Another flu wave expected

Courier-Post
February 13, 2010

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.

Shreveport child diagnosed with rare disease after flu shot

Chrissi Coile
KTBS 3
February 11, 2010

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.

Swine flu epidemic is dying, CDC declares

Press TV
February 6, 2010

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.

Thousands of Americans Died from H1N1 Even After Being Vaccinated

by Mike Adams
NaturalNews
Published January 17, 2010

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.

//

Investigation Chief: Swine Flu Pandemic Was A Hoax

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, February 4, 2010

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.

Canadians Contract Guillain-Barre Syndrome After Swine Flu Shot In Same Doctor’s Office

Paralyzing nerve disease just a coincidence according to health officials

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.

Telegraph: Was swine flu ever a real threat?

Mark Honigsbaum
London Telegraph
February 2, 2010

It’s been a good week for drug companies and an even better one for conspiracy theorists. Last Tuesday, angered by the bumper rise in profits being reported by vaccine manufacturers as the incidence of swine flu plummets, the former head of health at the Council for Europe accused the World Health Organization of “faking” the pandemic.

“It looks like the WHO is under the influence of industry,” Dr Wolfgang Wodarg told a hearing in Strasbourg. “It was stated in panic-stricken terms that this was a flu that could threaten humanity. This is why billions of medications were bought.”

Exhibit number one, says Dr Wodarg, is the WHO’s decision to soften its definition of a pandemic last April, shortly before the emergence of the H1N1 virus. By eliminating the requirement that influenza pandemics should cause “enormous morbidity and death”, the WHO provoked an unnecessary “scare” that conveniently triggered the activation of “sleeping” contracts with vaccine manufacturers. Yet since the WHO’s declaration of a pandemic in June, swine flu has caused just 14,000 deaths worldwide – a fraction of the number who die from seasonal flu every year. This month, the Department of Health reported that cases had fallen to such a low rate that it was cancelling its weekly press briefings.

Like all conspiracy theorists, Wodarg started with the question “Cui bono?” and served up a plausible bad guy. For its part, the WHO vigorously denies the allegations and says Wodarg is “trivialising” what for millions of people has been a very serious problem.

So who is right? Was swine flu ever a genuine pandemic threat, or was it all a lot of (very expensive) fuss about nothing? And what are the lessons for the future? When, in late March, residents of La Gloria, in Mexico, began complaining of peculiar fevers, aches and sore throats, no one took much notice at first. The Mexican government, like the WHO, was focused on a different threat: bird flu. Following the re-emergence of the H5N1 avian virus in 2005, the WHO had drawn up a comprehensive pandemic plan, complete with a phased alert system, to be activated in the event that the virus, which had a mortality rate as high as 60 per cent, began spreading widely in human populations.

“The concern was that if bird flu suddenly went pandemic, it could trigger mortality on a massive scale,” explains John Oxford, professor of virology at Barts and The London Hospital. “The last thing anyone was expecting at that point was a pig virus from Mexico.”

It seems odd to recall now, but the massive stockpiles of Tamiflu which have come in for so much criticism were originally purchased for bird flu. Indeed, it wasn’t until two Californian children developed flu-like illnesses in mid-April that officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta realised that a new swine flu virus was on the loose.

Scientists quickly began joining the dots, and when the CDC confirmed that the H1N1 subtype from the Californian cases was identical to a virus isolated from a five-year-old boy in the La Gloria outbreak, it automatically triggered a “phase five” alert.

At around the same time, the WHO published those new guidance notes, deleting the requirement that pandemic strains should cause “enormous morbidity and death”. This was part of an ongoing review of how it should define a pandemic. Henceforth, all that would be required was “sustained” transmission in at least two different parts of the world at the same time. The result was that on June 11, when it became clear that swine flu had spread to more than 70 countries, the WHO had no option but to declare a pandemic.

But Wendy Barclay, professor of virology at Imperial College London, who was present at many of the meetings where the change of definition was discussed, says it is a “nonsense” to make out, as Wodarg does, that it was a conspiracy. “The timing was coincidental,” she says. “The WHO was considering the change long before swine flu.” And in view of the initial reports from Mexico, which suggested unusual mortality patterns among young adults, she believes the WHO was right to call for the fast-track manufacture of vaccines. “The drug companies should be applauded for delivering the vaccines in record time,” she says.

Peter Openshaw, the director of the Centre for Respiratory Infection at Imperial College London, agrees with that verdict, pointing out that the fear at the time was that swine flu could prove as deadly as the 1918 “Spanish” influenza, another strain of H1N1 that killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. Although he has reservations about the definition change, saying that pandemics should also be required to meet a “severity threshold”, he argues that “on balance it would have been irresponsible not to have taken the measures we did”.

