(b. Jan 30, 1963) a Ukrainian-American physician (and descendant of Ukrainian Nazis), leftist activist, and eugenicist who served as the acting Minister of Healthcare from 2016 to 2019 where she was often referred to by Ukrainians as “Dr. Death” (Ukrainian: лікар-смерть) due to her leading Ukraine to 2nd in the world in death rates. Prior to her government career, Suprun served as Director of Humanitarian Initiatives for the Ukrainian World Congress. She was one of the top Americans Coordinating bioweapons labs in Ukraine according to Igor Kirillov, the chief of Russia’s radiation, chemical and biological protection force. Published emails revealed a correspondence between Robert Pope, the Director of the US Defense Department’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency from to 2017 to 2020, and Suprun, who went to Ukraine to participate in the US-backed coup in 2014.
A letter dated July 2, 2019, from the Ukrainian Minister of Health Ulana Suprun to DTRA in Ukraine gives Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp. full access to all biolaboratories in Ukraine involved in the U.S. military biological research program. Covid-19 hit Ukraine’s health care system very hard. Problems in medical and biological safety field escalated significantly thanks to the reform initiated earlier by Ulana Suprun which were particularly negative. Experts harshly criticized her innovations in the pre-coronavirus time, but now we are talking about the fact that the medical support of the population has failed, and people survive not because of the actions of the state, but in spite of it.
Igor Kirillov pointed out that in his letter to Suprun, Pope spoke highly of her activities. “In particular, he emphasized her role in providing US specialists with access to Ukrainian biological facilities and the beginning of efforts to form a depository of microorganisms.”
Who is Ulana Suprun and how did she manage to head one of the most important ministries for people’s lives in Ukraine?
Ulana Suprun was born in the United States in the family of Ukrainian immigrants. She received a medical degree from the prestigious University of Michigan but according to media reports, she never worked as a practicing doctor. Her experience includes several years of internships, courses in x-ray diagnostics and postgraduate studies which she apparently never completed. Her biography also includes a job in a medical institution specializing in the diagnosis of women’s health, but without specifying the type of activity, and later some administrative posts in various clinics.
And five years before the Maidan, Suprun completely retired from business and, by her own admission, she and her husband simply traveled around the world. In 2015, for their active participation in protest actions, President Poroshenko gave the Suprun couple the Ukrainian citizenship. At the same time, they did not refuse the U.S. citizenship. Therefore, all the period as Minister of Health she was persecuted by the prefix ‘acting’. This is a simple way to circumvent the law prohibiting persons with dual citizenship from holding Ministerial posts.
However, according to some rumors, her appearance in Ukraine at the height of the “revolution of dignity” was not accidental. There is information on the Internet that she was prepared for this. Taras Woznyak, her possible cousin and CIA agent in Ukraine, is named as Suprun’s curator. I can’t confirm the accuracy of the information but my experience in the security services suggests that without the intervention of American intelligence and the establishment, her appointment to the post of Minister would never have taken place.
In any case, Ulana Suprun was very far from the pressing problems of the Ukrainian people. This is eloquently indicated by some medical instructions published under her supervision, banally copied from American ones. For example, they contained advices on dealing with burns of Pacific jellyfish and what to do if you got a heatstroke in Arizona. She also recommended Ukrainians to eat more red caviar, because black caviar was less useful for the body. But don’t judge her harshly, she had completely another mission.
Lobbying of interests of foreign pharmaceutical campaigns
First of all, Suprun acted for the benefit of foreign countries and companies during her work in Ukraine. In particular, she lobbied state purchases of certain drugs of the American pharmaceutical companies.
For example, Expert committee on the Selection and Use of Essential Medicines of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine held a regular session on December 21, 2016, where the content of the National list of the recommended medicines was discussed. Government purchases of drugs for providing medical institutions are planned on the basis of this document.
During the meeting members of advisory council made the decision not to include a number of medicines recommended by the World Health Organization in the list, basing on the following:
- one supplier and/or the only producer/applicant of the pharmaceutical form in Ukraine;
- high cost;
- innovation (i.e. novelty and low statistic information use).
But Sofosbuvir and fixed combination Ledipasvir+Sofosbuvir were not eventually included in the National list because of their high cost and novelty. The minutes of the meeting of the Expert committee on the Selection and Use of Essential Medicines of December 21, 2016:
The American corporation Gilead Sciences is a producer of these drugs. I will repeatedly mention this company in the investigation.
