Michael Fumento

In response to my Philadelphia Inquirer piece “Swine Flu Epidemic Ends with a Whimper,” predictably public health community members have squealed that the only reason the disease proved so mild is because of their own Herculean efforts. I saw the same thing with heterosexual AIDS and SARS. So it was that Steven J. Barrer, M.D. wrote to the newspaper:

Michael Fumento’s assertion that the swine flu epidemic predicted for this flu season was a medical scandal ignores the enormous effort of the country’s public-health sector to mitigate the potential seriousness of this disease.Vaccine production was accelerated, public education was aggressive, and awareness was heightened worldwide. Every physician I know made an effort to educate patients. Fumento also belittles simple efforts such as hand sanitizer, but that, and frequent hand-washing, muffling sneezes in your arm rather than hand, and minimizing casual physical contact, are widely credited with reducing the spread of contagious disease.

They are among the efforts hospitals are using, successfully, to reduce their infection rates.

Diseases don’t go away. We just get better at dealing with them. I consider the mildness of this flu season a stunning public-health success.

 Yet as my piece noted the epidemic peaked in mid-October, before anybody was vaccinated. It also observed that Australia and New Zealand had remarkably mild epidemics that ended before any vaccine was available.

Hand sanitizer and handwashing appears to have no impact on the spread of flu, as this article discusses. I found a recent medical journal article claiming to show that it does help, but when you actually look at their data you see they provided good evidence that it does not. If that’s the best they can do, it tells you something.

Handwashing was basically thrown at the public as a talisman and because, lacking a vaccine, the public health community and especially the CDC felt it had to offer something for the public to do, even if it was worthless. (Also, handwashing does protect against colds and food poisoning.)

In light of this, it’s hard to see how mealy-mouthed terms like “aggressiveness” and “awareness” played any role. The simple fact, as I took great pains to note, is that swine flu has a vastly milder impact on the immune system than seasonal flu. I’ve even explained why, that we’ve been exposed to H1N1 viruses as part of the seasonal flu since 1997. That also explains why children are disproportionately affected. Where did I first write this? In the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Read more…

Mike Adams
Natural News
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

The great swine flu hoax of 2009 is now falling apart at the seams as one country after another unloads hundreds of millions of doses of unused swine flu vaccines. No informed person wants the injection anymore, and the entire fear-based campaign to promote the vaccines has now been exposed as outright quackery and propaganda.

Even doctors are now calling the pandemic a complete hoax. As reported on FoxNews, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a leading health authority in Europe, says that drug companies “organized a ‘campaign of panic’ to put pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic. He believes it is ‘one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century,’ and he has called for an inquiry.” (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933…)

H1N1 swine flu was never dangerous, and it never should have been escalated to a level-six pandemic in the first place. It was all a big marketing scam whose purpose was to simply sell vaccines. (And the CDC and WHO were in on it…)

And it worked! Big Pharma made out with billions of dollars in profits for a useless vaccine that’s now being dumped by the truck load. These vaccines were, of course, paid for with taxpayer dollars, making the Great Swine Flu Hoax of 2009 nothing more than an elaborate financial scam whose goal was to transfer wealth from the People to the shareholders of Big Pharma.

In just the fourth quarter of 2009, GlaxoSmithKline shipped $1.4 billion worth of vaccines. (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS…)

That’s $1.4 billion worth of taxpayer dollars, by the way. Dollars that could have been spent on nutrition or real health education. $1.4 billion worth of free vitamin D supplements would have done far more to protect public health than vaccines could ever hope to accomplish.

A bailout for Big Pharma

Wall Street hucksters have nothing on Big Pharma, the CDC and the WHO, all of which conspired to mislead the public and generate irrational fear in order to make money selling people vaccine shots they never needed in the first place.

The drug companies raked in billions of dollars in revenues while providing a product that offered absolutely no net reduction in mortality. In fact, as the long-term side effects of the vaccines remain unknown, it could turn out that the vaccines actually result in a net increase in mortality.

Read more…

Michael Fumento

Hidden within the latest edition of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FluView was this sentence: “The proportion of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza was below the epidemic threshold.”

That’s right: The great American swine flu epidemic – which led to two proclaimed national emergencies and thousands of spooky news stories – has ended with a whimper.

