Swine Flu: Natural Pandemic or Man-Made Pandemonium?
Filed Under Big Government, Big Pharma, Future of Medicine, Pandemic,
Vaccines
by Lila Rajiva
The latest
in the barrage of media reports on swine flu is a Bloomberg news report
(August 25, 2009) that it might hospitalize 1.8 million patients in the
US and over-burden hospital intensive care units.
This comes from a planning scenario released by the President’s Council
of Advisers on Science and Technology
The Bloomberg story cites some theatrical numbers:
* Half of the US population infected (that is, over 150 million people)
* 300,000 people in hospital intensive care units
* 30–90,000 people dead
* By-pass surgery emergency operations disrupted
But hidden in paragraph 5 of the Bloomberg piece is the most pertinent
part:
These numbers are only “scenario projections” that were “developed from
models put together for planning purposes only,” says a Centers for
Disease Control spokesman.
So.
* Statistical projections.
* Projections from models of past pandemics. (And not the past, as in
1968 or 1957, but way back, as in 1918.)
* Projections developed for planning purposes only.
That’s three stages removed from anything you could call reality.
But perish this tenuous link with facts, PCAST wants Obama to rush
through vaccine production so that 40 million people can be infect – er
– injected by mid-September.
And who should make that decision?
A doctor? The surgeon-general? A medical team?
Why, the homeland security adviser!
That’s John Brennan, a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, deputy
executive director of the CIA under George Tenet, and the director of
the National Counterterrorism Center (CTC) from 2004 to 2005 during the
exact period when the CIA became most heavily involved in torture
practices in Iraq and elsewhere.
(Question: Why not Janet Napolitano, Secretary for Homeland Security?)
* Item: The results f the first trials of the vaccines will be available
only in mid-October…
* Item: According to UK’s Daily Mail, a letter was sent by the UK
government to about 600 neurologists on July 29 expressing concern that
the vaccine itself could cause serious complications, specifically, the
deadly nerve disease Guillain-Barre syndrome. GBS was one of the
side-effects when a similar swine-flu vaccine was used in the United
States in 1976.
* Item: More people died from vaccine-induced GBS than from the 1976
flu.
* Item: The current vaccine, which is going to be given to children,
hasn’t been specifically tested on infants.
Question: Why the rush?
Also hidden way, way down in the Bloomberg piece is the opinion of the
chief medical officer of a New Jersey university hospital. He says the
PCAST estimates are “overblown.”
Also hidden is the admission that normal flu season kills about 36,000
people anyway. And that the normal flu shot is taken by 100 million
people.
Question: Then why all the hysteria?
The answer seems to boil down to two things:
* H1N1 targets healthier and younger (12–17 years) people.
* H1N1 seems related to the Spanish flu of 1918, which, reportedly,
killed 50 million people – a flu that was displaced by other strains
some fifty plus years ago.
(Note: What caused the deaths is not undisputed).
On the surface, at least, it looks like we’ve got ourselves a plague not
seen around for half a century… and it goes in for kids.
Talk about intelligent design. If someone wanted a Friday-the-13th
horror story to stir up panic in the population, they couldn’t have done
better.
Children are already the easiest part of the population to target. Mom
and dad might not scare on their own behalf, but let junior sneeze and
every parental gene jumps into action.
How hard is it for the government to get involved when most of a child’s
life is lived on government property anyway, under the eye of government
employees – teachers, counselors, nurses, principals, supervisors?
Still, it’s a giant step from finding something suspicious to proving
it’s fraudulent. And that goes double when the thing you suspect is a
virus. But while we should hesitate to play amateur virologist, there’s
no reason at all why we shouldn’t question the bureaucrats behind the
viruses.
Who are they and what’s in it for them?
The first part is easily answered.
The President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, the
creators of the swine-flu scenario, has three co-chairs:
1. John Holdren (Director, White House Office of Science & Technology)
2. Eric Lander, head of the Broad Institute (MIT)
3. Harold Varmus (CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center, NY)
A little digging fills in the details.
1. John Holdren:
Holdren isn’t just any old scientist. He’s a climate change expert who
holds the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government
(The ‘Teresa’ is, of course, John Kerry’s wife when she was spouse of
Ketchup king, John Heinz)
The support for climate change policies goes hand in hand with support
for nuclear technology, which Holdren believes is needed for those
policies. He also believes all nuclear energy should be under the
monitoring of the International Atomic Energy.
