New Jersey health officials say the country is due for a third wave of the pandemic flu and are reiterating their advice that immunization shots against regular influenza and H1N1 are the best protection against infection.

“You don’t want to get that,” said Bob Gogats, Burlington County Health Coordinator. “It makes you sick for quite awhile and immunization only takes a few minutes. Plus, it’s free. It doesn’t make any sense not to get it.”

Burlington, Camden and Gloucester counties are providing free immunizations against both viruses at county-run clinics this month and in March. There are ample doses of both vaccines and supplies can be replenished if necessary, county officials say.

“People need to keep thinking H1N1 even when the usual flu season is over because it acts a little bit differently,” said Dr. Susan Walsh, a deputy commissioner for Public Health Services. “During this quiet period is exactly when they should get vaccinated,” she added.

Unlike regular flu, which peaks from January to March, H1N1 — also know as swine flu — strikes in waves lasting six to 12 weeks. The second wave of the H1N1 virus lasted from October into early December and health officials are now warning that the next bout is imminent.

The H1N1 virus is passed through casual contact with an infected person but risk can be reduced by regularly washing hands, sneezing into the crook of your elbow instead of your hand, staying home when sick and avoiding crowds and sick people.

The majority of flu cases in New Jersey and across the country are caused by the H1N1 virus, she said.

The H1N1 virus has killed 42 New Jerseyans — from a 3-year-old Bergen County girl to an 80-year-old Hudson County woman — since last spring’s breakout. Those deaths were reported across the state, with the tri-county area accounting for nine cases, or 20 percent, according to the state Department of Health and Senior Services.

Some can shake an infection with bed rest while others require hospitalization that could include intensive-care treatment, Walsh said.

Ironically, New Jersey has been seeing “regional activity” — the second of three steps that measure intensity — of H1N1 virus for the past five weeks. Activity has slowed since January, Walsh said.

The highest-level category is “widespread activity” while “sporadic activity” is the lowest level.

“New Jersey was one of the last states to go to widespread activity,” she said. And although the H1N1 virus arrived later than in most other states, it has stayed around longer.

Gogats characterized the flu season this year as “unusual” for two reasons:

1. A 16 percent increase in hospital emergency room admissions was “four times higher than the highest we’ve ever had during our average flu season.”

2. The school absenteeism rates peaked to their highest point in 10 years, which was “more than double the historical average absenteeism for any week. . .”

Gogats remembers that people looking for H1N1 immunization shots last spring and summer were “beating the door down. Now you can’t get anybody to come in,” he said.

Anna Dragsbaek has worked quietly for years to build support for expanding the state’s immunization registry, a database of vaccines given to Texans. Now, Dragsbaek, the executive director of the Texas-based Immunization Partnership, is ready for the spotlight: She and her allies are asking lawmakers to include all Texans in the registry. They’ll make their case before an influential Senate committee this month — and face an impassioned and formidable group of privacy proponents and anti-immunization parents.

Advocates for vaccination records say they’re vital to a robust public health system, that a complete registry of those shots would help the state navigate major health crises. Furthermore, they say, it would save the state huge sums in unnecessary bureaucracy. Opponents say the registry jeopardizes patient privacy, that it’s an effort to force people to give up their medical records. Lawmakers aren’t quite sure where they stand.

At the heart of the debate is the question of who’s included. The registry has the capacity to track every vaccine given to every person in the state. Currently, it only tracks vaccines for children whose parents opt in to the registry and adults who agree at age 18 to keep their vaccines on file with the state or are emergency first responders. Advocates want all Texas children’s shot records to be included in the registry unless the parents actively opt out.

Dragsbaek argues that a well-populated registry will allow for a significantly better response to health crises like the H1N1 virus and Hurricane Katrina. Texas is 12th in the country in vaccination rates, with about 22 percent of kids missing at least one dose of one vaccination, and 96 percent of the state’s under-18 population is in the database, according to the Department of State Health Services. Dragsbaek believes that number might be inflated (she says data quality has been a consistent problem in the registry) but that nonetheless, getting adults into the system will take time — the registry only just started including people older than 18 last session. Vaccines are often in short supply in the U.S., and distributing the shots efficiently can be a challenge. A full registry allows officials to know where the need is. “That prioritization and identification of vulnerability is crucial,” Dragsbaek says. “We can’t do that in Texas right now because our database is so poorly populated.”

During the H1N1 crisis last year, vaccines came in late and in small quantities, and many children never received the requisite second dose. Priority groups — children, caretakers for infants under six months and those with immunodeficiency — were not reached as efficiently as health officials hoped, Dragsbaek says. In the aftermath of that crisis, the Legislature is considering methods to improve vaccination systems, giving vaccination advocates the chance they’ve been waiting for to change the state’s registry.

They’ll have tough opposition, says Dawn Richardson, head of Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education, or PROVE. Richardson is a leading voice in Texas for allowing parents to decide whether their children should get vaccinated. While Dragsbaek has been waging war to get vaccines to more children, Richardson has been just as active in reminding parents they have a choice. Richardson has a lot of questions about the safety of vaccines but says that when it comes to the registry, it’s simply a question of privacy rights. “Just because the vaccines are the sacred cow, you can’t give away people’s medical records,” she says.

Richardson maintains that even if the opt-out method is more time-consuming, it’s worth it to protect medical information. She argues the current system works: Parents can give consent for the registry when they apply for their child’s birth certificate. During emergency situations, like H1N1, the state can already collect immunization data without consent. “There are really no burdens on the registry at this point,” Richardson says. After all, the vast majority of parents let their children’s information go into the registry. This new effort, she argues, is “an attempt to get people in there who don’t want to be.”

Richardson has a strong base of support: National organizations that favor parental choice, autism communities that believe vaccines can cause the disease, privacy advocates. Then there are the anti-vaccine and vaccine safety parents. Well-educated and tenacious, they have no qualms about making themselves heard. “It offends people on all ends of the spectrum,” Richardson says. “It’s made for interesting political allies.”

But Dragsbaek says the opt-in registry doesn’t do the trick. The current system requires so much paperwork that parents don’t always sign up and doctors don’t always follow through. “We spend hundreds of thousands to protect the privacy of 4 percent of the population,” she argues. Dragsbaek points out the system is just as secure as online financial records and other such private online information. Richardson’s view is “a shrill, irrational response that really doesn’t have much logic to it when you understand how the system works,” she says.

