Fear, Intimidation & Media Disinformation: U.K Government is Planning Mass Graves in Case of H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic

By Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, August 19, 2009

An official UK government report --quoted extensively in Britain's tabloid media-- is warning the British public that there will be countless deaths in the case of a swine flu pandemic. According to the WHO, a Worlwide public health emergency situation will take place in the Fall.
A high death toll is predicted without corroborating evidence. 

The official report confirms government plans to set up mass graves for the victims of the swine flu pandemic: 
"Plans for mass graves have been drawn up to cope with a second wave of swine flu this Autumn. The chilling proposals are spelled out in a Home Office document discussed at a meeting of Whitehall officials and council leaders last month.
It warns emergency plans may be needed in areas where there are not enough graves to cope.
The 59-page document talks about using "a grave that is for a number of unrelated persons, excavated mechanically in advance and designed for efficient preparation and use". (The Sun, Augsut 19, 2009)
The mass graves, according to the report, "are being planned to deal with the rising death toll from swine flu if the pandemic escalates":
"The grim revelation will see the mass burial sites dug in advance to cope with any potential crisis.
The Government is planning to create a series of communal graves to cope with the second outbreak expected in the autumn and through the winter.
A Home Office document published earlier this year sets out plans for how local councils should deal with a high death toll – estimates of the number of deaths range from 55,000 to as high as 750,000 from the H1N1 killer virus – including setting up temporary mortuaries.
So far, 44 people in England have been confirmed as dying after contracting swine flu and another five have died in Scotland. The document says that while most cemeteries have sufficient burial capacity for a number of years, this could be put to the test at the peak of a pandemic. (Daily Express, August 19, 2009)
 
The chilling proposals contained in the government report serve to intimidate the British public and create an atmosphere of panic. A public health crisis is being planned in a diabolical fashion. . 

The report suggests unequivocally that there will be countless deaths resulting from the level 6 WHO pandemic, which require the development of mass graves: 
Within weeks of a full-blown pandemic emerging, the number of burials could more than double. Inner city areas “may experience a shortage of grave space”, the report stated.
Freight containers and “inflatable” storage units may be needed to provide extra mortuary space. But it stated that “refrigerated vehicles and trailers should not be used”.
Other contingency plans being suggested were the need for cemeteries and crematoriums to work seven days a week and to hire extra staff to cope with demand.
There may also be a need for more “basic and shorter services at the chapel” or for “memorial services” to be held at a person’s home instead.
Retired doctors could be called back to work to issue death certificates so GPs can focus on patients, while NHS Blood and Transplant has appealed to the public to give blood to ensure banks were well stocked.
A Home Office spokeswoman said: “This is prudent, precautionary planning that has been taking place over a number of years, with the health service, other essential services and local authorities. It is important to stress that these are possible scenarios, not certainties, so that our stakeholders can plan for the worst and be prepared to deal with the outbreak effectively.” (Ibid)
These assertions are totally fabricated. There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support these claims.

