A Phil-for-an-ill Blog

October 28, 2009

Is the Disease Really Worse than the Cure?

As I was looking for vaccine related information, I stumbled on this most remarkable quote by one Prof. Annika Linde:

Thousands of Swedes have been vaccinated so far and the reports of side effects are “flooding in” to The Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control (SMI). Annika Linde: “It is obviously so that the vaccine against the swine flu results in more side effects than the normal flu vaccines. That is because the swine flu vaccine contains adjuvants, shark liver oil, which triggers the immune defense to respond. That also results in that the protection against the virus becomes better.blogs.healthfreedomalliance.org

Questioning the Rationale for Deploying Vaccines

Let’s analyze that statement for a while. It is asserted that when more people come down with side-effects then this means somehow that the protection against the actual disease is getting better. That’s an interesting thought. So the assumption is made that the stronger the immune response is, the more effective the vaccine then also must work in the sense that the disease then also should be combated more effectively.

But is this blanket assumption really justified?

What if a stronger immune response does not automatically imply that the disease is also combated more effectively? What if a stronger immune response actually not only attacks the disease but also starts attacking parts of the body? After all, this is the essence of autoimmune disease, where your own immune system becomes your enemy.

What if it just so happens that a vaccine-induced hyped up immune system stands to do more bad than good?

It should be understood that there are real dangers to using adjuvants in vaccines. In a previous blog I proved the presence and of the notorious adjuvants, thimerosal, squalene and TWEEN 80 in the current H1N1 flu shots. As I also indicated in my blog, these substances are dangerously far removed from the spectrum of safe substances. In a nutshell, thimerosal has been linked with the development of autism-like symptoms, squalene has been linked with the dreaded auto-immune disease known as Gulf War Syndrome, and TWEEN 80 may induce (deadly) anaphylaxis and has been shown to cause infertility in rats. So, these are no mild side-effects by any stretch and so the price ticket of taking this witches brew vaccine is not exactly negligible.

And therefore the statement made by Prof. Linde only makes sense if somehow the benefits of taking the vaccines outweigh its associated risks. That is, it’s worthwhile considering taking the vaccine only if the cure is not worse than the disease, proverbially speaking. Her statement only makes sense if the swine flu pandemic is also a serious enough pandemic that severely enough affects a great enough number of people across the globe. Then and only then can justification for taking a vaccine that obviously brings its own set of health-hazards be given consideration.

And so we need to ask ourselves: Just how big is this Swine flu alleged pandemic? And, how severely does it affect people around the globe?

How Severe is the H1N1 Flu Pandemic?

The CDC claims that: “So far, most flu is 2009 H1N1 flu.” I had some difficulty believing this to be true, but as you can see they do indeed claim as such:

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Spotted 29 October 2009

More specifically the CDC claims:

The first 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus infections were identified in the United States in April 2009 (1). By August, the cumulative number of infections in the United States was estimated to be at least 1 million.* This report provides an overview of influenza activity during April–August 2009 and recommendations for the upcoming 2009–10 influenza season. Pandemic H1N1 influenza activity peaked in the United States during May and June and declined during July and early August. However, levels of influenza activity remained above normal for summer months, and focal outbreaks were reported throughout the summer. During the last 2 weeks of August, pandemic H1N1 influenza activity increased in certain areas of the United States. Clinicians and public health officials should be aware that these recent increases might signal an early start to the 2009–10 influenza season, with pandemic H1N1 influenza viruses predominating at least initially.In the United States, CDC’s National Influenza Surveillance System consists of nine different systems that monitor influenza viruses and the geographic spread and level of influenza activity. In addition to these ongoing systems, in April 2009, in response to the emergence and spread of the pandemic H1N1 virus, the states and CDC implemented line-listed reporting for cases of pandemic H1N1. In May, this system transitioned to include aggregate counts of pandemic H1N1 influenza cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. On July 24, CDC recommended that states discontinue reporting of individual confirmed and probable cases of pandemic H1N1 virus infection but to continue to provide aggregate reports of influenza-associated hospitalizations and deaths. From mid-April to August 30, a total of 9,079 hospitalizations and 593 deaths associated with laboratory-confirmed 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus infections were reported to CDC. cdc.gov

