The Infection Deception -- Unanswered Questions about the Swine Flu Controversy

by Byron Belitsos and Len Saputo, M.D.

On Friday October 23, President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, plunging the H1N1 controversy ever more deeply into an Orwellian world of disinformation, fear, and confusion. The government's program of swine flu vaccination was already the most ambitious of its kind since the anti-polio campaign of the 1950s. And now, this surprise declaration from the president raised anxiety levels by giving federal health officials much greater powers in the face of a supposed pandemic. The ostensible reason for Obama's heavy-handed act--at least according to the official explanation--was merely to authorize hospitals to set up emergency health-care operations in nonstandard ways and locations. Yet this explanation was odd in the extreme, given that a national emergency declaration is just not necessary in order to simply waive something as simple as hospital-tent rules; Obama could have easily accomplished the same thing with an Executive Order. [1]

But a bigger cause of consternation was that, just two days previous to Obama's surprise announcement, CBS News had published the results of a major swine flu investigation that effectively refuted the need for such an emergency declaration. CBS seriously disputed the government's official figures concerning the number of infections, publishing raw state-by-state data obtained from state labs which showed that the incidence of swine flu was being overstated by more than 90 percent. CBS also revealed that the CDC had directly obstructed their investigation in a variety of ways. Something had to be done quickly to counter one of America's most respected news sources.

Upping the swine-flu ante was none other than Tom Freiden, the head of the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) in Atlanta, who came forward a few days after this embarrassment to state that "many millions had been infected. Confirming "research was then released a week later by the CDC that was based not on actual collected data, but on computer projections. [2]

Now we knew for sure: CDC officials would stick with a program of obfuscation in the face of contrary facts, even if published by the mainstream press.

The problems facing the administration were mounting: By mid-October, too many Americans weren't buying the swine flu threat. Surveys showed that more than 50 percent of all health care workers nationwide, including nurses and physicians, did not plan to take the vaccine. An LA Times poll showed that 62 percent of the public were choosing to not vaccinate themselves or their family despite the president insisting it was an emergency. Another major national poll showed that more than a third of all parents would not get their kids vaccinated.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, America's own "celebrity TV physician, confounded the debate even more, when in an interview on CNN he declared that he will get the vaccine (which he did later, live, on his national show), but that his wife and kids would not. And then a few weeks later it was revealed that Oz has since 2005 owned 150,000 options on stocks in SIGA Technologies, a vaccine technology company whose success depends on the widespread adoption of vaccines. [3]

And many more zigzags were set to occur--that is, jerky movements of the epidemic plot line in which reality zigged one way, while compromised science and government disinformation zagged in the opposite direction.

Zig: California's governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declares a state of emergency in the nation's most populous state. Zag: CBS News finds a few weeks later that only two percent of test samples from over 13,000 suspected swine flu patients in the state were actually swine flu.

Zig: Governor David Paterson of New York declares his own state of emergency. Zag: Just a week or so before that, a New York Supreme Court judge issued a restraining order against the state, ordering it not to enforce the controversial mandatory vaccination on health care personnel.

And then there's the ultimate zig and zag: The government stops counting the numbers of swine flu cases via lab tests. Its "assumed numbers get zonked by the nation's leading TV investigative team. This is next followed by a declaration of a national emergency. And then, the CDC suddenly triples the death count overnight from 1,615 to 4,000 on November 11.

Eventually, all such cases of cognitive dissonance must get resolved: Either there is outright deception underlying the governmental programs at the national and international levels--one designed to panic populations into believing the influenza is more serious than it actually is, so that they will take the "jab--or the federal government, the WHO (World Health Organization), and the CDC have lost their ability to think clearly about human biology or count past one hundred.

This article seeks to discover the reasons for these strange doings, and asks key unanswered questions that now bedevil this controversy.

In our survey of the data derived primarily from mainstream media sources, it appears that four pillars of evidence point to a massive disjunction between the facts and government rhetoric that trumpets a national emergency whose only solution is the largest vaccination drive in 60 years.
(1) First of all, the alleged epidemic is--thus far--almost a non-event; it prevalence and virulence are comparable to a typical seasonal flu.