Realities are turned upside down. The British government is deliberately misleading the British public.  
With some exceptions, the British media bears a heavy burden of responsibility in failing to analyse these "authoritative" statements emanating from Her Majesty's Government. 
The WHO has not provided the evidence, nor has the British  government.
There is ample evidence, documented in numerous reports, that the WHO's level 6 pandemic alert is based on fabricated evidence and a manipulation of the figures on mortality and morbidity resulting from the N1H1 swine flu.
The data initially used to justify the WHO's Worldwide level 5 alert in April 2009 was extremely scanty.
 The WHO asserted without evidence that a "global outbreak of the disease is imminent". It distorted Mexico's mortality data pertaining to the swine flu pandemic. According to the WHO Director General Dr. Margaret Chan in her official April 29 statement: "So far, 176 people have been killed in Mexico". From what? Where does she get these numbers? 159 died from influenza out of which only seven deaths, corroborated by lab analysis, resulted from the H1N1 swine flu strain, according to the Mexican Ministry of Health.
The swine flu has the same symptoms as seasonal influenza: fever, cough and sore throat. What is happening is that the widespread incidence of the common flu is being used to generate the data pertaining to the H1N1 swine flu.
And all of sudden, the British authorities are predicting widespread mortality resulting from an influenza related ailment. What is the evidence. Big Pharma is behind the official reports and the media disinformation campaign.
Similarly, in the US the intervention of the military (as well as martial law provisions) are being envisaged in the case of a public health emergency.
Is this emergency being planned ahead of time. Are these various national emergencies (Britain, France UK) being coordinated through inter-governmental consultations, which serves to trigger a Worldwide public health emergency, based on fabricated evidence?
Deadly Vaccines
On the other hand, amply documented and denied by Western governments, the proposed vaccines could result in more deaths than those caused by the H1N1 influenza, as confirmed by Britain's Health Protection Agency:
 A warning that the new swine flu jab is linked to a deadly nerve disease has been sent by the Government to senior neurologists in a confidential letter.
The letter from the Health Protection Agency, the official body that oversees public health, has been leaked to The Mail on Sunday, leading to demands to know why the information has not been given to the public before the vaccination of millions of people, including children, begins.
It tells the neurologists that they must be alert for an increase in a brain disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), which could be triggered by the vaccine.
GBS attacks the lining of the nerves, causing paralysis and inability to breathe, and can be fatal.
The letter, sent to about 600 neurologists on July 29, is the first sign that there is concern at the highest levels that the vaccine itself could cause serious complications.
It refers to the use of a similar swine flu vaccine in the United States in 1976 when:
* More people died from the vaccination than from swine flu.
* 500 cases of GBS were detected.
* The vaccine may have increased the risk of contracting GBS by eight times.
* The vaccine was withdrawn after just ten weeks when the link with GBS became clear.
* The US Government was forced to pay out millions of dollars to those affected. (Mail on Sunday, August 16, 2009)
 
The British government has announced that more than 13 million people will be innoculated. The proposed vaccines for the H1N1 swine flu have not, as yet, been tested.  

The Worldwide H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic.
The WHO plans to vaccinate more than half the World's population

By Global Research

Global Research, August 4, 2009

THE H1N1 SWINE FLU PANDEMIC. SELECTED ARTICLES, NEWS REPORTS, ANALYSIS AND VIDEOS (SCROLL DOWN)

