More of Public Enemy # 1

[Guest guest]

From: Framson <mframson@...>

They got the press to line up on not covering stories which would

threaten vaccine acceptance, the same way the press lined up on weapons

of mass destruction.

The usual NYT crap is towards the end.

The debunking succeeded, Dr. Osterholm

said, “despite the fact that there are many fewer reporters who

understand medical issues than there used to be.”

[ like Amy Wallace, Trine

Trusederous, Pat Callahan, G. Mcneil, Couric, Forest Sawyer,

I guess these are the ones that understand medical issues. When you

can't get reporters to do their jobs, you get celebrities to do the

reporting. ]

They also invited dozens of reporters to

daylong seminars on influenza at C.D.C. headquarters in Atlanta and to

exercises around the country led by the former anchorman Forrest Sawyer,

at which they debated, for example, whether a

miscarriage by one woman after getting a flu shot was a big scoop or

a nonstory.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/health/02flu.html?hp

January 2, 2010

U.S. Reaction to Swine Flu: Apt and Lucky By

DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Although it is too early to write the obituary for

swine flu, medical experts, already assessing how the first pandemic

in 40 years has been handled, have found that while luck played a part, a

series of rapid but conservative decisions by federal officials worked

out better than many had dared hope.

The outbreak highlighted many national weaknesses: old, slow vaccine

technology; too much reliance on foreign vaccine factories; some major

hospitals pushed to their limits by a relatively mild epidemic.

But even given those drawbacks, “we did a lot of things right,” concluded

Dr.

T. Pavia, chairman of the pandemic

flu task force of the Infectious

Diseases Society of America.

Federal officials deserve “at least a B-plus,” said

Dr. Schaffner, chairman of

preventive medicine at

Vanderbilt University’s medical school.

Even Dr.

Palese, a leading virologist at Mount Sinai Medical School, who can

be a harsh critic of public policies he disagrees with, called the

government’s overall response “excellent.”

About 10,000 people had died by mid-November, the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated; the pandemic

seems unlikely to reach even the lower end of a forecast of 30,000 to

90,000 deaths made in August by the

President’s Council of Advisers on

Science and Technology.

The virus and the vaccine cooperated. While the former proved highly

transmissible in children, it was only rarely lethal, remained

susceptible to drugs and has not thus far mutated into an unpredictable

monster. Vaccine supply was a problem, but one small dose was enough. (By

contrast, an experimental avian

flu vaccine protected people only when it was six times as strong.)

For that reason, the relatively cautious decisions by the nation’s

medical leadership contained the pandemic with minimal disruption to the

economy.

For example, in the early days, they ignored advice to close the Mexican

border and pre-emptively shut school systems. They released part of the

national

Tamiflu stockpile, but did not give it to millions of healthy people

prophylactically, as Britain did. They ordered vaccine made with a

50-year-old egg technology rather than experimental methods. They bought

adjuvants ­ chemical “boosters” ­ that could have stretched the first 25

million vaccine doses into 100 million, but did not use them for fear of

triggering a backlash among Americans made nervous by the messages of the

antivaccine movement.

To alert the public without alarming it, a stream of officials ­ from

doctors in the navy blue and scrambled-eggs gold of the Public Health

Service to a somber

President Obama in the White House ­ offered updates, at least twice

a week for months.

It is now clear that this is the least lethal modern pandemic.

The flu appears to kill about one of every 2,000 people who get it,

American researchers say. (British researchers found half that death

rate.) By contrast, the Spanish flu of 1918 killed about 50 of every

2,000, and the 1957 and 1968 pandemics killed about 4 of every 2,000.

The flu has reached more than 200 countries and is still peaking in

places like Eastern Europe and Russia. Even though there was no vaccine

yet, it killed fewer than expected during the Southern Hemisphere’s

winter, June through August.

Officials in the United States conceded that some mistakes were made.

For example, they could have spotted the new virus earlier if there had

been better cooperation with Mexico. In late April, the United States

isolated it in samples from Texas and California just as Canadian

officials were testing Mexican ones. The outbreak probably began in rural

Mexico in January, but was spotted only when thousands fell ill in late

March or early April in Mexico City.

The C.D.C. tests viruses in Southeast Asia, where new flus are usually

born. “This time,” said Dr.

R. Frieden, the C.D.C. director, “one happened to emerge in a

place where we don’t have a surveillance system.”