Only 161 new infections were reported to CDC-monitored labs last week, compared to 11,470 at the epidemic’s mid-October peak. Only one state (Alabama) still reports “widespread activity.” Deaths and hospitalizations were 14 and 374, respectively, compared to 189 and 4,970 a week at the peak. To put that in perspective, the CDC estimates that an average of 257 Americans normally die of seasonal flu every day during the season, or about 36,000 a year.

Like all infectious disease epidemics, swine flu followed a bell curve. It peaked in mid-October, before anybody was vaccinated.

Repeat, the American portion of the first flu pandemic declared in four decades – which just weeks ago spawned such headlines as “CDC: Cases, Deaths Are Unprecedented” – is over.

So where do the swine flu numbers go from here? Not to zero, unfortunately. Rather, we’re at what’s called an “endemic” level: We can expect infections, hospitalizations, and deaths to continue at something similar to the current rate until the end of flu season, in the spring. (That means there’s still plenty of time to get your shot if you haven’t yet been infected or vaccinated yet.)

But, judging by what we’ve seen so far in the United States and elsewhere in the world, especially in New Zealand and Australia, the flu season will continue to be quite mild. In both of those Southern Hemisphere countries, where winter has ended, there have been far fewer flu deaths than was normal during their past seasonal flu epidemics. Yet swine flu accounted for virtually all their cases, and no vaccine was available. In addition, these countries saw the season peak only once, without the “next wave” we’ve been warned of.

Why were there so few flu deaths? First, swine flu is vastly milder than the seasonal variety. According to the latest CDC estimate, while seasonal flu kills between one in 480 to one in 1,700 Americans infected, swine flu has killed only one person for every 5,000 infections. (Even that estimate is probably high, given the vastly lower death rates in comparable industrialized nations, such as France and Japan.)

Second, swine flu is more contagious than the seasonal flu strains, essentially muscling them aside. And people infected with swine flu appear to be immune to seasonal flu, just as the mild cowpox virus inoculated people against the fearsome smallpox virus (as the famed vaccine inventor Edward Jenner noted). Of those 161 new flu cases reported to the CDC last week, only four clearly weren’t swine flu.

You may recall all those additional deaths we were supposed to suffer as a result of swine flu – 30,000 to 90,000, according to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (a number I previously disputed); or “89,000 to 207,000,” according to an op-ed by author John Barry. But like New Zealand and Australia, the United States can actually expect considerably fewer overall flu deaths because of the swine flu.

Read more…

Telegraph.co.uk

By James Delingpole

Journalist dies, oinking horribly, after failing to take Swine Flu seriously. That was the title I gave one of my first Telegraph blogs – April 27th 2009 – well aware that I was offering up a tremendous hostage to fortune. My how they would all have laughed darkly if I’d caught swine flu and died! But I didn’t, did I? And nor strangely did you.

Here are some of the comments that appeared below the blog:

Here’s a very angry science expert who signs herself Kaytie:

“James Delingpole is a dolt and…it’s well worth spending quite a bit of resource on stockpiling Tamiflu and Relenza even when the stockpiles have a shelf-life and have to be regularly replaced.”

Here’s Redking:

by Michael Fumento

Inevitably when pandemic doom fails to pan out, whether it be heterosexual AIDS, SARS, avian flu, or anything else the public health establishment that panicked everyone will claim that the only reason their predictions didn’t prevail was fast action on their part. So it was inevitable with swine flu, as we’re told in an article with the sub-headline: “If You Warn of An H1N1 Epidemic But Stop It, Do You Get Credit?”

Professor Robert Field of the Drexel University School of Public Health tells ABC News online that his poor fellows were, as the piece put it, “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.” According to the story, with the subtitle of “Public health officials faced a tough choice in May and June,” “to some extent, we may be seeing a milder epidemic than we feared because of the vaccine and other measures people are taking” says Field.

Pouring on the unmitigated gall, he added: “It’s so easy to be a victim of your own success.”

As they say in The Valley, “Gag me with a spoon!” As I’ve written, the epidemic here peaked in mid-October. Nobody had vaccine immunity in this country then. Nobody. Australia and New Zealand had incredibly mild flu seasons even though almost all of the flu was of the H1N1 swine variety and there was no vaccine even available until the seasons ended. Even now, relatively few Americans have gotten the shot and according to news accounts they’re not going to. More and more are claiming they’ve been bamboozled.