Global Research Editor's Note
We bring to the attention of our readers a collection of in-depth reports and articles on the H1N1 Flu Pandemic, published by Global Research since the outbreak of the crisis in Mexico in April. 
"The U.S. expects to have 160 million doses of swine flu vaccine available sometime in October", (Associated Press, 23 July 2009)
"Vaccine makers could produce 4.9 billion pandemic flu shots per year in the best-case scenario", Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), quoted by Reuters, 21 July 2009)
Wealthier countries such as the U.S. and Britain will pay just under $10 per dose [of the H1N1 flu vaccine]. ... Developing countries will pay a lower price." [circa $400 billion for Big Pharma] (Business Week, July 2009)
The Worldwide H1N1 swine flu pandemic serves to mislead public opinion.
The 2009 pandemic, which started in Mexico in April, is timely: it coincides with a deepening economic depression. It takes place at a time of military escalation.
The epidemiological data is fabricated, falsified and manipulated. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an epidemic of worldwide proportions now looms and threatens the livelihood of  "2 billion people [who] could become infected over the next two years — nearly one-third of the world population." (World Health Organization as reported by the Western media, July 2009). According to the Obama adminstration,  the "swine flu could strike up to 40 percent of Americans ... and as many as several hundred thousand could die if a vaccine campaign and other measures aren't successful." (Official Statement of the US Administration, Associated Press, 24 July 2009).
These statements serve to mislead public opinion. There is ample evidence, documented in numerous reports, that the WHO's level 6 pandemic alert is based on fabricated evidence and a manipulation of the figures on mortality and morbidity resulting from the N1H1 swine flu.
The Pandemic serves the interests of Big Pharma. The WHO is planning for the production of 4.9 billion dose, enough to inoculate a large share of the World's population. Big Pharma including Baxter, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis and AstraZeneca have signed procurement contracts with some 50 governments. (Reuters, July 16, 2009). For these companies, compulsory vaccination is a highly lucrative undertaking:
The Role of the Military
According to CNN, the Pentagon is "to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall, according to Defense Department officials."
"The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
The officials would not be identified because the proposal from U.S. Northern Command's Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.
The plan calls for military task forces to work in conjunction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There is no final decision on how the military effort would be manned, but one source said it would likely include personnel from all branches of the military.
It has yet to be determined how many troops would be needed and whether they would come from the active duty or the National Guard and Reserve forces.
Civilian authorities would lead any relief efforts in the event of a major outbreak, the official said. The military, as they would for a natural disaster or other significant emergency situation, could provide support and fulfill any tasks that civilian authorities could not, such as air transport or testing of large numbers of viral samples from infected patients.
As a first step, Gates is being asked to sign a so-called "execution order" that would authorize the military to begin to conduct the detailed planning to execute the proposed plan.
Orders to deploy actual forces would be reviewed later, depending on how much of a health threat the flu poses this fall, the officials said." (CNN, Military planning for possible H1N1 outbreak, July 2009, emphasis added)
The implications are far-reaching.
The decision points towards the militarization of civilian institutions, including law enforcement and public health.
A nationwide vaccination program is already planned for the Fall.
The pharmaceutical industry is slated to deliver 160 million vaccine doses by the Fall, enough doses to vaccinate more than half of America's population.
The Pentagon is already planning on the number of troops to be deployed,. with a view to supporting a mass vaccinaiton program.
It is worth noting that this involvement of the military is not being decided by the President, but by the Secretary of Defense, which suggests that the Pentagon is, in a key issue of of national interest, overriding the President and Commander in Chief. The US Congress has not been consulted on the issue.
This decision to mobilise the Armed Forces in the vaccination campaign is taken in anticipation of a national emergency. Although no national emergency has been called, the presumption is that a national public health emergency will occur, using the WHO Level 6 Pandemic as a pretext and a justification.
Other countries, including Canada, the UK and France may follow suit, calling upon their Armed Forces to play a role in support of the H1N1 vaccination program.