As if by timely divine providence, the CBS offers a nice rebuttal to these amazing CDC claims:

A three-month-long investigation by CBS News, released earlier this week that included state-by-state test results, revealed some very different facts. The CBS study found that H1N1 flu cases are NOT as prevalent as feared. A CBS article even states:

“If you’ve been diagnosed “probable” or “presumed” 2009 H1N1 or “swine flu” in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu. In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all.

Obviously CBS News and the CDC are completely contradicting each other. So who is right?
[…]
Before beginning their investigation, CBS News asked the CDC for state-by-state test results prior to their halting of testing and tracking. The CDC did not initially respond so CBS went to all 50 states directly, asking for their statistics on state lab-confirmed H1N1 prior to the halt of individual testing and counting in July.

What did they find? CBS reported:

“The results reveal a pattern that surprised a number of health care professionals we consulted. The vast majority of cases were negative for H1N1 as well as seasonal flu, despite the fact that many states were specifically testing patients deemed to be most likely to have H1N1 flu, based on symptoms and risk factors, such as travel to Mexico.”mercola.com

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The CBS article can be found here. As also mentioned in the Mercola article based on this CBS report, Finland apparently has had enough of the Swine flu hype and decided to downgrade its threat level.

Swine Flu Compared to Seasonal Flu

To give you an impression of the real magnitude of the Swine flu casualty record. Here is an overview by flucount.org of the actual number of people fallen victim to the H1N1 flu:

As of 29 October 2009

I assume that the Swine flu cases that have been recorded by flucount.org were also severe enough to warrant medical treatment. It seems reasonable to assume that milder cases had escaped detection and therefore also escaped registration. After all, if only mild, a good portion of people may prefer to just sweat it all out at home without the intervention of medical doctors.

Assuming the pandemic is about half a year old, this means that globally we will see about a million cases all year around, claiming about a projected 15 thousand deaths. The current global case fatality ratio, is thus roughly 1,3 percent.

In the US about a projected 90 thousand people will come down with Swine flu, annually, of which about 24 hundred people will succumb. The current US case-to-fatality ratio is roughly 2,6 percent.

How do these numbers compare to conventional, seasonal flu? Wikipedia comes up with the following estimates:

Typically, in a year’s normal two flu seasons (one per hemisphere), there are between three and five million cases of severe illness and up to 500,000 deaths worldwide, which by some definitions is a yearly influenza epidemic.[127] Although the incidence of influenza can vary widely between years, approximately 36,000 deaths and more than 200,000 hospitalizations are directly associated with influenza every year in the United States.[128][129] Roughly three times per century, a pandemic occurs, which infects a large proportion of the world’s population and can kill tens of millions of people (see history section). Indeed, one study estimated that if a strain with similar virulence to the 1918 influenza emerged today, it could kill between 50 and 80 million people.[130]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza

So we see that seasonal flu is good for about 4 million cases a year, claiming about 500 thousand lives annually and globally. This yields a global case fatality ratio of about 12,5 percent. In the US about 200,000 people get severely ill, of which 36 thousand people annually die because of the contraction of seasonal flu. This yields a current US case fatality ratio of roughly 18 percent.

Any casual comparison of those figures shows without doubt that seasonal flu poses a much graver threat to public health than does Swine flu. But isn’t it odd that it is precisely Swine flu, rather than seasonal flu, that is regarded to deserve a pandemic status?

