Jon Christian Ryter

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A nonexistent flu virus now tops the "worry meter" at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control. Bird flu now tops the agenda at DHHS with Secretary Michael O. Leavitt holding regular briefings on fighting this pandemic threat to the world as America's healthcare industry rushes to stockpile enough H5N1 vaccine to inoculate America's at risk flu population. So how many vials of bird flu vaccine will the government need to cover this pandemic threat? Maybe one. Perhaps two.

Bird flu does not exist. What does exist, however, is the ability of the media to easily manipulate the minds of the consumers. (The barons of business and overlords of industry prepared America for the theft of their wealth and the theft of their liberty through the ratification of the 16th and 17th Amendments in 1910 and the creation of the Federal Reserve on Dec. 23, 1913. By inundating the American people with propaganda from 1929 to 1932, the money barons sold the people on the idea that the Great Depression happened because American banking system was not elastic enough to adjust to the calamity and could not generate enough currency to protect the American investor from bankruptcy. The media also sold the American people on the notion that they should have the right to directly elect their US Senators when, in fact, the Senate did not represent the people at all. The Senate, constitutionally, represented the collective views of the States, not the people within the State. That was how power-sharing was balanced at the federal level. Because of the 17th Amendment, the unelected 4th branch of government—the bureaucracy—now controls power in Washington. True power was removed completely from the hands of the people.

The rape of the wealth of the American people was completed by FDR, who pushed the New Deal Congress to legislatively abolish the gold clause—something the Congress had no legal authority to do since all constitutional alterations must be made by the ratification of amendments to the Constitution by the States. Congressman Oscar Calloway [D-TX] noted in the March, 1915 Congressional Record that a cabal of wealthy bankers and industrialists purchased the controlling interest in 179 newspapers in 1910 for the purpose of controlling public opinion in the United States. Calloway noted that the cabal reduced their holding to the 25 largest circulation newspapers in the country in 1915.) From World War I on, the cabal of bankers, industrialists and barons of business who pull the strings on Capitol Hill, learned just how easily they could manipulate the public's fears and anxieties through their partnerships with the media. Bird flu is just one more scare at the tail-end of a mile-long string of health-related scares we've witnessed in this country since the banning of DDT in the 1960s over Rachel Carson's voodoo-science fantasy, SILENT SPRING in which Carson predicted the death of all the world's birds followed by an apocalyptic plague of locusts devouring all the food in the world. Following Carson's epic excursion into avian fantasy came Paul Ehrlich's classic 1962 work (utilizing 17th century science) THE POPULATION BOMB that predicted an economic Armageddon would take place in the year 2000. Both books were heavily hawked by the left—and by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Club of Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Trust, and the UN—in thousands of newspaper and magazine articles around the world as true science—just as global warming is hawked today when only those scientists employed by the doomsayer soothsayers—roughly 13% of the scientific community—actually hold the view that global warming is real. Imaginary crisis are created for one reason and one reason only: to control you. The only time you will willingly surrender your rights to government is when you are most afraid—and have been convinced that government can eliminate that which you fear.

Which is why, when the Bush Administration began hawking avian flu as a crisis-waiting-to-happen shorting after the election of 2000, DHHS Secretary Tommy Thompson became angry when the heads of several of his agencies—who were having trouble completing a "pandemic emergency plan" for a flu that does not exist—could not give him a status report on their preparations for the impending disaster from a flu virus that did not exist. Bush has asked Congress for emergency funding for H5N1—$1.2 billion for 20 million doses of an experimental H5N1 avian flu vaccine and an additional $2.8 billion in grant money for pharmaceutical companies to develop new flu vaccines (which the drug companies will retail at $15 to $25 per dose, arguing that the high price of the vaccine at retail is due to the immense cost of research—which is largely absorbed by the taxpayers—and the cost of liability insurance to protect them from frivolous lawsuits from class action lawyers. For that reason, Bush also pressed Congress to insulate the pharmaceutical industry from lawsuits. "[Protection from frivolous lawsuits] is a key issue," Robert Webster, a research scientist at St. Jude's Children's Hospital who has made a prototype H5N1 vaccine, said. "Maybe this bird flu will never happen, but the country has got to be able to make its own vaccines."