Vaccination Myths and Truths

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, August 3, 2009

Alan G. Philips is an attorney with the following credentials:
-- he's one of the few American lawyers whose practice includes vaccine exemption and waiver issues;
-- he advises other attorneys seeking help for their own clients on vaccine exemptions;
-- he co-founded Citizens for Healthcare Freedom (CHF) as "a grassroots, nonprofit organization supporting an exciting new Consumer Health Freedom Act in North Carolina" where he lives and practices law;
-- he "may be the only attorney in the US with a website dedicated to vaccine exemptions" - vaccinerights.com;
-- he authored "The Authoritative Guide to Vaccine Legal Exemptions;" and
-- he's written numerous articles and publications on vaccinations and immunizations, including "Dispelling Vaccination Myths: An Introduction to the Contradictions Between Medical Science and Immunization Policy," published in 1996 and most recently updated in 2007.
Given the possibility of universally mandated untested, experimental, toxic, and extremely dangerous Swine Flu vaccinations this fall, Philips' work is especially relevant and vital.
In its entirety, it can be accessed at www.vaccinerights.com/dispellingvaccinationmythsx.pdf. A brief account follows below, focusing on 10 myths and truths he explains plus some additional information. More than ever, information is vital for protection against vaccines that can cause annoying to life-threatening autoimmune diseases, even the illnesses they're designed to prevent.
Of special concern is their effect on children. In America and elsewhere, they're over-immunized enough to destroy their immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to a lifetime of serious health disorders.
No one should voluntarily or otherwise take any vaccine, let alone one as untested and dangerous as for H1N1. But make no mistake. The dominant global media are readying a high intensity fear-mongering campaign to convince the unwary to jeopardize their health and well-being by doing it. Just say NO!!
In America, laws in place empower the Health and Human Services and/or Defense secretaries to declare a national emergency and order mass vaccinations. Legally, individual states can resist, but not likely when enough pressure is applied.
Under the proposed, but not enacted, October 2001 Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA), states are advised on how to exercise extraordinary emergency powers without regard to civil liberties issues. Individual ones have adopted some of its provisions and may add more later given the power of Washington and the media to force them.
The WHO is also empowered under the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR) to address but not mandate global vaccinations. But it has enough influence to compel nations to go along in case of a "declared" pandemic threat, even without evidence to prove one.
Suspicious H1N1's Origins
On April 24, AP reported that
"Health officials are investigating a never-before-seen form of the flu that combines pig, bird and human viruses.... (It's) a growing medical mystery because it's unclear how (affected people) caught the virus. None (of seven cited had) contact with pigs." Nor had others reportedly affected in other US cities.
The "intercontinental" mixture included North American Swine Flu, North American Avian Flu, human H1N1 flu, and a fourth H3N2 strain found in Asia and Europe.
Suspicions about a synthetic laboratory-made virus have surfaced. Writing in NewsMax.com, Dr. Russell Blaylock quoted an unnamed viroligist saying: "Where the hell it got all these genes we don't know." According to Blalock: "Debate continues over the possibility that swine flu is a genetically engineered virus."
Dallas County Medical Director Dr. John Carlo voiced concern about the possibility that:
"This strain of swine influenza (may have been) cultured in a laboratory....something that's not been seen anywhere actually in the United States and the world...."
Recently interviewed on Russia Today TV, investigative journalist Wayne Madsen cited a University of Wisconsin lab conducting joint influenza vaccine research with drug company FluGen. On March 24, Reuters reported that:
"FluGen, Inc., an emerging leader in the development, production and delivery of influenza vaccines and related products, today announced it has secured exclusive rights to a novel, patent-protected vaccine-delivery technology (that) painlessly delivers seasonal and pandemic influenza vaccines."
Madsen believes "the Swine Flu virus began in a lab," the objective being profits for vaccine makers with products "that may not actually be safe." Many noted experts share that view about all vaccines.
NutriMedical founder Dr. William Deagle reported that 6-8% of Swine Flu DNA matches no virus on record. He believes more lethal strains may appear in the fall.
Project Camelot "provide(s) a vehicle for researchers and whistleblowers to get their stories out." Interviewed on its Whistleblower Radio show, Burk Elder Hale claimed that a senior drug company biochemist (unnamed to protect him) told him:
"....an aerosoled precursor has been put into the air and almost everyone has breathed it into their lungs. (When Swine Flu) vaccines (are) administered in the fall, (they'll) be activated when (their) constituents come into contact with the aerosoled precursor in the body and will cause a rapid spread of the H1N1 influenza A virus. The biochemist is very upset about the matter....and is a very reliable source that needs our utmost protection."
Catherine Austin Fitts is a former high-level US government official and Wall Street insider. She's now the editor of Solari.com and runs Solari, Inc. as an "online media company focusing on ethical investment and preserving family wealth."
Admitting she's no expert, she wrote this about Swine Flu on July 22:
"I believe one of the goals of the swine flu vaccine is depopulation. Perhaps it is the goal of a swine flu epidemic as well, whether bio-warfare or hype around a flu season....Lowering immune systems and increasing toxicity levels combined with poor food, water and terrorizing stress will help do the trick....a plague can so frighten and help control people that they will accept the end of their current benefits....without objection. And a plague with proper planning can be highly profitable. Whatever the truth (about) swine flu and related vaccines....it can be used (to) control (a) situation that is quickly shifting out of control."
"In short, an epidemic can be used to offset the inflation of capital with increasing deflation of the value and income of labor and continual demand destruction. (What's coming next is the) meaner face of 'the establishment against the rest of society.' "
The possibility of a diabolical depopulation scheme can't be dismissed. The idea's been around for decades, including from the 1974 Henry Kissinger project - National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200). It was backed by powerful economic interests to cull the world population of useless feeders so corporate giants could exploit world resources unimpeded.
Kissinger's scheme was to make birth control a prerequisite for US aid. He wanted the annual death rate doubled and for a population decline in the hundreds of millions by 2000. Poor third world women in countries like Brazil were involuntarily sterilized. Millions were harmed then. Perhaps today's toll from mandatory global Swine Flu vaccinations will be billions.
Yet US laws were passed to prevent it. In 1986, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) required:
-- giving parents written information on vaccine benefits and risks so they could decide on what was safe for their children;
-- maintaining a permanent record of all vaccines given children, including producer names and lot numbers;
-- keeping up to date medical records of all vaccinations given children; and
-- recording all serious health problems after vaccinations were administered and notifying the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) immediately.
At issue is whether federal laws and constitutional and Nuremberg protections will help. Nuremberg requires voluntary consent with full disclosure of known risks and avoidance of experimental treatments if there's any reason to believe harm may result. The Fifth Amendment protects against abusive government authority in stating that "No person shall....be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law...." The Eighth Amendment prohibits "cruel and unusual punishments." Harming human health is cruel and abusive. Mandating suspect drugs violates Nuremberg, the US Constitution, and other protective laws. Whether they'll be enforced is another matter.