And therefore the whole H1N1 circus smells like hype, and a particularly unhealthy type of hype at that. Indeed here is a statement by the CDC director no less, that perfectly illustrates that we are in fact dealing with hype:

Meanwhile, swine flu is more widespread now than it’s ever been, and has resulted in more than 1,000 U.S. deaths so far. Flu illnesses are as widespread now as they are at the winter peak of normal flu seasons, said CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden.

“Many millions” of Americans have had swine flu so far, according to an estimate he gave at a Friday press conference. The government doesn’t test everyone to confirm swine flu so it doesn’t have an exact count.news.yahoo.com

Hype it up some more why don’t you? At first the CDC claimed that “at least a million” folks came down with Swine flu. And now we have a brazen CDC director saying that “many millions” have gotten sick. I suppose that once you’ve passed the million barrier, then somehow it is okidoki at the CDC to just jump from a single million to “many millions.”

Most Americans do not live on “Planet CDC” though, so how about many thousands instead, chief? 45 thousand to be more accurate.

So what is the reason then for decorating Swine flu with a pandemic status? Wikipedia gives one reason:

The 2009 swine flu has been compared to other similar types of influenza virus in terms of mortality: “in the US it appears that for every 1000 people who get infected, about 40 people need admission to hospital and about one person dies.”[56] There are fears that swine flu will become a major global pandemic at the end of the year (coinciding with the Northern Hemisphere winter months), with many countries planning major vaccination campaigns.[57] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza

Indeed, it seems that the authorities are hell-bent on classifying Swine flu as being a pandemic, whipping up fear to fever pitch levels, and pushing all sense and reason aside in the process, as is customary and pretty much unavoidable in these kind of rash and irrational bouts of decision-making. You see, in today’s “age of terror” it is of course most fashionable to play this nice and shiny fear card. In the present world everyone is always somewhere somehow under some sort of threat.

Why? Because the industries of fear are big business, that’s why. By exaggerating this threat of Swine flu to unseen irrational heights, the answer to the question cui bono (“who benefits”) is easily guessed through basic deduction. For one, the producers of the Swine flu vaccines make a killing of course. But since their witch’s brews are loaded with poisons it is can be anticipated with mathematical certainty that in the not too distant future numerous vaccinated people will come down with all kinds of ailments and diseases, most of them permanent and progressive (e.g. Gulf War Syndrome). Most of them will require permanent medication and/or hospitalization. So who benefits from this systemic retardation of public health? Why, Big Pharma and Big Medica of course.

Hence we have identified the likely culprits behind this farcical hype called Swine flu.

Here’s a piece of a Reuters article that even admits that Swine flu is less devastating than estimated but happily goes ahead and defends its pandemic classification just the same:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The death rate from the pandemic H1N1 swine flu is likely lower than earlier estimates, an expert in infectious diseases said on Wednesday.New estimates suggest that the death rate compares to a moderate year of seasonal influenza, said Dr Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University.”It’s mildest in kids. That’s one of the really good pieces of news in this pandemic,” Lipsitch told a meeting of flu experts being held by the U.S. Institute of Medicine.”

Barring any changes in the virus, I think we can say we are in a category 1 pandemic. This has not become clear until fairly recently.”

The Pandemic Severity Index set by the U.S. government has five categories of pandemic, with a category 1 being comparable to a seasonal flu epidemic.

Seasonal flu has a death rate of less than 0.1 percent — but still manages to kill 250,000 to 500,000 people globally every year.

A category 5 pandemic would compare to the 1918 flu pandemic, which had an estimated death rate of 2 percent or more, and would kill tens of million of people.

Lipsitch took information from around the world on how many people had reported they had influenza-like illness, which may or may not actually be influenza; government reports of actual hospitalizations and confirmed deaths.

He came up with a range of mortality from swine flu, from 0.007 percent to 0.045 percent.reuters.com

So what is a pandemic anyway and what is this Pandemic Severity Index that the article mentions?

