by Jim Marrs
CBS requested state-by-state information on swine flu victims, but the news organization was stalled for some time by the CDC. Everyone was shocked when figures for state flu cases were finally released. “The vast majority of cases were negative for H1N1 as well as seasonal flu, despite the fact that many states were specifically testing patients deemed to be most likely to have H1N1 flu, based on symptoms and risk factors, such as travel to Mexico,” CBS reported.
Even real cases were hyped by a compliant corporate media. One headline in September 2009 stated: “H1N1 Flu Infects Over 250 Georgetown Students.” Yet a closer investigation at Georgetown University showed the number of sick students came only from “estimates” made by counting students who went to the Student Health Center with flu symptoms, students at the emergency room, and even those who called the H1N1 hotline or the Health Center’s doctor on call, not from laboratory tests.
In early February 2010, the whole stressful pandemic of swine flu was unraveling, with vaccines being returned to manufacturers unsold. Sanofi Pasteur in Swiftwater, Pennsylvania, issued a nationwide recall of its H1N1 vaccine after it was discovered to have a lack of potency. The discovery was made after allotments had been shipped to all fifty states.
THE KANSAS CITY PANDEMIC OF 1921
THE SWINE FLU PANDEMIC may be just the latest occurrence in a history of instances where powerful organizations exaggerated the dangers of a disease in order to profit from scaring the population. In the early 1920s in Kansas City, Missouri, a citizen’s watchdog group called “The Advertiser’s Protective Bureau” successfully prosecuted the Missouri state chapter of the AMA, the Jackson Medical Society, for unduly spreading fear about a smallpox pandemic when none existed. The bureau reported:
“In the fall of 1921, the health of the city was unusually good, but slow for the doctors. So the Jackson Medical Society met and resolved to make an epidemic in the city. According to the minutes of this meeting, ‘a motion was made and seconded, that a recommendation be made by the committee, to the board of health, that an epidemic of smallpox be declared in the city…it was moved and seconded that a day be set aside, termed Vaccination Day, on which physicians would be stationed at all schools, clinics, public buildings and hospitals to vaccinate “free of charge”…it is further recommended that wide publicity be given, stating that vaccination is a preventive of smallpox, and urging the absolute necessity of vaccination for every man, woman, and child in the city.’”
Dr. A. True Ott, a naturopathic medical doctor and talk-show host who specializes in health and medicine issues, researched this case and noted the Jackson Medical Society’s propaganda blitz was highly successful. “Over a million previously healthy and happy American citizens were hypnotized and terrorized into placing the vaccine toxins into their bloodstreams. All public school children in the region were vaccinated while at school! Parents who dared question the vaccination of their children were ostracized and publicly vilified. The court record on this case is very clear. In the weeks and months following the ‘mass vaccinations’ the area’s hospital beds were filled to over-flowing with vaccine-induced smallpox cases. Tens of thousands of people became ill, and many hundreds of innocents died, and many more were permanently crippled. Of course, the newspapers then trumpeted how wise the medical establishment was to promote the vaccines, stating how much worse the death toll would have been without the vaccination campaign.”
Evidence presented in court showed there was no epidemic at any time, either in Kansas City or the state. However, the Jackson Medical Society produced large quantities of posters, flyers, newspaper stories, and ads featuring lurid pictures of children covered with massive smallpox sores and open wounds. The Advertiser’s Protective Bureau later proved that these photographs came from British newspapers.
According to Dr. Ott, “While the Protective Bureau won the criminal court case the American People lost. The case should have made front-page headlines around the nation, showing the Modus Operandi of certain corrupt ‘medical practitioners’—how, by means of fraud, treachery, and trickery, [the Jackson Medical Society] made millions of dollars in windfall profits while thousands of innocent, trusting, and naive Americans suffered and died. The entire sordid affair, with all its damning details, was kept out of the American Press. John D. Rockefeller’s AMA [American Medical Association], with its millions of dollars of influence made sure of that!”