Dispelling Vaccination Myths with Truths
Myth No. 1: Vaccines are safe
Under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Reporting System) was established. Annually, it reports about 11,000 serious vaccine reactions, including up to 200 deaths and many more permanent disabilities.
Far more alarming is the following;
-- the FDA estimates that only 1% of serious adverse reactions are reported;
-- CDC says it's 10%;
-- medical school students testified before Congress that they're told not to report these incidents;
-- according to the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), only one in 40 New York doctors reported adverse vaccine reactions or deaths;
-- international studies show vaccines cause up to 10,000 US SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) deaths annually, and at least half of them are from vaccines;
-- another study determined that 3000 US children die annually from vaccines;
-- poor reporting in America suggests that annual adverse vaccine reactions, in fact, number from 100,000 - one million;
-- since 1988, the government's National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) paid families of affected children $1.2 billion in damages;
-- as authorized by the 2006 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, HHS Secretary Sebelius, granted drug companies legal immunity (except for impossible to prove willful misconduct) to proliferate dangerous, untested Swine Flu vaccines globally;
-- vaccines are legally mandated in all 50 US states, though legally avoidable in most (under normal circumstances) as explained below;
-- in settling vaccine damage suits, drug companies impose gag orders to keep vital information from the public; and
-- insurers refuse to cover adverse vaccine reactions because of the high potential liability they'd face.
Truth No. 1
Vaccinations cause high numbers of severe reactions, permanent disabilities, and deaths as well as an enormous personal and public cost. Virtually none of this gets reported.

Myth No. 2: Vaccines are very effective
Medical literature documents significant numbers of vaccine failures for measles, mumps, small pox, pertussis, polio and Hib-causing bacterial meningitis and pneumonia. In 1989, Oman experienced a widespread polio outbreak six months after completing a population-wide immunization program. In Kansas (in 1986), 90% of 1300 reported pertussis cases were "adequately vaccinated," and 72% of Chicago pertussis incidents in 1993 had been as well.
Truth No. 2
Evidence shows that vaccinations are an unreliable and dangerous way to prevent illness and disease.

Myth No. 3: Low US disease rates are attributable to vaccines
From 1850 - 1940, well before mandatory vaccination programs, the British Association for the Advancement of Science reported a 90% decrease in childhood diseases due to improved sanitation and hygiene practices. By 1945, US medical authorities noted a 95% drop in deaths from the leading childhood infectious diseases (diphtheria, pertussis, scarlet fever and measles), well before mass-immunizations began.
A recent WHO report found that third world disease and mortality rates had no direct correlation with immunization programs, but closely relate to hygiene and diet standards.
Truth No. 3
No evidence links vaccines with infectious disease declines. Proper hygiene and diet practices may be far more effective.