Note: Climate change and “peaceful nukes” have been the beneficiaries of
a huge PR effort over the last twenty odd years, largely stemming from
the Pentagon, specifically, from Andrew Marshall, a charismatic theorist
of American dominance whose Office of Net Assessments is the most
influential outfit you never heard of.
This PR typically derides any dissent from climate orthodoxy and
downplays the enormous costs and risks involved in the global move to
nuclear energy. It also involves a lot of fear-mongering over states
with “ancient rivalries” (read, India-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine) that
carries a sub-text of racial anxiety. The underlying horror is masses of
starving people (read, brown and black people) threatening the
resource-rich (read whites).
That’s also the subtext of much population alarmism, including Holdren’s.
As early as 1969 Holdren teamed up with neo-Malthusian doomsdayer Paul
Ehrlich to advocate population control to “fend off the misery to come.”
In 1977, he and Ehrlich, as well as Anne H. Ehrlich, co-authored a
textbook (”Ecoscience”), in which they discussed “a wide variety of
solutions to overpopulation from voluntary family planning to enforced
population controls.”
Ehrlich, with whom Holdren associated until as late as 2003, is known to
have advocated compulsory birth control and to have been part of FAIR,
deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (To be fair to
Ehrlich, some people think the SPLC is something of a hate-monger
itself.)
For a run-down of the most alarming comments in “Ecoscience,” check this
webpage.
“Ecoscience” approvingly describes a “planetary regime” that would use a
“global police force” to actively control people who “contribute to
social deterioration.”
An example of Holdren’s eco-alarmism:
In 2006 he claimed that global sea levels could rise by 13 feet by the
end of the century, whereas the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change) 4th Assessment Report (2007) suggested a potential rise in the
same period 0.6–1.9 feet.
2. Eric Lander:
Lander’s work is also suggestive. The Broad Institute, which he heads,
has for its goal the mapping of the human genome, with an eye to linking
specific genetic markers to diseases in the population.
Put that next to the ongoing rush to digitalize medical information, the
rapid development of an “electronic police state” in the US, and the
increasing dominance of the insurance industry over all markets (recall
the global fall-out when insurance giant AIG threatened to collapse),
and you have to wonder whether health insurers wouldn’t find genetic
markers very, very useful in creating insurance policies…and whether
Homeland Security couldn’t find uses for that information too.
3. Harold Varmus:
The third co-chair, Harold Varmus, is a Nobel Prize winner in Physiology
who’s also done work in genetics. As director of the National Institute
of Health, Varmus is credited with doubling its budget
More worrisome, Varmus is on the advisory board of something called the
Campaign to Defend the Constitution, a group that actively opposes the
influence of the religious right on science and policy. He’s also on the
board of “Scientists and Engineers for America” (SEA), another group
which advocates for “sound science.”
But though SEA is a non-profit and calls itself non-partisan, it appears
to be no more than a revamp of an outfit created in 2004 to support John
Kerry’s election.
["Scientists and Engineers for Change" – please note the word,
"change."]
SEA is far from being non-ideological.
As Wesley Smith writing in The Weekly Standard (October 5, 2006) noted:
“It [SEA] further demands that the government “remove inappropriate
limits on stem cell research,” meaning dramatic increases in NIH grants
for ESCR and public funding of human-cloning research. It urges that
public policy “promote new partnerships between government-funded
researchers and industry, including the biotechnology and pharmaceutical
sectors” – in other words, time to ratchet up the corporate welfare! And
it seeks “an aggressive program of research and innovation incentives,”
to promote more efficient energy use, which would, not coincidentally,
provide substantial financial benefits to an increasingly powerful
science-industrial complex.” (”A New Political Action Committee Enters
the Fray”)
Most intriguingly, SEA is affiliated with another non-profit, the SEA
Action Fund, which is headed up by Michael Stebbins, a bio-weapons
expert. Stebbins is also on the Obama team, as a liaison to the science
and technology committee.
Bottom line: The Obama “objective science” team has at least two proven
ideologues with axes to grind.
It gets more unsettling.
The week before PCAST came up with its H. G. Wells scenario, Varmus was
taking part in a Brookings Institution forum on policies to advance
science and technology.
