- 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 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 own 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,' ninety-five 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).'
-
- OK. 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 adds, 'To
date, this school-based outbreak is the largest cluster of S-OIV cases
reported in theUnited 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 breed
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 theUSA, 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 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, ruralMexico. Several years ago the Smithfield pig
CAFO in Romania was 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 vil- lages 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 pro- vincial 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 col- lected 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 Influ- enza for further characterization, where they are characterized
as influ- enza 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 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 coverup of what has become a colossal health danger.
-
- 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 latest book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy
in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press), is due to be released
later this month. He may be reached via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
|
