pharmaceutical-company-related deaths in Africa takes place in Canada, at the University of Saskatchewan.  It was pretty shocking to me to be reading about the U of S in “The Constant Gardener”!

(Wikipedia):  The Constant Gardener is a 2001 novel by John le Carré. It tells the story of Justin Quayle, a British diplomat whose activist wife is murdered. Believing that there is more behind the murder, he seeks to uncover the truth behind her death, and finds an international conspiracy of corrupt bureaucracy and pharmaceutical money.

John le Carré writes in the book’s afterword, “By comparison with the reality, my story [is] as tame as a holiday postcard.” [1])”

From a blog:  “An important part of Quayle’s quest takes him to Saskatchewan, where he finds one of the drug’s main developers.”

At the time of seeing the movie I was weak and in the early stages of overcoming the TB organisms in my body.  I thought I was going to see a gardening movie of some kind!

I walked out of the theatre thinking I had been on some outer space hallucinatory experience.  The movie was about tuberculosis in a spy-thriller John le Carré setting. It was a disease I had thought had been eradicated from Canada and most of elsewhere – – which I now had.  Part of the action was at the University of Saskatchewan where I had just been for medical attention.  The timing of seeing the movie was all too bizarre and disorienting.

I have always wondered why le Carré  placed part of the action in Saskatchewan?  The only thing I could think was that the U of S is a big centre for biotechnology (developing crops that are resistant to chemical applications) and I knew there are biotech pharmaceuticals at the U of S. That was the only link I could think of.  I thought that John le Carré might have known more?

Later, when I read that the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation was donating a lot of money to help find the cure for the renewed rising threat of tuberculosis in the world, I wanted to tell the Gates:  put your money into finding alternatives to “the cure”.

If my one experiment was successful in combating the disease without potent drugs, then it is POSSIBLE that it can be done.  But as long as the pharmaceutical corporations are involved, the ONLY avenue that will be explored is the drug option.  And it is a wrong-headed approach, obviously.  You might think you are God, but you cannot stop evolution (drug-resistant organisms).

I thought that John le Carré  (his pen name) would have a better chance of talking to and persuading the Gates than me (ha! HA!). Also, I wanted to thank David Cornwell (his real name) for his book. So I found an email address for the publisher.

I requested that the publisher forward my email.  After explanations and thanks, the email requested that Cornwell contact the Gates Foundation:  (UPDATE –  you can laugh!  Nothing like going to one of the foxes in the hen-house, ignorant me!)

Bill Gates should read “The Constant Gardener” to understand the lay of the land with the pharmaceutical corporations, their murderous ways, and he might re-consider where he wants to donate his money.

Why not ask?!  It gets it out of my system, and it is supportive of people like Cornwell (John le Carré).  He’s not only a good guy, he is putting his neck on the line.  He needs our support.

A reply was received:

Mon 21/05/2007 5:03 AM

Dear Ms Finley

Your message has found its way to me, John le Carre’s agent.  I shall make sure that he sees it.

Yours sincerely

Bruce Hunter

David Higham Associates

Visit our website at www.davidhigham.co.uk

Monsieur le Carré hasn’t let me know if he communicated on the matter with Mr. Gates!  Ha ha!   Oh well, my modus operandi is to “put it out there”.  And then let it go.  I don’t need to know what happened; that’s beyond my control.

That was all I knew, until this last week (Nov 2009). Howard Woodhouse’s book “Selling Out”, in the chapter on the synchrotron at the University of Saskatchewan talks about VIDO.

VIDO = Vaccine Infectious Diseases Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.   http://www.vido.org/

EXCERPTS:

VIDO is a not-for-profit organization owned by the University of Saskatchewan. A separate Board of Advisors contributes industry expertise and practical guidance. … VIDO continues to be competitive nationally and internationally, with more than 80 awarded U.S. patents.  . . . . .  VIDO is one of four Canadian teams offered funding through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative.   (INSERT:  The Gates Foundation is heavily invested in VACCINES.)

(If you didn’t know that the University of Saskatchewan is a wholly-owned subsidiary of various corporations, or about to become so, you SHOULD know!)

MAYBE John le Carré knew about VIDO, the work being done at the University of Saskatchewan for the pharmaceutical corporations, when he wrote “The Constant Gardener”?  Take a Ramble through the VIDO website – it’s all there.

What University of Saskatchewan professor, Howard Woodhouse, makes clear in his book “Selling Out” and which is there again in the VIDO information is that WE citizens are paying the COSTS for the corporations, through Government Budgets.

The details and the extent, the amounts of the subsidies, are well documented in “Selling Out”.

It is “socialization of the costs and privatization of the profits” — for what is beneficial to the corporations, not what is necessarily beneficial for citizens.

The cost to students is financially large. There are “cutbacks” and higher tuition fees because the money is sucked up by the research for the pharmaceutical and other corporations. The University Administration hypes it as “Innovation”.

Conflicts-of-interest abound: professors in veterinary medicine who promote factory-size pig barns (origins of swine flu) receive money from that industry. That industry is now going into bankruptcy.  It was heavily subsidized by tax-payers, resisted by many communities.  It forced smaller, more humane and health-giving local meat producers out of production.  It also forced small producers in other countries out-of-business and into dependency upon imported cheap, inferior food from Canada. . . . Our Government and our University working for us in “public-private-partnerships”.

The “innovative” corporate model adopted by the University does not reflect our values. The conflicts-of-interest created by the “partnerships” should not be tolerated.  There was a time in Canada when the illegality of conflicts-of-interest was prosecuted.

Old-timers in our network know the story where I challenged a salaried full-time government scientist who works at “Innovation Place” at the University.  Simultaneously he makes “up to ten thousand dollars” per contract he does for the very corporations he is supposed to be regulating. And which he had been doing for 8 years at the time. I received a letter from a lawyer threatening to sue me if I should say such-and-such to Saskatoon City Council about the situation.  (The City had a pesticide bylaw under consideration. There was a serious conflict-of-interest involved.)  My reply to the lawyer was to compare his letter to mafia tactics.

The work at the University is NOT “innovative”, as they keep heralding and would have us believe.  The drug approach is the status quo.  The pharmaceutical corporations are corrupt.  And we are the silly ones putting up the money, in more ways than we know.  If more people knew, there would be a revolt. .. I think it’s under way.

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These are links to the TB-related postings.   There is repetition of material because they cover a span of 6 years.   Also, they are too lengthy.   Hence the above excerpt.

/S

POSTINGS ON MY BLOG:

• 2005-06-02 Health, Follow-up on: I have tuberculosis. Includes incidence and history.
• 2005-09 Roundup to herbicide-tolerant crops to fusarium to myco toxins to tuberculosis to the regulatory function of government. PRRCG
• 2005-10-28 Related: pharmaceuticals in h2o supply, resistant organisms, myco toxins, Tuberculosis
• 2007-06-01 Tuberculosis story improbable ?? Same day, Nigerian Government brings criminal charges against Pfizer. (has the letter I wrote to Le Carre.)
• 2009-04-06 $75 million. Pfizer settles Nigerian drug case out of court (criminal charges for death of children)
• 2009-10-31 Tuberculosis explodes on northern reserves
• 2009-11-07 Tuberculosis The Forgotten Disease – Part 6 – Winnipeg Free Press
• 2009-11-19 H1N1 (or nukes or gmo’s or energy) in the context of “Selling Out”: the larger issue. Immune systems. TB. Constant Gardener.
• 2011-09-14 Europe’s tuberculosis spreading fast, Al Jazeera