SHADOW art by Scott CunninghamBIRD FLU SCARE:
Hype, Hypothesis, and Hypodermic
By A. Kronstadt
SHADOW art by Scott Cunningham
(We must always be aware that when professional purveyors
of information such as governments and corporations tell us something, it is for
their own reasons. You are not going to get an objective assessment of the
dangers of a little-known virus from bureaucrats, executives, or scientists who
are heavily invested, financially as well as scientifically, in a hypothetical
vaccine for that virus. They may or may not necessarily lie to us in every given
instance, but they will certainly make maximum use of the speculative aspects of
the situation. Research into bird flu, also known as avian influenza, is
presently taking place, mainly on a speculative level.)
Is 2006 the Next 1918?
In 1918, amidst the chaos of World War I, with its consequent population
displacements and troop movements, a great influenza pandemic arose. The
disease, which continued to spread through the beginning of 1920, was popularly
called the Spanish Flu in the United States due to the myth that it had spread
from Spain. Scientists variously point to the trenches of France, India, China,
and even the U.S. itself as the epicenter of the pandemic.
Without antibiotics, people succumbed to the bacterial pneumonia that attacked
people whose lungs had been compromised by the influenza. The war also brought
about a wave of malnutrition in various parts of the world and hunger worked
hand in hand with the influenza virus to end the lives of some 20 million
people. Extrapolations are being made from these figures based on the present
world population, putting possible deaths in a pandemic of influenza caused by
the avian flu in the hundreds of millions.
At present, the number of humans who have so far died from bird flu is only in
the hundreds, and the people who have caught it have gotten it from birds and
not from other humans. However, even though the pandemic virus, which would have
to transmit from human to human in an efficient manner, does not exist yet, Big
Pharmaceuticals and government bureaucracy are latching onto the apocalyptic
speculations of some scientists to panic society into putting vast resources
into vaccines that may or may not protect against any possible eventual human
version of the virus.
The Speculative Vaccine: Does Big Pharma Have the
Answer?
The purpose of a vaccine is to cause the human immune system to develop
antibodies to defend against a specific microbial invader. If the identity of
the invader is vague, any vaccine against it will be of uncertain usefulness in
protecting us against it. For example, a reliable human vaccine against the
feared avian influenza strain H5N1 cannot be developed until it fully transforms
itself from a bird to a human virus itself, and there is no fully human version
of the bird flu virus at this time. The avian influenza virus strain H5N1 is
still a bird disease, spreading via infected poultry, poultry products and
contaminated items associated with the industry in and around factory-like
establishments where birds are imprisoned in order to provide eggs and meat for
human consumption. The scientific community in general admits that any vaccine
against such a bird virus may or may not work against future versions of the
virus that have mutated to specifically spread among humans.
In 1997, the first cases of bird-to-human transmission of H5N1 were observed in
areas of Southeast Asia, where both factory-scale and small-scale farming of
chickens and ducks are central to the economy. Since then, there have been more
than 121 human cases, with an approximate 50% fatality rate. The patients were
all people who had lived or worked in close proximity to poultry or poultry
derivatives, and there is no evidence at this time that the virus has been
transmitted from one human to another, like the common humanized strains of the
flu that people catch all over the world.
H5N1 is transmitted to poultry workers and their family members, and to pigs,
which are ubiquitous in the countryside of China, Vietnam, and Thailand where
the disease has also spread to humans. In all of the abovementioned species, we
are told that the virus is mutating, and it is only a matter of time before the
germ becomes fully adapted to the pigs and to the humans and acquires the
ability to spread among members of both of these species, as well as among the
birds. It is then that, so the authorities tell us, the disease will reach
pandemic status and there will be mass fatalities, because we will have less
innate immunity to a newly-mutated virus than we do to the regular strains to
which we are exposed on a daily basis.
There is a Catch-22 here: it will only be after the disease starts spreading
from human to human, probably in some urban context, that development of a truly
reliable vaccine can even start, because only then will there be a specific
virus against which to make the vaccine, just as there are vaccines against the
common strains of flu that spread through big cities in the winter. This has not
prevented pharmaceutical companies from taking billions of dollars from the
government to stockpile "pre-pandemic" vaccines against the virus strains that
have affected the hundred or so humans that have so far caught the disease from
birds, on the assumption that it will be these strains that will become
pandemic.
Chiron Pharmaceuticals claims that its vaccine against the H5 part of the virus
will be sufficient to immunize against any of the possible mutants that will
start transmitting from human to human. On October 27, 2005, the Emeryville,
California, pharmaceutical giant announced that it had obtained a $62.5 million
contract from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to supply the
U.S. government with pre-pandemic bird flu vaccine. A month prior to Chiron's
announcement, HHS announced that it had awarded a $100 million contract to
Sanofi Pasteur, the U.S. offshoot of the French drug conglomerate of that same
name, to sell HHS a pre-pandemic vaccine to protect against one of the virus
strains currently passing from bird to human.