The forum was attended by Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary under Bill
Clinton, and Rubin’s protégé, Lawrence Summers, chief Obama economic
adviser, a former President of Harvard (where PCAST co-chair Holdren
teaches) and a former Treasury Secretary, also under Bill Clinton,
Rubin is Mr. Wall Street, ex co-chair of kleptocrat megabank, Goldman
Sachs, and ex-chairman of corrupt drug money launderer, Citigroup, a man
as responsible as anyone for the deregulation of the financial industry
and the consolidation of the banks that snow-balled a crisis of cheap
money into a global depression, a man who never met a door he couldn’t
revolve through, a man who’s bailed out of enough corporate-state ships
to sink an armada.
Summers, for his part, defends the perfect economic logic of dumping the
toxic waste of multinational corporations in Africa.
The outfit that put these power players together, the Hamilton Project,
also deserves scrutiny.
HP is the brainchild of its co-chairmen, Bob the Bailer, and another
revolving banker of high caliber, Roger Altman, CEO of Evercore, a
boutique investment bank.
Altman has had stints at Lehman Brothers (before and after its merger
with Shearson) as well as at Treasury, first as an assistant secretary
and then as deputy secretary (under Clinton). He’s been an adviser of
both John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. In fact, he resigned from Treasury
after admitting he tipped off the Clintons about criminal referrals
arising from an investigation into the Clintons’ Whitewater investments.
In other words, Altman is not only a Wall Street insider, he’s a Clinton
confidante.
Also telling is the fact that Altman has headed up Mergers &
Acquisitions and international outreach for the secretive and huge
private-equity firm, Blackstone.
Blackstone, as Wall Street watchers know, has a strange way of sneaking
into just about everything going on of any importance.
[An aside: Blackstone's CEO is Pete Peterson, commerce secretary under
Reagan and also the creator of the Peterson Foundation, the Peterson
Institute, and the Concord Coalition. All three outfits present
themselves as disinterested policy advocates, but all three betray a
focus on budgetary issues that just happens to tally wondrously with
Peterson's own financial advantage].
Besides Altman’s ties with Blackstone, the Hamilton Project has another
link with Peterson. Along with Obama economic adviser and former Federal
Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, Rubin is a vice-chairman of Peterson’s
Concord Coalition, which gave him its Economic Patriotism award in 2006.
How are any of these ties relevant to swine flu?
Both Blackstone and Evercore have powerful ties to big pharma.
I. Blackstone:
Blackstone entered the huge Indian drug market in 2006, buying shares in
Emcure, which produces antiretroviral drugs, antiviruses and
antibiotics. Besides pharmaceuticals, Blackstone is also heavily
invested in hospitals, nursing homes, health insurance and health care
packaging, among other things. So while drug companies don’t want
Americans buying cheaper generic drugs abroad, companies like Blackstone
are investing in foreign drug companies and profiting.
II. Evercore:
Evercore, which Altman now heads, is a big player in the drug industry
too.
In July (just one month after swine-flu was declared a pandemic)
Evercore concluded its second multi-billion dollar health care deal of
this year when it advised leading vaccine maker Sanofi-Aventis (SASY.
PA) in its acquisition of the other 50% of Merial from joint owner,
Merck. Evercore’s previous multi-billion dollar deal was advising Wyeth
on its acquisition by Pfizer, the biggest pharma deal of the year when
it took place.
Sanofi-Aventis is described as the world’s leading flu vaccine maker and
is rushing to create a swine-flu vaccine that it began testing on August
6.
Industry analysts have noted that sales of swine-flu vaccine will add
billions of dollars to drug company revenues in 2009 and 2010. (”Sanofi-Aventis
Starts Swine Flu Shot Trials,” Reuters, August 7, 2009).
Meanwhile, the Sanofi-Aventis and Pfizer deals have pushed Evercore
ahead of Credit Suisse in volume of mergers & acquisitions in US
rankings.
Both deals were put through by Altman and a former Credit Suisse banker
who joined Evercore two years ago, after concluding some of the decade’s
biggest health-care deals for clients like Johnson & Johnson,
Schering-Plough, Wyeth, GlaxoSmithKline, Roche Holding and Teva
Pharmaceutical.
(”The Pharmaceuticals Banker That Helped Evercore Land a $4 Billion
Mandate,” Deal Journal, July 31, 2009)
Note: Roche Holdings and GlaxoSmithKline are producers respectively of
Tamiflu and Relenza, two popular vaccines that retard the spread of
swine-flu in the body. The two companies have ramped up their production
in anticipation of the pandemic. (”The Quest for a Swine Flu Vaccine,”
BBC, April 29, 2009)
III. Big pharma has its fingers in the Obama administration in another
way.