Myth No. 4: Sound immunization theory and practice prove the effectiveness of vaccines
Although vaccines stimulate antibody production, no evidence suggests that alone assures immunity. A 1950 British Medical Council-published study found no relationship between antibody count and disease incidence. Natural immunization involves many bodily organs and systems. Artificially producing antibodies can't achieve it.
Research also shows how squalene adjuvants harm the human immune system, making it susceptible to numerous illnesses and diseases ranging from very annoying to life threatening. In addition, the "herd immunity" notion of mass-immunizations effectiveness is largely discredited. Just the opposite is true as evidence shows that fully vaccinated populations have experienced epidemics numerous times in the past.
Further, vaccine effectiveness "remains scientifically unproven" because no double blind studies have been conducted to do it. Significantly, recent disease outbreaks have affected more vaccinated children than unvaccinated ones. And the common practice of "one size fits all" is troublesome. It lets tiny new-borns get the same dosage as a five year old. It tolerates dubious quality control practices producing what's known as "Hot Lots" - ones associated with disproportionately high death and disability rates.
Shockingly, the FDA refuses to act preventatively against them. In fact, individual vaccine lots have almost never been recalled even when associated with severe adverse reactions. Instead, they're administered under the assumption that all recipients respond the same, regardless of race, ethnicity, genetic makeup, or other characteristics.
A recent New England Journal of Medicine-reported study found that a significant number of Romanian children receiving polio vaccine contracted the disease. Evidence linked antibiotic injections to it. One innoculation raised the polio risk eight-fold; two - nine shots, 27-fold, and 10 or more 182-fold.
New research may reveal other unknown hazards, but public safety won't be addressed until government health officials act responsibly, report accurately, and adequately protect their populations from vaccines they never should allow.
Truth No. 4
Many supposed vaccine truths have, in fact, been proved false.

Myth No. 5: Childhood diseases are extremely dangerous
False. Even CDC data show a 99.8% pertussis recovery rate during the 1992-94 period. One Cincinnati Children's Hospital infectious diseases expert said at the time: "The disease was very mild, no one died, and no one went to the intensive care unit."
Nearly always, childhood infectious diseases "are benign and self-limiting. They usually impart lifelong immunity, whereas vaccine-induced immunization (when achieved) is only temporary." In fact, it can increase vulnerability later on by postponing better tolerated childhood illnesses until adulthood when death rates (though still low) are far higher.
Most important is that nearly all common infectious diseases are rarely dangerous, and, in fact, can develop strong, healthy adult immune systems when they're most needed. In addition, few people know that children who didn't contract measles have a higher incidence of skin diseases, degenerative bone and cartilage ones, and tumors while ovarian cancer is higher among mumps-free adult women. The human immune system benefits from common childhood infectious diseases. Freedom from them may be harmful later on.
Truth No. 5
Childhood disease dangers are greatly exaggerated to scare parents into getting their children vaccinated with unsafe drugs.

Myth No. 6: Polio vaccinations were very successful
False again. In 1955, when the Salk vaccine was introduced, polio was considered the most serious post-war public health problem. A year later, six New England states reported sharp rises ranging from more than double in Vermont to a 642% increase in Massachusetts. Other states also were badly impacted enough for Idaho and Utah to halt immunizations due to increased incidence and death rates.
In his 1962 congressional testimony, Dr. Bernard Greenberg, Biostatistics Department head at the University of North Carolina, reported sharp polio increases from 1957 to 1959 and a Public Health Service whitewash that suppressed it. In 1985, the CDC reported that 87% of US cases between 1973 and 1983 were caused by the vaccine. Later it added that it caused nearly all imported cases, and most of the victims were fully vaccinated.
Further, misdiagnosing, poor reporting, and cover-ups suggest that the actual number of vaccine-associated paralytic polio (VAPP) cases "may be 10 to 100 times higher than that cited by the CDC."
In 1977, even Jonas Salk admitted that mass inoculations caused most polio cases since 1961.
Truth No. 6
The Salk vaccine proved highly dangerous. Information about it was suppressed, and declines in the disease were well underway when mass-immunizations were begun. In Europe, they occurred in countries that used, then rejected the vaccine proving it was never needed in the first place. Showing also that the same is true for other diseases, including Swine Flu with the WHO and CDC admitting that most cases are mild, unthreatening, and generally pass without treatment, let alone risking dangerous unneeded vaccines.

