WHO takes a page from a Michael Crichton novel
As the late great American poet Yogi Berra might have put it, �this
just gets absurder and absurder.� The international agencies supposedly
responsible for monitoring worldwide dangers of new pandemic threats, the WHO
and CDC are acting like the directors of a Hollywood �B� grade sci-fi movie or
the author of a copycat version of Michael Crichton�s Andromeda Strain
novel.
The global panic over the outbreak of a new human-to-human Swine Flu
pandemic is increasingly revealed as a likely operation in mass psychological
terror whose only beneficiaries are the few global pharmaceutical giants that are
in the business of peddling so-called �antiviral� drugs -- Roche,
SmithKlineGlaxo and Novavax most prominently. The losers are the rest of us
normal folks.
The press
releases of the WHO in Geneva and the US Centers for Disease Control in
Atlanta, the central coordinating agencies in this production, are worth
careful study. On April 30 the CDC issued a detailed report with the alarming
title, Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections in a School --- New
York City. The report described in detail a school in New York City where,
�As of April 28, approximately half (45) of all U.S. cases of S-OIV infection
had been confirmed among students and staff members.� The CDC called these
cases all �genetically similar to viruses subsequently isolated from patients
in Mexico.� [1] We are not told in scientific terms what �genetically similar
to� means, but it sure sounds ominous.
At that
point, the CDC claimed 109 victims of confirmed Swine Flu in the United States.
Forty five of the 109 came from this New York school. The TV news channels were
flooded with panic messages of the uncontrolled spread of Swine Flu.
On April
29, the next day, the WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan, upgraded their
Swine Flu Pandemic alert status from a Phase 4 event to Phase 5, a step below
full global Pandemic Alert.
According
to WHO, Phase 5 indicates that there is evidence of the virus being spread from
human-to-human in at least two countries in one WHO region. Phase 6, the
pandemic phase, is characterised by increased and sustained transmission in the
general population.
In her
announcement of the upgrade, Dr Chan made an unfortunate panic-making added
comment that was predictably grabbed onto by CNN and the world media: �After
all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic.� [2]
Note the WHO director-general had not declared a Pandemic Phase 6 alert, but in
a speech in Geneva in an apparent side comment, merely made the self-evident
observation that �during a pandemic� all humanity is under threat.�
A press
release by the Atlanta-based CDC stated, �On May 3, CDC is scheduled to
complete deployment of 25 percent of the supplies in the Strategic National
Stockpile (SNS) to all states in the continental United States. These supplies
and medicines will help states and US territories respond to the outbreak. In
addition, the Federal Government and manufacturers have begun the process of
developing a vaccine against the novel H1N1 flu virus.� [3] The pandemic
response apparatus was going into high gear.
The 45 New
York City school children the CDC solemnly reported were �confirmed cases of
swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus (S-OIV) infection,� 95 percent of whom
reported to the health authorities symptoms that included �fever plus cough
and/or sore throat, meeting the CDC definition for influenza-like illness
(ILI).�
Okay.
Better to be cautious when dealing with a new form of Andromeda Strain. But cough? Sore throat? Fever? Aren�t these
pretty vague ordinary symptoms? Not for CDC apparently. The 45 kids were
immediately added to the growing �confirmed cases� statistics, fuelling
emergency responses, statements by the president of the United States, economic
catastrophe to the fragile Mexican economy as tourism dried up overnight, and
worldwide fears of a new Black Death or at least a new version of the 1918
Spanish Flu plague.
The CDC
hastened to add the note, �symptoms in these patients appear to be similar to
those of seasonal influenza.� For those bothering to read through three
detailed pages of the CDC New York report, they found near the end that, �on
April 27, 37 patients (84%) reported that their symptoms were stable or
improving, three (7%) reported worsening symptoms (two of whom later reported
improvement), and four (9%) reported complete resolution of symptoms. Only one
reported having been hospitalized for syncope and released after overnight
observation.� The CDC added, �To date, this school-based outbreak is the
largest cluster of S-OIV cases reported in the United States.� [4]
In addition
to the 109 �confirmed cases� reported in the United States, including one death
of a Mexican boy in Texas, the CDC reported as of April 29, �a total of 57
confirmed cases had been reported, including seven deaths (in Mexico). By
country, the following numbers of cases had been reported: Mexico (26); Canada
(13); United Kingdom (five); Spain (four); Germany and New Zealand (three
each); Israel (two); and Austria (one).� [5] Is this another case of
�Chicken Little� crying the sky is falling?