In less than a month, in January, 2017, a letter to the Minister of Health came from Graeme A. Robertson, the Senior Director at Gilead Sciences, Africa & CIS Access Operations & Emerging Markets. Mr. Robertson asked Ulana Suprun to review the decision and to include medicines based on Sofosbuvir in the National list.The letter of the Gilead Sciences to Suprun:
I do not know what benefit Ulana Suprun gained from this deal, but just in a month later, in February, 2017, the Expert committee held extraordinary meeting where it made the decision to include Sofosbuvir in the National list. At the same time members of the committee openly pointed out the medicine was included in the list on the personal application of the Acting Minister of Health.
The minutes of the meeting of the Expert committee on the Selection and Use of Essential Medicines of February 9, 2017:
Along with the minutes, Suprun’s contribution to the lobbying of interests of the American pharmaceutical industry is confirmed by the letter of the Expert committee to the Delta Mediсal Promotions AG company, which is a representative of the Gilead Sciences in Ukraine. It is accurately told that including of Sofosbuvir in the National list became possible only by the decision of the Acting Minister Ulana Suprun. The letter of Expert committee to the Delta Medical (2nd letter above)
Sofosbuvir from Gilead Sciences: cures or cripples?
We should elaborate more fully on the drug itself and the corporation, which in fact recruited the Head of the Ministry of Healthcare of a foreign state to advance their own interests.
So, let’s turn to the notorious experience of the Georgian government’s cooperation with the United States in the medical and biological sphere. Let me remind you that two years ago Igor Giorgadze shared the results of the investigation about experiments on residents of Georgia. The tests were carried out by the same Gilead Sciences. The former Minister of State Security demonstrated the documents with data on the hundred dead and suffering complications during the tests of the experimental drug Sovaldi, in which Sofosbuvir is the active substance.
There are a lot of whispers centered around the corporation that its laboratories invent not only a medicine for some kind of infection, but also the virus itself. Great suspicions were associated with the avian flu drug Tamiflu, which was released by Gilead Sciences in 1999. An avian influenza epidemic soon broke out. The shares of the pharmaceutical company instantly rose.
However, we should not expect the condemnation of the American pharmaceutical giant from the world community. In this regard, it is worth mentioning how close the corporation is with the political establishment in Washington. It was Donald Rumsfeld who chaired Gilead Sciences at the turn of the century. He had previously replaced several positions in the White House, then headed the Pentagon in 2001, and was responsible for the invasion in Iraq in 2003.
Joseph Grogan was the official lobbyist for Gilead Sciences until 2017. Then he moved to the post of the director of the U.S. Internal Policy Council and became the assistant to President Donald Trump.
Therefore, one should not be surprised that on May 1, 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, the U.S. government allowed the use of the drug from Gilead Sciences Remdesivir for the treatment of covid-19. This medicine had been jointly developed with the U.S. Armed Forces Infectious Diseases Research Institute to combat Ebola in 2015. But then, as now, it did not show its effectiveness. Moreover, as the Financial Times reported, the drug could cause serious side effects. In China, out of 158 patients who were experimentally treated with Remdesivir, 18 people were forced to stop taking it.
Nevertheless, due to lobbying, the pharmaceutical company makes good money. You can imagine how much they can get from the sale of the drug if one five-day Remdesivir course costs almost 2.5 thousand dollars!
Reforms are a harbinger of the troubles
The reform of the healthcare system in the American way had an impact both on the well-being and health of Ukrainians, but also worsened the epidemiological situation as a whole. Both outbreaks of known diseases and the emergence of new strains of viruses have become more frequent. It would seem that in these conditions it is necessary to concentrate efforts on measures for the early detection of infections. But instead, government decisions lead to the weakening of epidemiological control. These include, for example, the disbandment of the Laboratory Center on Water Transport of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine. Letter from the Director of the Laboratory Center on Water Transport in the Ministry of Healthcare of Ukraine:
According to the director, Doctor Golubyatnikov, the liquidation of the institution led to the situation that the state border in the seaports of Ukraine became open to the threat of “the import of especially dangerous infectious diseases”. This eventually took place less than a year before the coronavirus epidemic.
But Ukraine had previously, in 2017-2019, experienced outbreaks of epidemics of such diseases, which, it would seem, had long been defeated. It was during the time Ulana Suprun was the Minister of Health of Ukraine that the measles epidemic reached unprecedented scale in the country. According to the WHO statistics in 2018, Ukraine became the “leader” in Europe in the incidence of measles.