Myth No. 7: Lack of an initial adverse reaction proves vaccines are safe
Documented long-term health problems include arthritis, chronic headaches, rashes indicative of disease, non-healing skin lesions, seizures, autism, anemia, multiple sclerosis, ALS, cancer, and many others. Ingredients common to all vaccines are at issue. Squalene adjuvants are a biological time bomb that can harm or destroy the human immune system.
Other ingredients are known toxicants and carcinogens, including thimersol (a mercury derivative), aluminum phosphate, formaldehyde, phenoxyethanol, and numerous gastrointestnal toxicants like liver toxicants, cardiovascular and blood toxicants, and reproductive toxicants. "Chemical ranking systems rate many vaccine ingredients among the most hazardous substances" known, even in microscopic doses.
"Millions of children (and adults) are partaking in an enormous crude experiment, and no sincere, organized effort is being made to track the negative side effects or to determine the long-term consequences."
Dr. Bart Classen's epidemiological research found vaccines as the cause of 79% of insulin type I diabetes cases in children under 10. The sharp rise in numerous other diseases may also be linked with mass-immunizations. California's autism rate skyrocketed 1000% in the last 20 years. In the 1990s, MMR vaccine usage in Britain (for measles, mumps and rubella) occurred at the same time autism rose sharply. The January 2000 Journal of Adverse Drug Reactions reported that no adequate testing was done, so the vaccine never should have been licensed.
The Autism Society says: "Autism is a complex developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life and is the result of a neurological disorder that affects the normal functioning of the brain...."
According to the CDC and National Vaccine Information Center, one in every 150 US children develop the disease. Tens of millions are affected worldwide, making it more common than pediatric cancer, incurable type 1 (juvenile-onset) diabetes and AIDS combined. In the early 1940s, prior to mass immunizations, autism was so rare that few doctors ever encountered it. Today it's a global pandemic.
Truth No. 7
Long-term vaccination reactions have been suppressed and ignored in spite of the alarming correlation between their use and the rise of autoimmune and other diseases. Vaccines aren't for protection. They're for profit and other nefarious purposes. Avoiding them is essential to protecting human health and well-being.

Myth No. 8: Vaccines are the only available disease prevention option
"Historically, homeopathy has proven many times...more effective than allopathic (conventional) medicine in the treatment and prevention of disease." During the 1849 US cholera outbreak, homeopathic hospitals documented a 3% death rate compared to 48 - 60% in conventional ones. It's as true today, and recent epidemiological studies show homeopathic remedies far superior to vaccines in preventing diseases. They're safe, effective, and toxin and side effect-free, yet most insurers won't cover them.
Truth No. 8
Alternative treatments and remedies have been safe and effective for generations, yet the medical establishment and governments attack and spurn them.

Myth No. 9: "Vaccinations are legally mandated and unavoidable..."
All states require them. However, laws vary by state, legal exemptions exist, and all states offer one or more of the following:
-- all states allow medical exemptions for persons susceptible to adverse reactions; parents can cite this for their children based on family history;
-- 48 states offer religious exemptions but may require membership in an established religious organization; "according to federal precedent, personal religious beliefs may be sufficient for a religious exemption regardless of which religious organization you belong to, or whether or not you belong to an organized religion at all;" in addition, the Supreme Court defined religion broadly for legal purposes; and
-- 17 states allow philosophical or personal exemptions.
All public and private schools must comply with federal and state vaccination laws and permit legal exemptions.
Truth No. 9
Some vaccines are mandated, but most, perhaps all, US citizens may use legal exemptions to avoid them. In a recent article, however, Phillips states:
"All non-medical exemptions in the US are ultimately provided conditionally. That is, states have the right to require immunization for everyone, legally exempt or not, during an (emergency) outbreak, other than (for) those" with medical exemptions.