A revealing
name change
Now, not
only are the alleged victims in New York of the worst plague since the Black
Death showing signs of remarkable recovery after only days, but the WHO also
announces a name change in the middle of the worldwide events. By May 1 the
WHO, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health in Maryland all announced
the name Swine Flu was no longer appropriate, that, despite the fact that,
according to Dr. Raul Rabadan, a professor of computational biology at Columbia
University, six of the eight genetic segments are purely swine flu and the
other two segments are bird and human, but have lived in swine for the past
decade. [6]
We, instead,
are told to call it Influenza A (H1N1). That�s a catchy name.
The name
change came following a heavy lobbying campaign by the US pig industry to drop
the Swine Flu label as it was apparently cutting into pork sales. The largest
US and world pig producer, Smithfield Foods of Virginia, was most certainly
among those lobbying CDC and the WHO for the name change. They won their wish.
But name change or not, the swine production process of Smithfield Foods and
other industrialized Factory Farms or as they are technically known, CAFOs -- Concentrated
Animal Feeding Operation -- bears closer scrutiny.
As I
detailed in Part I, the Mexican Swine Flu deaths and illness
first were recorded in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico,
where local residents had for weeks prior to the official announcement been
protesting the dangers of the huge Smithfield Foods pig CAFO in the village.
Children and adults alike were reported having a rash of symptoms in the
vicinity of the vast pig waste linked to the site. Smithfield Foods is the
world�s largest industrialized pig meat producer. It also has one of the most
egregious health and safety records.
Pig
feces and other niceties
Feces is
the Latin term for what most of the world terms shit, the waste product of
human or animal digestion. Pigs are world champion waste producers. An average
pig produces some three times in weight the amount of fecal matter that an
adult person does. As GRAIN, an agricultural organization reports, �the rise of
large-scale factory farms in North America has created the perfect breeding
grounds for the emergence and spread of new highly-virulent strains of
influenza.� [7] The pig fecal waste product is at the center of the
problem, something the CDC name change conveniently tends to obscure.
As the GRAIN
study notes, because concentrated animal feeding operations tend to concentrate
large numbers of animals close together, they are ideal breeding grounds for
toxins and virulent pathogens. In 2003, Science magazine warned that
swine flu was �on a new evolutionary �fast track� due to the increasing size of
factory farms and the widespread use of vaccines in these operations.� [8] It�s
the same story with bird flu, where huge industrial CAFO Factory Farms with
tens of thousands of chickens produce toxic waste galore.
Smithfield
Foods, the world�s biggest hog butcher and CAFO owner has an impressive track
record of violations of health and safety, including water safety laws. In the
USA, the world�s largest pig CAFO is in Tar Heel, North Carolina. According to
local reports the town could easily be renamed Pig Waste, N.C. given the scale
of fecal waste and combined matter Smithfield Foods� Tar Heel CAFO emits
locally.
As Jeff
Tietz, in an analysis of the pig waste problem calculated, �the best estimates
put Smithfield�s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would
fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig
production units that surround the company�s slaughterhouses, that is not a
containable amount.� [9]
Tietz adds,
�So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its
effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that
standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes
of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open,
untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into
groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of
environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of
Smithfield�s business model.� [10]
The
problem, he and other critics of CAFO pollutants stress, is not just normal pig
waste, but waste combined with staggering volumes of antibiotics and toxic
chemicals used by Smithfield Foods and similar industrial CAFO operations to
maximize �efficiency.�
Tietz
notes, �A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is
another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a
continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to
organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield�s efficiency. The
company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That�s a
remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the
only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented
concentrations.� [11]
The degrees
of concentration in the Smithfield Foods vertically integrated pig meat
concentrations have little to do with traditional hog farming. In facilities
now spread around the world, Smithfield�s pigs live by the hundreds or
thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are
artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so
small they cannot turn around.