Also, the government predicted in early summer that it would have 160

million vaccine doses by late October. It ended up with less than 30

million, leading to a public outcry and Congressional investigations.

“Imagine if they’d managed the expectations better,” said T.

Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and

Policy at the

University of Minnesota. “If they’d said, ‘We won’t have any till

December,’ and had some in October, they would have looked like

heroes.”

Robin , chief of vaccine purchasing for the

Department of Health and Human Services, was the most overly

optimistic. In an interview, Dr. said he had actually tried to

be conservative, assuming that manufacturers would get 1.4 doses per egg,

when they typically got two or more.

Until the eggs could be tested in August, “we didn’t know that we had one

of the poorest-producing viruses in the last 50 years,” he said. Good

batches had 0.6 doses per egg, he said, bad ones had 0.2.

If he had it to do over again, he said, “I’d factor in the worst-case

scenario ­ which was 2009.”

Another controversial decision ­ sending a few early vaccine doses to

Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs and Citibank ­ was more of a bad

public relations move than a bad public health one, experts said. That

choice was made by the New York City Health Department, “and we made the

decision not to second-guess local health authorities,”

Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services, said in an

interview.

The government allotted vaccine to states based on population size. Some

local health officials had thousands line up in parking lots for shots,

some sent teams into schools and some relied on private doctors.

Distribution of the vaccine could have been focused more precisely,

experts said, directing it to hospitals first, or to doctors treating

children and pregnant women, or to cities with big outbreaks.

“I still think sending it out on a per capita basis was the fairest and

most equitable way,” Ms. Sebelius said.

The early combination of fears about the vaccine and anger over

shortages, said Dr. Offit, chief of

infectious diseases at Children Hospital of Philadelphia, reminded

him of an old Borscht Belt joke: “The food at this resort is so

terrible,” one patron complains. “Yes,” agrees her companion. “And such

small portions!”

One real triumph, several experts said, was how little damage

misinformation did. In 1976, many people refused shots after three

elderly Pittsburgh residents died shortly after getting theirs; it took

the C.D.C. five days to explain that it was just a coincidence.

This time, many rumors arose but were quickly debunked: That thousands

had died in Mexico. That the virus had circulated in the Midwest for a

decade, undetected. That it had escaped from a laboratory. That seasonal

flu shots made catching

swine flu more likely. That flu shots did not work or caused

autism. That the administration would make them mandatory. That

Tamiflu resistance was widespread in Northern California. That a flu shot

had disabled a Washington Redskins cheerleader, or that she was cured by

chelation therapy by a doctor associated with the antivaccine movement.

That mutant killer flu strains were circulating in Argentina or Ukraine

or North Carolina.

The debunking succeeded, Dr. Osterholm said, “despite the fact that there

are many fewer reporters who understand medical issues than there used to

be.”

This time, both the C.D.C. and the

World Health Organization responded quickly to almost every rumor. At

the epidemic’s height, they held several news conferences a week, taking

questions by phone from all over the world.

They also invited dozens of reporters to daylong seminars on influenza at

C.D.C. headquarters in Atlanta and to exercises around the country led by

the former anchorman Forrest Sawyer, at which they debated, for example,

whether a

miscarriage by one woman after getting a flu shot was a big scoop or

a nonstory.

Remaining to be seen is what effect the pandemic has had on Americans’

feelings about vaccines.

Dr. Frieden said he thought a victory over the antivaccine movement had

been scored. Nearly 60 million people have been vaccinated, including

many pregnant women and children, with no surge in side effects.

P. , an

AIDS researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College, was less sure. Dr.

, who spent years fighting AIDS denialism, has called skepticism

about flu vaccine “an unholy alliance of the left and right” because it

joined the liberal natural-medicine proponents with anti-big-government

conservatives.

“It’s hard to say if it hurt or helped,” Dr. said, pointing out

that polls still show a large minority of Americans rejecting the

vaccine. “As with AIDS, people have to die before others understand the

consequences of ignoring science-based medicine.”

Sheri Nakken, R.N., MA, Hahnemannian

Homeopath

Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Washington State, USA

Vaccines -

http://vaccinationdangers.wordpress.com/

Vaccine Dangers, Childhood Disease Classes & Homeopathy

Online/email courses - next classes start January 6 & 7

http://www.wellwithin1.com/vaccineclass.htm or

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