With help from the Texas Medical Association and the Texas United Way, Dragsbaek has slowly tried to move the registry conversation away from questions of vaccine safety, which she says is a separate fight. She shies from the term “opt-out,” which she says can cause even more controversy. She prefers to use “implied consent” or “voluntary exclusion.” She says she’s focusing on the logistics of improving the database. After Katrina, she helped push through a bill to include EMTs and other first-responders in the registry. Last session she persuaded lawmakers to allow for interstate data sharing. Then she helped pass bills to allow young adults turning 18 to keep their vaccine records on file, turning the database into a “lifetime registry.”

The reality, public health experts say, is that in a community where only a small percentage of people are vaccinated, even those who have the shot may be at risk for the disease. “No vaccine is perfect,” says Dr. John Gullett, a retired infectious disease expert who spent most of his career in Abilene. “The best vaccine with the best response rate is probably 95 percent or 98 percent, but there are still some people who don’t respond to it.” If a population has a high enough percentage of the population vaccinated, Gullett says, the disease cannot easily enter the community, and even those without the vaccination will be protected — “herd immunity,” he calls it.

For state Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, the H1N1 experience highlighted the need for a more inclusive registry, something he’s been advocating for years. “We don’t really know how many people are immunized and whether we’ve reached the point of herd immunity unless we have that information,” Coleman explains. Dragsbaek agrees: The registry, she says, is “a decision-making tool about where to deploy resources.” It can help alert parents when children need booster shots and second doses, as well as prevent children from unnecessarily getting the same vaccinations twice. When resources are slim — as they often are with vaccines, advocates say — the registry would allow for maximum immunization.

Furthermore, people often need their vaccination records later in life, to get into the army or get a job in healthcare or even just to go to college. “Let’s make it easy for people to get those jobs, to go to school, to join the army,” says Jason Sabo, a United Way of Texas lobbyist who has been a primary advocate of the effort.

Lawmakers are listening closely, and weighing their options. While Coleman supports Dragsbaek’s efforts, State Rep. John Zerwas, R-Simonton, has concerns about the new effort. “If you support immunization registries, you have to support that they have some benefit to public health,” says Zerwas, an anesthesiologist who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Health and Human Services — and is an influential voice in the debate. “I don’t think they have the magnitude of benefit that we in Texas should demand that everyone should be a part of it.”

State Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, who chairs the Senate Health and Human Services Committee and has been one of Dragsbaek’s “champions” on the registry issue, didn’t respond to requests for an interview. But in a written statement, she said, “The statewide immunization registry offers parents a convenient way to track their children’s vaccinations … but parental rights must be respected and parents should have the last word.”

Dragsbaek’s coalition may have to rely for support on TMA, a coalition partner with significant political clout. Traditionally, TMA has been more than willing to speak up on the need for the registry. “The benefits outweigh the concerns [around the registry], which to an extent I think are largely speculative,” says Dr. Jeff Levin, chair for the Council on Public Health at TMA. But advocates acknowledge that they face a tough balancing act between privacy and public health. “Nelson has to her credit been walking that very fine line very well,” says Jason Sabo, the lobbyist for the United Way of Texas and an active partner with Dragsbaek.

If the Legislature does decide to support the registry change, public health may not have anything to do with it. Advocates say the new system will cut costs dramatically: In her upcoming testimony, Dragsbaek will argue the current system costs $1.13 per record under the opt-in system, which adds up when there’s 24 million potential entries. The current system is expensive because the state must reach out to parents to ask them to opt in, and then must process the paperwork for the 96 percent participating. Dragbaek’s proposal would mean the state only had to process the four percent not participating rather than the 96 percent who are. Since the governor has demanded every agency find ways to cut five percent of their budget, anything with savings has legislative appeal.

The cost saving measures have caught the attention of Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, the chair of the House Public Health Committee. “Would it be wiser to stretch that tax dollar and cut down on the bureaucratic waste?” she asks. “We have to look at not just policy but what we’re willing to spend.” But even Kolkhorst is hesitant to openly support the effort, citing privacy concerns. “I’m listening very carefully to both sides,” she says.

Advocates for the registry will take any reasoning they can get to bring legislators on board, but they say the overall goal is not about government efficiency or helping people keep track of their own records. “At the end of the day,” says Dragsbaek, “it is about getting shots in arms. It is about stopping vaccine-preventable diseases.”

To hear the vaccine pushers say it, all the recent outbreaks of mumps and measles are caused by too few people seeking out vaccinations. It’s all those “non-vaccinated people” who are a danger to society, they say, because they can spread disease.

Reality tells a different story, however: It is the vaccinated people who are causing these outbreaks and spreading disease!

Just this week, an outbreak of mumps among more than 1,000 people in New Jersey and New York has raised alarm among infectious disease authorities. The outbreak itself is not unusual, though. What’s unusual is that the health authorities slipped up and admitted that most of the people infected with mumps had already been vaccinated against mumps.

In Ocean County, New Jersey, county spokeswoman Leslie Terjesen told CNN that 77 percent of those who caught mumps had already been vaccinated against mumps.

77 of those infected had been vaccinated

Usually this information is censored out of the press. The vaccine industry wants the public to believe that vaccines are effective at preventing infection. So the media typically refrains from reporting what percentage of the infected people were already vaccinated against the infectious disease.

But in this case, the 77 percent figure slipped out. And now intelligent observers are increasingly seeing the truth about these vaccines:

* Infectious disease vaccines simply don’t work. If they did, then why did all these children who were already vaccinated still get mumps?

* Vaccines may actually increase your risk of disease. Notice that far more vaccinated children were stricken with mumps than non-vaccinated children?

* The people who administer vaccines never tell you that their vaccines don’t really work. They tell you that you’ll be “protected” with the vaccine, implying a near-100% level of protection (which is blatantly false).

* Even if you’re vaccinated against a disease, you may still catch that disease anyway! So what’s the point of the vaccine?

The lies of the CDC

The CDC claims the mumps vaccine is 76 to 95 percent effective, but they offer no scientific evidence whatsoever to support that claim. To date, there has never been a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled study published on the mumps vaccine in humans. The so-called “scientific” evidence supporting these vaccines is purely imaginary.

I still have a $10,000 reward offered for anyone who can provide a single scientific study proving the safety and effectiveness of any H1N1 vaccine (http://www.naturalnews.com/027985_H…). To date, not a single person has stepped forward to claim that $10,000. I might as well raise the reward to a million dollars, because I’ll never have to pay it: There is no scientific evidence proving the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines!

Does being vaccinated raise your risk of infection?