Having said that, Prof Openshaw admits there are some things that should be done better next time. The Department of Health’s prediction in July that as many as 65,000 Britons could die over the winter was wrong, because scientists did not have accurate data. Initial reports suggested the virus was less widespread than it was, artificially elevating the death rate. However, a study just published in The Lancet, based on more extensive tests conducted over the summer, shows that, at that time, as many as one in three people in Britain were carrying the virus, 10 times more than could be estimated from the data available from hospitals and surgeries. As a result, the fatality rate has now been downgraded to a paltry 0.03 per cent, meaning that swine flu is 100 times less lethal than Spanish flu. “What we didn’t know at the time was that there were a large number of asymptomatic carriers,” explains Prof Openshaw.

Having said that, swine flu has tended to target people between the ages of 15 and 45, a group not normally at risk from seasonal flu, which has, the experts say, fully justified the NHS’s decision to provide early treatment with Tamiflu. In the United States, points out Prof Openshaw, those infected did not get antivirals until much later, and admissions of young adults to intensive care units have been far higher.

In fact, if anything, he believes we need to deliver antivirals and vaccines even faster next time – which is why he would like to see the NHS “iron out the bottlenecks” in its distribution system. That is a message seconded by Prof Oxford, who points to the “salutary” experience of Ukraine, where a huge surge in swine flu infections late last year brought the country’s medical system to its knees and had politicians scrabbling for supplies of Tamiflu and vaccines.

Prof Oxford also warns that the winter flu season is by no means over, and that vaccination could prove vital if, as he expects, H1N1 returns next year. “Swine flu is behaving in classic Darwinian fashion,” he says. “It has already displaced 99 per cent of the other flu viruses out there. My worry is that when it gets into the elderly next year, we could see many more deaths.” So far there have been 390 deaths in the UK.

No doubt Wodarg and his supporters will see this as a further example of scaremongering. The issue, they say, is not whether swine flu poses a risk but whether the risk is big enough to justify the diversion of precious funds to influenza vaccines, when diseases such as heart disease and hypertension kill many more people each year. And the row is not likely to be resolved any time soon. Although the government is now holding talks with GlaxoSmithKline to find a way of disposing of 60 million unwanted doses of vaccine, analysts predict that it and other vaccine manufacturers stand to make windfall profits of around £4 billion.

Yet rather than looking for scapegoats, Prof Barclay says we should be grateful that the pandemic turned out to be so mild. “In many ways, swine flu has been a dress rehearsal,” she says. “Next time, we may not be so fortunate.”

H1N1 needle blamed for partial paralysis

MICHELE MANDEL
Canoe.ca
February 1, 2010

Downstairs in the rehab wing of Markham Stouffville hospital, in a private room with a sunny window, lies Donna Hartlen, a young mother who is now partially paralyzed.

The Whitby woman can’t stand without leaning on a walker and her legs are too numb to allow her to walk for more than a few steps. The right side of her face is paralyzed, she can’t properly chew solid food and her right eye is bandaged because she can no longer blink to protect it.

Until five weeks ago, she was a perfectly healthy woman spending Christmas with her family in Nova Scotia. And then on Dec. 29 she was rushed to an emergency room in Halifax, suddenly unable to stand on feet.

The doctors diagnosed her with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological condition characterized by sudden weakness or paralysis. And while no one seems willing to discuss the likely cause, the 39-year-old knows exactly where the fault lies.

She blames the H1N1 flu shot she received on Dec. 13 – two weeks before her symptoms suddenly appeared.

Of course, there is no way to know for certain. But Hartlen has only grown more convinced since chatting by chance in the hall with the older gentleman from the hospital room next door.

// //

Don Gibson has GBS as well, with legs so numb now that he is confined to a wheelchair. It turns out that not only was he also vaccinated against H1N1, but he got the shot just two days before Hartlen, in the very same Markham doctors’ office.

“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.”

They are now comrades in arms, an unlikely duo who share a rare illness and a similar vaccination history that no one wants to acknowledge.

According to the Public Health Agency, there are about 600-700 new GBS cases a year in Canada, caused usually by food-borne bacteria, respiratory infections or surgery.

“The risk of getting GBS after any flu vaccine is about one case for every million doses distributed,” the website says. “The benefit of the vaccine outweighs this theoretical risk.”

So far, the agency says they haven’t had any unusual spike in GBS – there’s been 22 cases following the H1N1 vaccination – or .87 per million doses distributed. But Hartlen questions how many GBS patients are actually being reported; she says she was the one who finally called her local public health department because no medical professional seemed interested in the possible connection.

“Not a single doctor we’ve talked with will even remotely discuss that it’s the H1N1 shot,” marvels Hartlen. “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.”

So GBS patients like Hartlen and Gibson are on their own.

