No honest investigation into accidental global release of Spanish Flu virus

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No honest investigation into accidental global release of

Spanish Flu virus

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 09:13:25 -0700

 

 

 

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

 

No honest investigation into accidental global release of Spanish Flu

virus

 

 

What if a terrorist acquired a deadly strain of influenza that had

killed millions of people in the past? What if that terrorist were

able to replicate that virus, obtain the names and addresses of

organizations all around the world, and distribute it across the

world? What if that became headline news, and everybody found out

about it? You would think that law enforcement officials might be

interested, right? You'd think that somebody would investigate how

this deadly strain of influenza got shipped to all of these

organizations around the world...

 

In reality, that's not what would happen at all. Such a hypothetical

event actually occurred, except it wasn't a terrorist. It was a

research company that claimed to have " accidentally " distributed all

of these samples of the deadly H2N2 influenza strain, which is most

famous for killing millions of people around the world in 1957. It was

called the " Spanish Flu " at the time, although that name is not

technically accurate.

 

This company took this deadly virus and replicated it, then put it in

kits that were part of an everyday influenza identification testing

kit. They overnighted these kits through postal mail or courier

services to over 4,000 destinations around the world in many different

countries. When this became headline news, however, nobody was

interested in finding out whether this was a crime. Nobody thought,

" Why is this happening? " Nobody raised the alarm and said, " You know

what, this is a threat to human health. " This is a deadly virus and

people born after 1957 have no immunity whatsoever to this virus. This

means you could re-release this old H2N2 influenza strain into today's

population, and you could observe the same kill rate experienced back

in 1957. You could see the same mess all over again with millions of

people dying worldwide.

 

As if all of these viruses aren't dangerous enough on their own -- for

example, Marburg in Angola and the bird flu (see related ebook on bird

flu) virus in Southeast Asia -- we actually have companies replicating

these deadly strains and distributing them, just to make sure that

they're in everybody's labs all over the world.

 

It gets worse. Some of these shipments were lost. They don't even know

where they are! They claim now that virtually all of these shipments

have been destroyed, but how do we know? Even then, shouldn't somebody

be held responsible for distributing this deadly virus? You could be

charged with federal crimes if you were caught with this kind of

material. If you sent it out to somebody, who knows how many years

you'd do in prison for a stunt like that. In this country, we've been

arresting people for putting white powder in envelopes and sending

them to Congressmen, claiming it was anthrax. Anthrax doesn't even

approach the kill rate of something like H2N2. And as far as I can

see, nobody's really being held responsible for this.

 

This is not a minor issue. This is not " Oops, we just released a

level-4 biological agent into the wild. We sent it to 4,000

destinations in over a dozen different countries, and we can't really

find 10 percent of those any more. We don't know where they are, and

nobody does. " To me, this all sounds a little suspicious. If anybody

else had pulled a stunt like this, they would have the FBI, the CDC,

and the World Health Organization descending upon them instantly. This

research company, however, appears to have undergone no such scrutiny.

Where are the answers to the really important questions in this

matter? How did they get their hands on H2N2? Shouldn't this be a

controlled viral specimen? Aren't there restrictions on who has this

stuff? Can anybody just order H2N2, H5N1, or any of the other

influenza strains that have killed people over the years? Can we just

go out and buy this stuff on the internet? Apparently, yes. That's

what these people did. Over 4,000 customers bought this kit. They

said, " Take my credit card and send me some level 4 biological agents. "

 

It all just strikes me as a little bizarre. What if one of these vials

broke open in the shipment? What if a FedEx driver broke one of these

containers, contracted the virus, and it suddenly started replicating

in that person? It could have been any courier, but what if they then

came into contact with other people? Suddenly, you'd have a carrier,

and the virus would be spreading. We would have the Spanish Flu all

over again.

 

That scenario is not at all out of the realm of possibility,

especially when the virus sample has been sent to 4,000 destinations.

If you play the odds long enough, nature is going to clobber you.

Nature will survive and viruses, of course, are not even living. A

virus is just basically a pattern of DNA. It doesn't have to be alive

to be dangerous. The fact that these were " dead " samples did not make

it safer for all of us.