The CDC also says that 2009 was a bad year for mumps outbreaks. They blame all the people who refuse to be vaccinated for causing these outbreaks. Their theory, of course, is based on the imaginary idea that mumps vaccines halt mumps infections. But once again, it’s all imaginary! As we saw this week in New Jersey, most of the people who get infected in these outbreaks are the very people who were vaccinated!

If mumps vaccines actually worked, then what you should see instead is the mumps infection spreading among those who refused the vaccines, right? It’s only logical.

In fact, if vaccines really work, then why should the vaccinated people be bothered at all by those who don’t get vaccinated? After all, if their vaccines protect themselves from disease, then non-vaccinated people are no threat to them, right? So why are vaccinated people so pushy about forcing non-vaccinated people to get vaccinated?

The shocking truth about infectious disease and vaccines, however, is very different from what you’re told by the drug companies (and the health authorities who pander to their interests): Some vaccines may actually promote the very diseases they claim to prevent!

That may be why 77% of those who recently got mumps in New Jersey were, in fact, the very people who were vaccinated against mumps. The vaccine may, in fact, weaken your immune system against future infections, causing you to become more susceptible to future outbreaks.

Many thousands of Americans who died from H1N1 swine flu were the very people who got vaccinated against H1N1 (http://www.naturalnews.com/027956_H…).

The great vaccine hoax exposed

Take a look at nearly every outbreak of infectious disease in recent years and you’ll find the same pattern. You’ll either see that most of those who got infected were already vaccinated, or you’ll see those statistics completely stripped out of all media reports.

It’s all part of the grand vaccine cover-up. Vaccines simply do not work as promised. Vaccines do not offer the level of protection against infectious disease that they promise. In fact, vaccines are far less effective than vitamin D in preventing infections!

Instead of shooting up our children with over 100 different vaccines (which is now standard practice, by the way), what we should be doing is boosting their immune function with vitamin D, zinc and immune-boosting nutrients from medicinal plants. That would protect them from all common infectious diseases at the same time, and it doesn’t require needles or the use of dangerous chemical preservatives like thimerosal, which is linked to autism.

Don’t believe the recent attacks on Dr. Wakefield. This was an organized smear campaign designed to discredit Dr. Wakefield before he could publish the results of his “14 monkeys” study that shows severe neurological harm caused by vaccines given to young primates (http://www.naturalnews.com/028109_A…).

There is a way to protect people from infectious disease: Give them the immune-boosting nutrients their immune systems need to defend themselves against disease. Outbreaks of infectious disease would plummet along with seasonal flu deaths.

Of course, so would sales of vaccines. And that’s the whole reason you never hear health authorities recommending vitamin D even though it’s far more effective than any vaccine at preventing infectious disease (http://www.naturalnews.com/027385_V…). The CDC, we now know, is little more than the marketing branch of Big Pharma’s vaccine operations. That’s why the former head of the CDC, Dr. Julie Gerberding, is now suddenly the president of Merck’s worldwide vaccine division (http://www.naturalnews.com/027789_D…).

Vaccines make lots of money, but they don’t make people immune to disease. The fact that so many vaccinated people are being stricken with the very diseases they were vaccinated against is proof that vaccines fail to deliver what they promise.

A Shreveport girl is battling a rare disease.

In December 5 year old Hannah Pham started complaining her leg was numb. When her parents took her to the hospital doctors diagnosed her with Tranverse Myelitis. It’s a disease doctors say infects about 1 in a million people.

Experts say the disease is a neurological disorder which typically follows a virus.

Hannah got an swine flu shot in early December. The Pham family is worried that’s what caused the illness, but the CDC hasn’t reported any cases of Tranverse Myelitis following swine flu shots.

Hannah has been hospitalized for five weeks, meanwhile her family is praying for her recovery.

Employess at Spa Concepts where Hannah’s parents work are collecting donations and raffeling off spa treatments to help the family pay medical costs. They also set up an account at Capital One. If you would like to help out the account number is 573-240-4947.

While swine flu is still circulating around the world, no major activity has been detected in the US for the past four weeks, health officials report.

Latest figures revealed that some 80 million Americans, including the 11,000 fatal cases, have been infected with swine flu. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials reported that the virus has claimed the lives of nine more children in the past week.

“Many people believe the outbreak is over and I think it is too soon for us to have that complacency,” said Anne Schuchat of the CDC, stressing that the number of affected cases has declined everywhere.

Some 70 million of the US population, however, have been vaccinated against the disease, indicating that many Americans have underestimated the ongoing outbreak and therefore have ignored the vaccine.

“We don’t seem to be seeing the disappearance of this virus, and we haven’t seen the emergence of the seasonal strain … so I think this virus is going to be finding susceptible people,” said Schuchat, urging more people to get vaccinated.

The CDC is engaged in a very clever, statistically devious spin campaign, and nearly every journalist in the mainstream media has fallen for its ploy. No one has yet reported what I’m about to reveal here.

It all started with the CDC’s recent release of new statistics about swine flu fatalities, infection rates and vaccination rates. According to the CDC:

• 61 million Americans were vaccinated against swine flu (about 20% of the U.S. population). The CDC calls this a “success” even though it means 4 out of 5 people rejected the vaccines.

• 55 million people “became ill” from swine flu infections.

• 246,000 Americans were hospitalized due to swine flu infections.

• 11,160 Americans died from the swine flu.

Base on these statistics, the CDC is now desperately urging people to get vaccinated because they claim the pandemic might come back and vaccines are the best defense.

But here’s the part you’re NOT being told.

The CDC statistics lie by omission. They do not reveal the single most important piece of information about H1N1 vaccines: How many of the people who died from the swine flu had already been vaccinated?

Many who died from H1N1 had already been vaccinated

The CDC is intentionally not tracking how many of the dead were previously vaccinated. They want you (and mainstream media journalists) to mistakenly believe that ZERO deaths occurred in those who were vaccinated. But this is blatantly false. Being vaccinated against H1N1 swine flu offers absolutely no reduction in mortality from swine flu infections.

And that means roughly 20% of the 11,160 Americans who died from the swine flu were probably already vaccinated against swine flu. That comes to around 2,200 deaths in people who were vaccinated!

How do I know that swine flu vaccines don’t reduce infection mortality? Because I’ve looked through all the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials that have ever been conducted on H1N1 vaccines. It didn’t take me very long, because the number of such clinical trials is ZERO.

That’s right: There is not a single shred of evidence in existence today that scientifically supports the myth that H1N1 vaccines reduce mortality from H1N1 infections. The best evidence I can find on vaccines that target seasonal flu indicates a maximum mortality reduction effect of somewhere around 1% of those who are vaccinated. The other 99% have the same mortality rate as people who were not vaccinated.

