A close relative of a senior White House official revealed to be a lobbyist for a coronavirus vaccine developer
Jeff Ricchetti, brother of White House counselor Steve Ricchetti, has registered to lobby for a company behind a Covid-19 vaccine that is approved only in Taiwan, a new report has revealed.
The connection between Ricchetti and the Taiwan-based Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corporation was laid bare in a disclosure report first revealed by CNBC on Wednesday.
Ricchetti filed to lobby for the company earlier this month. His job will be focused on “issues related to Covid-19 vaccines accepted for foreign travelers to the United States.”
Ricchetti has lobbied the White House on behalf of other companies based in the healthcare industry before. Earlier this year, he also filed to work with Amazon on issues related to the delivery of Covid-19 vaccine shipments.
Responding to allegations of a possible conflict of interest, Ricchetti dismissed the claim, saying he had not mentioned his brother in talks with his partners or US officials, nor had he lobbied his close relative directly.
“I do not lobby my brother and I have not even mentioned to him the names of clients that I currently represent,” he told CNBC in April. “For the better part of the last thirty years I have lobbied members of Congress and their staff, and various individuals who have served in the successive administrations. It is what I do for a living.”
Medigen’s Covid vaccine is only approved for distribution in Taiwan. Ricchetti is currently the sole lobbyist for the company.
Ricchetti Inc. was founded by both brothers, though Steve Ricchetti has not been a registered lobbyist for years and stepped away from the company in 2012. He went on to work in Barack Obama’s administration, in which President Joe Biden then served as vice president.
The firm reportedly nearly quadrupled their earnings in the first three quarters of this year over the same period last year.
Pandemic-related travel restrictions may have put a dent on international migration figures in 2021, but the number of people forced to leave their homes, due to conflict and persecution, rose to record highs.
A new documentary has accused the US intelligence agency of supporting experiments on several hundred Scandinavian children
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) allegedly backed secret experiments into schizophrenia on 311 Danish children, many adopted or from orphanages, during the early 1960s, according to a newly released documentary.
Danish Radio’s documentary ‘The Search for Myself’ accuses the US spy agency of supporting the experiments at the Municipal Hospital in Cophenhagen. The studies were reportedly investigating the link between schizophrenia and heredity or the environment.
Per Wennick, who claims to have been a participant in the experiments as a child, alleged that he was placed in a chair, with electrodes strapped to him and forced to listen to loud, shrill noises. The aim of the test was supposedly to find out if a child had psychopathic traits.
“It was very uncomfortable. And it’s not just my story, it’s the story of many children,” Wennick said, describing his experience.
I think this is a violation of my rights as a citizen in this society. I find it so strange that some people should know more about me than I myself have been aware of.
The project was co-financed by a US health service, receiving support from the Human Ecology Fund, which is operated on behalf of the CIA, according to Wennick and the National Archives.
While the children were not told what the experiments were for, during or after the research, a dissertation was published in 1977 by Danish psychiatrist Find Schulsinger detailing the study.
The Danish Welfare Museum’s Jacob Knage Rasmussen said that this is the first documented time where children under care were used for research purposes in the country.
“I do not know of similar attempts, neither in Denmark nor in Scandinavia. It is appalling information that contradicts the Nuremberg Code of 1947, which after World War II was to set some ethical restrictions for experiments on humans” Rasmussen stated.