Moreover, there were people in May and June who relayed evidence that swine flu was proving to be extremely mild. Well, there was one person at least. Me.

My first published article on the subject, with the telling title “The Price of a Porcine Panic,” appeared June 1. I said it would ridiculous for the WHO to declare a pandemic, and as soon as it did I wrote why it had been ridiculous. It was obviously milder than seasonal flu, when heretofore flu pandemics were defined by extreme severity.

Later on, as the data, came in, I documented how vastly milder swine flu was. This was before the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology made its incredible prediction of 30,000 to 90,000 deaths.

No, the public health establishment bungled at best and lied at worst. I’ve written 14 articles at countless blogs about it. Don’t let them off the hook this time.

foodConsumer.org

A Finnish member of the World Health Organization board, an advisor on vaccines, has received 6 million Euros for his research center from the vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline.

Although WHO promises transparency, this conflict of interest is not available for the public to see at WHO’s homepage.

Professor Juhani Eskola is the director of the Finnish research vaccine program and a new member of the WHO group ‘Strategic Advisory Group of Experts’ (SAGE).

SAGE recommends which vaccines — and how many — member countries should purchase for the pandemic.

According to documents acquired through the Danish Freedom of Information Act, Eskola’s Finnish institute, THL, received almost 6.3 million Euros from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) for research on vaccines during 2009. GlaxoSmithKline produces the H1N1-vaccine ‘Pandemrix,’ which the Finnish government — following recommendations from THL and WHO — purchased for a national pandemic reserve stockpile.

Several other WHO experts also have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry — a double role that notably is not published by WHO.

Read More Here.

By Michael Fumento

The Big Scare of 2009 is over, folks. The U.S. swine flu epidemic has ended.
“The proportion of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza (P&I) was below the epidemic threshold,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website Fluview and this chart shows it.

End of Epidemic

New infections continued to drop this week to only 306 reported by CDC-monitored labs, compared to 1,370 just three weeks before and 11,470 at the height of the epidemic. That’s a plummet of over 97% from the height. Deaths and hospitalizations have plumetted to merely 20 and 313 respectively, compared to 85 and 982 just a week earlier and compared to 189 and 4,970 at the peak in October.

Remember that according to CDC estimates, about 257 Americans die of seasonal flu per day during flu season. Mind you, the swine flu deaths are actual while the seasonal flu ones are estimates so it’s not a completely apples-to-apples comparison.
Only 7 states still report widespread activity, down from 11 last week. The American College Health Association did not report new numbers this week, presumably because of the Christmas holiday.

Repeat, the swine flu epidemic is over.

So where do we go from here? No, unfortunately not to zero. Instead we’re at what’s called an “endemic” level. We can expect infections, hospitalizations, and deaths to continue at something the same rate as this last week until the end of flu season in April.

Judging by what we’ve seen so far in the U.S. and the experiences in New Zealand and Australia, we are in for an extremely mild flu season overall. That’s because swine flu is more contagious than the far deadlier seasonal flu, essentially muscling it aside. People inoculated with swine flu infection don’t get the seasonal flu.

So while you may recall all those “excess” deaths we were supposed to be getting from swine flu (30,000 to 90,000 according to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and “89,000 to 207,000″ according to flu book author John Barry in a Washington Post op-ed, we will actually get far fewer flu deaths overall both worldwide and in the U.S. because of swine flu.

While the media are finally beginning to admit that the World Health Organization’s swine flu “pandemic,” made possible only by completely redefining the definition, may be the mildest in history, they are not willing to admit that we will actually have fewer flu deaths internationally because of this alleged pandemic.

MEDICALLY CAUSED DEATH IN AMERICA

By Jon Rappoport
http://www.insolutions.info/
http://www.nomorefakenews.com/

On July 26, 2000, the US medical community received a titanic shock to the system, when one of its most respected and honored public-health experts, Dr. Barbara Starfield, revealed her findings on healthcare in America. 