So let’s give the recent H1N1 vaccines the benefit of the doubt and let’s imagine that they work just as well as other flu vaccines. That means they would reduce the mortality rate by 1%. So out of the 2,200 deaths that took place in 2009 in people who were already vaccinated, the vaccine potentially may have saved 22 people.

61 million injections add up to bad public health policy

So let’s see: 61 million people are injected with a potentially dangerous vaccine, and the actual number “saved” from the pandemic is conceivably just 22. Meanwhile, the number of people harmed by the vaccine is almost certainly much, much higher than 22. These vaccines contain nervous system disruptors and inflammatory chemicals that can cause serious health problems. Some of those problems won’t be evident for years to come… future Alzheimer’s victims, for example, will almost certainly those who received regular vaccines, I predict.

Injecting 61 million people with a chemical that threatens the nervous system in order to avoid 22 deaths — and that’s the best case! — is an idiotic public health stance. America would have been better off doing nothing rather than hyping up a pandemic in order to sell more vaccines to people who don’t need them.

Better yet, what the USA could have done that would have been more effective is handing out bottles of Vitamin D to 61 million people. At no more cost than the vaccines, the bottles of vitamin D supplements would have saved thousands of lives and offered tremendously importantly additional benefits such as preventing cancer and depression, too.

The one question the CDC does not want you to ask

Through its release of misleading statistics, the CDC wants everyone to believe that all of the people who died from H1N1 never received the H1N1 vaccine. That’s the implied mythology behind the release of their statistics. And yet they never come right out and say it, do they? They never say, “None of these deaths occurred in patients who had been vaccinated against H1N1.”

They can’t say that because it’s simply not true. It would be a lie. And if that lie were exposed, people might begin to ask questions like, “Well gee, if some of the people who were killed by the swine flu were already vaccinated against swine flu, then doesn’t that mean the vaccine doesn’t protect us from dying?”

That’s the number one question that the CDC absolutely, positively does not want people to start asking.

So they just gloss over the point and imply that vaccines offer absolute protection against H1N1 infections. But even the CDC’s own scientists know that’s complete bunk. Outright quackery. No vaccine is 100% effective. In fact, when it comes to influenza, no vaccine is even 10% effective at reducing mortality. There’s not even a vaccine that’s 5% effective. And there’s never been a single shred of credible scientific information that says a flu vaccine is even 1% effective.

So how effective are these vaccines, really? There are a couple thousand vaccinated dead people whose own deaths help answer that question: They’re not nearly as effective as you’ve been led to believe.

They may not be effective at all.

Crunching the numbers: Why vaccines just don’t add up

Think about this: 80% of Americans refused to get vaccinated against swine flu. That’s roughly 240 million people.

Most of those 240 million people were probably exposed to the H1N1 virus at some point over the last six months because the virus was so widespread.

How many of those 240 million people were actually killed by H1N1? Given the CDC’s claimed total of deaths at 11,160, if you take 80% of that (because that’s the percentage who refused to be vaccinated), you arrive at 8,928. So roughly 8,900 people died out of 240 million. That’s a death rate among the un-vaccinated population of .0000372.

With a death rate of .0000372, the swine flu killed roughly 1 out of every 26,700 people who were NOT vaccinated. So even if you skipped the vaccine, you had a 26,699 out of 26,700 chance of surviving.

Those are pretty good odds. Ridiculously good. You have a 700% greater chance of being struck by lightening in your lifetime, by the way.

What it all means is that NOT getting vaccinated against the swine flu is actually a very reasonable, intelligent strategy for protecting your health. Mathematically, it is the smarter play.

Because, remember: Some of the dead victims of H1N1 got vaccinated. In fact, I personally challenge the CDC to release statistics detailing what percentage of the dead people had previously received such vaccines.

The headline to this article, “Thousands of Americans died from H1N1 even after receiving vaccine shots” is a direct challenge to the CDC, actually. If the CDC believes this headline is wrong — and that the number of vaccinated Americans who died from H1N1 is zero — then why don’t they say so on the record?

The answer? Because they’d be laughed right out of the room. Everybody who has been following this with any degree of intelligence knows that the H1N1 vaccine was a medical joke from the start. There is no doubt that many of those who died from H1N1 were previously vaccinated. The CDC just doesn’t want you to know how many (and they hope you’ll assume it’s zero).

Where are all the real journalists?

I find it especially fascinating that the simple question of “How many of the dead were previously vaccinated?” has never been asked in print by a single journalist in any mainstream newspaper or media outline across the country. Not the NY Times, not WashingtonPost.com, not the WSJ, LA Times or USA Today. (At least, not that I’m aware of. If you find one that does, let me know and I’ll link to their article!)

Isn’t there a single journalist in the entire industry that has the journalistic courage to ask this simple question of the CDC? Why do these mainstream journalists just reprint the CDC’s statistics without asking a single intelligent question about them?

Why is all the intelligent, skeptical reporting about H1N1 found only in the alternative press or independent media sites?

You already know the answer, but I’ll say it anyway: Because most mainstream media journalists are just part of the propaganda machine, blindly reprinting distorted statistics from “authorities” without ever stopping to question those authorities.

The MSM today, in other words, is often quite pathetic. Far from the independent media mindset that used to break big stories like Watergate, today’s mainstream media is little more than a mouthpiece for the corporatocracy that runs our nation. The MSM serves the financial interests of the corporations, just as the CDC and WHO do. That’s why they’re all spouting the same propaganda with their distorted stories about H1N1 swine flu.

But those who are intelligent enough to ask skeptical questions about H1N1 already realize what an enormous con the pandemic was. In the end, it turned out to be a near-harmless virus that was hyped up by the CDC, WHO and drug companies in order to sell hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines that are now about to be dumped down the drain as useless.

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Although the year is young, it has already brought my first moral dilemma. In early January a friend mentioned that his New Year’s resolution was to beat his chronic depression once and for all. Over the years he had tried a medicine chest’s worth of antidepressants, but none had really helped in any enduring way, and when the side effects became so unpleasant that he stopped taking them, the withdrawal symptoms (cramps, dizziness, headaches) were torture. Did I know of any research that might help him decide whether a new antidepressant his doctor recommended might finally lift his chronic darkness at noon?

The moral dilemma was this: oh, yes, I knew of 20-plus years of research on antidepressants, from the old tricyclics to the newer selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that target serotonin (Zoloft, Paxil, and the granddaddy of them all, Prozac, as well as their generic descendants) to even newer ones that also target norepinephrine (Effexor, Wellbutrin).

