Pandemic Check

Keep this in mind when they try to sell you a pandemic

image source

Jon Rappoport
Activist Post

Researchers are making noises about a possible new pandemic. One or more variations of bird flu. And of course, in all these ramp-ups, the bottom line is: get vaccinated.

The so-called pandemics train you to obey, so you’ll take all the shots they recommend for every disease, like a good little muffin.

“Seasonal flu? Pandemic flu? Meningitis? Hepatitis? Whooping cough? Measles? Polio? Martian Traveler’s Disease? Venusian Restless Leg? Gimme everything you’ve got. Inject me! Protect me!”

Here are few items to consider when the pandemic professionals start grinding out media warnings.

How many confirmed cases of the disease in question are there, at that moment? Ten? Fifty? A thousand? Out of a population of eight billion?

For example, as Peter Doshi pointed out in BMJ online, when the big push on Swine Flu started, in the spring of 2009, there were only 20 purported cases of Swine Flu. Twenty. (BMJ Online, v.339, b3471)

This is a pandemic?

The mere claim that “a novel virus,” never before seen, has emerged in humans is NOT a slam-dunk for a pandemic. Not by a long shot.

Swine Flu was supposed to be one of those, and it was a dud. The number of deaths reported was far lower than the numbers traditionally reported for seasonal flus.

Number 2, how are doctors or researchers testing patients to confirm they have “pandemic flu?” This is a big issue. If, for example it’s antibody testing, they’re conning you straight out. Why? Because the presence of antibodies (a scouting component of the immune system) is not a sure sign that the person has been ill, is ill now, or will become ill.

Antibodies only indicate a person has contacted the virus in question. That’s it. And until the mid-1980s, when the science was turned upside down for no good reason, a positive antibody test was normally taken to mean the person’s immune system was healthy and had kicked out the virus.

If doctors and researchers are testing people for some purported pandemic virus using the PCR method, there are other problems. The PCR is a procedure that takes tiny, tiny fragments of organic matter from a patient and amplifies them, blows them up, so they can be recognized and read.

However, there is no sure-fire guarantee these fragments are really pieces of viruses. And if the original extraction of such organic material yielded so little from the patient, how on earth would one assume it was causing illness?

Which brings us to the next point. In determining whether a patient has some pandemic illness, and especially early in the game when researchers are still trying to figure out what’s going on, they need to actually isolate that virus from the patient and show it is present in huge numbers in his body. Otherwise, there is no reason to infer the virus is causing disease.

The purported cases of flu in patients could be coming from a number of different factors. A person might be ill as a result of: toxic chemicals, environmental or pharmaceutical; nutritional deficits; stress; parasites, etc.

The biggest issue is: the strength or weakness of that person’s immune system.

In devastated areas, where poverty, contaminated water supplies, starvation, lack of basic sanitation, and overcrowding are chronic, many germs can sweep through the population and cause death, because these people’s immune systems are shot, compromised, on the way out, and can’t defend against the germs.

The same germs, in an affluent area, would cause little harm.

The bottom-line is, to know what is making a person ill, you have to examine that person for many different factors. You can’t just say, “Well, we found a virus in him and therefore that’s why he is sick.”

That’s not science, that’s hype. That’s not research, that’s PR.

As the hype expands and health agencies like the CDC and WHO announce there are thousands of cases of pandemic flu and deaths, they don’t tell you how they’re counting.

That’s a gross omission. For instance, in the summer of 2009, the CDC stopped testing patients who walked into clinics and hospitals with generalized “flu symptoms.” The CDC just assumed they were all suffering from Swine Flu. CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson reported this fact and it caused a firestorm, until the story was cut off at the knees by the CBS news division.

You want to know what really happens when so-called flu patients are tested?

Here’s a quote from Peter Doshi’s BMJ review, “Influenza: marketing vaccines by marketing disease” (BMJ 2013; 346:f3037):

“…most ‘flu’ appears to have nothing to do with influenza. Every year, hundreds of thousands of respiratory specimens are tested across the US. Of those tested, on average 16% are found to be influenza positive.”

Boom.

Doshi then states: “…It’s no wonder so many people feel that ‘flu shots’ don’t work: for most flus, they can’t.”

In other words, even if you believe in vaccines, even if you think they’re wonderful and the world would collapse without them, when it comes to the flu, things are not what they seem. 84% of supposed or suspected or diagnosed flu patients are falsely labeled. Even by loose conventional standards, they don’t have the flu. It’s a mirage.

Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed and Exit From the Matrix, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

from:    http://www.activistpost.com/2014/02/keep-this-in-mind-when-they-try-to-sell.html

Mutant H5N1 — Why?

Killer-Flu Debate: Should Mutant H5N1 Have Been Created?

