Thread: Move over, Solyndra. Here comes Siga-Gate

Obama's Half-Billion-Dollar Crony Drug Deal
By Michelle Malkin | Michelle Malkin – Wed, Nov 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.

http://news.yahoo.com/obamas-half-bi...080000550.html

Pardon me, but according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the last case of smallpox in the United States was in 1949. We also have a huge stockpile of smallpox vaccine and this "new drug" would only be used "...by smallpox patients who received diagnoses too late to be treated with the existing smallpox vaccine." We haven't had a single case of smallpox in this country in over 60 years, so they're handing out a $433 million sole source contract to produce a morning after pill for a disease that we don't have? Wow... Obama sure did change the way that the country does business. I don't think that even the Republicans were this blatant about feeding their cronies at the public trough.

Dem Senator Asks HHS to Review Obama Admin’s $443 Million No-Bid Vaccine Contract
By Doug Powers • November 26, 2011 03:05 PM

Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting and Oversight, is up for re-election in less than a year. McCaskill’s in a statistical dead heat with a Republican challenger, and riding President Obama’s coattails may well amount to a one-way trip to the unemployment office. As a result, McCaskill could be motivated to create some daylight between her re-election campaign and the administration.

From the Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/24/mc...cine-contract/

Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, has asked The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to review the Obama administration’s award of a $443 million sole-source contract to a company owned by a major Democratic donor.

The Los Angeles Times reported earlier this month that the Obama administration has taken unusual steps to procure an experimental smallpox vaccine from a company owned by a major Democratic donor despite concerns from some experts that such a drug was unnecessary and would not be effective.

You mean there are some Democrats in Congress who might not willingly throw themselves on the crony capitalism grenade and sacrifice their political careers for the greater good of the beneficiaries of Hope & Change?

We may see more of this from Senate Dems up for re-election. Here’s why: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/66518.html

In every major race next year featuring a Senate Democratic incumbent, Obama is polling worse than the incumbent — in some cases, by a substantial margin — according to publicly released surveys.

So rather than running for reelection on Obama’s coattails, these Senate Democrats may end up facing questions over whether they can win with the president on the ballot.

If Democrats up for re-election don’t start seeing their odds improving soon, how long will it be until they start calling for Eric Holder to resign, demand a widening of the Solyndra investigation and maybe even place a 3 a.m. phone call to Hillary?


McCaskill asks for investigation into Obama administration’s sole-source vaccine contract
Published: 12:29 PM 11/24/2011 | By Will Rahn

http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/24/mc...cine-contract/

Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, has asked The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to review the Obama administration’s award of a $443 million sole-source contract to a company owned by a major Democratic donor.

The Los Angeles Times reported earlier this month that the Obama administration has taken unusual steps to procure an experimental smallpox vaccine from a company owned by a major Democratic donor despite concerns from some experts that such a drug was unnecessary and would not be effective.

Citing “serious questions” about the contract, the Los Angeles Times reported that McCaskill has asked the inspector general of HHS to investigate. McCaskill is the chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting and Oversight.

The New York-based Siga Technologies was awarded a contract in May to deliver 1.7 million doses of an antiviral pill called ST-246. It was the only company asked to submit a proposal, and the price tag of $255 a dose is well above what government specialists said was reasonable. When a contracting specialists at HHS was resistant to pay so much, the company complained and the lead negotiator was replaced.

Ronald Perelman, a billionaire and longtime Democratic Party donor, owns Siga Technologies. After the government put a renewed emphasis on protecting the nation from chemical and biological attacks in the wake of September 11, 2001, Perelman bought a controlling stake in Siga through his holding company.

A year after Perelman’s investment, in 2004, President George W. Bush signed Project BioShield, a $5.6 billion, ten-year program to stockpile medications in the event of such an attack.

ST-246, the company’s most promising new compound, was purchased from a Pennsylvania company two months later. It then began lobbying heavily for U.S. government contracts.

Starting in 2005, Siga spent $800,000 on three separate lobbying firms. Representatives of the company told the Los Angeles Times that they lobbied only “generally” for biodefense spending, and that, “Neither Siga nor anyone else on Siga’s behalf ever lobbied anyone to get this contract.”

Siga also hired Andrew Stern — the former Service Employees International Union president and a frequent White House visitor — to their board last year.

Perelman and his holding company partners donated a combined $607,550 to federal campaigns during the last two elections, the paper reported. Sixty-five percent went to Democrats, while Perelman donated another $50,000 to Obama’s inauguration.

In October 2010, Siga announced it had been awarded a multi-billion dollar contract to develop ST-246, despite the fact that the contract stipulated only a small business could be the winning bidder. A smaller company protested, and in response, the Obama Administration blocked everyone except Siga from bidding for a second offering of the contract.

The government’s justification for only talking to Siga was that an antiviral was needed within five years, and Siga was the only company who could do it. That justification troubled some HHS officials, one of whom called it “a stretch” in an internal email obtained by the paper. As much as $115 million in taxpayer money had already been spent developing the drug, which had not been approved by the FDA.

The FDA is skeptical ST-246 can ever be approved for use in humans, in part because there’s no way to guage its effectiveness short of exposing people to virus. The United States and Russia are the only two nations to have stockpiles of smallpox, a highly lethal virus that was all but eradicated in the 1970s. The last American case was in 1949.

McCaskill is the first senator to call for a review into the purchase of ST-246. In a statement released Wendesday, Siga said a review would show its contract was “negotiated and executed in good faith in accordance with all applicable law to address an important national security need.”