Alfred Hitchcock Born Again (Bird Flu: How many times can they fool us?)

[No Exit]

Alfred Hitchcock born again
Bush's avian flu rap is attempt to blind America with fear

Sean Gonsalves

The major news outlets have been giving lots of coverage to yet another dreadful warning coming from the Bush administration -- the looming "bird flu pandemic." (Cue the sound track of Hitchcock's classic "The Birds").
Best case scenario, reports the Associated Press, a minimum of 200,000 people will die from an avian flu pandemic, but it could be as many as 2 million deaths in America alone. Yikes.

Ah, the power of fear. Edmund Burke, the intellectual father of conservatism, would be impressed. In Burke's "On the Sublime and Beautiful" (1757), he wrote: "No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."

President Bush didn't let Burke down. At an Oct. 4 press conference, he talked about the possibility of having a military-enforced quarantine.

(snip)

Every time you turn around, up pops another "coincidence." Bush has deep ties to the oil industry and oil companies are making record profits. A "war on terror" is being waged and who gets the multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts? Companies with ties to the Bush administration.

The rebuilding of the Gulf Coast? More money for Bush cronies. And now, the president just happens to be reading a book about the 1918 influenza outbreak and decides to start preparing the public for another possible major threat from which Rumsfeld stands to handsomely profit.

(snip)

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=19857

[FreedomAngel82]

1. Yep

As Bush once said: won't get fooled again. I love that scene in the F911 movie when Moore says "for once we agree."

[NNN0LHI]

2. I suspect we have had some snake oil (Tamiflu) salesmen here too

They were advising us all to read the same book that Bush did.

Don

[jbonkowski]

3. Bush didn't invent this threat

America is behind the rest of the industrialized world on preparations for an outbreak of avian flu. Do you think the White House is creating all these international conferences on this as some kind of smokescreen?

http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/media/nr-cp/2005/2005_fin_e.html

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr58/en/index.html

Bush is botching the preparations by following his MO. He's planning martial law and overpaying drug companies for stockpiles of ineffective remedies, instead of taking a reasonable, medical approach to the situation.

Avian flus mutated into the human population three times in the 20th century, with three different levels of lethality. The 1918 outbreak was extremely deadly, killing 40 million, which would be the equivalent of about 200 million people today. And this was before airplanes let people carry the virus around the world. Every indication is that the new virus is of the highly lethal variety, and if it mutates into an airborne variety (which flu viruses easily do) with anything like the same amount of lethality, the death toll could be enormous. International health experts agree it is only a matter of time until it mutates, and the only question is how deadly it will be. Since it is unrelated to the normal flu that goes around every year, people have no built in immunity to it.

Instead of automatically rejecting the threat of avian flu just because Bush recognizes the threat, people should redirect their scorn for how Bush is handling it. The threat is very real.

jim

[No Exit]

4. Dear "jim": Thanks for the boost!--Rummy

I am sick of hearing people--I'm talking about persons who KNOW darn well that Bush is a LIAR--say, "Yes, but this is a very real problem". Real or not, WE DON'T NEED TO GO ALONG WITH ANYTHING THAT BUSHCO TELLS US ABOUT THIS!! "A liar is not believed even when he speaks the truth."--Aesop.
I personally DON'T think "bird flu" is all of a sudden this big threat of a "pandemic". (Whatever happened to "epidemics"?) And if I ever did believe that it WAS any kind of threat, the first thing I'd do to protect myself would be to run as far as I could from ANYTHING done, said, proposed, mandated, etc., by George W. Bush, the Worst President Ever.

You're speculating, jim. That's all. Hey--SARS! Boo!

"March 02, 2005
'Bird Flu', SARS - Biowarfare or a Pandemic of Propaganda?

Are we being stampeded into a pandemic? The announcement was made by Dr Nancy Cox of the US Centers for Disease Control. According to an article in The Scotsman, Cox says that a global epidemic of bird flu could dwarf history’s worst infection disaster, which killed between 20 and 40 million people. The reference of course is to the "Spanish Flu" at the end of World War I which, according to a BBC article of almost exactly one year ago, experts say to have possibly been caused by "a bird virus jumping to humans".