Chiron's record with regard to health and safety has been less than sterling. In
August of 2004, contamination by a bacterium, Serratia marcescens, often
associated with hospital-acquired infections in patients, delayed shipment of a
conventional flu vaccine in the U.S. and resulted in the suspension of Roche's
license to produce the vaccine at its plant in Liverpool, U.K.
Scientists are by no means unanimous in assessing the value of these
pre-pandemic vaccines. Particularly since early 2006, when the H5N1 strain was
detected in migratory wild bird populations and lurking silently in apparently
healthy birds, the focus has been on the opportunities that the virus has had to
mutate. There are now four distinct varieties of H5N1, and, according to Dr.
Malik Peris in a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science (2/7/06), emphasis has to be on broad cross-protection, rather than on a
single vaccine.
Virus of Profiteering: Rumsfeld and Tamiflu
The money allotted to Chiron and Sanofi Pasteur is only part of the $1.2 billion
in discretionary funding granted by Congress to President George W. Bush for the
production of 20 million doses of pre-pandemic vaccine, which is, in turn, only
part of the $7.1 billion in avian flu emergency funds, all of which is to be
spent at Bush's own discretion. That package also includes $2 billion to
stockpile advanced antiviral drugs for the treatment of people already infected
or exposed, the best known of which is Tamiflu, manufactured by the Swiss
pharmaceutical corporation Roche. Tamiflu, whose generic name is oseltamavir, is
a DNA-like compound that combines with and "clogs up" an enzyme essential to the
reproduction of the flu virus and thereby stops the germ's transmission from
cell to cell. Roche leases the patent for Tamiflu from Gilead Sciences, a Foster
City California-based research and development firm specializing in
"small-molecule therapeutics," including antivirals, such as Viread, used in
AIDS therapy, and Hepsera, used in the treatment of hepatitis B, as well as
Tamiflu. From 1997 until the beginning of 2001, when he was tapped by President
George W. Bush for the job of Secretary of Defense, Donald H, Rumsfeld served as
chairman of the board of Gilead Sciences.
Rummy, who has served in dozens of high corporate posts between government jobs,
resigned his post at Gilead when he took the Bush cabinet position, and pledged
to recuse himself from any government decisions involving his "former" company.
However, Rumsfeld still holds somewhere between $5 million and $25 million in
Gilead stock. Gilead is a low-profile company that does little manufacturing on
its own -- for example, it collects royalties from Roche for the rights to
Tamiflu, but, technically speaking, is not the commercial supplier for the drug.
When the Pentagon, under Rumsfeld's tutelage, purchased $58 million worth of the
antiviral for use by military physicians, Rummy had plausible deniability in
saying that he had recused himself from dealings directly involving Gilead as a
party in the legal sense of the word. But in reality, his equity in the Gilead
stock has been swelled by the royalties paid by Roche out of the money paid to
them by the government. Gilead stock has increased in value by at least 500%
since 2001, from $7 per share to $54 per share, and has undergone a surge from
$35 to $54 a share over a few weeks at the height of the big bird flu panic.
In November of 2005, Gilead defeated Roche in a Federal lawsuit and won the
right to terminate the latter company's license to Tamiflu. It will be
interesting to note who the next licensee will be and how much of the Bush
administration's discretionary funding they will end up with.
In May, 2004, in response to clinical findings that included the deaths of at
least two patients, health officials in Japan ordered that neurological
symptoms, including impaired consciousness, abnormal behaviors, and
hallucinations, be added to the list of possible side effects associated with
Tamiflu, a.k.a. oseltamivir. Japanese physicians reported an additional 64 cases
of neurological complications from the drug that led to hospitalization, plus
the deaths of an additional ten pediatric patients from other non-neurological
side effects.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refused to beef up its warnings in
response to the Japanese data, stating that, since the patients were suffering
from influenza, there was no way of knowing whether it was the oseltamivir or
the influenza virus itself that led to any particular death. The FDA stated that
symptoms of such side effects had not yet turned up in the U.S. Up to this
point, Japan has been the place where Tamiflu has been most heavily tested, with
34 million doses prescribed, so we may have to wait until the drug has become
that widespread in the U.S. before we have enough data to confirm or contradict
the Japanese studies in a statistically significant manner.
