Creating a Needless World-Wide Panic!

It has become literally impossible lately to open a newspaper or turn on a radio, or TV, and not hear, or see, dire warnings about the horrible crisis the world, and the US in particular, faces, in the coming months and years, as a result of… no… not Global Warming, this time (that is an entirely different "panic button" issue). This time it is the Avian or Bird flu.

Having watched the way organizations, which depend upon the largesse of government money to operate, and even exist, tend to present whatever it is they have latched onto for their government gravy train of money, I have concluded we are being lambasted with a hoax.

That is not to say the Bird Flu does not exist, for it does. But to scare the living daylights out of a few billion people with so little evidence to support their proclamation of an eminent pandemic, I think, is irresponsible.

Sure we have chickens and turkeys, and all sorts of birds, in the US, too. But we don’t live with them!

Beware... any time the government becomes interested in your health!

There is something more at work here, I'm afraid. I’m not a "conspiracy nut", but this much noise from the egghead section of our health organizations tends to spook me.

The last time the US got involved in heading off a flue pandemic they wound up killing a rather large group of Americans… needlessly.

On February 5, 1976 an army recruit at Fort Dix said he felt tired and weak. He died the next day and four of his fellow soldiers were later hospitalized. Two weeks after his death, health officials announced that swine flu was the cause of death. Alarmed public health officials decided that action must be taken to head off a major pandemic and they urged that every person in the US be vaccinated for the disease. The vaccination program was plagued by delays and public relations problems but about 24% of the population was vaccinated by the time the program was cancelled.

The vaccine was blamed for 25 deaths (more people died from the vaccine than died from the swine flu itself) and a small, but statistically significant, rise in the incidence of a rare illness called Guillain-Barré syndrome or GBS.

Then:

In February 2004, avian influenza virus was detected in pigs in Vietnam, increasing fears of the emergence of new variant strains. It is feared that if the avian influenza virus combines with a human influenza virus (in a pig or a human), the new subtype created could be both highly contagious and highly lethal in humans. Such a subtype could cause a global influenza pandemic, similar to the Spanish Flu, or the lower mortality pandemics such as the Asian Flu and the Hong Kong Flu.

From October 2004 to February 2005, some 3,700 test kits of the 1957 Asian Flu virus were accidentally spread around the world from a lab in the US.

In May 2005, scientists urgently call nations to prepare for a global influenza pandemic that could strike as much as 20% of the world's population.

In October 2005, cases of the Avian flu (the deadly strain H5N1) were identified in Turkey. EU Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou said: "We have received now confirmation that the virus found in Turkey is an avian flu H5N1 virus. There is a direct relationship with viruses found in Russia, Mongolia and China." Cases of bird flu were also identified shortly thereafter in Romania, and then Greece. Possible cases of the virus have also been found in Croatia, Bulgaria and in the United Kingdom. However, by the end of October only 67 people had died as a result of H5N1 which was atypical of previous influenza pandemics.

Despite popular newspaper reports, Avian flu cannot yet be categorised as a "pandemic".
(From Wikipedia)

Back in October, of 2005, I write the following:

The Avian Flu. Anything like the Swine Flu??


What the dickens is going on with the Avian flu, the media, and the politicians?

I have had any number of people approach me, in the past few days, and exclaim, “You know, if the Press keeps on, they’re gonna talk people into getting the Avian (Bird) Flu!”

Well, I spent over half my life in the media and I know a little about shaping and guiding public opinion. Seems to be, all the earmarks of a full out propaganda campaign are at work here.

Now, lets see, there have been, worldwide, only 60 (Actually 67 as of this writing in October of 2005) cases of Avian flu… right? And all the cases were in Asia… right? How many thousands of chickens have been slaughtered? A lot.

In the past few days the airwaves in America have been filled, to overflowing, with talking heads telling us that the sky is falling! The end of the world is nigh! The Bird flu is coming! It’s coming and it’s going to kill you, and your family, and wipe out civilization, as we know it, on this planet!

That sound about right?

I mean… did I catch the tenor of the panic-stricken voices shouting: “Pandemic”! “Pandemic”!

Now, take a deep breath, and sit back, and allow me to remind you another such campaign to invoke panic in the American populace.

Ever hear of the Swine Flu scare in 1976? Oh yeah, it was a mess. The National Immunization Program failed. A lot of people WERE immunized, but the epidemic never appeared! Never! To make matters worse, hundreds of Americans were killed, or injured, (including those who wound up with Guillain-Barré syndrome) as a result of the inoculation given them by the government. Some 40 million Americans were inoculated for the Swine flu. The Swine flue epidemic never appeared. I repeat: It never appeared!

Millions of dollars spent, people frightened, hundreds killed (and injured) by the vaccine, and no epidemic.

It has been nearly 30 years since that fiasco. Basically one generation has expired. But those of us still on the “right side of the grass” remember that disaster and are not eager to see it again.

However, it sure appears that between the docs, the press, and the politicians… that is exactly where we are headed.

So, next time you hear “Avian Flu”… think Swine Flu. Remember, many more people were killed, in the US, from the inoculation to prevent the Swine flu than were killed by the flu itself. Let’s not do that again!

- 0 -

I have concluded there is a group of people, on this tiny little planet, who simply do not feel important if they are not at the spear point of a worldwide “scare”. Let’s see: there’s Global Warming, Nuclear winter, an asteroid striking the earth, HIV, famine, and now... the Bird Flu. If all these fail, they can always bring back the time honored Bubonic Plague, the “Black Plague”! Of course all these warnings come attached to a warning that everyone on earth will be wiped out, or, nearly everyone.

It takes very little, it seems, to frighten the moneygrubbers at the UN and they are among the first to climb aboard the bandwagon to raise money from “voluntary” donations from concerned member nations, which, in turn, get it from the tax money of their “frightened nearly to death” citizens.

The US may well have a few cases of Bird flu. It would be foolish to think otherwise. But to project it into a world-wide pandemic, at this point, is , in my view, unwise and needlessly frightening the masses.

You can bet that the minute the first case of Bird Flu shows up in the US, Hospitals and doctor’s offices, all over the nation, will be flooded with people who know, beyond a doubt, that they have Bird Flu and they will demand treatment.

Most of them will not have it, and will never get it, but our medical community will be "overloaded" and people who are truly sick will not get necessary treatment and lives will be lost. I’m concerned that this is the scenario the “Bird Flu Scare” has set into motion.

Surely, we are better than this! Surely, we Americans will not be herded, like sheep, by fear!

What’s needed here is calm, clear, thinking. Those attempting to create a panic should be told to back off. Let’s see some real science on this and not the “pop” science we get so much of today. Let’s not have a replay of the Swine Flu Scare of 1976. The sun WILL come up tomorrow and most of us will be alive to see it. Bird Flu, or not!

Longstreet