rigorousintuition.ca

Eeeew! Vaccine made in bugs?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125911113742763271.html

Vaccine Makers Struggle to Speed Output
Cell-Culture Technology Hastens the Process, but Slow-Growing Virus Remains a Problem, and U.S. Production Is Years Away




By BETSY MCKAY and JEANNE WHALEN

A new Novartis AG vaccine plant in North Carolina is supposed to boost the U.S.'s ability to fight pandemics like the current swine-flu virus. But despite a ribbon-cutting Tuesday, it won't be pumping out flu shots for at least another two years.

Nor will the plant's cutting-edge technology do much to solve one of the biggest problems vaccine makers have faced in churning out this year's swine-flu vaccine: a slow-growing virus. High-speed techniques that bypass the lengthy and onerous process of incubating viruses to make vaccine are years away.

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Reuters

Novartis employees clean equipment at the Novartis flu vaccine facility in Holly Springs, N.C., on Tuesday.

After more than five years and about $2 billion in government spending, the U.S. is still struggling to modernize and speed up production of vaccinations against deadly pandemics like swine flu. The system is undermined by a lack of manufacturing plants and by decades-old technology that takes six to nine months to make flu vaccine.

The new Novartis plant, heavily financed by the U.S. government, represents one of the biggest steps in 60 years toward modernizing flu-vaccine manufacturing in the U.S. It uses new technology to grow flu viruses in vats of cells derived from dog kidneys, and uses these viruses to make vaccine. The decades-old process involves growing the virus in chicken eggs.

Novartis says the new approach could shave four to six weeks off the time needed to make each shot. The plant has other advantages: If a deadly avian-flu virus hit, it could kill scores of chickens and endanger the supply of eggs needed to make vaccine the old-fashioned way. Cell-culture technology removes that risk.


Novartis's new plant is just one element of a bigger modernization strategy that will take years to unfold. It has taken the Swiss pharmaceutical giant more than three years to build the plant and fine-tune the technology. And the company must carry out more tests on its equipment and vaccine before it can start mass producing the shots in the U.S., even though it already has a cell-culture factory in Germany.

Even when the new Novartis plant is up and running, flu viruses that grow slowly in eggs, as does the current H1N1 virus, may also grow slowly in cells, meaning production may not be much faster, scientists warn.

Cell-culture technology "is not the end game for us," said Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. government's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. His institute is spending $262 million this year on influenza research, including research on a new generation of vaccines that can be made without having to grow a virus.

Protein Sciences Corp., of Meriden, Conn., received a $35 million contract from the Department of Health and Human Services in June to develop a next-generation flu vaccine that doesn't depend on growing the virus, but inserts genetic material from a flu virus into another virus that infects insect cells. The infected insect cells produce proteins that are then used to create a vaccine for humans. Such a shot is "a year or two [away] at the most," Dr. Fauci said. A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel narrowly voted last week against approval of the vaccine, asking for more studies.

The government began investing heavily in flu vaccine after the outbreak of avian flu in 2003, and then a shortage of seasonal-flu vaccine in 2004 when a large manufacturer suffered a contamination problem. HHS has put $1.56 billion into cell-based projects like the new Novartis plant.

But when the new H1N1 virus emerged in April, none of those technologies had yet been licensed. The government had no choice but to turn to its slow, but tried-and-true egg-based system. Then, the new H1N1 virus proved uncooperative, growing slowly in the eggs and yielding only a quarter to a third of the antigen—the main ingredient in vaccine—that manufacturers had been expecting.

The slow pace of modernization underscores a deeper, fundamental problem with the U.S. market for flu vaccines: uncertain demand and slim profit margins. The government is trying to build a pandemic vaccine manufacturing system on the back of a fickle market for seasonal-flu vaccine.

The majority of Americans routinely ignore public health officials' pleas to get an annual flu shot.

An oversupply of flu vaccine on the U.S. market in the past three years has pushed prices down 30% to 40%, "creating a strong disincentive for manufacturers to maximize or even maintain current production capacity for the U.S. market," Vas Narasimhan, president of Novartis Vaccines USA, said in written testimony submitted for a congressional hearing last week.