Dr. Frist, the Cat Killer, Presents His "Government
Knows Best" Act
Such safety statistics may not even be available to the consumer under
legislation now winding its way through the Senate. Senate Bill 1873, known as
the Bio-Defense Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act, sponsored by
Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist, provides for the creation of a government
agency to deal with health emergencies, to be called the Biomedical Advanced
Research and Development Agency (BARDA), which would be the first government
agency ever created with an a priori exemption to the Freedom of Information
Act. The bill states: "Information that relates to the activities, working
groups, and advisory boards of the BARDA shall not be subject to disclosure
under section 552 of title 5, United States Code [Freedom of Information Act],
unless the Secretary or Director determines that such disclosure would pose no
threat to national security. Such a determination shall not be subject to
judicial review."
Why would legislators ostensibly concerned with transparency and openness be so
interested in creating an agency specifically exempt from disclosing
information, for example, regarding bacterial contamination of a vaccine or the
side effects of a drug like Tamiflu? Although Senate Bill 1873 does not
specifically address the subject of forced vaccination or drugging, by removing
liability when things go wrong, it gives more ammunition to authoritarian health
officials who believe that the only way to fight disease is with sweeping,
mandatory vaccination.
Does Senator Bill Frist, a Tennessee heart-transplant surgeon and co-founder of
Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), the largest private operator of health
care services in the world, really have national security in mind when he wants
to make certain health information classified, thereby granting immunity and
impunity to all of those involved in any possibly faulty decision-making
process?
Frist is currently being investigated by the Securities Exchange Commission
(SEC) in connection with a an order that he gave to sell all of his shares in
HCA just two weeks before the stock fell 15 points. Frist also has a long
history of shady dealings in the name of Big Medicine that perhaps started when
he was a medical student at Harvard in the 1970s and took cats out of shelters
on the pretext of adopting them, only to bring them to the labs at the medical
school and practice heart surgery upon them, leading to the eventual deaths of
the animals. Perhaps that is why he is so enthusiastic about the veil of secrecy
that Senate Bill 1873 provides to duplicitous doctors.
Meanwhile, even though it is still a bird virus and not a human one, the avian
flu virus strain H5N1 has already demonstrated resistance to Tamiflu. The World
Health Organization has reported that a girl in Vietnam under treatment with
oseltamivir for an apparent poultry transmitted infection, showed high-level
resistance to the antiviral. Many other cases of resistance by more common,
human-transmitted versions of the virus have also been reported.
To Hell With Their Poison
The issue for those of us who are not big stockholders in pharmaceutical
companies seems to be whether we are willing to allow people to stick needles
into our bodies and inject us with substances that, under certain circumstances
have been associated with the transmission of diseases, such as the
above-mentioned Serratia bacteria, and possibly worse.
All "attenuated" vaccines against the flu virus contain actual virus-derived
materials and have been associated with flu-like reactions in a certain
percentage of those vaccinated. Particularly when pressured to stretch out a
limited amount of vaccine, pharmaceutical companies often mix in "adjuvants,"
any number of chemical agents intended to enhance the immune response, often at
the expense of greater irritation and in some cases, the formation of unstable
scar tissue around the injection site associated with subsequent sarcomas and
other cancers. It is not necessarily a question of how many people actually end
up suffering from the after effects of vaccinations, because even if it is only
a fraction of a percent, individuals have the right to decide how much risk they
will expose themselves to.
Swine Flu and Swine Government
The example of the kind of physician-disseminated disaster that can result from
blind reliance on vaccines is demonstrated by the "swine flu" scare of 1976
when, after the military recruits at Fort Dix, New Jersey became infected with a
strain of flu (H1N1) normally seen only in pigs and which then seemed to be
spreading to humans. H1N1 had similar identifying traits to the virus believed
to have disseminated in the influenza pandemic after World War I.
Then-President Gerald Ford, in consultation with his many contacts in the
pharmaceutical industry, whom he had represented in the Senate for many years,
initiated a program to immunize all of the then 220 million residents of the
U.S. Ford himself was immunized in front of t.v. cameras. The feared pandemic
never materialized and the soldiers at Fort Dix are now believed to have been
the victims either of an isolated instance of a rare strain of flu or of a mis-diagnosis.
On the other hand, some 25 deaths occurred among the approximately 24 percent of
the population (about 40 million) that were actually vaccinated, and a rise in
the instance of a polio-like autoimmune disease called Guillain-Barre syndrome
was noted among the vaccinated population.
Pandemic of War, Pandemic of Poverty
Central to government propaganda concerning avian influenza is the great
influenza pandemic of 1918-1920. The malnutrition and displacement wrought by
the First World War fanned the dissemination of the disease. Even here in
American, vitamin-poor diets associated with poverty, as well as a lack of
individual consciousness about the health of the immune system and its
relationship to diet and personal behavior, allowed the disease to spread
through its big cities and claim hundreds of thousands of lives.