As Tietz
notes, �Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a
tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw,
fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a
catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in
the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old
batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs
-- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the
pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to
create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts
out into a large holding pond.� [12]
He
continues on the toxic CAFO conditions: �They become susceptible to infection,
and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in
one pig, will rush sprite-like through the whole population. Accordingly,
factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are
doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin,
ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs
remain in a state of dying until they�re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready
to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs
as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as
the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.� [13]
Jeff Tietz
is not the only one who has noticed the gargantuan scale of the Smithfield
Foods CAFO pig waste problem. The United States government�s Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) has repeatedly fined Smithfield Foods for damage to local
water supply with discharge of its pig waste from its CAFOs at Tar Heel and
elsewhere across the USA. In Virginia, its home state, Smithfield was fined
$12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act -- the
third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the EPA, for waste
generated during the hog-slaughtering and meat processing operations. [14]
There was little convincing evidence the fines changed their practice of waste
disposal in any significant way.
Smithfield
Foods has spread its hog CAFOs to other countries where environmental
regulations are presumably less strict, including Romania, Poland, and of
course, rural Mexico. Several years ago, the Smithfield pig CAFO in Romania was
the focus of major accusations by local and government health officials.
Smithfield refused to let local authorities enter its pig farms after residents
complained of the stench coming from hundreds of dead corpses of pigs left
rotting for days at the farms. �Our doctors have not had access to the American
[company�s] farms to effect routine inspections,� stated Csaba Daroczi,
assistant director at the Timisoara Hygiene and Veterinary Authority in
Romania. �Every time they tried, they were pushed away by the guards.
Smithfield proposed that we sign an agreement that would oblige us to warn them
three days before each inspection.� It later emerged that Smithfield had been
covering up a major outbreak of classical swine fever on its Romanian CAFO
farms. [15]
The drug
cartel comes in
Rather than
order a full-scale independent investigation into the pathogen-generation in
the toxic waste of Smithfield Foods� Veracruz CAFO pig operations or other
similar pig CAFOs around the world for production of deadly toxics and various
possible pathogens, the CDC and increasingly the WHO seem to be more concerned
with creating a climate for mass distribution of what have been documented to
be dangerous, and in some cases deadly, influenza drugs such as Tamiflu.
On April
14, almost two weeks before the panic over Mexico�s cases of Swine Flu or as
CDC now prefers, Influenza A H1N1, the US pharmaceutical company, Novavax
announced a pre-clinical study allegedly showing, �an investigational H1N1
virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine based on the 1918 Spanish influenza strain
protected against both the Spanish flu and a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian
influenza strain.� The genetically-manipulated vaccine of Novavax, the company
claimed, �protected Mice and Ferrets Against the Spanish Flu and Highly
Pathogenic H5N1 Bird Flu,� and also conveniently �provided protection against
highly pathogenic H1N1 and H5N1 Influenza strains.� [16]
On April
24, the WHO issued a press release stating that �The Swine Influenza A/H1N1
viruses characterized in this outbreak have not been previously detected in
pigs or humans. The viruses so far characterized have been sensitive to
oseltamivir . . . � Osteltamivir is the technical name for Tamiflu, the drug
invented by Donald Rumsfeld�s Gilead Sciences and licensed to Roche Inc. The US
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a convenient Emergency Authorization
on April 27 that allows US health officials and others to administer Tamiflu
even to infants under one year of age. The FDA statement added it had decided,
�to authorize the use of unapproved or uncleared medical products or unapproved
or uncleared uses of approved or cleared medical products following a
determination and declaration of emergency.� [17]
That
suggests that the US government has or is about to release experimental drugs
on a panicked population, such as the VLP-based Influenza vaccine of Novavax,
as well as the vast stockpiles of Tamiflu and influenza drugs sold by giants
like GlaxoSmithKline�s Relenza (zanamivir).
With the
evidence to date of the scale of the �confirmed� cases of Swine Flu H1N1
variety worldwide, 985 cases of influenza A (H1N1) or Swine Flu infection,
there is hardly grounds to subject the human population to drugs whose side
effects have included death or severe complications and typically flu-like
symptoms and, as in the case of Tamiflu, never even claim to �prevent or cure�
the influenza. The entire drama of the past weeks is reading more and more like
a bad remake of Crichton�s Andromeda Strain.