It isn't clear how many benefits cell-culture technology will offer. A spokeswoman for Illinois-based Baxter International Inc. said the company's cell-culture plant in the Czech Republic—one of the first large-scale cell-culture facilities—initially experienced the same difficulty growing the H1N1 virus that egg-based plants did. Like other drug makers, Baxter managed to improve the yield, she said, though she declined to say by how much. Baxter is supplying 80 million doses of H1N1 vaccine to countries including Austria, the U.K., Ireland, Germany and France. Its flu vaccine isn't licensed for sale in the U.S.

Other companies have had mixed results with cells. GlaxoSmithKline PLC of the U.K. received a $274 million HHS contract in 2007 to develop cell-culture vaccine and to build manufacturing capacity for it, but in an interview in September, the head of the company's vaccine business said the technology is about a decade away from being "mature" enough for use. "GSK will be in cell-culture technology perhaps in ten years, but not today," Jean Stephenne, the Glaxo official, said.

France's Sanofi-Aventis, the world's largest flu-vaccine maker, has also cast doubt on the immediate usefulness of cell-culture technology. In an interview in April, Sanofi's chief executive said the sticking point was designing the right kind of cells. "We just haven't actually found the right cell lines that do what we need them to do," he said."We're still several years away from cell-based flu vaccines," he said.

HHS gave Sanofi a $97 million grant in 2005 to carry out work in the area. A Sanofi spokeswoman said Tuesday that the company did develop a cell-based flu vaccine, but found that it provided only a "modest" reduction in production time and would be "considerably" more expensive to produce.

The "ultimate end game" is a universal flu vaccine that would protect people against all flu strains by targeting a component of the influenza virus that remains constant from season to season, said Dr. Fauci. That would eliminate the need for a flu shot every year. Novartis and other companies are at an early stage of researching such a vaccine, but such a shot is at least 10 years away, he said.

chiggerbit wrote:Eeeew! Vaccine made in bugs?

Made in insect cells, not bugs per se.

Insect cells are often used in biochemistry labs where eukaryotic cells are needed.

Good thing these mutations don't seem to transmit very effectively.

http://tinyurl.com/yzx8mnq

H1N1 virus mutation means no protection - swine flu vaccine ineffective against Ukraine flu outbreak
November 27, 8:35 AMLA Health Technology ExaminerVictoria Nicks

H1N1 vaccine may not help if swine flu mutation spreads
AP Photo/Toby Talbot


One sample of the Ukraine flu virus has been classed as a low reactor to the H1N1 vaccine. If this mutation spreads, it could result in infection for people who have been vaccinated against the swine flu. Other mutations that have been identified include Tamiflu resistance and complete destruction of the lungs.

Virus mutation and reaction to flu vaccines

Vaccines are created to respond to each different type of virus, and must be adapted if the virus changes too much from the original. Influenza viruses are highly susceptible to mutation, which explains the requirement for a new seasonal flu vaccine each year. When a vaccine provides a strong immune response to a virus, that virus is considered to be a high reactor to the vaccine. In the event that the virus mutates to the point where the vaccine provides a limited or nonexistent level of protection, it is considered a low reactor.

H1N1 mutation and the swine flu vaccine

The samples of the Ukraine flu virus that were analyzed by the World Health Organization provide a great deal of information about the mutations found in this strain of the swine flu. For example, each of the samples from fatalities contained a change in the receptor binding domain for the virus to D225G, which affects the lungs. In addition, one sample has been classed as a low reactor, which means that if that strain of virus were to spread, individuals who have been vaccinated would not be protected.

http://www.financialsense.com/editorial ... /1208.html

The man with the nickname "Dr Flu", Professor Albert Osterhaus, of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam Holland has been named by Dutch media researchers as the person at the center of the worldwide Swine Flu H1N1 Influenza A 2009 pandemic hysteria. Not only is Osterhaus the connecting person in an international network that has been described as the Pharma Mafia, he is THE key advisor to WHO on influenza and is intimately positioned to personally profit from the billions of euros in vaccines allegedly aimed at H1N1.