Now, new diseases are breeding in the places where animals are force fed and
slaughtered to satisfy our fatty urges and spread obesity. There is a symmetry
between the damage that we humans inflict on the environment, on other living
things, and that which we inflict upon ourselves. Instead of entrusting our
health and our future to the likes of Donald Rumsfeld or Bill Frist, perhaps we
need to be improving our diets and getting rid of war and mass displacements,
the scourges of the twentieth century which are showing no sign of abatement in
the twenty-first.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
THEY WANT TO INJECT US!!
(Write and Call these politicians now)
The politicians listed below are members of the Senate
Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee that allowed the "The
Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005" (BARDA, also
known as S. 1873) to move on to the Senate floor where it awaits a full Senate
vote. This bill envisions forced vaccines and forced drugging with
untested/experimental drugs and vaccines, and gives freedom from liability to
drug companies. The sponsors of the bill are Burr, Enzi, Gregg, Frist,
Alexander, and Dole, all Republicans. Some of the Democrats, including Kennedy
and Clinton, voiced objections to parts of the bill, but did not take the
necessary measures to stop it from moving on to the full Senate. These pols
think we are all guinea pigs ready to die for their in-competence. Use this
information to give them hell.
REPUBLICANS:
> Judd Gregg (R-NH): 393 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Phone: (202) 224-3324, Fax: (202) 224-4952. <http://gregg.senate.gov/sitepages/contact.cfm>
> William Frist (R-TN): 509 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Phone: (202) 224-3344, Fax: (202) 228-1264. <http://frist.senate.gov/index.cfm>
> Mike Enzi (R-WY): 379A Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Phone: (202) 224-3424, Fax: (202) 228-0359. <http://enzi.senate.gov/email.htm>
> Richard Burr (R-NC): 217 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Phone: (202) 224-3154, Fax: (202) 228-2981. <http://burr.senate.gov/index.cfm>
> Johnny Isakson (R-GA): 120 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC
20510. Phone: (202) 224-3643, Fax: (202) 228-0724. <http://isakson.senate.gov/contact.cfm>
> Lamar Alexander (R-TN): 302 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Phone: (202) 224-4944, Fax: (202) 228-3398. <http://alexander.senate.gov/index.cfm>
> Christopher Bond (R-MO): 274 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC
20510. Phone: (202) 224-5721, Fax (202) 224-8149. <http://bond.senate.gov/contact/contactme.cfm>
> Pat Roberts (R-KS): 109 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Phone: (202) 224-4774, Fax (202) 224-3514. <http://roberts.senate.gov/email_pat.
html>
> John Ensign (R-NV): 356 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Phone: (202) 224-6244, Fax (202) 228-2193. <http://ensign.senate.gov/forms/email_form.cfm>
> Mike DeWine (R-OH): 140 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Phone: (202) 224-2315, Fax (202) 224-6519. <http://dewine.senate.gov>
DEMOCRATS:
> Edward Kennedy (D-MA): 317 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC
20510. Phone: (202) 224-4543, Fax: (202) 224-2417. <http://kennedy.senate.gov/index_high.html>
> Christopher Dodd (D-CT): 448 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC
20510. Phone (202) 224-2823, Fax (202) 228-1683. <http://dodd.senate.gov/webmail/form-opinion.html>
> Tom Harkin (D-IA): 731 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Phone (202) 224-3254, Fax (202) 224-9369. <http://harkin.senate.gov/contact/contact.cfm>
> Barbara Mikulski (D-MD): 503 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC
20510. Phone: (202) 224-4654, Fax (202)224-8858. <http://mikulski.senate.gov/contactme/mailform.html>
> Jeff Bingaman (D-NM): 703 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Phone:(202) 224-5521, Fax (202) 224-2852. E-mail to: <senator_bingaman@bingaman.senate.gov>
> Patty Murray (D-WA): 173 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Phone: (202) 224-2621, Fax: (202) 224-0238. <http://murray.senate.gov/email/index.cfm>
> Jack Reed (D-RI): 728 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Phone:(202) 224-4642, Fax (202) 224-4680. <http://reed.senate.gov/form-opinion.htm>
> Hillary Clinton (D-NY): 476 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC
20510. Phone: (202) 224-4451, D.C. Fax (202) 228-0282, NY Fax (631) 249-2847.
<http://clinton.senate.gov/contact/webform.cfm?subj=issu>
(This information was provided by Citizens for Legitimate Government, a
multi-partisan activist group established to expose the Bush Coup d'Etat and
oppose the Bush occupation in all of its manifestations. See: <http://www.legitgov.org/index.html>
for more--Ed.)