Ron Paul Warns Swine Flu Scare Will Be Used As Precedent For More Big Government
Repeat of 1976 fearmongering campaign in full swing
Steve Watson Infowars.net Tuesday, April 28, 2009
“Step back and think for a minute before rushing and panicking” is the message coming from Texas Congressman Ron Paul who has warned that the swine flu scare will once again be used as a precedent for big government intrusion.
“It makes me think back to 1976, the first year I served in the Congress,” Paul has said in a video update. “We had a vote on the swine flu. Back then there was panic, they said it was going to sweep the nation and they rapidly came up with some flu shots and the government was going to inoculate everybody and save the world from this disaster.”
“It turned out that our instincts were correct.” the Congressman, also a medical physician, commented. “Not only did we think that the government should be involved in making medical decisions… but the flu came, the flu went and one person died, except for those individuals that died from getting the flu vaccine.”
Earlier this week we reported on the events of 1976, highlighting the fact that this last significant outbreak of swine flu in the U.S. originated at the army base at Fort Dix, New Jersey.
President Gerald Ford and then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (a man who has long standing intimate ties with the big pharma companies that have and will reap millions in profits from these scares) instituted a mass nationwide vaccination program. More than 40 million people were vaccinated. However, the program was stopped short after over 500 cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a severe paralyzing nerve disease, were reported. Officially 30 people died as a direct result of the vaccinations, though the real figure is generally thought to have been much higher.
At the time Congressman Ron Paul was one of only two representatives to vote down the vaccination program. His comments were recorded in the book Swine Flu Expose, by Eleanora I. McBean, Ph.D., N.D.
Paul described the move as “a shocking misuse of funds …and an evil political maneuver”, “blatant advertising efforts to panic the people into taking Swine Flu shots will fail.” Paul said.
How were bird flu viruses sent to unsuspecting labs?
Updated Thu. Feb. 26 2009 7:45 AM ET
The Canadian Press
Officials are trying to get to the bottom of how vaccine manufacturer Baxter International Inc. made "experimental virus material" based on a human flu strain but contaminated with the H5N1 avian flu virus and then distributed it to an Austrian company.
That company, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then disseminated the supposed H3N2 virus product to subcontractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany. Authorities in the four European countries are looking into the incident, and their efforts are being closely watched by the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Control.
Though it appears none of the 36 or 37 people who were exposed to the contaminated product became infected, the incident is being described as "a serious error" on the part of Baxter, which is on the brink of securing a European licence for an H5N1 vaccine. That vaccine is made at a different facility, in the Czech Republic.
"For this particular incident ... the horse did not get out (of the barn)," Dr. Angus Nicoll of the ECDC said from Stockholm.
"But that doesn't mean that we and WHO and the European Commission and the others aren't taking it as seriously as you would any laboratory accident with dangerous pathogens - which you have here."
Accidental release of a mixture of live H5N1 and H3N2 viruses - if that indeed happened - could have resulted in dire consequences. Nicoll said officials still aren't 100 per cent sure the mixture contained live H5N1 viruses. But given that ferrets exposed to the mixture died, it likely did.
H5N1 doesn't easily infect people, but H3N2 viruses do. They are one of two types of influenza A viruses that infect people each flu season.
If someone exposed to the mixture had been co-infected with H5N1 and H3N2, the person could have served as an incubator for a hybrid virus able to transmit easily to and among people. That mixing process, called reassortment, is one of two ways pandemic viruses are created.
Research published last summer by scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that in the laboratory, H5N1 and H3N2 viruses mated readily. While less virulent than H5N1, a number of the offspring viruses appeared to retain at least a portion of the killing power of their dangerous parent.
Baxter International, which is based in Deerfield, Ill., said the contamination was the result of an error in its research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria.
The facility had been contracted by Avir Green Hills to make what Baxter refers to as "experimental virus material" based on human H3N2 viruses.
Christopher Bona, Baxter's director of global bioscience communications, said the liquid virus product was not a vaccine and was developed for testing purposes only. He deferred questions about the purpose of the testing to Avir Green Hills, but said the batch was to be used in animals and was never intended for use in humans.
Avir Green Hills said in an email that it took possession of the material in late December. It later sent the product to the sub-contractors. The email said the material was stored and handled throughout under high biosafety conditions.
Alarm bells rang in early February when researchers at the Czech sub-contractor inoculated ferrets with the material and the animals promptly died. Baxter learned about the problem on Feb. 6, Bona said from Deerfield.
Ferrets are susceptible to human flu strains, but they don't die from those infections. Preliminary investigation found the material was contaminated with H5N1 flu virus, which is lethal to ferrets.
Nicoll said the fact the ferrets died supports the working assumption that there were live H5N1 viruses in the material Baxter produced.
Bona said Baxter has identified how the contamination happened and has taken steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. He said Austrian authorities audited Baxter's Orth-Donau research operations after the problem came to light and are satisfied with the steps taken.