Earlier this year the Second Chamber of the Netherland Parliament undertook an investigation into alleged conflicts of interest and financial improprieties of the well-known Dr. Osterhaus. Outside Holland and a mention at the time in the Dutch media, the only note of the sensational investigation into Osterhaus' business affairs came in a tiny note in the respected British magazine, Science.

Osterhaus's credentials and expertise in his field were not in question. What is according to a short report published by the journal Science, are his links to corporate interests that stand to potentially profit from the swine flu pandemic. Science carried the following brief note in its October 16 2009 issue about Osterhaus:

It's a long article, here's more:

In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in Germany, epidemiologist Dr. Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration, an organization of independent scientists evaluating all flu related studies, noted the implications of the privatization of WHO and the commercialization of health:

"...one of the extraordinary features of this influenza -- and the whole influenza saga -- is that there are some people who make predictions year after year, and they get worse and worse. None of them so far have come about, and these people are still there making these predictions. For example, what happened with the bird flu, which was supposed to kill us all? Nothing. But that doesn't stop these people from always making their predictions. Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.

SPIEGEL: Who do you mean? The World Health Organization (WHO)?
Jefferson: The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies. They've built this machine around the impending pandemic. And there's a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions! And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding...18

When asked if the WHO had deliberately declared the Pandemic Emergency in order to create a huge market for H1N1 vaccines and drugs, Jefferson replied,

"Don't you think there's something noteworthy about the fact that the WHO has changed its definition of pandemic? The old definition was a new virus, which went around quickly, for which you didn't have immunity, and which created a high morbidity and mortality rate. Now the last two have been dropped, and that's how swine flu has been categorized as a pandemic." 19

Conveniently enough, the WHO published the new Pandemic definition in April 2009 just in time to allow WHO, on advice of SAGE and others like Albert "Dr Flu" Osterhaus and David Salisbury, to declare the mild cases of flu dubbed H1N1 Influenza A to be declared Pandemic. 20

In a relevant footnote, the Washington Post on December 8 in an article on the severity, or lack of same, of the world H1N1 ,pandemic" reported that "with the second wave of H1N1 infections having crested in the United States, leading epidemiologists are predicting that the pandemic could end up ranking as the mildest since modern medicine began documenting influenza outbreaks."

Greed at it's best...

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20091211_Swine-flu_cases_drop_in_the_region.html?viewAll=y


Posted on Fri, Dec. 11, 2009


Fit, but dead of swine flu
By Don Sapatkin

Inquirer Staff Writer

Laura Brewster, healthy and fit at 56, ran, swam, and played tennis. Two weeks ago, she returned to Glenside from a dream vacation in China. Less than a week later, she was dead of swine flu.

Kevin Hirsch, 26, almost never missed a day of work at a McDonald's restaurant in Northeast Philadelphia. "He didn't have a runny nose, a cold, or a fever in 15 years," said his father, Mickey, who disconnected his son's life support on Nov. 18 after nearly 15 agonizing days in the ICU.

For months, public health authorities have emphasized the dangers of swine flu for people with specific medical conditions. Such patients account for between 60 and 80 percent of hospitalizations and deaths.

But 20 to 40 percent do not fit that profile. Some may have gotten medical care too late. Some may have had underlying conditions not known to them or their doctors or factors, such as a genetic predisposition, that science has yet to discover. Others may simply have lost out in the roll of the dice, like the nonsmoker who dies of lung cancer.

As a society, we tend to think everything has a clear cause, said epidemiologist Laurie Kamimoto, who leads the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's surveillance of influenza hospitalization.

"I don't think people cozy up to the idea that it [may be] just bad luck," she said.

Even as more people die from swine flu, new cases have dropped dramatically, a concern to experts who fear that people will skip vaccination, making them vulnerable to a return wave.

Scientists worldwide are trying to identify who is most at risk from novel H1N1 influenza. Children were identified early on. The biggest risk factors for seasonal flu - pulmonary, heart, and metabolic diseases (such as diabetes), and immune systems that are suppressed (by drugs for cancer and diseases such as HIV) - do raise the risk of complications from swine flu.