The landmark Starfield study, “Is US health really the best in the world?”, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, came to the following conclusions: 

Every year in the US there are:

12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries; 
7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals;  
20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals; 
80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals; 
106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.
The total of medically-caused deaths in the US every year is 225,000.

This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer.

The Starfield study is the most explosive revelation about modern healthcare in America ever published.  The credentials of its author and the journal in which it appeared are, within the highest medical circles, impeccable.     

Yet, on the heels of Starfield’s astonishing findings, although media reporting was extensive, it soon dwindled.  No major newspaper or television network mounted an ongoing “Medicalgate” investigation.  Neither the US Department of Justice nor federal health agencies undertook prolonged remedial action.

All in all, it seemed that those parties who could have taken effective steps to correct this mind-boggling situation preferred to ignore it.         

On December 6-7, 2009, I interviewed Dr. Starfield by email. 

Read more…

By Jon Rappoport
http://www.insolutions.info/
http://www.nomorefakenews.com/
November 28, 2009

We are at a defining and crucial moment in our history.  A machine is in motion that will alter our future.  If after you read this article, you agree with its main points, or at least feel they need to be heard, send it on to others.  Find ways to make your voice count.

It is one thing to read and understand the details of the Obama Health Plan.  It is another thing to grasp the kind of power this bill will create, and what that power, in the future, will mean and do.

I realize that many people reading this essay have no interest in alternative medicine.  However, that field represents freedom of choice for millions of Americans, and if you want to deny that choice—because you have a mistaken notion about, and a misplaced faith in, how medical science actually operates—the medical facts I describe and cite below should bring about a new appreciation of what freedom looks like, and how important the job of protecting it is.

This might be the most important medical article I’ve ever written, and in 20 years as a reporter, I’ve written many. 

As I begin this essay on Thanksgiving morning, I recall that, 15 years ago, I was preparing to challenge Henry Waxman for his seat in the US House, in the 29^th District, Los Angeles.  At that time, the issue was Health Freedom, the right of every American to choose how to maintain and improve his/her health.  And here I am again, with the same issue—only this time, there is a gargantuan White House program in place to destroy that freedom from the top down.

And various alternative-health advocates, having lost their minds, are supporting it.  Among them are people who actually believe the small affirmative nods from politicians, in the direction of alternative medicine, are signaling an enlightened age under the Obama Star.

Duped again.  One more time.    

I have never imagined Democrats or Republicans represented the American people.  This time, it is the political Left, with their naïve belief in “science” and “humanitarian work” who are leading the country over a cliff. 

Read more…

Mike Adams
Natural News
November 20, 2009

The CDC now reports that nearly 4,000 Americans have been killed by H1N1 swine flu. This number is supposed to sound big and scary, motivating millions of people to go out and pay good money to be injected with untested, unproven H1N1 vaccines. But let’s put the number in perspective: Did you know that more than four times as many people are killed each year by common NSAID painkillers like aspirin?

The July 1998 issue of The American Journal of Medicine explains it as follows:

“Conservative calculations estimate that approximately 107,000 patients are hospitalized annually for nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)-related gastrointestinal (GI) complications and at least 16,500 NSAID-related deaths occur each year among arthritis patients alone.” (Singh Gurkirpal, MD, “Recent Considerations in Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug Gastropathy”, The American Journal of Medicine, July 27, 1998, p. 31S)

So for every person the CDC claims was killed by H1N1 swine flu this year, common painkillers like aspirin have killed four! Yet you don’t see the CDC, FDA, WHO or mainstream media running around screaming about the extreme dangers of aspirin, do you? All those deaths apparently don’t matter. Only swine flu deaths lead to hysteria.

Understanding risk

According to death statistics tables available on the ‘net, you are ten times more likely to die in a car accident this year than be killed by swine flu.

Nearly 100,000 Americans die every year from adverse reactions to FDA-approved prescription drugs. That’s twenty-five times the number of people killed by H1N1 swine flu (even if you believe the CDC’s numbers). So where’s the big warning about the dangers of prescription drugs? Why isn’t the CDC warning Americans about an “epidemic of dangerous drugs” that poses a far greater threat to your health?

The answer, of course, is that health authorities want to push people to buy vaccines that are about to become worthless (they’re only good before swine flu fizzles out). And the only way to sell more vaccines to people who don’t need them is to hype up a bunch of scare stories by citing bold statistics that make H1N1 swine flu seem really, really dangerous.