But ever since a seminal study in 1998, whose findings were reinforced by landmark research in The Journal of the American Medical Association last month, that evidence has come with a big asterisk. Yes, the drugs are effective, in that they lift depression in most patients. But that benefit is hardly more than what patients get when they, unknowingly and as part of a study, take a dummy pill—a placebo. As more and more scientists who study depression and the drugs that treat it are concluding, that suggests that antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs.

Hence the moral dilemma. The placebo effect—that is, a medical benefit you get from an inert pill or other sham treatment—rests on the holy trinity of belief, expectation, and hope. But telling someone with depression who is being helped by antidepressants, or who (like my friend) hopes to be helped, threatens to topple the whole house of cards. Explain that it’s all in their heads, that the reason they’re benefiting is the same reason why Disney’s Dumbo could initially fly only with a feather clutched in his trunk—believing makes it so—and the magic dissipates like fairy dust in a windstorm. So rather than tell my friend all this, I chickened out. Sure, I said, there’s lots of research showing that a new kind of antidepressant might help you. Come, let me show you the studies on PubMed.

It seems I am not alone in having moral qualms about blowing the whistle on antidepressants. That first analysis, in 1998, examined 38 manufacturer-sponsored studies involving just over 3,000 depressed patients. The authors, psychology researchers Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein of the University of Connecticut, saw—as everyone else had—that patients did improve, often substantially, on SSRIs, tricyclics, and even MAO inhibitors, a class of antidepressants that dates from the 1950s. This improvement, demonstrated in scores of clinical trials, is the basis for the ubiquitous claim that antidepressants work. But when Kirsch compared the improvement in patients taking the drugs with the improvement in those taking dummy pills—clinical trials typically compare an experimental drug with a placebo—he saw that the difference was minuscule. Patients on a placebo improved about 75 percent as much as those on drugs. Put another way, three quarters of the benefit from antidepressants seems to be a placebo effect. “We wondered, what’s going on?” recalls Kirsch, who is now at the University of Hull in England. “These are supposed to be wonder drugs and have huge effects.”

The study’s impact? The number of Americans taking antidepressants doubled in a decade, from 13.3 million in 1996 to 27 million in 2005.

To be sure, the drugs have helped tens of millions of people, and Kirsch certainly does not advocate that patients suffering from depression stop taking the drugs. On the contrary. But they are not necessarily the best first choice. Psychotherapy, for instance, works for moderate, severe, and even very severe depression. And although for some patients, psychotherapy in combination with an initial course of prescription antidepressants works even better, the question is, how do the drugs work? Kirsch’s study and, now, others conclude that the lion’s share of the drugs’ effect comes from the fact that patients expect to be helped by them, and not from any direct chemical action on the brain, especially for anything short of very severe depression.

As the inexorable rise in the use of antidepressants suggests, that conclusion can’t hold a candle to the simplistic “antidepressants work!” (unstated corollary: “but don’t ask how”) message. Part of the resistance to Kirsch’s findings has been due to his less-than-retiring nature. He didn’t win many friends with the cheeky title of the paper, “Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo.” Nor did it inspire confidence that the editors of the journal Prevention & Treatment ran a warning with his paper, saying it used meta-analysis “controversially.” Al-though some of the six invited commentaries agreed with Kirsch, others were scathing, accusing him of bias and saying the studies he analyzed were flawed (an odd charge for defenders of antidepressants, since the studies were the basis for the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drugs). One criticism, however, could not be refuted: Kirsch had analyzed only some studies of antidepressants. Maybe if he included them all, the drugs would emerge head and shoulders superior to placebos.

Kirsch agreed. Out of the blue, he received a letter from Thomas Moore, who was then a health-policy analyst at George Washington University. You could expand your data set, Moore wrote, by including everything drug companies sent to the FDA—published studies, like those analyzed in “Hearing Placebo,” but also unpublished studies. In 1998 Moore used the Freedom of Information Act to pry such data from the FDA. The total came to 47 company-sponsored studies—on Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Serzone, and Celexa—that Kirsch and colleagues then pored over. (As an aside, it turned out that about 40 percent of the clinical trials had never been published. That is significantly higher than for other classes of drugs, says Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco; overall, 22 percent of clinical trials of drugs are not published. “By and large,” says Kirsch, “the unpublished studies were those that had failed to show a significant benefit from taking the actual drug.”) In just over half of the published and unpublished studies, he and colleagues reported in 2002, the drug alleviated depression no better than a placebo. “And the extra benefit of antidepressants was even less than we saw when we analyzed only published studies,” Kirsch recalls. About 82 percent of the response to antidepressants—not the 75 percent he had calculated from examining only published studies—had also been achieved by a dummy pill.

The extra effect of real drugs wasn’t much to celebrate, either. It amounted to 1.8 points on the 54-point scale doctors use to gauge the severity of depression, through questions about mood, sleep habits, and the like. Sleeping better counts as six points. Being less fidgety during the assessment is worth two points. In other words, the clinical significance of the 1.8 extra points from real drugs was underwhelming. Now Kirsch was certain. “The belief that antidepressants can cure depression chemically is simply wrong,” he told me in January on the eve of the publication of his book The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Anti-depressant Myth.

The 2002 study ignited a furious debate, but more and more scientists were becoming convinced that Kirsch—who had won respect for research on the placebo response and who had published scores of scientific papers—was on to something. One team of researchers wondered if antidepressants were “a triumph of marketing over science.” Even defenders of antidepressants agreed that the drugs have “relatively small” effects. “Many have long been unimpressed by the magnitude of the differences observed between treatments and controls,” psychology researcher Steven Hollon of Vanderbilt University and colleagues wrote—”what some of our colleagues refer to as ‘the dirty little secret.’ ” In Britain, the agency that assesses which treatments are effective enough for the government to pay for stopped recommending antidepressants as a first-line treatment, especially for mild or moderate depression.

But if experts know that antidepressants are hardly better than placebos, few patients or doctors do. Some doctors have changed their prescribing habits, says Kirsch, but more “reacted with anger and incredulity.” Understandably. For one thing, depression is a devastating, underdiagnosed, and undertreated disease. Of course doctors recoiled at the idea that such drugs might be mirages. If that were true, how were physicians supposed to help their patients?