Pregnancy, another known risk, appears to be an even greater factor in this pandemic. Hypertension, a history of smoking, and obesity also may make people more vulnerable.

Morbidly obese people (body mass index of 40 and above), currently 5 percent of the U.S. population, were hospitalized at five times the expected rate, Kamimoto and colleagues reported in the New England Journal of Medicine last month. Most had other chronic conditions, however, so the reasons are unclear.

Brewster and Hirsch each had a slight brush with possible new risk factors: She smoked one or two cigarettes a day before quitting last year. He, at 5-foot-4 and 180 pounds, qualified as obese (defined as BMI of 30 and over; his was 30.9).

In interviews, however, their doctors and families described them as unusually healthy and at no particular risk of complications. They were not members of any group currently given priority for immunization, and they did not get vaccinated.

With vaccine supplies slowly increasing, the government is expected soon to expand eligibility. Reports this week that a swine-flu strain resistant to the antiviral Tamiflu was implicated in the death of a Delaware man last month, as in a handful of other cases worldwide, highlighted the role of vaccine as a key barrier to infection.

The death toll has continued to rise, now touching every county in the region except Bucks. Pennsylvania attributed 65 deaths to swine flu through yesterday, including one each in Chester and Delaware Counties, five in Montgomery, and at least 15 in Philadelphia. New Jersey listed 34 deaths through last week, including two each in Camden and Burlington Counties, and three in Gloucester County.

The actual death toll is widely believed to be far higher. The CDC yesterday estimated that nearly 10,000 people have died nationwide, about 10 times the number of confirmed cases. None were believed to have died during the normal flu season, which typically kills an estimated 36,000 Americans.

Meanwhile, new swine flu cases have plummeted.

Just 2.4 percent of specimens from a sampling of laboratories in the extended Philadelphia region tested positive for flu last week, said SDI Health L.L.C., a Plymouth Meeting company that analyzes health data. That is down from 30.1 percent six weeks earlier and close to the lowest recorded in a year for the region, which extends from Reading, Pa., east to Ocean City, N.J., north to Trenton, and south to Dover, Del.

Visits to the emergency room at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, which hit a record in October, declined to normal levels about 10 days ago for the first time since September.

Less sickness may mean less interest in vaccine, and that worries Mickey Hirsch. In the three weeks since Kevin's death, he has turned grief into action.

The single father of three had a powerful bond with his preternaturally happy eldest son, who had a constellation of cognitive deficits, from severe learning disabilities to an inability to think abstractly, since infancy. "He didn't understand history, didn't understand God, but he understood sports," Hirsch said, "and he had a Ph.D. in public transportation."

Now the independent contractor is on a whirlwind campaign for vaccination, tacking more than 100 homemade posters around his Welsh Road-Willets Road neighborhood, and purposefully corresponding with thousands of people on the "Prayers for Kevin Hirsch" Facebook page set up during his son's illness.

For those who are uncertain, he offers support, personally escorting dozens to get vaccinated at the city health center on Cottman Avenue.

And for those who loudly question the worth or safety of vaccines, he is blunt: "They should be thankful that their parents didn't feel the same way when it came time to get the polio vaccine. Otherwise you would be on crutches or in wheelchairs."

Stanton Segal, medical director of Aria Health and an attending physician at its Torresdale Campus, where Kevin Hirsch died, is less strident. "It is a good illustration of how important it is to get vaccinated," he said. "This was a pretty healthy young guy."

In fact, researchers have noticed a paradox with this flu and others. "Some of the people in the most robust health," said Andrew T. Pavia, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Utah School of Medicine, "have the most severe disease."

One possibility is that their immune systems are so aggressive that they fail to shut down, overwhelming the body.

The trait may turn out to be genetic. A paper that Pavia coauthored last year in the Journal of Infectious Diseases found that the siblings, children, and grandchildren of people who died in the 1918 influenza pandemic were more likely than others to die of flu-related complications decades later.

Inherited or not, an immune system so strong that it can kill when provoked might be strong enough to confer unusually good health otherwise, Pavia said.