(2) Immunization programs for flu have never been shown to be effective.

(3) The FDA is directly suppressing products that boost immunity in the population, making Americans even more vulnerable to other infections, and even to H1N1 itself. This issue is, by the way, just another species of the paradigm war waged by mainstream allopathic medicine against alternative medicine that we map out in our book, A Return To Healing: Health Care Reform and the Future of Medicine (Origin Press, 2009).

(4) Considerable evidence points to the possibility that the flu vaccines are more dangerous that the diseases they purport to protect us from.

Let's consider each of the four areas.

Is the Current Strain of H1N1 Really a Threat?

From the outset, WHO Director General Dr. Margaret Chan seemed almost eager for a pandemic to call her very own, when she declared on April 29--with very scanty evidence in hand--that a "global outbreak is imminent. Chan's initial declaration was based on the alleged fact that, as she said, "So far, 176 people have been killed in Mexico.

Unfortunately, this crucial number turned out to be highly misleading. Soon after her announcement, only seven deaths were shown by lab analysis to result from the H1N1 swine flu strain, according to the Mexican Ministry of Health. A week later the official toll was scaled down to 19. This was a sketchy way to launch a global pandemic.

A similar rush to judgment occurred in New York city in late April, when several hundred children were quickly categorized as having the H1N1 influenza; yet in none of these cases was the diagnosis corroborated by a laboratory test.

The mild, new strain was certainly communicable, and it did manage to travel around the world to numerous countries. By June 11 Chan had raise the level of influenza pandemic alert to Phase 6, the highest possible--making it the first flu pandemic declaration in 41 years.

How could this escalation to a global pandemic of the worst sort possible happen so quickly, in less than two months from the outbreak?

According to our investigation, the WHO was in part enabled to declare a "global flu pandemic of the worst sort because--by virtue of sheer and utter coincidence--WHO officials had a month earlier changed the very definition of the word "pandemic to something much more benign. We have ascertained that this occurred sometime during the month of May, or early June, in time for the Phase 6 designation.

Our archival search shows that by as late as May 1, 2009, a pandemic was defined at the WHO website in just the way that it has long been understood to mean--as a worldwide epidemic "with enormous numbers of deaths and illness. Somehow during the period between May 1 and the June 11 announcement of a Phase 6 pandemic, the requirement of enormous virulence was quietly struck from the definition. The definition of pandemic now posted at the WHO site reads: "A disease epidemic occurs when there are more cases of that disease than normal. A pandemic is a worldwide epidemic of a disease. [4]

Later in June the WHO claimed that "as many as 2 billion people could become infected over the next two years--nearly one-third of the world population. It also asserted that at least 4.9 billion doses would be needed to inoculate the planet, representing an estimated $400 billion in revenue to vaccine manufacturers.

Fast-forward to mid-November.

The current "official totals in the global outbreak as of this writing are: 643,278 cases worldwide and 8,083 deaths, or a death rate of 1.2 percent. And according to the questionable CDC data, the U.S. is among the most infected countries, with 44,555 cases and 1,615 deaths, and a death rate of 1.9 percent. (See flucount.org.)

We've already broached that little hard evidence exists to back up any of this data, at least at the national level. Let's look more closely at this crucial work of CBS News.

First, one must understand that the CDC stopped testing for and counting swine flu cases on August 30, advising states to do the same, justifying this by asserting that "the government has already confirmed an epidemic.

A new system of data-gathering by states now replaced the required weekly report of lab-confirmed H1N1-related hospitalizations and deaths that had begun in April. Now they were to send in consolidated reports that combined the numbers of either laboratory-confirmed swine flu, pneumonia, and flu incidence from all types or subtypes of influenza.(5) In ordering this, the CDC was now following the lead of the WHO. Soon after they had declared the swine flu a pandemic in early June, the WHO stated on their website that they would recategorize all cases of common influenza as H1N1 swine flu.