Adding a
note of the bizarre to the entire drama, in November 2004, amid the early days
of the then-world panic over alleged Avian Flu, when Tamiflu was first promoted
as a wonder drug by Donald Rumsfeld and others, the WHO published an
extraordinary fantasy scenario. In a UN agency normally given to issuing dull
scientific notices to world health professionals, the 2004 report was
extraordinarily �prescient� of the current scenario with Swine Flu panic. In a
fantasy section titled �Sometime in the future . . . � the WHO
wrote four years ago:
Rumours of an outbreak of unusually severe
respiratory illness in two villages in a remote province reach the ministry of
health in one of the World Health Organization�s (WHO�s) Member States. A team
is dispatched to the province and learns that the outbreak started about a
month earlier. The team is able to identify at least 50 cases over the previous
month. All age groups have been affected. Twenty patients are currently in the
provincial hospital. Five people have already died of pneumonia and acute respiratory
failure. Surveillance in surrounding areas is increased, and new cases are
identified throughout the province. Respiratory specimens collected from
several patients are tested at the national laboratory and are found to be
positive for type A influenza virus, but they cannot be further subtyped. The
isolates are sent to the WHO Reference Centre for Influenza for further
characterization, where they are characterized as influenza A(H6N1), a subtype
never isolated from humans before. Gene sequencing studies further indicate
that most of the viral genes are from a bird influenza virus, with the
remaining genes derived from a human strain. [18]
If one
changed the name from Influenza A (H6N1) to Influenza A (H1N1) we could be
talking about the current situation.
That 2004
WHO fictional scenario reads as if it were the handbook for what has unfolded
since late April in the US, Mexico and beyond. It leads to a serious question
whether the world is being submitted to a giant psychological warfare game
aimed at inducing them to take massive doses of dangerous drugs to counter a
danger that does not actually exist as claimed.
With the
reported cases in Mexico clearly dropping off at present and little sign of the
feared repeat of the 1918 Spanish Flu or worse as officials were warning only
days earlier, it is well beyond time to launch a full-scale worldwide health
inquiry into the toxic conditions of CAFO pig and other animal Factory Farm
concentrations, and to end the official cover-up of what has become a colossal
health danger.
Notes
1. Centers
for Disease Control, Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1)
Virus Infections in a School -- New York City, April 2009, April 30,
2009.
2. Margaret
Chan, WHO Director-General, quoted in Murray Wardrop, Swine flu All of
humanity under threat WHO warns,
Daily Telegraph, London, April 30, 2009.
3 CDC, H1N1 (Swine Flu).
4Centers
for Disease Control, Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections in a
School --- New York City . . . Op. Cit.
5 Ibid.
6 Seth
Borenstein, Swine flu
name change? Flu genes spell
pig, AP,
May 1, 2009.
7 GRAIN, A food system that kills: Swine flu is meat
industry�s latest plague, April 2009.
8 Bernice
Wuethrich, Chasing the Fickle Swine Flu, Science, Vol. 299, 2003.
9 Jeff Tietz, Pork�s Dirty Secret:
America�s Top Hog Producer is also one of America�s Worst Polluters, Rolling Stone, December 14, 2006.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 EPA, UNITED STATES SUES
SMITHFIELD FOODS FOR POLLUTING VIRGINIA WATERWAYS, Press Release, December 16, 1996.
15 Mirel
Bran, Swine Plague: Romania Criticizes American Group�s Attitude, Le Monde, 15 August
2007, translated by Leslie Thatcher, cited in GRAIN Op Cit. .
16 Tricia J. Richardson, NOVAVAX
Announces Publication of a Preclinical Study Demonstrating that a Virus-like
Particle Vaccine Provided Protection Against Highly Pathogenic H1N1 and H5N1
Influenza Strains, April 14, 2009, Rockville, Md. Press Release.
17 FDA
News, FDA Authorizes Emergency Use of Influenza Medicines, Diagnostic Test
in Response to Swine Flu Outbreak in Humans, April 27, 2009.
18 WHO, WHO checklist for influenza pandemic
preparedness planning, November 2004.
F. William Engdahl is author of Seeds of
Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca.)
and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order
(Pluto Press). His new book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in
the New World Order (Third Millennium Press) is due out later this month. He
may be contacted through his website: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.