The reasoning in the CDC statement goes on like this:


The H5N1 influenza strain that has already killed 42 has a fatality rate of 76 per cent, cases so far suggest. The virus which caused the 1918 pandemic killed only 1 per cent of those it infected.

The association is tenuous at best and the reasoning sounds odd, but the message is clear: "Prepare for the worst".

It might be good to remind ourselves that H5N1 is very same bird virus that was being "researched", meaning it was being actively changed and cultured, when Liu Jianlun, a laboratory scientist in China's Guangdong province became the first SARS victim two years ago - on 4 March 2003. Another death of a scientist was later linked to a laboratory in Singapore. The laboratory was culturing the same virus.

- - -

The SARS "pandemic" eventually faded away, but not without leaving a deep impression. A high pitched media campaign had convinced the world it was facing a great threat when in reality SARS turned out to be a comparably minor disease with 8.500 infected world wide and around 812 deaths. Compare that to CDC figures of 36.000 flu related deaths yearly in the U.S. alone. Or compare it with the mayhem of more than 100.000 U.S. deaths from the damaging effects of pharmaceutical drugs in the same time span.

"The researchers, from the influenza branch of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, will mate H5N1 and human flu viruses in a process known as reassortment. Viable offspring will be tested in animals thought to be good surrogates for humans, to see if the viruses can infect, can be transmitted easily from infected animals to healthy ones and to note the severity of disease each provokes. In other words, the CDC researchers will be deliberately engineering viruses of pandemic potential. It's high-risk but crucial work, the influenza community insists."
This is what we read in an article published in Canada just last December, which quotes experts explaining that such an admittedly high risk undertaking is necessary to prevent a possible outbreak of a new pandemic. I just cannot help but think of little children playing with matches in a wood shed. The thought of it is enough to make one nervous.

In Vietnam, about a week ago, annother pronouncement reported by (CBC Canada): "We at WHO believe that the world is now in the gravest possible danger of a pandemic," Dr. Shigeru Omi, head of the UN health agency's Western Pacific office, warned a scientific conference in Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday. Public health officials fear the H5N1 form of the bird flu virus, which has already passed from person to person twice, will get better at spreading between humans and unleash changes for which the population has no natural immunity.

Thus, in a replay of the SARS scare, we again see government research on how to make the virus jump the species barrier, and again we have dire predictions of imminent disaster from the world's top health authorities.

What are the solutions being readied for us? According to this article, we are in good hands:

Right now, 50 people representing drug companies, governments, and vaccine licensing agencies are meeting in Geneva in a closed-door session to discuss what can be done to prevent this next coming flu pandemic. The World Health Organization has flatly stated there will not be enough vaccine to go around. On their web site, they say, "production capacity for a pandemic vaccine will be vastly inadequate unless other companies engage in vaccine seed development and preparation of batches for clinical testing." The group also stated that in the event of a pandemic, vaccine will be in short supply and will likely be unequally distributed.
The "solution" seems to be a vaccine, which is being readied in all haste and behind closed doors, by those very people who are responsible, directly or indirectly, for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year - the ones who have given us a medical system that has been called genocidal in a criminal complaint filed with the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Officially, there is no mention of good health being the first line of defense. Not one of the high officials seems to think that 'beefing up' our own defenses by good nutrition, rest and supplements is important, although that would make eminent sense. With the dismal record of vaccines in preventing any disease - they are actually immune suppressors - we should very well look at these other options and perhaps we should make them the primary line of defense against any hypothetical "pandemic" encroaching on the people of the world.

Since SARS was defeated not by a vaccine but by hygiene and by people taking matters into their own hands, stocking up on vitamin C and other immune-enhancing nutrients, would it not be better if we followed this successful path?" (snip)

http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:Ux7rml5_VZIJ:www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2005/03/02/bird_flu_sars_biowarfare_or_a_pandemic_of_propaganda.htm+%22bird+flu%22+scam&hl=en