The H5N1 avian virus was first detected in Asia in 1997. Scientists believe—but have no hard evidence to support the view—that the current avian virus strain, H5N1, is close enough to the 1918 Spanish flu to cause a global flu alert. Spanish flu killed over 600 thousand in the United States alone. To date, 122 people have been affected by the H5N1 avian virus. Sixty-two poultry workers worldwide have died after being infected by poultry carrying the virus. It must be noted that no person in the world has become infected from eating an infected bird that has been cooked. Normal cooking kills the H5N1 virus strain— unlike the AIDS virus which is so hardy it requires temperatures in excess of 400 degrees to kill it. Two hundred million birds have been destroyed in Asia and Eastern Europe since 1997 to stem the spread of the H5N1 virus.

In the height of the 1918 pandemic, US Army Surgeon General Victor Vaughn said: "If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration, civilization could easily disappear from the face of the Earth within a few weeks." Fearmongering, we see, is nothing new. Spanish flu ran its course in one "flu season," claiming 40 million lives throughout the world and, as stated above, 600 thousand here. Spanish flu began in the battlefields of Europe and spread throughout the world. Most of the dead were from 20 to 40 years of age. Unlike current flu strains, Spanish flu spared the young and the elderly. Researchers comparing the 1918 genome with H5N1 believe the two share some virulence factors, but that they are two completely different types of viruses since H5N1 has been contained for the eight years scientists have known about it.

Dr. Donald Burke, MD, at Johns Hopkin University said the "viral chatter" suggests something serious is just around the corner. Although there is no evidence that H5N1 can or will cross-mutate—and even more evidence to show that its had over a hundred opportunities to do so and has not—studies from the CDC, the Army's Institute of Pathology and Mt. Sinai School of Medicine suggest that all forms of flu known to man originated as an avian virus that contaminated humans and mutated into an airborne flu virus. An influenza pandemic situation occurs only when a viral strain emerges that [a] is so completely different from previously known circulating viral strains that everyone in the world is susceptible to it—if it mutates and [b] it has the capacity to be transmitted easily from person to person once it mutates. According to the CDC only three such avian viruses have occurred over the last 100 years—in 1918, 1957 and 1968.

If H5N1 mutates and becomes transmissible among humans, the scientific community speculates, the loss of human life worldwide could easily be tallied in the hundreds of millions—particularly in the third world nations where all of the factories of the industrialized world are being relocated—and where the industrialists, bankers and barons of business, see the "economic hope" of the world during the 21st century.

During the first week of November, 2005 President George W. Bush asked Congress for $7.1 billion to confront the "pandemic threat" as the Bush Administration assembled its massive flu preparedness plan. Bush health officials and about 400 human and veterinary health officials from the United States flew to Geneva for a 3-day UN conference focused on stopping the spread of the nonexistent flu virus. UN officials are quick to note that what "has arrived" is not the flu, but the issue.

At the UN Conference in Geneva, health officials argued that the world community needed to invest heavily in global infectious disease surveillance and scientific cooperation on the development of vaccines. In addition, the participants argued, there needed to be an international understanding with drug companies on the need to establish core principles that guarantee the availability of flu vaccines and other anti-viral drugs to the at-risk third world countries—with donor organizations getting appropriate tax write-offs for either donating the vaccines or greatly discounting them to the at-risk nations. In Geneva, the UN made a presentation for the establishment of a trust fund managed by the World Bank—funded by donations from the industrialized nations. The discussion centered on creating regional stockpiles of vaccines and antivirals for use by at-risk nations during any health catastrophe. What was not decided was where the stockpiles would be placed, and who would control their distribution and use. Likely, control would go to the World Health Organization under the control of Dr. David Nabarro who was recently named UN Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza.

Thompson told the media last week that the plan—396 pages of dire predictions of doom and advice on how the medical community will cope with the disaster and minimize the loss of life—was four years late. This was the report newly-installed DHHS Secretary Thompson was looking for, but didn't get, in 2001. Yet, the crisis on our doorsteps never materialized in 2001. Nor in 2002, 2003, 2004 or thus far, in 2005. From the time the H5N1 virus was discovered in 1997—8 years ago—it has not mutated into an airborne human flu virus, and is not likely too. And humans did not mutate from monkeys.