The polio vaccine of the 1950s is yet another instance in which a vaccine has hurt Americans more than it has helped. Prior to the polio vaccine, parents were deathly afraid their children would contract polio, an infectious viral disease often resulting in paralysis or permanent disability, such as suffered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The population was greatly relieved with the discovery and distribution of the Jonas Salk polio vaccine beginning in the mid-1950s. But after millions of Americans and others around the world were given the new vaccine, scientists discovered the vaccine contained a cancer-causing monkey virus called Simian vacuolating virus 40 (SV-40), a virus closely related to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and one that was born through the manufacture of the polio vaccine from infected monkey glands. SV-40 has been connected to brain tumors, bone cancers, lung cancers, and leukemia. It can be transmitted from mother to child in the womb as well as through sexual intercourse.
There has been a good deal of documentation over how pervasive this disease has become in the American population. Yet very little of this story has been brought to the attention of the public by the corporate mass media. Conspiracy-minded researchers are suspicious that no samples of pre-1962 polio vaccine can be found. Although more than ten million people were inoculated with potentially contaminated batches of vaccine, there is now no way to determine if they were exposed to the SV-40 virus, which can lie dormant in the human body for years before causing tumors and cancer.
And one should not forget the swine flu scare of 1976, when President Gerald R. Ford and some forty million Americans dutifully took swine flu shots.
And what was the death toll from that flu? Exactly one—the poor soldier who started the scare in the first place. The soldier died after his body reacted to an experimental vaccine while he was completing a “forced march” during training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Others in the country had received the same experimental vaccine, and several deaths were reported. Just as disturbing, hundreds of others who were vaccinated suffered from Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), a debilitating response to the immune system that causes lupus or paralysis in the extremities and the facial muscles. Guillain-Barré is one of the world’s leading causes of non-trauma-induced paralysis.
Court cases against the government and the vaccine manufacturers stacked up in the years following the 1976 scare. In July 2009, the media reported that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had taken steps to prevent a recurrence of lawsuits similar to those from 1976 by signing an order granting legal immunity to vaccine makers. This order was issued under provisions written into a 2006 law for public health emergencies.
Paul Pennock, a New York plaintiff’s attorney on medical liability cases, was critical of the grant of immunity. He stated, “If you’re going to ask people to do this for the common good, then let’s make sure for the common good that these people will be taken care of if something goes wrong.”
Though some may argue that liability is not an issue to consider in vaccination cases, the case of Lance Corporal Josef Lopez of Missouri is an appropriate rebuttal. After being deployed to Iraq for just nine days, Lopez ended up paralyzed in a coma and unable to breathe on his own. Had he been shot? Had his truck come too close to a roadside bomb? No. Lopez suffered a violent reaction to a smallpox vaccine administered by the military. Three years later, Lopez still had to wear a urine bag, walked with a limp, suffered short-term memory loss, and was taking fifteen pills a day to control leg spasms.
Yet when Lopez applied for GI benefits, the Veterans Administration rejected him, claiming that
benefits are “for traumatic injury, not disease, not illness, not preventative medicine.” Stephen Wurtz, the VA’s deputy assistant director for insurance, said administrators were simply trying to follow the intent of Congress. “It has nothing to do with not believing these people deserve some compensation for their losses.” VA officials were unable to say how many claims have been rejected because of vaccine-related injuries. The Military Vaccine Agency, which is in charge of troop vaccinations, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from a reporter.
Despite Lance Corporal Josef Lopez’s debilitating reaction to the flu vaccine, the Defense Department announced on September 1, 2009, that swine flu vaccinations were mandatory for all military personnel, including health-care workers, deploying troops, those serving on ships and submarines, and new enlistees at the top of the list.
“Any place where we take a lot of people, squash them all together…and put them under stressful conditions will get the vaccine first,” stated army lieutenant colonel Wayne Hachey, director of preventive medicine for Department of Defense health affairs. The vaccination program was to begin in early October 2009, and millions of doses had been readied.