 

Here's another interesting fact in all of this. This deadly strain of

influenza was only discovered accidentally by one of the labs that had

received this shipment. It took some real detective work for them to

figure out they had this deadly influenza strain in this kit. In other

words, the research company that was sending these kits out wasn't

even aware that they were doing it. They most likely would never have

been aware of it if one of their customers hadn't alerted them. There

was no mechanism in place to test these outgoing kits. There was no

safety net. They could have been shipping these off to anybody, and it

could have continued for years. Who knows how many samples would have

been out there in the wild?

 

As a nation, we are frequently worried about the wrong things. For

example, we're spending all this money on the fight against

terrorists, and we're in Iraq fighting a war, and it seems like every

decade we do it again. However, we've got people right here in the

United States who are replicating these deadly strains of influenza

and shipping them out into the wild. To me, that's a much bigger

threat than any terrorist, real or imagined. I don't mean to minimize

the whole international situation, but if one virus like this gets out

and the right person contracts it, you'd have a pandemic on your

hands. You'd have an outbreak. And you can't fight a pandemic with

bullets.

 

It wasn't too long ago that President Bush signed an order giving the

government the right to quarantine air travelers who may be infected

with things like the bird flu, or any other infectious disease. Here's

the scenario: You've suddenly got H2N2 out in the wild, you've got

Marburg going crazy over in Angola, you've got the bird flu virus all

over in Korea right now, and you suddenly get people flying back to

America exhibiting some upper respiratory symptoms. They get taken off

the plane and quarantined, because they're a threat to everyone else

in this country. If this gets any worse, or if H2N2 actually gets out

into the wild and starts infecting people, we're going to have a lot

of people quarantined. You'd better not get sick, because they're

going to take you away. Seriously, that's what the order dictates.

They're going to take you away and quarantine you for the good of

everyone else in society.

 

I actually agree with that policy. I think that if you are in charge

of the safety of a population, you have to make that kind of decision.

You cannot let a pandemic just keep growing and spreading. If you're

in charge of the CDC, or the World Health Organization, or the US

Government, you have to quarantine people who appear to be a threat to

public health. But what it means for us in terms of our freedoms is

that they're being trampled on. Again, you'd better not get sick,

since there are so many infectious disease agents out there now that

people are getting increasingly paranoid. You could be pulled off of a

plane, you could be pulled out of a line at some kind of a checkpoint,

you could be quarantined, and you'd have no say about it. You wouldn't

get an attorney, and you'd be quarantined by force. If you resist, you

could quickly see firearms being pointed in your face. Gunpoint is the

ultimate application of government willpower.

 

The Spanish Flu should have been over and done with in 1957. We

shouldn't have to revisit it again. We've got enough dangerous stuff

going around anyway. We've got superbugs in the hospitals. We've got

people breeding superbugs in their own kitchens and bathrooms because

they're using these antibacterial soaps that actually encourage the

creation of resistant bacteria strains. We've got the bird flu virus

now becoming a potentially serious threat. We've got Marburg over in

Angola, which has a kill rate of anywhere from 90 to 98 percent,

depending on how you work the math and which reports you believe.

Hopefully, these illnesses will never show up over in North America,

Australia, or Europe, but their existence is frightening enough. We

don't have to be adding to it by doing nature's job of replicating

these dangerous strains. Nature does that well enough on its own. It

doesn't need our help.

 

Modern medicine: doing more harm than good

I want to drive home the point that our current medical research

system in this country is absolutely insane. It has lost its mind even

beyond the fact that researchers keep claiming they'll find cures for

cancer if we only give them another couple of billion dollars. That's

completely absurd, by the way. Aside from that fact, and the whole

" cure con, " as I call it, we have these organizations actually

creating threats to our lives.

 

It's not just the pharmaceutical companies I'm talking about here,

although their products are very dangerous for human health. (Let's

face it, prescription drugs are killing twice as many Americans every

year as the total number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War.

This is a statistic from the Journal of the American Medical

Association.) You've also got organized medicine killing

three-quarters of a million people in the United States each year.

That figure is from the " Death By Medicine " research document. In

addition, you've got companies like this viral research lab blatantly

increasing our risk. They're just rolling the dice, folks. They're

rolling the dice with your life on the line. Perhaps this time we'll

get lucky. Perhaps they'll find all of these missing vials and destroy

them. Even if they do, it's just a lucky narrow escape. If you keep

betting against nature, if you keep pushing the odds, sooner or later

they're going to come up snake eyes. Sooner or later, nature is going

to find a way to make that virus replicate in the wild. We'll only

have ourselves to blame.