But the flu is no more dangerous than aspirin. In fact, H1N1 swine flu may be safer than aspirin.

Read more…

By Dr. Sherri Tenpenny

It seems people often need to experience a bullet to the head before they will believe bullets can be deadly…and then they rue the day they ignored warnings about playing with loaded guns. 

Vaccination seems to hold a similar place. People ignore words of caution and roll up their sleeves to get a flu shot. It seems they think getting a vaccine is the same as taking a multivitamin, and equally as benign. But when serious adverse events occur, such as Guillain-Barre paralysis, a seizure disorder or even a death, a jolt of reality lays bare just how damaging a “simple vaccine” can be.

The stranglehold of fear, perpetrated by those in white coats and by the medical bureaucrats in Washington DC who take their marching orders from pharma, is working hard to choke rationally thinking adults into submission. I get emails almost every day that say something like, “I bought your DVDs and your books…but I have a question: Should I get a flu shot?” WHAT?@!>!  My mouth drops. I have to clear my head and find a way to say, “No, you should not get the flu shot”, being cautious to keep my tone void of sarcasm. That may seem harsh, but in very turbulent times. Soft language and hand holding until people “get it” is becoming increasingly more difficult.

Being in the business of waking people up to the hazards of vaccines certainly has its ups and downs. A recent “up” was the public policy debate held on November 10 at the University of Texas in Austin. Sponsored by the Libertarian Longhorns, the Texas College Republicans and a few other Texas health freedom groups, the discussion called, “Are Vaccine Mandates Good or Bad for Public Health?” was open to the general public. Interest in this timely topic was reflected by the standing-room only attendance of the meeting.

Speaking in support of vaccination and school mandates was Tom Betz, MD, MPH, Director of Region 7 for the Texas Department of Health Services. Several of his health department colleagues joined him in the audience but chose not to join him on the stage. I had the pleasure of being teamed with Dawn Richardson, President and Co-founder of PROVE (Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education) in Austin, Texas and the Directory of State Advocacy for the National Vaccine Information Center in Vienna, Virginia. Our presentation was mostly about opposition to vaccine mandates but we were able to address our opposition to vaccines in general. Based on the hundreds of comments we received, the debate (found all on YouTube) was well received and enlightening for all.

All three participants were given the questions to review prior to the debate. There is so much to say about vaccines that preparation was important to cover key points, almost as sound bites; only three short minutes were allowed for each answer. Our very professional moderator, Dr. Donna Campbell, allowed equal time for each side.

Read more…

By Jon Rappoport
www.insolutions.info

NOVEMBER 14, 2009.  I was, of course, wondering whether some explanation other than a virus could account for the million cases of illness recently reported in the Ukraine. 

First of all, a million new cases in a month?  Germs don’t travel that fast.  Is that million-figure even correct?  Who knows?  But I plowed on anyway.

The first thing that caught my attention was an undated article by a Prof. Yu. I. Kundiev, titled “State of Affairs in Ukraine and Other CIS Countries.”  The article may be a chapter in a book.

“A major problem today is the storage of large quantities of pesticides which are outdated or prohibited for further use. According to a special survey of the Ukrainian Environmental Ministry such stocks amount to 22 million tons, most of which are persistent chlororganic pesticides.

“The storage conditions are different, and mostly inadequate. Together with the long storage time, low quality of containers and packaging, this led to the formation of different compositions of substances, and even possibly of new compounds with unknown properties. Further storage of such quantities of toxic substances in unfit storehouses surely poses a permanent threat to the environment and human health fraught with an environmental catastrophe.

“Besides, in the present situation there is real possibility of illegal use of prohibited pesticides. There already are reports of such cases. But it is practically impossible to determine the scope of such unauthorized use or where and how the pesticides are applied.

“It is imperative that all the CIS countries should work out and implement organizational, technical and technological measures and conditions to neutralize and dispose of outdated and prohibited pesticides.”

Next, I came across a journal paper by Tamara Gurzhiy: “Expired and prohibited pesticides problem in Ukraine.”  Independent Agency for Ecological Information, Kharkiv, Ukraine.  Whoever did the English translation did it roughly in spots.

Read more…