Such a scenario could help explain, in theory, cases like Laura Brewster's.

"She entered your life with the gusto of a Nike ad and challenged you to just do it," said Fran Duffy, rapidly tapping the words on a small laptop for a visitor at her home in Lafayette Hill.

The women's friendship began at a swimming pool more than 10 years ago; when Duffy later lost the ability to speak after a stroke, Brewster became a part-time caregiver. It was Brewster who suggested a 12-day adventure, Shanghai to Beijing, including the Great Wall, the terra cotta army of Xi'an, and a Yangtze River cruise.

On the last day, she developed a cough and figured it was a mild flu. It had worsened by the time she arrived home on Thanksgiving Day, her family said. Two days later, her doctor said her lungs seemed clear but he wrote prescriptions for medicine to ease her breathing, and for a chest X-ray.

"Oftentimes early on there can be no indication that things are going to get much worse," said Jaclyn Rosenzweig, an infectious-disease doctor at Abington Memorial Hospital who later consulted on the case. "On the other hand, if they sent everybody into the hospital who had influenza, the hospitals would be overwhelmed," she said, and all the mildly sick patients would spread disease.

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, one day after seeing her doctor, Brewster went to Abington. By the next day, she was on life support. Two days later, on Wednesday, she died.

"She was the picture of health," Duffy wrote on her keyboard, "the most unlikely person" to die from swine flu.

"I would have thought I'd be more vulnerable."

I wonder how much might be a lack of inborn immunity. And how the heck can inborn immunity be passed on? Also, is it possible that the 1918 flu has passed on an inborn immunity, which explains why this flu is so mild?

http://tinyurl.com/yfgf38o

Native Americans Four Times More Vulnerable to H1N1 Death, Says CDC
Comment Email Print RSS News Widget ShareThis
Cheryl Clark, for HealthLeaders Media, December 16, 2009

Hospitalizations and deaths from the H1N1 virus this year are much higher among Native Americans and Alaska Natives than other racial or ethnic groups, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in cooperation with a 12-state investigation project.


"During (the period between) April 15 and Nov. 13, American Indian and Alaska Natives in the 12 participating states had an H1N1 mortality rate four times higher," the CDC said in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5848a1.htm) last week.

Reasons for this disparity in death rates are unknown, but CDC suggested it could be because of a higher prevalence of chronic health conditions in those populations, which make them predisposed to influenza complications, as well as poverty and delayed access to care.

CDC suggested increased awareness of these patient populations and their healthcare providers to educate about the "potential severity of influenza and current recommendations regarding the timely use of antiviral medications."

The 12 states highlighted are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Michigan, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, which are regions of the country where 50% of the U.S. Native American and Alaska Native populations reside.

Ok, here's what I've been waiting for--an assessment of how the crisis, minor as it was, was handled, so far. I don't think we're ready yet for the bad one.

http://ahier.blogspot.com/2009/12/repor ... ps-in.html

Report Shows H1N1 Revealed Gaps in Nation's Emergency Health Preparedness Efforts



The seventh annual Ready or Not? Protecting the Public’s Health from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism report, released today by the Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), found that the H1N1 flu outbreak has exposed serious underlying gaps in the nation’s ability to respond to public health emergencies and that the economic crisis is straining an already fragile public health system.


The report found that 20 states scored six or less out of 10 key indicators of public health emergency preparedness. Nearly two-thirds of states scored seven or less. Eight states tied for the highest score of nine out of 10: Arkansas, Delaware, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, and Vermont. Montana had the lowest score at three out of 10. The preparedness indicators are developed in consultation with leading public health experts based on data from publicly available sources or information provided by public officials.

“The H1N1 outbreak has vividly revealed existing gaps in public health emergency preparedness,” said Richard Hamburg, deputy director of TFAH. “The Ready or Not? report shows that a Band-Aid approach to public health is inadequate. As the second wave of H1N1 starts to dissipate, it doesn’t mean we can let down our defenses. In fact, it’s time to double down and provide a sustained investment in the underlying infrastructure, so we will be prepared for the next emergency and the one after that.”