 

Vaccines: a channel for spreading infectious disease?

This kind of behavior is a good demonstration of why I don't trust

companies that are replicating and distributing these dangerous

infectious agents. This is why I don't trust vaccine companies at all.

I never get vaccinated, and I don't recommend vaccination for anybody.

I think the science behind vaccinations is bad. The mercury content of

vaccines is toxic. There is a clear link to autism in children, and I

think that a lot of vaccines have been contaminated with various

strains of infectious disease over the years. In fact, there's strong

evidence that some of the outbreaks we've seen in North America in the

past were actually caused by mass vaccination programs.

 

When you see incidents such as the " accidental " mass distribution of

H2N2, it becomes all the more believable. These companies really don't

know what they're doing. They don't have adequate safety measures in

place. It's being operated like a fast food chain -- " Here's your

order. Maybe it's everything you ordered, maybe not. Move on through

the drive-thru, there are people behind you. " This is the kind of

attitude that obviously must be going on at these research labs. It's

unacceptable, because we're playing with the lives of millions of people.

 

Some may say, " It's okay, because it was an accident. This company

didn't mean to send that out. It was an accident. " Do you think that

excuse would fly with a terrorist? Do you think they would say, " Oh, I

didn't mean to fly into that building. It was an accident! " Do you

think that would be accepted? " We didn't mean to release sarin gas

into the subway. That was a complete accident. We had no intention to

do that. " That excuse wouldn't be acceptable!

 

A complete lack of leadership and responsibility

It shouldn't matter who it came from. It doesn't matter what their

intentions were. What matters is what effect they had. Whose lives did

they put at risk through their actions and through their lack of

responsibility? It's the same lack of responsibility that we see

across modern medicine here in the United States, especially in the

pharmaceutical industry and medical research institutions. There's a

disturbing lack of responsibility, ethics, and basic understanding of

human or animal rights. There's even a lack of recognizing the

individuality of human beings. It appears they're living in another

world, where they think their actions have no consequences. They think

they can just do anything they want, ship out anything they want, and

forget about quality control. These are all just various strains of

infectious disease. Let's send them out anyway, and we'll worry about

it later. That must be the attitude that's taking place. It can only

be sloppy quality control and a frightening disregard for human life

that allowed something like this to happen.

 

Personally, I think somebody needs to be nailed for this. Somebody

should be held responsible, and we deserve an explanation of more than

just saying, " It was an accident. Oops! We just sent out a deadly

strain of influenza. " I don't buy that. There is more to this story;

there's a reason why this happened. There had to be a chain of

mistakes all the way through the organization, a chain that could have

been stopped by somebody speaking up, or somebody doing their job

correctly, or somebody just doing the right thing. There wasn't a

whistleblower here. So this situation happened, putting us all at

risk. That is unacceptable. We should demand a better explanation than

" oops! "

 

What's to stop them from doing it again? What's to stop another

company from doing it? How do we know that other strains aren't being

shipped out right now? H2N2 is only one strain among many. You've got

H5N1 today, and you've got all kinds of influenza strains from the

past, such as the 1929 flu, which was a huge killer. How do we know

that these are being contained right now? How do we know that the

institutions that claim to be researching these actually have safety

measures in place? How do we know that? We don't really.

 

All we know is what the press tells us, which doesn't seem to be the

whole story by any stretch of the imagination. Even if a deadly strain

WERE accidentally released, and people were starting to get infected,

you can bet the CDC and White House would force mainstream newspapers

to keep the lid on the news. Why? They don't want to cause a panic. So

even if this virus were in the wild right now, you couldn't count on

the mainstream media to tell you the truth about it. Washington would

be, " balancing truth with public safety, " as they say. Or, perhaps,

balancing truth with corporate profits.

 

Don't trust any " official " news on infectious disease. The official

news is shaped to minimize panic and control the public, not to impart

accurate information to individual citizens. And I'm willing to be

we'll never get the true story about this global release of H2N2 by a

lab that can only says, " Oops. "

 

We got lucky this time. But when you're dealing with infectious

disease, you can only thumb your nose at nature so many times.

 

Overview:

 

* No honest investigation into accidental global release of

Spanish Flu virus

 

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