Baxter is the only flu vaccine manufacturer to work with wild type flu viruses, felt to be more dangerous than the altered and attenuated (weakened) viruses other manufacturers use.
The company uses what is known as BSL3 level precautions in all its vaccine research facilities, Bona said. (Researchers at the U.S. CDC use BSL3-plus biocontainment when working with H5N1 viruses, a spokesperson for the agency said.)
People familiar with biosecurity rules are dismayed by evidence that human H3N2 and avian H5N1 viruses have somehow co-mingled in the Baxter research facility. That should not be allowed to happen, a number of experts insisted.
The company isn't shedding much light on how it did.
"It was a combination of just the process itself, (and) technical and human error in this procedure," Bona said. When asked to elaborate, he said to do so would give away proprietary information about Baxter's production process.
Bona said when Baxter realized its error, it helped the various companies destroy the contaminated material and clean up their facilities. And staff who had been exposed to the contaminated product were assessed and monitored by infectious diseases doctors. They were also offered the antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu).
Baxter's error is reminiscent of a 2005 incident where a U.S. manufacturer of kits used by laboratories to test their detection capabilities included vials of H2N2 virus in several thousand proficiency kits. H2N2, the virus that caused the 1957 pandemic, has not circulated since 1968 and is thought to be a prime candidate to cause the next pandemic.
That mistake, discovered by Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory, set authorities around the world scrambling to retrieve and destroy the vials of virus, which had been sent to labs in 18 countries.
WHO says H1N1 could infect two billion worldwide
Updated Thu. May. 7 2009 1:11 PM ET
CTV.ca News Staff
The World Health Organization says as many as two billion people could be infected by the new H1N1 virus, if the current outbreak continues to spread.
WHO flu chief Keiji Fukuda made the comment Thursday at the daily WHO news conference in Geneva, not as a prediction, but as an observation about flu pandemics.
In previous pandemics, Fukuda said, one-third of the world's population gets infected. So with a world population of six billion people, it's "reasonable" to expect two billion infections, he said.
That doesn't mean any pandemic that might be declared of this virus would be severe and cause as many deaths as the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed about 70 million people.
It may be more like the the last flu pandemic, the Hong Kong Flu in 1968, which was considered mild by pandemic terms. Only about one million people globally died of that flu, caused by a new strain of H3N2. That compares to the estimated 500,000 people who die around the world every year from seasonal flu.
Fukuda said it is impossible at this point to say whether a H1N1 pandemic would be mild or severe.
Last week, the WHO raised its flu pandemic alert to Phase 5, one step short of a pandemic. On Thursday, Fukuda said the H1N1 virus is not yet spreading in a sustained way outside North America, so the pandemic level will remain at 5.
"We remain at Phase 5. That is not changed," Fukuda told reporters.
"We continue to see human to human transmission, community-level transmission, primarily in North America. We are not seeing it yet anywhere else."
According to the WHO's latest tally, the virus has killed 42 people in Mexico and two in the United States. Many of the 2,099 people with confirmed infections have had relatively mild symptoms similar to the seasonal flu.
The WHO defines a flu pandemic as a worldwide spread of infection from a new influenza virus to which people have little or no immunity. Rises in the pandemic level reflect assessments of how the virus is spreading, not the severity of its effects.
A move to Phase 6, the highest level of the pandemic scale, would speed up efforts already under way to produce and distribute antiviral drugs and vaccines. Fukuda said governments should do all they can now to get ready.
"This is a time in which we can work with countries to be as prepared as possible," he said. "Our bottom is line that there are things that countries can do, that we can help them with, to get them prepared for this potential increase in people getting sick."
JAKARTA, May 6 (Xinhua) -- An Indonesian doctor disclosed Wednesday that an A/H1N1 flu suspect is currently treated in a hospital in Surabaya, the capital of Indonesia's East Java province.
This is the first suspected case of A/H1N1 flu in Indonesia and in Southeast Asia, a report the Elshinta radio said on Wednesday.
The Dr. Soetomo hospital in Surabaya is treating a A/H1N1 flu suspect, the radio quoted Harko Hari Santosa, a doctor working in the hospital, as saying.
At the present, Harko said, the suspect patient is isolated in a particular isolation room in the hospital.
Without disclosing the patient's arrival date, Harko said the patient had just arrived in Surabaya from Hong Kong. When the patient arrived at the airport in Surabaya the thermal scanner spotted his high temperature.
However, the hospital has yet to confirm whether it was a A/H1N1 flu case, he added.
St. Francis Preparatory School, the center of the swine flu outbreak in Queens, N.Y.
New York Times contributor Roni Caryn Rabin weighs in with a first-hand account of swine flu outbreak.
