WHO declares swine flu pandemic

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http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=1016372

WHO declares swine flu pandemic

Sapa-AFP Published:Jun 11, 2009

The World Health Organisation declared a swine flu pandemic on Thursday,

raising its alert to the maximum level six, the Swedish government said in a

statement.

Swedish Health Minister Larsson was to hold a press conference later

Thursday following " the WHO’s decision to raise the pandemic level to six

for the influenza A(H1N1), " the government said in a statement.

A total of 74 countries are now affected by the virus.

The WHO was holding a meeting at its headquarters in Geneva amid growing

evidence the virus, which originated in Mexico two months ago, is now being

widely transmitted between humans in Asia and Europe as well as the

Americas.

Under WHO guidelines, one key criteria for declaring a pandemic would be

established community spread in a country outside the first region in which

the disease was initially reported.

The Geneva-based UN body last declared a flu pandemic 40 years ago.

On Wednesday, the number of A(H1N1) infections reported to the health agency

by the 74 countries had reached 27,737, including 141 deaths.

The figures were released before authorities in Guatemala reported the

country’s first swine flu-related death, when a 12-year-old boy stricken by

the virus died from kidney failure.

Guatemala is the eighth nation to report a death linked to swine flu. All

fatal cases have been in the Americas and the Caribbean.

The vast majority of deaths have been in Mexico where 108 are known to have

been killed by the virus. More than 6,133 have been infected there.

Comments:

osm said at Jun 11 2009 4:40PM

I just hope and pray that it does not spead fast and furious on to our

shores it would be a disaster.

IBlank said at Jun 11 2009 5:47PM

It never ceases to amaze me that there are still sheeples out there naive

enough to believe in all the various " pandemic " hoaxes concocted by WHO and

its genocidal playmates over the past decades. Who would benefit the most

from the flying pig pandemic? No other than the manufacturers of toxic

vaccines and drugs. Hopefully, this excellent article by Engdahl

will open your eyes and in the meantime take your Vitamin C instead of

useless flu shots laced with brain-scrambling adjuvants such as mercury and

aluminium.

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va & aid=13856

Global Research, June 5, 2009

According to information from within the World Health Organization in

Geneva, the UN organization supposedly monitoring global health dangers, WHO

Director-General Margaret Chan plans to declare a Phase 6 Official Pandemic

Alert in the coming days. This bizarre act if declared would come at a time

that the country which had to date reported far the latest number of

suspected H1N1 cases, the USA, has simply arbitrarily stopped reporting new

cases.

If you consider to let your family get scared into taking drugs like Tamiflu

that not only do not prevent or even ameliorate symptoms of flu, but in some

cases are so toxic they cause severe paralysis, breathing problems and even

death, you should at least know the facts before.

The report that WHO may declare an official Pandemic global alert any time

is all the more bizarre given the fact that the global wave of cases

reported to date to WHO from around the world reportedly have been so mild

as to be indistinguishable from the symptoms of ordinary flu.

And the relatively small number of deaths alleged tied to swine flu as it

originally was named, appear in no way definitely tied to to H1N1 causes. In

a May 28 CDC press briefing, the CDC reported, ‘When we look at our deaths,

we have information on 11 of the 12 deaths that have been reported to us so

far. And it appears that 10 of those fatalities occurred in people who had

an underlying condition that put them at greater risk for severe

complications of influenza.' That is what epidemiologists call correlation

not causality or ‘opportunistic infection' deaths.

European epidemiologists privately believe that there is no proven link

between supposed H1N1 Influenza A illness and the deaths, rather that the

deaths are ‘coincidence' or what health professionals term ‘opportunistic

infections.' The CDC report would seem to strengthen that argument.

US CDC stops regular reporting?

Even more bizarre for a supposed pandemic ‘threat to all mankind' the

official monitoring agency in the nation with so far the largest number of

reported case counts, which notably include ‘probable' ad well as

‘confirmed' H1N1 cases, namely the United States, the CDC announced en

passant, on that May 28 press briefing that, ‘beginning next week, we're

going to shift to a different schedule. We'll be updating our case count

information less frequently.' That statement came from Dr. Anne Schuchat,

Deputy Director for Science and Public Health Program of the US Centers for

Disease Control. She declined to say what ‘less frequently' was or even why

such a decision was reached at the same time the US Government is dedicating

billion dollars fast track funds to drug makers to produce H1N1 vaccines.

Oops! Wait a minute. I thought we were teetering on the edge of declaring a

global Pandemic Emergency, Phase 6 where travel restrictions, mandatory

quarantine and other extreme steps would be implemented. Then the

responsible national agency in the country with something like 67% of all

reported cases of H1N1 Swine Flu decided casually not to report so often?

Another anomaly in the increasingly bizarre situation is the release of new

WHO Pandemic guidelines on April 20, 2009, conveniently enough just in time

to affect the current world pandemic scare. According to a WHO official

responsible for the report, the revision of revised 2005 WHO Pandemic

guidelines was begun ‘well before the Mexican flu cases were first

reported.' The official spoke off record.