Wynne Parry, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 23 December 2011 Time: 10:11 AM ET
chickens, bird flu research, controversy
Controversial new research found a way to make bird flu spread easily among mammals.

News of two separate research projects that altered the bird-flu virus so it could potentially spread between humans has some experts asking: Should this research have been done at all?

Other scientists, however, are defending the projects as important progress in understanding how the virus, called H5N1, could adapt to cause a devastating pandemic.

“I wouldn’t do it,” said W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. “I think it is one thing to study the pathology of an organism to try to understand ways in which you can reduce the risk to humankind or animals by doing basic research. … This isn’t the case [here]; this virus doesn’t transmit readily to humans.”

Others argue that the two projects addressed questions crucial to averting a global tragedy: Could H5N1 mutate into a form that could spread between humans? And, if so, how

“The bottom line is science has been advanced by this, we know something about the virus that we didn’t know before,” Thomas Daniels, an associate research scientist and co-director of the Vector Ecology Laboratory at Fordham University, told LiveScience. “It could be it’s going to be very, very useful down the road, but right now we have to proceed with caution.”

An unusual exception

The details of the studies aren’t available yet, in fact, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has asked the researcher and the journals considering publishing their work to withhold details that could provide a blueprint for those seeking to do harm.

In science, experiments and their results are shared so others can reproduce them and advance the field, but this case seems to merit special consideration. Half a dozen scientists interviewed for this article supported withholding details, such as the specific genetic changes in the altered viruses.

Bird flu basics

The bird flu is deadly for birds, only rarely infecting humans who catch it directly from the birds. But when people do catch it the results are often deadly –- since November 2003, nearly 600 human infections have been reported globally, and approximately 60 percent of those have been fatal, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

One of the two groups to have created a more transmissible form of the virus, led by Ron Fouchier from Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, developed a form of H5N1 that ferrets, which are mammals like us, could catch from one another even though they were not in physical contact. In other words, the infection became airborne, according to reports based on Fouchier’s presentation at a meeting in Malta in September.

The other study, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Tokyo, also produced a more highly transmissible form of the virus using ferrets, although more details were not available.

A dangerous undertaking

Publishing the specifics of these projects would be the second mistake; the first was conducting these experiments, write biosecurity experts, led by Thomas Ingelsby, CEO and director of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

This work was conducted by internationally respected scientists working under top-of-the-line biosafety conditions, but “the risk of a person accidentally becoming infected and starting an outbreak with this new strain is low. But it is not zero,” they write in an editorial published on Dec. 15 in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science.They cite the accidental release of an influence strain from a lab in 1977. [Predicting the Next Major Virus]

The potential benefits, such as screening viruses for similar changes or developing a pandemic-preventing vaccine based on the engineered strain, are uncertain and do not outweigh the risks, they write.

Preparing for a crisis

Others say the work isn’t risking catastrophe; it may help prevent one.

“It should not have been done if the final goal is to show you can make a deadly virus,” said Dr. Andrea Gambotto, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine, and director of the university’s Vector Core Facility. “In this case, the goal is different; the goal is to try to predict what can happen, how a virus can mutate.”

Vaccines and antiviral medications effective against H5N1 exist, but these were designed to fight off a virus that has not fully adapted to humans. So, it’s not clear how they would fare against a strain that has made the evolutionary jump and can spread among humans as the Fouchier’s did among ferrets, he said.

The altered viruses developed by Fouchier’s and Kawaoka’s research might give researchers a better idea of how to prepare, Gambotto said.

Vaccine developers could test the existing vaccines against the lab strains to get at least some idea of how effective they might be against the mutant virus. If they don’t prevent infection, then developers know they’ll need something else in order to have a running start, he said.

“By the time we start seeing the first people dying, isolate a virus, generate a vaccine, it is probably one year or eight months if everything goes smoothly,” he said. “But that eight months can be deadly for humanity.”

A wake-up call

The demonstration that bird flu can be coaxed into spreading easily among mammals is a wake-up call to the world that has been tuning out a potential pandemic, Robert Webster, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, told LiveScience.

“The virus has been around for 15 years since it appeared in Hong Kong and it first got a lot of attention, then less, and less. Even though it has [caused] 600 cases in humans and killed about 60 percent of people, people were starting to say this is an aberration, so let’s move on to worry about bigger problems,” Webster said. “These two papers make it clear this can happen.”

In comparison, the flu pandemic of 1918 killed about 2.5 percent of the people it infected.

“People are saying the scientists were irresponsible for doing this; it was not an irresponsible thing to do,” Webster said. “These scientists are the leading scientists in the world in influenza and they made a huge contribution.”

from:   http://www.livescience.com/17623-deadly-h5n1-virus-recipe-debate.html