Overall, the report found that the investments made in pandemic and public health preparedness over the past several years dramatically improved U.S. readiness for the H1N1 outbreak. But it also found that decades of chronic underfunding meant that many core systems were not at-the-ready. Some key infrastructure concerns were a lack of real-time coordinated disease surveillance and laboratory testing, outdated vaccine production capabilities, limited hospital surge capacity, and a shrinking public health workforce. In addition, the report found that more than half of states experienced cuts to their public health funding and federal preparedness funds have been cut by 27 percent since fiscal year (FY) 2005, which puts improvements that have been made since the September 11th tragedies at risk.

Some key findings from the report include:

27 states cut funding for public health from FY 2007-08 to 2008-09.
13 states have purchased less than 50 percent of their share of federally subsidized antiviral drugs to stockpile for use during an influenza pandemic.
14 states do not have the capacity in place to assure the timely pick-up and delivery of laboratory samples on a 24/7 basis to the Laboratory Response Network (LRN).
11 states and D.C. report not having enough laboratory staffing capacity to work five 12-hour days for six to eight weeks in response to an infectious disease outbreak, such as H1N1.
“State and local health departments around the country are being asked to do more with less during the H1N1 outbreak as budgets continue to be stretched beyond their limits,” said Michelle Larkin, J.D., public health team director and senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “Public health provides essential prevention and preparedness services that help us lead healthier lives—without sustained and stable funding, Americans will continue to be needlessly at risk for the next public health threat.”

The report also offers a series of recommendations for improving preparedness, including:

Ensure Stable and Sufficient Funding. The 27 percent cut to federal support for public health preparedness since FY 2005 must be restored, and funding must be stabilized at a sufficient level to support core activities and emergency planning. Increased funding must also be provided to modernize flu vaccine production, improve vaccine and antiviral research and development, and fully support the Hospital Preparedness Program.
Conduct an H1N1 After-Action Report and Update Preparedness Plans with Lessons Learned. Strengths and weaknesses of the H1N1 response should be evaluated and used to revise and strengthen federal, state, and local preparedness planning, including assessing what additional resources are needed to be sufficiently prepared. Identified gaps in core systems, including communications, surveillance, and laboratories much be addressed. In addition, continued surge capacity concerns, including establishing crisis standards of care, must be addressed.
Increase Accountability and Transparency. Federal and state health departments should regularly make updates on progress made on benchmarks and deliverables identified in the Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness Act available to the public so they can see how tax dollars are being used and how well protected their communities are from health threats.
Improve Community Preparedness. Additional measures must be taken to reach out quickly and effectively to high-risk populations, including strengthening culturally competent communications around the safety of vaccines. Health disparities among low-income and racial/ethnic minorities, who are often at higher risk during emergencies, must also be addressed.
Score Summary:

For the state-by-state scoring, states received one point for achieving an indicator or zero points if they did not achieve the indicator. Zero is the lowest possible overall score, 10 is the highest. The data for the indicators are from publicly available sources or were provided from public officials.

9 out of 10: Arkansas, Delaware, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Vermont

8 out of 10: Alabama, California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Wisconsin

7 out of 10: Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia

6 out of 10: Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming

5 out of 10: Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Maine, Washington

3 out of 10: Montana

beeline wrote:http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20091211_Swine-flu_cases_drop_in_the_region.html?viewAll=y


Posted on Fri, Dec. 11, 2009


Fit, but dead of swine flu
By Don Sapatkin

Inquirer Staff Writer

Laura Brewster, healthy and fit at 56, ran, swam, and played tennis. Two weeks ago, she returned to Glenside from a dream vacation in China. Less than a week later, she was dead of swine flu.

Two people died. Everybody get vaccinated now!!!

chiggerbit wrote:Ok, here's what I've been waiting for--an assessment of how the crisis, minor as it was, was handled, so far. I don't think we're ready yet for the bad one.

Well, I guess we'll need a couple more test runs then.

chiggerbit wrote:
Ok, here's what I've been waiting for--an assessment of how the crisis, minor as it was, was handled, so far. I don't think we're ready yet for the bad one.