Two other factors are at work in the widespread rejection of Kirsch’s (and, now, other scientists’) findings about antidepressants. First, defenders of the drugs scoff at the idea that the FDA would have approved ineffective drugs. (Simple explanation: the FDA requires two well-designed clinical trials showing a drug is more effective than a placebo. That’s two, period—even if many more studies show no such effectiveness. And the size of the “more effective” doesn’t much matter, as long as it is statistically significant.) Second, doctors see with their own eyes, and feel with their hearts, that the drugs lift the black cloud from many of their depressed patients. But since doctors are not exactly in the habit of prescribing dummy pills, they have no experience comparing how their patients do on them, and therefore never see that a placebo would be almost as effective as a $4 pill. “When they prescribe a treatment and it works,” says Kirsch, “their natural tendency is to attribute the cure to the treatment.” Hence the widespread “antidepressants work” refrain that persists to this day.

Drug companies do not dispute Kirsch’s aggregate statistics. But they point out that the average is made up of some patients in whom there is a true drug effect of antidepressants and some in whom there is not. As a spokesperson for Lilly (maker of Prozac) said, “Depression is a highly individualized illness,” and “not all patients respond the same way to a particular treatment.” In addition, notes a spokesperson for Glaxo-Smith-Kline (maker of Paxil), the studies analyzed in the JAMA paper differ from studies GSK submitted to the FDA when it won approval for Paxil, “so it is difficult to make direct comparisons between the results. This study contributes to the extensive research that has helped to characterize the role of antidepressants,” which “are an important option, in addition to counseling and lifestyle changes, for treatment of depression.” A spokesperson for Pfizer, which makes Zoloft, also cited the “wealth of scientific evidence documenting [antidepressants'] effects,” adding that the fact that antidepressants “commonly fail to separate from placebo” is “a fact well known by the FDA, academia, and industry.” Other manufacturers pointed out that Kirsch and the JAMA authors had not studied their particular brands.

Even Kirsch’s analysis, however, found that antidepressants are a little more effective than dummy pills—those 1.8 points on the depression scale. Maybe Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and their cousins do have some non-placebo, chemical benefit. But the small edge of real drugs compared with placebos might not mean what it seems, Kirsch explained to me one evening from his home in Hull. Consider how research on drugs works. Patient volunteers are told they will receive either the drug or a placebo, and that neither they nor the scientists will know who is getting what. Most volunteers hope they get the drug, not the dummy pill. After taking the unknown meds for a while, some volunteers experience side effects. Bingo: a clue they’re on the real drug. About 80 percent guess right, and studies show that the worse side effects a patient experiences, the more effective the drug. Patients apparently think, this drug is so strong it’s making me vomit and hate sex, so it must be strong enough to lift my depression. In clinical-trial patients who figure out they’re receiving the drug and not the inert pill, expectations soar.

That matters because belief in the power of a medical treatment can be self-fulfilling (that’s the basis of the placebo effect). The patients who correctly guess that they’re getting the real drug therefore experience a stronger placebo effect than those who get the dummy pill, experience no side effects, and are therefore disappointed. That might account for antidepressants’ slight edge in effectiveness compared with a placebo, an edge that derives not from the drugs’ molecules but from the hopes and expectations that patients in studies feel when they figure out they’re receiving the real drug.

The boy who said the emperor had no clothes didn’t endear himself to his fellow subjects, and Kirsch has fared little better. A nascent collaboration with a scientist at a medical school ended in 2002 when the scientist was warned not to submit a grant proposal with Kirsch if he ever wanted to be funded again. Four years later, another scientist wrote a paper questioning the effectiveness of antidepressants, citing Kirsch’s work. It was published in a prestigious journal. That ordinarily brings accolades. Instead, his department chair dressed him down and warned him not to become too involved with Kirsch.

But the question of whether antidepressants—which in 2008 had sales of $9.6 billion in the U.S., reported the consulting firm IMS Health—have any effect other than through patients’ belief in them was too important to scare researchers off. Proponents of the drugs have found themselves making weaker and weaker claims. Their last stand is that antidepressants are more effective than a placebo in patients suffering the most severe depression.

So concluded the JAMA study in January. In an analysis of six large experiments in which, as usual, depressed patients received either a placebo or an active drug, the true drug effect—that is, in addition to the placebo effect—was “nonexistent to negligible” in patients with mild, moderate, and even severe depression. Only in patients with very severe symptoms (scoring 23 or above on the standard scale) was there a statistically significant drug benefit. Such patients account for about 13 percent of people with depression. “Most people don’t need an active drug,” says Vanderbilt’s Hollon, a coauthor of the study. “For a lot of folks, you’re going to do as well on a sugar pill or on conversations with your physicians as you will on medication. It doesn’t matter what you do; it’s just the fact that you’re doing something.” But people with very severe depression are different, he believes. “My personal view is the placebo effect gets you pretty far, but for those with very severe, more chronic conditions, it’s harder to knock down and placebos are less adequate,” says Hollon. Why that should be remains a mystery, admits coauthor Robert DeRubeis of the University of Pennsylvania.

Like every scientist who has stepped into the treacherous waters of antidepressant research, Hollon, DeRubeis, and their colleagues are keenly aware of the disconnect between evidence and public impression. “Prescribers, policy-makers, and consumers may not be aware that the efficacy of [antidepressants] largely has been established on the basis of studies that have included only those individuals with more severe forms of depression,” something drug ads don’t mention, they write. People with anything less than very severe depression “derive little specific pharmacological benefit from taking medications. Pending findings contrary to those reported here … efforts should be made to clarify to clinicians and prospective patients that … there is little evidence to suggest that [antidepressants] produce specific pharmacological benefit for the majority of patients.”

Right about here, people scowl and ask how anti-depressants—especially those that raise the brain’s levels of serotonin—can possibly have no direct chemical effect on the brain. Surely raising serotonin levels should right the synapses’ “chemical imbalance” and lift depression. Unfortunately, the serotonin-deficit theory of depression is built on a foundation of tissue paper. How that came to be is a story in itself, but the basics are that in the 1950s scientists discovered, serendipitously, that a drug called iproniazid seemed to help some people with depression. Iproniazid increases brain levels of serotonin and norepinephrine. Ergo, low levels of those neurotransmitters must cause depression. More than 50 years on, the presumed effectiveness of antidepressants that act this way remains the chief support for the chemical-imbalance theory of depression. Absent that effectiveness, the theory hasn’t a leg to stand on. Direct evidence doesn’t exist. Lowering people’s serotonin levels does not change their mood. And a new drug, tianeptine, which is sold in France and some other countries (but not the U.S.), turns out to be as effective as Prozac-like antidepressants that keep the synapses well supplied with serotonin. The mechanism of the new drug? It lowers brain levels of serotonin. “If depression can be equally affected by drugs that increase serotonin and by drugs that decrease it,” says Kirsch, “it’s hard to imagine how the benefits can be due to their chemical activity.”