Definition of Pandemic Pandemic: An epidemic (a sudden outbreak) that becomes very widespread and affects a whole region, a continent, or the world.By contrast:

  • An epidemic affects more than the expected number of cases of disease occurring in a community or region during a given period of time. A sudden severe outbreak within a region or a group as, for example, AIDS in Africa or AIDS in intravenous drug users.
  • An endemic is present in a community at all times but in low frequency. An endemic is continuous as in the case of malaria in some areas of the world or as with illicit drugs in some neighborhoods.

The word “pandemic” comes from the Greek “pan-“, “all” + “demos”, “people or population” = “pandemos” = “all the people.” A pandemic affects all (nearly all) of the people. By contrast, “epi-” means “upon.” An epidemic is visited upon the people. And “en-” means “in.” An endemic is in the people.medterms.com

Is it true that the H1N1 flu really “affects all (nearly all) of the people”? Even the most casual of glances at the available data must answer that pivotal question in the negative. Rather than being a dreadfully dreadful pandemic, it’s much sooner just dreadfully exaggerated. It’s so not even worthy of calling it the smallest of pandemics, that it’s downright impossible not to scoff at any allegation that it is.

But oh wait, the sexy and trendy sounding Pandemic Severity Index seems to offer a smooth and nuanced way out of this amazing overestimation of this sheer impotent disease:
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The Pandemic Severity Index (PSI) is a proposed classification scale for reporting the severity of influenza pandemics in the United States. The PSI was accompanied by a set of guidelines intended to help communicate appropriate actions for communities to follow in potential pandemic situations.[1] Released by the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on February 1, 2007, the PSI was designed to resemble the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale classification scheme.[2][3][…]The index focuses less on how likely a disease will spread worldwide-that is, become a pandemic-and more upon how severe the epidemic actually is.[7] The main criterion used to measure pandemic severity will be case-fatality ratio (CFR), the percentage of deaths out of the total reported cases of the disease.[3]

The actual implementation of PSI alerts is expected to occur after the World Health Organisation (WHO) announces phase 6 influenza transmission (human to human) in the United States. This would probably result in immediate announcement of a PSI level 3-4 situation.[3]

The analogy of “category” levels were introduced to provide an understandable connection to hurricane classification schemes, with specific reference to the recent aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.[4][7] Like the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, the PSI ranges from 1 to 5, with Category 1 pandemics being most mild (equivalent to seasonal flu) and level 5 being reserved for the most severe “worst-case” scenario pandemics (such as the 1918 Spanish flu).[3][4] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic_Severity_Index

So, according to the very definition of the Pandemic Severity Index, seasonal flu has every bit of justification to be called a (Category one) pandemic too. In fact, more so even than the Swine flu. And yet, it isn’t… but the milder Swine flu is?

This idiotic and backward classification of the situation begs the question, WHY? Well, I already addressed that question a few paragraphs back but here’s a more poetic answer:

Reason Walks when Money Talks….

Conclusion

Here we have a disease of which the casualty numbers are suspiciously hyped up to irresponsible and unrealistic levels. And we have a so-called cure that is basically a toxic witches brew that on top of that has been rushed through production with no proper testing. In fact, it is impossible to assess any long term effects when they are to be deployed no later than midway of next year.

So no, the disease is not worse than the cure. In fact, it is the cure that should be dreaded most, not the disease.

References:

  1. Proof that European H1N1 Vaccines Contain Mercury, Squalene and TWEEN 80
  2. Mercola: CBS Reveals that Swine Flu Cases Seriously Overestimated
  3. CBS-NEWS: Swine Flu Cases Overestimated?
  4. flucount.org (Swine Flu Count – Worldwide statistics of the H1N1 Influenza A Pandemic)
  5. CDC : Questions and Answers Regarding Estimating Deaths from Seasonal Influenza in the United States

My H1N1 Swine Flu blogs:
Proof that European H1N1 Vaccines Contain Mercury, Squalene and TWEEN 80
Is the Disease Really Worse than the Cure?
Vaccines, Cure or Cause?

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