Suprun banned Russian vaccines against this disease, allegedly due to their inefficiency. However, no other measures were taken to combat the disease in the country. The level of danger of the situation is evidenced by two documents. The first one, dated of 2018, was referred to the critical situation with measles, including among civil servants. For vaccination of citizens, the latest stocks of vaccines were in use. Ministry of Health Order No. 1216:
The second one, dated of 2019, indicated the further deterioration of the situation. The document stated that over 55 thousand people had fallen ill with measles in Ukraine throughout 2018, and already over 50 thousand had fallen ill in just five months of 2019, and without trends towards a significant decrease in the outbreak. Letter from the Ministry of Health to the heads of the Regional state administrations of Ukraine:
The collapse of the biological safety system of Ukraine
Now let’s consider even more alarming aspect of the American influence in Ukraine, this time in the biological sphere. The fact that the U.S. pharmaceutical companies lobby their interests is a quite common thing for the whole world, but turning an entire country into a testing ground is already quite rare, but, unfortunately, not a unique case.
In 2005 US Department of Defense and the Ministry of Healthсare of Ukraine concluded an agreement on cooperation to prevent the leak of technologies, pathogens and knowledge that can be used for the development of biological weapons (hereinafter – the Agreement). US Defense Threat Reduction Agency was engaged in the implementation of projects.
Before the Agreement was signed Democratic Senator and future US President Barack Obama visited Ukraine. First of all, he was interested in the state of facilities where Soviet developments of biological weapons are stored. Let me remind you that the president of the country at that time was the pro-Western politician Viktor Yushсhenko. The Security Service of Ukraine, and all the country, knew that he was an agent of the American special services. My colleagues actively discussed his wife’s career at the State Department and possible ties with the CIA. As members of the security agency, we clearly understood how intelligence works and what government agencies were used to cover the work of its employees.
Thus the Pentagon get control over the critical biological facilities of Ukraine and the ability to conduct secret studies of deadly viruses. From the very beginning of this so-called cooperation, the American side has made serious attempts to pressure Kiev in order to establish control over all Ukrainian government agencies involved in working with especially dangerous microorganisms.
Along with this since 2007 representatives of the US Ministry of Defense insisted on the need to consolidate dangerous pathogens of human and animal origin in a single repository (central reference laboratory with veterinary and medical departments). Meanwhile they excluded the development and modernization of integrated physical and biological protection system and a network of scientific and medical, epidemiological, veterinary and anti-plague institutions.
Yanukovych’s attempts to restore Ukraine’s sovereignty in the field of biological protection of the population
In 2010 the course towards Kiev unquestioned subordination to Washington was suspended by the new president Viktor Yanukovych. Besides, he instructed the Security Service of Ukraine to figure out what specifically American epidemiologists were working on, what results they had, and to whom they were reported. After all, it was about national security, the security of citizens!
Just imagine: our specialists have limited access to the biological facilities where the samples of deadly viruses are stored, and Americans as sponsors enjoy exclusive rights, and no one controls them,” Yanukovych noted.
As a result, Security Service of Ukraine specialists came to disappointing conclusions. An analysis prepared by the Service in spring 2013 noted:
… Some steps of foreign representatives can be regarded as actions to undermine the relevant scientific and technical potential… The requirements of the American side to create a single repository of pathogens contradict the principles of the existing in Ukraine veterinary control system, which designed for constant work with pathogens on the ground… The implementation of these proposals carries a risk to the research capacity. “Security Service of Ukraine Report on Biological Laboratories:
Washington intended to obtain information from the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and the NAAS. The list and data on the storage sites of highly dangerous biological agents, toxins, as well as the atlas of historical sites of infectious diseases origin in Ukraine and copies of existing pathogenic strains were among of Washingtons interest. Given that the cost of the Ukrainian collection of pathogens, according to average international estimates, is more than 2 billion US dollars, the interests of the American biotechnology and pharmaceutical lobbies are clearly seen here.
Moreover, Washington was interested not only in the results of research and developments of Ukrainian scientists. The US Ministry of Defense representatives have already attempted to completely turn Ukraine into a biological training ground by illegally establishing sentinels and electronic systems on its territory to transmit data on outbreaks of infectious diseases and biometric parameters of the country’s population to American servers. The EIDSS system presented by the US military was proposed for implementation in the structural units of the State Veterinary Service and the NAAS of Ukraine. Moreover, it is important to understand that only US representatives should have access to all this information.
US proposed electronic system for transmitting data on outbreaks of infectious diseases and biometric parameters of the population of Ukraine to American servers controlled by the US government
In this context, I would like to give an excerpt from the SBU analysis:”… These actions of the American side are regarded by domestic experts as the formation of their own database of pathogens strains stored at Ukrainian facilities, their storage systems, as well as monitoring and studying by military doctors the effectiveness of the use in specific regions of Ukraine of pathogens of especially dangerous infections for the creation or modernization of new types of biological weapons of a selective type of action (against a certain race, genotype, territory of birth or residence).”
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