Billy Tauzin, the former Louisiana congressman, chief of Pharmaceutical
Researchers and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA), the biggest
pharmaceutical trade group, has recently managed to enlist Obama’s
support in protecting drug prices. The White House has agreed to stymie
congressional efforts to allow drugs from Canada to be imported or
bargain for lower drug prices, among other concessions. In exchange,
PhRMA has agreed to cut $80 billion in projected costs to taxpayers over
ten years
(”The White House Deal with Big Pharma Undermines Democracy,” Robert
Reich, Salon, August 10, 2009)
IV. And where are the insurance companies in all this? The five largest
private health insurers and their trade association, lobbied Congress to
the tune of over $6 million in Q1 2009 alone.
(”It’s Robbery,” Alternet, August 24, 2009).
It’s not swine-flu Americans should be worried about. It’s
swine-at-the-trough flu, a much more lethal condition.
Symptoms
1. Infiltration of the body politic by activists and unknown agents.
2. Extremism about rising temperatures, feverish statements, and
predictions bordering on the delusional.
3. Monopolistic conditions requiring constant monitoring.
4. Frequent and massive collapses needing bailing out and mopping up by
supervisors.
5. Ongoing influenz(a)-peddling, symptomatic lobbying, and
borderline-racketeering disorder.
6. Reliance on questionable and intrusive foreign bodies.
Diagnosis:
Moderate-Severe Pandemonium
Aetiology:
Cases of pandemonium often tend to be stirred up by government hacks,
corporate flacks, and welfare kings interacting with the media, causing
acute inflammation in the population. This one is no different.
Note: One of Obama’s chief flu-viators, the director of the Center for
Disease Control (CDC), Andrew Besser, left to become a correspondent for
ABC this past July.
Item:
The team that wants to vaccinate tens of millions of people, with
vaccines not yet tested for safety, for a plague that even the
government admits is unpredictable consists of the following:
* An environmental and population alarmist with a forty-year
track-record of making apocalyptic predictions that are flat-out wrong.
A guy who’s spent his whole life convinced that there are too many
people, that people are destroying the universe, and that we should
actively reduce the number of people on the planet.
* Another guy who’s creating genetic ID’s for people prone to disease –
a genetic profiler whose work would be invaluable to health insurance
companies and to government surveillance. An aside: What if they come up
with a gene for right-wing attitudes?
* A third guy who doesn’t like religious values in public policy and
works with ideological and activist “science” groups, one of which is
affiliated with bio-weapons. A lobbyist for the science-industrial
complex.
* One of the top five miscreants of the global economic collapse, a
big-time Wall Street player responsible for using the government, first,
to consolidate the mega-banks; then, to bail those banks out when they
blundered; and finally, to eviscerate less powerful banks. An insider
with ties to the insurance industry.
* Another Wall Street and government player with a track record of
consolidating big pharmaceutical companies, several of which will
directly profit from the swine-flu scare. Also an insider with ties to
the insurance industry.
Prognosis:
In the scheme of things, swine-flu is no more than a one-off bonanza for
the drug companies.
Far more lucrative over the long-haul is the continuing and increasing
use of vaccines of all kinds, especially vaccines subsidized and pushed
by the government.
Example: In January 2009, the Department of Health and Human Services
awarded a $487 Million contract to Novartis to make avian flu vaccine.
Novartis is one of five companies (along with GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi)
that are making both seasonal and swine-flu vaccines for the government.
Conclusion:
Just as the avian flu scare ended up being a dry-run for the current
round of medical hysteria, the current panic will likely be most
significant as a dry-run for an expansion of the police state and for
greater consolidation of the big banks, big insurance, and big pharma.
In fact, that’s just what Homeland Security adviser Brennan said in
remarks to the very influential Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS) on August 6, 2009.
Quote:
“Our coordinated response to the H1N1 virus – across the federal
government, with state and local governments, and with the private
sector and the public – and our extensive preparations for the coming
flu season will ensure that we are better prepared for any future
bio-terrorist attack.”
Health care, anyone?
Prescription:
Turn off the TV, stay out of crowds, wash your hands often, drink plenty
of water, and if you do feel sick, see what MMS can do for you:
http://blogs.healthfreedomalliance.org/protective-effect-of-low-concentration-chlorine-dioxide-gas-against-influenza-a-virus-infection/
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