The current swine flu pandemic is "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century," according to Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Health for the European Council....
He has also said that the severity of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic was intentionally exaggerated by pharmaceutical companies so they could receive large profits.
British taxpayers took the biggest hit, but they weren't the only ones to be sold that deadly pandemic notion.
The WHO of course denies this. Perhaps they should buy up the government vaccine stockpiles and body bags if they are so worried about it?
The article states that "swine flu has turned out to be no more serious than the common cold". This is demonstrably false; a small but significant number of otherwise healthy people ended up in the ICU with respiratory failure. Of those, about half died.
ReplyDeleteThis was not due to a "cytokine storm", but due to the fact that the H1N1 virus tended to attack tissues deep in the lung, as opposed to the upper respiratory tract.
There is a large degree of uncertainty in the epidemic models at the start of an outbreak. A small change in virulence or contagion can swing the fatality rate tremendously. It is a non-linear effect. And the vaccination program certainly had an effect to reduce the fatalities; "by how much" we don't know for sure...
...but imagine if good vaccines had been available in the 1918 influenza crisis, and that crisis had been averted. I'm sure the aftermath would have seen some eurocrat screaming "hoax! fraud! profiteering!" when reviewing pre-epidemic projections of global disaster and twenty million dead. The pre-crisis headlines of "Potential for influenza deaths projected to exceed the recent Great War!" would have been held up to special ridicule and nasty "cui bono" type inquests.
But those headlines would have been accurate.
Public policy in the face of catastrophic but highly contingent outcomes is fraught with bad faith hindsight. Actual crisis which prudential steps actually averted will always be met with accusations of hoax.
So the "Council of Europe" (take a look around their site) claims the drug companies "made it all up". What does this tell me? Absolutely nothing. They'd be saying the same thing regardless of whether the drug companies acted in good faith or not.
(Note I'm not saying the drug companies might not have leaned on the lever, I'm just saying that certain facts - like the fact that (so far) the epidemic hasn't fulfilled worst case expectations, or that eurocrats are up in arms - proves nothing conclusive).
Spot on analysis, Lewy. Thanks. What I was thinking but would never be able to write.
ReplyDeleteAs for the 'Council's' site. I stopped reading right here.... in the first post.
"''Criminalising the irregular entry and presence of migrants in Europe corrodes established international law principles and causes many human tragedies without achieving its purpose of genuine control''".
I don't even care what this gentleman's alternative solution may be, so read no further.
Drug companies? It sure sounded like the U.S. and Canadian Governments were pushing the hell out of it to me.
ReplyDeleteI got mighty tired of hearing that I might be responsible for the downfall of western civilization if I did not get a flu shot.
It is not that I have anything philosophical against flu shots -- I just know how my body works. If I don't get a flu shot, I have about a 5% chance of getting sick. If I do get a flu shot, I stand about a 95% chance of for-a-week-I-feel-like-I'm-gonna-die sick. I know that many people are the complete opposite. For those people, by all means get a flu shot. For me? Leave me the hell alone.
"The swine flu has turned out to be no more serious than the common cold.."
ReplyDeleteWhaaaaat? Tell that to the people that died from it.
Also, I think I'm a little leery of anything the "European Council" has to say; at least, I'll give it the same credence as UN pronouncements.
Luther said "Spot on analysis, Lewy. Thanks. What I was thinking but would never be able to write."
Word and word.
No, don't think so. This whole thing was nonsense. Just because people die from an illness doesn't mean it should have been called a "global pandemic" and that IS the point being made here. Nor does it mean that we should have everyone running around in a panic wearing masks, getting injected with untested vaccines (which have killed and injured people), and being shown rows of body boxes on the news to bring home the point that we are all going to die if we don't get our shots.
ReplyDeleteBritain is said to have spent over £1Billion on this fiasco, and is now shutting down all of its H1N1 Panic Centers.
3,900 people are recorded to have died in the US from H1N1.
400 Brits are dead from H1N1, and yet the entire flu season including H1N1 has been milder than most years.
14,000 are dead worldwide, which is a much lower death toll than typical flu seasons.
Contained in the figures for those affected by H1N1 are all other viruses. The CDC made the decision to stop testing and just declare basically all sick people to have H1N1.
Now that's just ridiculous.
Annually in the US we lose over 36,000 per year to the flu.
This was definitely overhyped.
That doesn't mean the people who get it are fine and dandy - any flu can clearly be serious. People have died from this flu.
But worldwide pandemic with millions dead (which is absolutely what we were sold on)?
Complete fabrication, and a profitable one at that for certain parties.
As for the virologists who have looked into the bizarre nature of H1N1 and stated that it could not possibly have occurred naturally now could it have emerged simultaneously in as many locations worldwide as it did - well, their statements were pretty much swept under the rug so far as the media was concerned.
Last but not least the WHO's new method of calculating "pandemic". Look a little more deeply into that, because it's a problem that's not going away. We can now have a global pandemic declared by the WHO when no such thing is occurring.
Think about what you heard from various governments and in the news this year about what was going to happen when H1N1 swept the world.
And now think about what REALLY happened.
The facts speak for themselves.
I don't think companies made as large a profit as they otherwise could have, if they were driving this whole thing. The reason is because governments wanted all doeses to be in individual containers instead of larger bottles, because some people feel that the preservative needed in the larger bottle causes, IIRC, autism. This slowed down production -- causing the shortage and greatly reduced profits.
ReplyDeleteMy company provided a free vaccine clinc for us -- the vaccine was not available to us until January 22.
I had the feeling that this whole thing was a political tool of manipulation. There was something about the tone of the pronouncements that bothered me -- "Do it for the good of the Motherland." Now that it did not work, governments are now piling on that old bogie man: Big Business.
Do to the delay in providing the vaccine and the number of people who opted not to get the vaccine, I do not think that the case can be made that "We did not have a pandemic because the vaccine did what it was supposed to do."
Make that "Due to the delay." Does your browser mess up your perfect spelling and grammer when you hit the "POST" button -- as mine does?
ReplyDelete"Does your browser mess up your perfect spelling and grammer when you hit the "POST" button -- as mine does?"
ReplyDeleteHahaha... good one Matt. I wondered what was happening to my comments. Glad you figured that out. :)
"Do to the delay in providing the vaccine and the number of people who opted not to get the vaccine, I do not think that the case can be made that "We did not have a pandemic because the vaccine did what it was supposed to do."
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree with you Matt. Noah and I had concerns about the vaccine, and chose to receive only the seasonal shot. The doctors around here stopped differentiating between seasonal flu, generic respiratory crud, and swine flu very early last fall. Who knows how many cases there actually were?
As a side note: this winter, we've had a dozen or more cases of pertussis crop up in our little community. Odd.
"MedImmune was one of five companies nationwide, including Sanofi Pasteur SA, (Baxter), and GlaxoSmithKline PLC, tapped for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of federal contracts to supply swine flu vaccines."
ReplyDeletelink
There is no opt-out on most of those contracts.
Hundreds of millions of dollars and ZERO liability. Whoah. They did quite well with H1N1.
Now MedImmune has just been sold to London's AstraZeneca PLC for $15.6BILLION.
How's that for a profitable venture?
If MedImmune was sluggish before H1N1, it certainly wasn't afterwards.
Good counterpoints, monkeyweather & Matt. I think you all have good points and there's probably truth to both sides.
ReplyDelete""Does your browser mess up your perfect spelling and grammer when you hit the "POST" button -- as mine does?"
LMAO!! Glad it's not just me :-)