Despite the fact that only twenty swine flu deaths were reported in Mexico by September 1, 2009, the U.S. corporate mass media continued a blitz of coverage on what was described as a pending pandemic. “That’s not an epidemic. This has all the markings of a propaganda campaign benefiting the huge pharmaceutical firms producing vaccines. It’s more than monetary motives that are driving this push. There seems to be a long-term agenda of making people totally dependent upon government money and actions to manage health,” wrote Joel Skousen of World Affairs Brief, a long-running Internet news roundup service.
During the height of the swine flu scare, the Centers for Disease Control earmarked $16 million for an “outreach” program in major metropolitan areas that was aimed at garnering support for the swine flu inoculations. At the same time, major TV networks such as ABC and NBC were refusing to air ads that warned of the dangers of the vaccines or that criticized President Obama’s health-care plan.
“Your biggest threat is first, schools (if you have children) and second, the workplace if they task employers to demand compliance of their employees. I oppose these measures as a matter of personal liberty and also due to the long history of vaccine contamination with immune damaging adjuvants like squalene and mercury,” warned Skousen. “Of course, public schools, incubator of all things contagious, are back in session in September. Newscasters fret that ‘the swine flu vaccine won’t be ready for schoolchildren until mid-October,’ clearly implying that an ‘all schoolchildren vaccination campaign’ is coming. All of this hype is aimed at priming everyone with sufficient fear so they will clamor for the vaccine—which could be very dangerous to your health. If history is any indicator, you won’t see a dramatic rise in swine flu cases until the vaccine is administered—vaccines often carry some live virus ‘by mistake.’”
As the school year began across the nation, schools prepared for what the Associated Press described as “the most widespread school vaccinations since the days of polio.” The National School Boards Association told the AP that three-quarters of the districts in a recent survey agreed to allow vaccinations in school buildings, and according to an AP poll, almost two-thirds of the parents queried said they would give permission to have their child vaccinated if the vaccines were offered for free through the school.
South Carolina school superintendent Jim Rex said his state planned at least one vaccination clinic in each of the state’s eighty-five school districts. South Dakota planned to offer both regular and swine flu vaccinations in many schools, said South Dakota state health secretary Doneen Hollingsworth. In mid-September 2009, more than seven hundred health and school officials participated in the National Association of County & City Health Officials’ online seminar about how to run school flu vaccinations.
Despite all the media hype, official hand wringing, and experts predicting a deadly repeat of the 1918 killer pandemic, as of this writing, the swine flu appeared to be just another scam to increase profits for the pharmaceutical corporations and a failed attempt to see how much public control could be garnered by the globalist fascists.
FLU FEARS
WITH THE HISTORY OF the false smallpox epidemic in Kansas City as an indication of corporate malfeasance, one should look at who profits from pandemics. With swine flu, there should be public scrutiny of Baxter International, the giant worldwide pharmaceutical conglomerate that was given millions to develop a swine flu vaccine. In 2008, 44 percent of its total profits ($5.3 billion) came from pharmaceuticals and vaccines. In 2010, several websites were claiming that President Obama, as a senator in 2005, bought $50,000 worth of stock shares in two companies, one being Baxter. Apparently, in March 2005, Senator Obama attached an amendment to the Foreign Relations Committee Authorization Act (S. 600) authorizing $25 million for international efforts to combat the avian influenza. On April 28, 2005, Obama introduced the AVIAN Act (S. 969), a comprehensive bill addressing the threat of an avian flu pandemic. Interestingly enough, major outbreaks of the avian flu took place in 2006 and 2007, which prompted some to wonder how Obama could have known about the problem in 2005.
Baxter has been the center of several controversies, one of which was the adulteration of an avian flu vaccine with a pathogen. In late February 2009, a batch of the usual seasonal flu vaccines from a Baxter lab in Austria was contaminated with live H5N1 avian flu viruses (which has a 60 percent kill rate) and shipped to subcontractors in several countries. Luckily, some cautious researchers in the Czech Republic decided to inject the vaccine into laboratory ferrets to observe any side effects. The ferrets all died. Baxter officials quickly said the offending vaccines were destroyed and that “preventive and corrective” measures had been instituted.