Right now, Quebec is the only province with a no-fault vaccine injury compensation program in place.

“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,” complains her husband, Wayne Burke.

They have two little girls at home, just 4 and 2. He works full-time at Telus; she was a self-employed business systems analyst. With no family in Whitby, they flew in her parents from Nova Scotia, but the elderly couple can’t look after the kids indefinitely.

Meanwhile, Hartlen has been told it can take months – and up to a year – before she completely regains all movement. So how is the partially-paralyzed mom supposed to take care of two young children until then?

“If my kids were 10 and 12 it would be different. But a four and two-year-old need 100% attention and I can’t give it to them,” she worries.

So she’s hardly unreasonable in expecting some kind of government support. But after countless phone conversations with every level of bureaucrat, she’s learned there will be no such thing.

“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?

“I need help for my kids – I’m not looking for anything extravagant. I’m not an ambulance chaser. I don’t want to sue anybody. I just want to get my kids looked after while their father is at work.”

Instead, there is only a shameful silence.

Ukrainian Black Lung Death Toll Over 1000, Over A Quarter-Million Hospitalized

Vince Veneziani
The Business Insider
January 26, 2010

The mutated version of the H1N1 Swine Flu is truly wrecking havoc throughout Eastern Europe, with the Ukrainian death toll now clocking in at 1005 dead, according to Before It’s News.

And to make matters worse, over 250,000 have been hospitalized over the deadly flu strain; that number is set to rise.

Pharmaceutical companies accused of crying wolf over swine flu

Russia Today
January 25, 2010

Swine flu is under scrutiny once again as pharmaceutical companies are being accused of hyping up a “false pandemic”. The Council of Europe has put the virus on its winter agenda, which starts on Monday.

A representative from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe claims the World Health Organization colluded with major drug companies and changed the definition of “pandemic” to ensure maximum profits with no risks for the pharmaceutical firms.

If PACE is putting forward the theory that the swine flu hysteria was engineered by pharmaceutical companies to generate revenue, then Ukraine is a perfect example.

The first revelations of the flu epidemic in Ukraine back in October 2009 caused panic across the country. News of the pandemic dominated the agenda of most of the Ukrainian mass media.

Public reaction was so strong that all anti-flu products flew off the shelves of pharmacies and drug stores across the country.

In the first several weeks of the flu rush it was almost impossible to find any medication against it in the pharmacies due to panic buying. Of course, pharmaceutical companies in Ukraine profited from the hysteria. This continued until the late stages of November 2009.

The joint profits of all the pharmaceutical organizations in Ukraine in October 2009 alone amounted to over $200 million, which was more than they had earned during the entire year before.

Thoughts about the “epidemic outbreak” resurged right in the middle of the presidential election campaign in Ukraine. Public mood suggested that the epidemic was being used by politicians as one of the factors in the campaign in an attempt to gain more votes from the electorate.

The biggest controversy surrounds the antiviral drug Tamiflu, which was believed to be the most effective means of combating swine flu – not in the sense of actually preventing the disease, but curing a person already infected with the virus.

When the first delivery of 300 tons of Tamiflu was delivered to Ukraine, Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko revealed that some pharmacies had already sold the drug at ten times the original price. She declared that any private pharmacy which demands steep prices for the drug would suffer legal consequences.

Later on she announced that the Tamiflu drug that Ukraine had received from Switzerland will not go to pharmacies, but directly to hospitals to help those already infected with H1N1 (the proper term for swine flu).

Despite Tamiflu being presented as the most effective medicine against H1N1, a respectable British medical journal wrote later on that it was doubtful whether the medication could actually help anyone suffering from H1N1.

As it turned out, the number of those who died of swine flu in Ukraine turned out to be less than the country loses annually due to regular seasonal flu, so the supposed swine flu epidemic is of little concern now.

Currently, all registered flu-related deaths in Ukraine are attributed to the ordinary flu virus strain.

Since swine flu does not make it to the headlines anymore, it looks like the previously announced purchase of anti-flu vaccine from countries like Canada and Switzerland have been cancelled.

“It’s incredible what is happening”

Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, the Chairman of the PACE Health Committee, told RT that the “World Health Organization is the institution that holds the biggest responsibility” for spreading news about “pandemic” swine flu.

“The WHO installed a private public partnership with pharmaceutical companies that started some eight years ago, and it seems that the pharmaceutical industry has very successfully influenced it because they had a lot profit with two false alarms of the WHO,” exclaimed Wodarg. “First, it was a bird’s flu alarm which never happened. Bird’s flu did not exist as a disease spread from one human being to another. And the second was the swine flu alarm, which was just a normal flu we experience every year, and even milder than most of the years.”

The expenses that followed the marketing used on scientists to impress governments to make contracts have already totaled billions of dollars, said Dr Wolfgang Wodarg.