Perhaps antidepressants would be more effective at higher doses? Unfortunately, in 2002 Kirsch and colleagues found that high doses are hardly more effective than low ones, improving patients’ depression-scale rating an average of 9.97 points vs. 9.57 points—a difference that is not statistically significant. Yet many doctors increase doses for patients who do not respond to a lower one, and many patients report improving as a result. There’s a study of that, too. When researchers gave such nonresponders a higher dose, 72 percent got much better, their symptoms dropping by 50 percent or more. The catch? Only half the patients really got a higher dose. The rest, unknowingly, got the original, “ineffective” dose. It is hard to see the 72 percent who got much better on ersatz higher doses as the result of anything but the power of expectation: the doctor upped my dose, so I believe I’ll get better.

Something similar may explain why some patients who aren’t helped by one antidepressant do better on a second, or a third. This is often explained as “matching” patient to drug, and seemed to be confirmed by a 2006 federal study called STAR*D. Patients still suffering from depression after taking one drug were switched to a second; those who were still not better were switched to a third drug, and even a fourth. No placebos were used. At first blush, the results offered a ray of hope: 37 percent of the patients got better on the first drug, 19 percent more on their second, 6 percent more improved on their third try, and 5 percent more on their fourth. (Half of those who recovered relapsed within a year, however.)

So does STAR*D validate the idea that the key to effective treatment of depression is matching the patient to the drug? Maybe. Or maybe people improved in rounds two, three, and four because depression sometimes lifts due to changes in people’s lives, or because levels of depression tend to rise and fall over time. With no one in STAR*D receiving a placebo, it is not possible to conclude with certainty that the improvements in rounds two, three, and four were because patients switched to a drug that was more effective for them. Comparable numbers might have improved if they had switched to a placebo. But STAR*D did not test for that, and so cannot rule it out.

It’s tempting to look at the power of the placebo effect to alleviate depression and stick an “only” in front of it—as in, the drugs work only through the placebo effect. But there is nothing “only” about the placebo response. It can be surprisingly enduring, as a 2008 study found: “The widely held belief that the placebo response in depression is short-lived appears to be based largely on intuition and perhaps wishful thinking,” scientists wrote in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. The strength of the placebo response drives drug companies nuts, since it makes showing the superiority of a new drug much harder. There is a strong placebo component in the response to drugs for pain, asthma, irritable-bowel syndrome, skin conditions such as contact dermatitis, and even Parkinson’s disease. But compared with the placebo component of antidepressants, the placebo response accounts for a smaller fraction of the benefit from drugs for those disorders—on the order of 50 percent for analgesics, for instance.

Which returns us to the moral dilemma. In any year, an estimated 13.1 million to 14.2 million American adults suffer from clinical depression. At least 32 million will have the disease at some point in their life. Many of the 57 percent who receive treatment (the rest do not) are helped by medication. For that benefit to continue, they need to believe in their pills. Even Kirsch warns—in boldface type in his book, which is in stores this week—that patients on antidepressants not suddenly stop taking them. That can cause serious withdrawal symptoms, including twitches, tremors, blurred vision, and nausea—as well as depression and anxiety. Yet Kirsch is well aware that his book may have the same effect on patients as dropping the magic feather did for Dumbo: without it, the little elephant began crashing to earth. Friends and colleagues who believe Kirsch is right ask why he doesn’t just shut up, since publicizing the finding that the effectiveness of antidepressants is almost entirely due to people’s hopes and expectations will undermine that effectiveness.

It’s all well and good to point out that psychotherapy is more effective than either pills or placebos, with dramatically lower relapse rates. But there’s the little matter of reality. In the U.S., most patients with depression are treated by primary-care doctors, not psychiatrists. The latter are in short supply, especially outside cities and especially for children and adolescents. Some insurance plans discourage such care, and some psychiatrists do not accept insurance. Maybe keeping patients in the dark about the ineffectiveness of antidepressants, which for many are their only hope, is a kindness.

Or maybe not. As shown by the explicit criticism of drug companies by the authors of the recent JAMA paper, more and more scientists believe it is time to abandon the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of not digging too deeply into the reasons for the effectiveness of antidepressants. Maybe it is time to pull back the curtain and see the wizard for what he is. As for Kirsch, he insists that it is important to know that much of the benefit of antidepressants is a placebo effect. If placebos can make people better, then depression can be treated without drugs that come with serious side effects, not to mention costs. Wider recognition that antidepressants are a pharmaceutical version of the emperor’s new clothes, he says, might spur patients to try other treatments. “Isn’t it more important to know the truth?” he asks. Based on the impact of his work so far, it’s hard to avoid answering, “Not to many people.”

With Sarah Kliff

Appearing on The Alex Jones Show, outgoing Chair of the Council of Europe’s Sub-committee on Health Wolfgang Wodarg said that his panel’s investigation into the 2009 swine flu outbreak has found that the pandemic was a fake hoax manufactured by pharmaceutical companies in league with the WHO to make vast profits while endangering public health.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a 47 nation body encompassing democratically elected members of parliament, began hearings last month to investigate whether the H1N1 swine flu pandemic was falsified or exaggerated in an attempt to profit from vaccine sales.

Wodarg said that governments were “threatened” by special interest groups within the pharmaceutical industry as well as the WHO to buy the vaccines and inject their populations without any reasonable scientific reason for doing so, and yet in countries like Germany and France only around 6 per cent took the vaccine despite enough being available to cover 90 per cent of the population.

Wodarg said he was alarmed when the WHO cited early cases in Mexico as a threat and quickly moved to pandemic status, despite the fact that the cases were relatively mild and the virus was not new.

“This was the mildest flu ever and the people were much more clever than the government so we have to find out what was going on with WHO – why did they do this pandemic alarm,” asked Wodarg, noting that pharmaceutical interests within the World Health Organization were instrumental in creating the panic and reaping the financial dividends.

“We don’t know what really happened, we only know that they changed the definition of a pandemic, which was a very dangerous thing before and now is just a normal flu, and this is why business for pharmaceutical companies was open,” said Wodarg, adding that select pharmaceutical companies were handed a monopoly on creating the vaccine.

“It is their trick that they always try to monopolize this and we pay much more like this,” said Wodarg, noting that if patents were left open, vaccines would be produced much quicker and far cheaper.

Wodarg said there was “no other explanation” for what happened than the fact that the WHO worked in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to manufacture the panic in order to generate vast profits, agreeing with host Alex Jones that the entire farce was a hoax.