Even more curious is the fact that the latest April 2009 WHO Pandemic

response guidelines prescribe the exact same response for Phase 5

(sub-pandemic) and Phase 6 (so-called Pandemic), namely ‘implement actions

as called for in their national plans.' For that we need WHO?

Drug giants gearing up

The situation is becoming a golden harvest for the giant pharmaceutical

makers as they receive samples from the CDC to begin producing possible

vaccines as well as so-called antiviral drugs like Tamiflu.

The US government recently made available one billion dollars to help big

vaccine makers like Sanofi-Aventis and GlaxoKline ready production of

new vaccines. Novartis leads the herd with $289 million in federal support,

followed by Sanofi Aventis with $191 million and GlaxoKline, which gets

$181 million. In addition the US Government had decided to ‘de-risk' the

vaccine production, presumably removing usual safeguards for new vaccines.

The US Health and Human Services Department (HHS) is placing orders with

manufacturers with which it already has contracts to produce a pandemic

vaccine for the never-pandemic H5N1 avian flu. More than $3 billion in

federal funds since 2005 have gone toward developing, building manufacturing

and stockpiling a vaccine to fight that disease. How long do such vaccines

hold in stock?

Fittingly given the bizarre nature of the entire Flying Pigs panic being

spread by WHO and CDC, the CDC reports that it expects the first H1N1

approved vaccines to be ready by Halloween. Trick or Treat?

In Australia the government has ordered 10 million doses of a new vaccine

being developed by CSL. CSL plans to start producing a new vaccine in the

next days that can be used for human testing. A vaccine based on the

California strain of the virus is being tested in ferrets. China says that

it will have samples of swine flu on hand by June and plans to start

manufacturing a new A/H1N1 vaccine in July.

Many drugmakers are using techniques of genetic manipulation to produce

their new vaccine offerings in a race to market. The land drugmaker

Novavax which reported severe annual income losses prior to the current

Swine Flu scare, now is preparing a genetically modified vaccine they claim

is suitable for H1N1 flu.

The 1976 Swine Flu fiasco

Once WHO declares a Phase 6 Pandemic Alert, all hell could break loose with

governments and population going into panic, cancellation of international

travel, severe domestic travel restrictions and other emergency measures

resembling martial law.

In 1976 President Gerald Ford issued an Executive Order calling for every

man woman and child in the USA to be vaccinated against a suspected outbreak

of swine Flu at the Fort Dix US military base. Within months more than forty

million unknowing Americans had been vaccinated, some 20% of the then total

population despite the fact that no pandemic ever appeared. The flu was

restricted to Fort Dix.

Interestingly, aside from severe weather and crowded barrack conditions at

Fort Dix, every recruit coming in had immediately been given multiple

vaccinations as routine, similar to what US soldiers are given today before

being shipped to Iraq or Afghanistan, or similar to what US and European

soldiers were given in 1918 during the spread of the misnamed Spanish

Influenza of 1918. Was the Fort Dix wave of illnesses and one death a

consequence of the vaccinations? We may never know as no government agency

was interested in pursuing the notion.

In that 1976 US swine flu panic, aided by a nervous President eager to win

re-election, there were thirty deaths due to adverse vaccine reactions and

dozens if not hundreds of cases of the rare Guillain-Barre syndrome which

led to halting of a national vaccination that was being given for a

non-existent pandemic.

Free from liability?

There was one very significant difference between 1976 and today however. In

1976 US insurance companies refused to insure vaccine manufacturers against

lawsuits for vaccine-related illnesses or deaths. Today drugmakers need have

little fear of damages from product liability lawsuits. They can unleash

whatever substances the FDA lets them, and indications are that under

Pandemic declaration safety standards would be dropped in the rush to stab

the population as widely as possible with vaccines.

Under rulings made under the Bush Administration, vaccines can be labelled

as “unavoidably unsafe” meaning that when a product is ‘carefully designed,

manufactured and marketed, but is dangerous nonetheless,' it is not a

defective product, even though it might cause injury. Clear? It certainly is

clear to the pharmaceutical industry which lobbied hard for the

determination.

A decisive victory for the drug industry came in January 2006 when Bush

Administration Health and Human Services Secretary Leavitt announced

a new ruling in defiance of established precedent and the expressed intent

of Congress. The new FDA rules pre-empted any state laws that allow citizens

to sue drugmakers for producing unsafe drugs under the dubious claim that

the FDA, an agency under HHS, had national responsibility for certification

of drug safety and state lawsuits impinged on that national responsibility.

As several Congressmen at the time pointed out the FDA track record for

timely response to clear drug dangers as in the Vioxx cases was hardly to

the benefit of the health and welfare of citizens suffering needless heart

attacks and death as a side effect of the drug.

It would be relevant to ask if the Democratic Congress that protested the

2006 FDA liability-free ruling has plans to change that free ride for

vaccine makers. That might do more than anything to reduce the effects of

Swine Flu. Then people might realize where the real swine danger lies.

Ingrid Blank/Merrivale