Posted on 01/11/2010 11:54:38 PM PST by myknowledge
THE swine flu scare was a "false pandemic" led by drugs companies that stood to make billions from vaccines, a leading health expert said.
Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, claimed major firms organized a "campaign of panic" to put pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic, UK tabloid The Sun reports.
He believes it is, "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century", and has called for an inquiry.
An emergency debate on the issue will be held by the Council of Europe later this month.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailytelegraph.com.au ...
I’ve thought the Hamthrax pandemic was a load of bunk all along.
Too few corpses littering the streets and too many yammerheads on TV screaming it was the end of days if you didn’t get injected with Uncle Sam’s magic elixir.
The H5N1 has done everything right to make epidemiologists shake in their boots. Yet, tantalizingly close to a strain easily transmitted from human to human, it has yet to make that final breakthrough.
Diseases typically begin by being somewhat lethal, but there is a predictable downward curve because of natural selection—the less deadly varieties survive and are passed on. Not so with H5N1, which has maintained a 60% mortality rate for years now.
Also troubling is the number of animal species it infects, some mild and some deadly. For example, cats, dogs, birds and fish all have very different immune systems, but H5N1 is almost unique in infecting them all. This means lots of animal vectors that can infect humans, and possibly wipe out so many farm animals that famine ensues.
Competing virus strains use flocks and herds of animals like a giant computer, using natural selection to choose the best between dozens of strains. Influenza is also capable of exchanging genetic data with other types, which usually happens in swine or people.
Estimated world mortality from H5N1 has been projected to be as high as 1B+, mostly in Asia and Oceania.
This would be more believable if we had been able to actually GET the vaccines in any quantity.
What’s the point of faking a pandemic if you can’t produce the vaccine you are trying to sell?
None of my family fell for it, too much hype too fast, too much panic for me to follow the stampede.
Seems to be a growing trend in America to create panic for monetary OR political gain,
This reminds me of the story about the boy that cried “wolf”. People are going to ignore health warnings if this doesn’t cease.
He believes it is, "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century", and has called for an inquiry.
Well that's not saying much since 'the century' is only 10 years old.
Oh, and I'm having Tin Foil sale.
And for an extra $10.00 I'll make a hat. (note: The shipping & handling is an extra $50) 
I do not give a sh** what Wolfgang Wodarg thinks.
Has it been found in the USA yet?
Just thinking of all the dead birds found and I know that there are a LOT less birds around this winter-the smallest number I’ve ever seen.
I always thought that the H1N1 fiasco, was a rehearsal, if you will, for something much bigger.
Maybe Rakkie-Back The Magic Negro can fix it...?
;-/
Right now, H5N1 has split into three major “clades”, each of which is doing its own, ominous thing.
The Chinese clade is spreading its endemic territory, becoming a permanent part of China, and figuring out how to remain viable in the “off” season. It is helped in this by a few species that can get infected but not die. But it’s driving the Chinese health authorities bonkers, because it will pop up somewhere and kill a person or two, then disappear, then reappear somewhere else a few weeks later and several hundred miles away.
The Indonesian clade is the most lethal so far. It is unnerving because there seems to be a genetic factor in who dies. An entire family will be wiped out, except for married spouses who are genetically different, who don’t even get sick.
The Egyptian clade is very worrisome, because for the first time, it has become both milder and a pediatric form. That is, it spreads very quickly among children, and maybe only one in a dozen die. This gives that clade the opportunity to mix genetic material with human varieties of influenza, and maybe get the key to easy H2H transmission.
Once it makes the transition, it will spread like wildfire, much faster than normal influenza. This is because people have partial resistance to other strains of flu, so it takes much more virus to break through the defenses. But nobody has resistance to H5N1, so just a little virus will infect everyone.
Years ago I interviewed people who as children survived the Spanish flu of 1918. It had a mortality of only 10-20%, and even in their 80’s, they were still traumatized by how many people died. It is close to unimaginable what a 60% mortality rate would be like.
The US would do much better than the rest of the world, but we would still lose as much as 10% of our population, or 30 million Americans.
And this is why doctors around the world are terrified of Avian flu.
maybe it only hits liberals ;^)
Seriously, that is very scary. I go to the CDC website every now and then and that alone, scares the pants off me!
So, it isn’t done mutating by the sound of it and would that be why they can’t come up with some kind of a vaccine? Too bad they can’t find the markers/DNA responsible for letting H5 ‘in’. If they know it hits family members, there must be a constant variable, no?
I think I had H1 last spring; when I finally went to an ER in North Carolina (I was visiting and had had this thing for 2 weeks already) the dr told me that EVERYONE on the staff had “it” or has it and there was nothing he could do for me. I was just happy I didn’t have pnuemonia-I just wanted someone to listen to my lungs. He told me to just rest and treat the symptoms because I would have a very very long wait in the ER.(they saw me right away cause I couldn’t breathe) There were 30 people ahead of me and this was NOT a hospital ER, it was a clinic type place. He told me on Easter Saturday, they usually only see car accidents, stubbed toes-that sort of thing. And every person that was there, with the exception of 1, was there for the same thing I had.
It was very scary to see all those people there for the same thing; my sister was stunned as she had never seen the place like that.
So I think the H1 vaccine/govt-distribution was a practice run. They saw a flu spreading that was new and didn’t want the crisis to go to waste. I mean the virus had already been around for a while.
I know it was killing people, but so does the flu. If you ask me, they didn’t pass the crisis test and did a terrible job of staying on top of it. Very scary to think about them handling H5.
It was WHO’s first debut to run a global pandemic program and call the shots - so to speak. In the meantime, one of the major players at WHO was all set to make a boat load of money on the vaccines.
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