That is a great question. I am of the opinion that this flu non-pandemic may not be a good measure of pandemic readiness because it was a deliberately and artifically manufactured pseuodo crisis. The true forces of the pandemic combat squad were never utilized because the heads of the larger machine knew it was a bogus situation. For the most part, the combat consisted of selling as much vaccine as possible into an artificially created hoax , and the rest was lip service window dressing. I don't consider that much of a pandemic combat effort. The CDC even advised that serology testing, except in a few key areas, cease and be stopped. That is the tip off that the perpetrators did not want too much evidence lying around. Had this been a real pandemic, the serology testing data would have been crucial info to combat future outbreaks, because it would show the distincts outbreak patterns, and as importantly lack of.

Which is what we have now "lack of", conveniently un-documented for the future.


I dug this thread up specifically to post this article but I see someone beat me to it. This is one of the better pieces of work I have seen to connect the dots and show how this non event was constructed.

http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/S ... _pope.html

WHO ‘Swine Flu Pope’ under investigation for gross conflict of interest

JANE BURGERMEISTER AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE SWINE FLU UPDATE 12 12 2009 1 / 5JANE BURGERMEISTER AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE SWINE FLU UPDATE 12 12 2009 1 / 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9WCD_Arsok

~
PharmaTimes

EU to probe pharma over “false pandemic”
By Lynne Taylor
04 January 2010

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is to hold an emergency debate and inquiry this month into the “influence” exerted by drugmakers on the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) global H1N1 flu campaign.

The text of the resolution approved by the Assembly calling for the debate and inquiry states that: “in order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies, and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.”

The WHO’s “false pandemic” flu campaign is “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century,” according to Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, chairman the PACE Health Committee, who introduced the parliamentary motion. “The definition of an alarming pandemic must not be under the influence of drug-sellers,” he adds.

Dr Wodarg, a doctor and former SPD member of the German Bundestag, says that the “false pandemic” campaign began last May in Mexico City, when a hundred or so “normal” reported influenza cases were declared to be the beginning of a threatening new pandemic, although there was little scientific evidence for this. Nevertheless the WHO, “in cooperation with some big pharmaceutical companies and their scientists, re-defined pandemics,” removing the statement that “an enormous amount of people have contracted the illness or died” from its existing definition and replacing it by stating simply that there has to be a virus, spreading beyond borders and to which people have no immunity.

These new standards forced politicians in most states to react immediately and sign marketing commitments for additional and new vaccines against swine flu, through “sealed contracts” under which orders are secured in advance and governments take almost all responsibility. “In this way, the producers of vaccines are sure of enormous gains without having any financial risks. So they just wait until WHO says ‘pandemic’ and activate the contracts,” says Dr Wodarg.

“In January, we will arrange an emergency debate about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the WHO, and 47 parliaments all over Europe are going to be informed. Following this, we will initiate an investigation and hearings involving those responsible for the pandemic emergency. The aim is that none of the pharmaceutical companies under any circumstances must be allowed to make their influence felt on pandemic emergencies,” he went on.

“The victims among millions of needlessly vaccinated people must be protected by their states, and independent scientific clarification should provide evidence and transparency for national and, if necessary, European courts,” added Dr Wodarg.
~

Flu news summaries from around the world:

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/specia ... 97097.html

http://organichealthadviser.com/archive ... do-not-mix

Many stories of women who miscarried very shortly after taking the vaccine.

I've seen that before. Now that you've reminded me...sorry, hard for me to talk about this....my daughter miscarried this month, first pregnancy. Looking at the timing now, I'm wondering if she became preggers near the time that she had the flu (most likely h1n1) or shortly afterwards.

Dammit, I'm re-reading what I said above, and see that my words might have come out to mean what I didn't mean. You didn't "remind" me of the miscarriage, Alwyn. That is there every day, so I'm not "reminded" of it. But you reminded me of the information on that site that possibly links the flu shots to miscarriages, which I had read before I knew about my daughter's pregnancy. And I put two and two together just now when I read that link.