By Roni Caryn Rabin
After the first reports were published about swine flu among kids at St. Francis Preparatory High School in Queens, N.Y., where I live, a friend called me in a panic. Like many parents in the neighborhood, she was wondering if should keep her 10-year-old home from school.
Her house is a stone’s throw from the school, and mine is just a few miles from hers. “I’m scared,” she said. “One of his best friends has an older brother who goes to St. Francis.”
Fear was spreading faster than any virus could. Hand sanitizer was flying off the shelves. Then the wet wipes started to disappear. People walking through busy shopping areas, and even back streets, were wearing surgical masks, a habit many Asian immigrants had brought from China. I drove past one car with three mask-clad passengers in back.
When a girl at my daughter’s high school complained of a cough, the nurse gave her a choice of wearing a mask for the rest of the day – or going home. (Guess which she chose?) A lot of schoolkids stayed home; my friend told me of one parent who kept her children home for three days straight, and she lived in another borough.
“Tell them to wash their hands a lot,” was the only advice I could offer.
Reporters like myself often parachute into a region to report about a war or an election, but in this case, I just happen to live here. As journalists we often feel insulated by our status — we’re observers, after all, not participants — and on some unconscious level I think I believed my family and I were immune.
I was wrong.
The fear, meanwhile, fueled rumors. My friend Mary, who lives nearby, said her daughter stayed home from public school because she wasn’t feeling good one day. Her friends called that afternoon and asked if she was alright — they heard she had swine flu. Four of the kids in her class had been to Mexico over spring break, Mary’s daughter told her. The next day she corrected herself: only one had gone, “and that was to Jamaica.”
But it soon became clear it didn’t really matter who you knew or where they had been. The cat was out of the bag.
Some parents wanted the city to close all schools. But while St. Francis was shut down for a week and a half, a lot of students with nothing to do went to hang out in another enclosed gathering place … the mall.
When my own 15-year-old started coughing on Monday evening, I thought little of it. She’s pretty hardy and hadn’t missed a day of school since sixth or seventh grade. But when she woke up at 3 a.m. groaning loudly enough to wake me, I realized I’d been mistaken.
Sure, most years my daughter didn’t get the flu. But this was a novel strain. A new virus.
It was a miserable night — for our whole family, but mostly for her. She didn’t know what hit her. She was hot, and then she was cold. She shivered and coughed and groaned. Her throat was killing her, and by morning she was whispering.
“Will I have to go to the hospital?” she whispered.
“What if I gave it to my friends?”
“Will they shut down my school?”
I was worried, but not nearly as much as I would have been just a few days earlier. It was becoming fairly clear that young people in the United States weren’t dying of this flu strain, and most recovered without being hospitalized. If you weren’t very young or very old or pregnant, and you didn’t have diabetes, heart disease, H.I.V. or a compromised immune system, you probably wouldn’t even get a definitive diagnosis, and any available Tamiflu, the anti-flu drug, would be reserved for someone else.
An infectious disease specialist had told me on Friday that health officials were reassured by the way the outbreak was unfolding here. “If it weren’t for Mexico, this would be a page-15 story,” he’d said.
One thing is clear: we have good surveillance systems. Everyone was collecting data and phoning it in. When the high-school attendance office called, they didn’t just want to know my child was home sick, they wanted a list of symptoms: Did she have a cough? Sore throat? Fever? How high? Fifty kids in the school were absent, up from a daily average of 20 at most.
We had good information, and it was easily accessible to the public, not just through the traditional media but through the internet and twitter.
You could go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site and find out whether face masks work (unclear), what you can do to minimize your risk (wash your hands, stay away from crowds, don’t touch your nose and face) and what you can do to help (sneeze into a tissue or your sleeve, stay home if you’re sick).
I still don’t know if my daughter actually has swine flu. The doctor who examined her was pretty sure she did — he called it A(H1N1), which somehow sounded less sinister. But there was no need for a test, and she was otherwise healthy and therefore not a candidate for Tamiflu anyway.
He listened to her lungs, proclaimed them all clear, and swabbed her throat for a strep culture, which was negative. The prescription was the usual for flu: Motrin, lots of fluids, rest. Oh, and ice-pops for the sore throat. We were to watch out for shortness of breath, worsening fever or unusual behavior.
She had completely lost her voice by then, so she borrowed my phone as we drove home and texted into it. “Throat like sandpaper stop 4 ice pops.”
By evening she was over the worst of it. She sat with us at dinner but had drunk so much tea she wasn’t really hungry. Every time she coughed we dove under the table. But I knew she was much better when, as she prepared for a world history exam, she had just one question, “What am I going to do about my chem test?”
And I have one lingering concern myself. If — and when — this rolls around again, in a fiercer form, will people think health officials are crying wolf and be blase about it? If this current flu does turn out to be much better than feared — and we all hope it does — the public health campaign must not stop. People need very clear explanations about why and how this virus could mutate into something worse.