Baxter’s distribution of the adulterated flu vaccine caused concern. To many it illustrated how sloppy corporate handling of deadly viruses could break out into a full-blown public disaster, and others even saw this as an attempt to spread a pandemic for which the company could provide an antidote…for a price, of course.
Christopher Bona, Baxter’s director of global bioscience communications, confirmed that the “experimental virus material” contained live avian flu virus but explained this was the result of “just the process itself, [and] technical and human error in this procedure.”
One great fear of combining seasonal flu virus with a virulent avian flu virus—a process called reassortment—is that such mixing could produce new hybrid bird-human viruses with dire consequences for the human population.
The Czech media publicly questioned if Baxter’s distribution of the deadly virus might have been a conspiracy to initiate a multination pandemic—a charge that may not be that absurd. According to routine laboratory protocols for vaccine makers, it is virtually impossible to accidentally mix a deadly live virus with a vaccine.
Mike Adams, editor of NaturalNews and a former trial tester for pharmaceutical companies, wrote, “Baxter is acting a whole lot like a biological terrorism organization these days, sending deadly viral samples around the world. If you mail an envelope full of anthrax to your senator, you get arrested as a terrorist. So why is Baxter—which mailed samples of a far more deadly viral strain to labs around the world—getting away with saying, essentially, ‘Oops’?”
It seems Baxter has a long history of problems and controversies with its operations as well as its products. Beginning in the mid-1990s, more than a half-dozen persons in the United Kingdom tried to sue Baxter, Bayer, and four other pharmaceutical firms in the United States, claiming all had shipped blood contaminated with the HIV virus to Britain. The suits were continuing in 2007 after an American judge ordered the case moved to the United Kingdom.
In 2008, Baxter was charged with the distribution of contaminated doses of the Chinese-produced drug heparin, a blood thinner that is used in kidney dialysis. The heparin wa
s provided to Baxter by Scientific Protein Laboratories of Waunakee, Wisconsin, and emanated from its plant in Changzhou City, China. The company is Baxter’s main supplier of the active pharmaceutical ingredient in heparin.
In 2009, Baxter’s subsidiary, Baxter Healthcare Corporation, settled a suit over excessive Medicaid billing in Kentucky for $2 million. Following an investigation, that state’s attorney general, Jack Conway, had charged Baxter with charging the Kentucky Medicaid program inflated average wholesale prices for its intravenous solutions bearing no relationship to prices the firm charged its customers. This created an artificial large gap between Baxter’s published prices and the real prices. At times this difference exceeded 1,300 percent, causing the Kentucky Medicaid program to pay substantially more for Baxter’s drugs than their actual cost.
On August 15, 2001, two elderly patients in Spain died within hours of receiving dialysis from Baxter products. Eventually fifty-one more patients would die; though the cause was unclear, the company issued a worldwide recall of Baxter’s two lines of filters, the sole common link between all the equipment used by the patients. Harry Kraemer, the company president at the time, apologized for the errors, shut down the factory producing filters, alerted competitors of the issue, and took a 40 percent pay cut along with a 20 percent cut for other executives. The company’s earnings dropped by $189 million as a result of the issues. The company took quick action to reduce the impact of the event and prevent future recurrence and as a result suffered minimal damage to its reputation.
Despite Baxter’s troubled past, at the end of 2009 the company remained one of the top contenders for making the swine flu vaccine. This is perhaps due to the fact that in 2008, Baxter was the first pharmaceutical company to announce the development of a swine flu vaccine. What is suspicious about the timing of Baxter’s 2008 announcement is that the company applied for a patent on several viruses, including swine flu, on August 28, 2007, nearly two years before the disease was said to have suddenly appeared in Mexico. The fortuitous timing of Baxter’s patent claim provides much grist for the mills of conspiracy theorists.