He also explained how health authorities were “already waiting for something to happen” before the pandemic started and then exploited the virus for their own purposes.

Wodarg said that the investigation was likely to recommend an end to the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies on public health institutions in Europe.

However, Wodarg pointed out, “There is no law for WHO, there is no one who punishes those people in WHO, we only have national law, so this is very important that we collect the information and on the national level we try to find those people responsible and we try to punish them.”

“Have investigations, have a deep look, we cannot tolerate such a development, we cannot have this next winter again, we don’t want such fake pandemics,” concluded Wodarg.

Wodarg said that vast quantities of unused vaccines were now being dumped on the third world and that other countries were simply trying to push ahead with vaccination programs even though the virus has proven not to be a major threat.

“The Japanese bought vaccines for 110 million people and they cannot return from this vaccine contract so they are in a very big political dilemma now and they already have problems because the Japanese people already know it wouldn’t be necessary to get vaccinated,” Wodarg told The Alex Jones Show.

Watch the interview with Wodarg below.

The article titled “Finish it off so it doesn’t suffer,” which calls for the euthanasia of disabled newborn children, has caused public outrage in Russia and has led to fierce debates in the blogging community.

In the article under question, the author says that “the killing of the newborn is in fact the same as an abortion or super-late term abortion” and calls disabled newborns “defective blanks” and “newborn idiots”. He states that depriving disabled infants of life is “true humanism”.

The Union of Russian Journalists has accused the author of the article of breaching professional ethics.

The Union Board’s criticism comes from the fact that, instead of discussing the right for free choice of a disabled newborns’ fate, the author claims the only rational way is to deprive them of life. The board concluded that the article entrenches upon extremism.

The board added that the author of the article should have realized that he is humiliating people who are already bringing up disabled kids.

“The author is not raising a disabled child – that is why his generalized conclusions about the life of disabled people and their families… are just speculations. As a mother of a disabled child, and based on my experience, I state that these speculations have nothing to do with the reality,” said Svetlana Shtarkova, who, along with another disabled child’s mother, Snezhana Mitina, has written a letter to the Union of Russian Journalists’ Board.

According to statistics, there are 545,000 disabled kids in Russia. Only 12.2% of them live in foster homes, 23.6% of these children have various organ diseases and/or metabolic disorders, 23.1% have motor disabilities, and 21.3% have mental disabilities.

Steve Watson & Paul Watson
Infowars.net
February 2, 2010

Two residents of Markham in Ontario, Canada have been diagnosed with the debilitating nerve disease Guillain-Barre Syndrome, after both taking the H1N1 flu shot in the same doctor’s office just two days apart.

The Toronto Sun reports that Donna Hartlen, a 39-year-old mother is unable to walk or chew solid food properly.

Hartlen has no history of illness and was perfectly health until the 29th December when she collapsed and was rushed to hospital.

Hartlen is adamant that the illness stems from a H1N1 shot she received two weeks before her symptoms suddenly appeared.

She became even more convinced this was the case when she encountered Don Gibson in the room next door, who received the same shot just two days before her, from the same GP. He too has been diagnosed with GBS.

“It’s way too coincidental,” insists the slight mom, her words slurred because the right side of her face will not move. “It’s either a bad batch or a lot more people are getting this than they are talking about.”

Her 80-year-old neighbour is equally convinced that the H1N1 vaccine to blame. “It must have been a bad batch,” Gibson believes. “But nobody is saying anything. I know I signed a piece of paper and there’s no liability but it’s pretty scary.”

Despite GBS’s clear historical link with the swine flu shot after more got ill from the vaccine than got swine flu during the 1976 mass vaccination program, allied with the fact that health officials last year warned neurologists that they needed to look out for increases in cases of the brain disorder following the launch of the immunization program, doctors and health officials are keeping quiet on the issue.

“Not a single doctor we’ve talked with will even remotely discuss that it’s the H1N1 shot,” Hartlen tells the Toronto Star. “They almost pretend they don’t hear you. They don’t want to alarm the public and they don’t want you to stir up trouble.”

The public health agency in Canada says they haven’t seen any unusual spike in GBS.

Hartlen is seeking government support to help care for her two young children while she suffers from the nerve disorder, however she has hit a wall of silence:

“They’re the ones who push this vaccine. They promote it every five minutes on TV. So I do what they say and I get GBS and they’re not going to help me?” Hartlen said.

“It’s a horror story of how little Ontario will do to help patients that come down with this after the government promotes it so much,” added her husband, Wayne Burke.

Similar cases of GBS, as well as other neurological disorders have been reported following the H1N1 shots in the U.S., Britain and France.

Last November, a high school athlete from Virginia was diagnosed with GBS hours after receiving a swine flu shot, but health authorities dismissed the connection as a coincidence, precisely as they resolved to do long before the H1N1 vaccination program even started.

Efforts on behalf of health authorities to claim that debilitating side-effects and nerve disorders such as GBS have no connection to the vaccine, despite the fact that they are clearly listed on vaccine inserts as potential dangers, is unsurprising considering this is precisely what officials resolved to do before the swine flu mass vaccination program began.

Back In September, Reuters reported on how public health officials were expecting “an avalanche of so-called adverse event reports, which are reports of death, illness or other health trauma,” in the two weeks after people receive the vaccine.

Authorities therefore resolved to dismiss any connection to the swine flu shots a host of heart attacks, strokes and miscarriages that “will be blamed on the H1N1 vaccine,” effectively performing a blanket diagnosis months in advance.

In November, the U.S. government appointed what the media ludicrously billed as an “independent” group of health advisors who were tasked with whitewashing adverse reactions to the swine flu vaccine and ‘explaining’ them to the public as mere coincidence.

The group is headed up by none other than Dr. Marie McCormick of the Harvard School of Public Health. McCormick and her affiliated organizations have routinely issued reports over the past 10 years supporting the government’s position on the link between vaccines and autism, dismissing a correlation entirely despite overwhelming evidence that contradicts this notion. McCormick has been widely criticized by other health experts for her dogged denial of the link between vaccines and autism.

Pharmaceutical companies can be assured that they won’t face reprisals for injuries and deaths that will inevitably occur as a result of exposing millions to mercury and squalene additives that are contained in the H1N1 shot during a mass vaccination program, because the government has already acted to provide them with blanket immunity from lawsuits.

“Vaccine makers and federal officials will be immune from lawsuits that result from any new swine flu vaccine, under a document signed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius,” reported the Associated Press last summer.