Myth No. 10: Governments place public health concerns above all others
Vaccination history shows "documented instances of deceit portraying vaccines as mighty disease conquerors, when in fact vaccines have had little or no discernible impact - or have even delayed or reversed - pre-existing disease declines....Conflicts of interest are the norm in the vaccine industry." Government agencies like the FDA and CDC are stacked with corporate officials who return to high-paying industry jobs provided they place profit considerations over public health and safety.
In November 2000, concern over this and adverse reactions got the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) to pass a unanimous resolution at its 57th meeting calling for a moratorium on mandatory childhood vaccinations and for doctors to insist on "truly informed consent for (their) use...."
In October 1999, Dr. Bart Classen, founder and CEO of Classen Immunotherapies, told Congress:
"It is clear....that the government's immunization policies are driven by politics and not by science. I can give numerous examples where employees of the US Public Health Service....appear to be furthering their careers by acting as propaganda officers to support political agendas. In one case....employees of a foreign government, who were funded and working closely with the US Public Health Service, submitted false data to a major medical journal. The true data indicated the vaccine was dangerous; however, the false data" indicated no risk.
In addition, "four letters from the FDA/Public Health Service....clearly reveal(ed) that the anthrax vaccine" approved for US military personnel was done "without the manufacturer performing a single controlled clinical trial." They're essential to determine safety and effectiveness. Failure to conduct them proved devastating to the health and well-being of recipients and still does today. Besides, all vaccines are unsafe and some are extremely dangerous.
US military forces receive many or all of the following vaccinations:
-- three shots for hepatitis B;
-- two for hepatitis A;
-- annually for influenza so all military personnel will get Swine Flu shots;
-- all military personnel must have documented proof of receiving MMR vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella; those without them them get single doses;
-- two varicella (chicken pox) shots;
-- smallpox doses every ten years;
-- three for polio for adults never vaccinated; those fully vaccinated get a booster shot;
-- tetanus-diphtheria and pertussis vaccinations for personnel who haven't have them in the past 10 years;
-- tetanus every 10 years;
-- typhoid vaccinations in either oral or injectable forms;
-- a multiple dose series for anthrax;
-- yellow fever every 10 years in some cases;
-- three for rabies and later boosters;
-- tuberculosis screening and shots;
-- single pneumococcal doses;
-- meningococcal vaccinations every five years before deployment to certain regions; and
-- three Japanese encephalitis doses in some cases.
Multiple vaccinations for all US military personnel practically assures damage to their immune systems and severe health problems later on.
Truth No. 10
Public health officials approve dangerous vaccines on unsuspecting recipients and profit handsomely for their efforts.

Final Comments
All vaccines are biological weapons that weaken or destroy the human immune system. They often fail to protect against diseases they're designed to prevent and often cause them. The H1N1 vaccine is experimental, untested, toxic, extremely dangerous, and essential to avoid even if mandated.
In a December 1994 Medical Post article, Dr. Guylaine Lanctot said:
"The medical authorities keep lying. Vaccination has been a disaster on the immune system. It actually causes a lot of illnesses. We are actually changing our genetic code through vaccination....100 years from now we will know that the biggest crime against humanity was vaccines."
Dr. Viera Scheibner is internationally known as perhaps the leading expert on adverse vaccine reactions. Her analysis concluded that "there is no evidence whatsoever of the ability of vaccines to prevent any diseases. To the contrary, there is a great wealth of evidence that they cause serious side effects."
Nonetheless, immunization programs proliferate because the profit potential is enormous despite growing numbers of reputable scientific figures citing concerns.
Currently, over 200 new vaccines are being developed "for everything from birth control to (curbing) cocaine addiction." Around half of them are in clinical trials using human guinea pigs putting their health and safety on the line unwittingly.
New delivery systems are also being developed that include nasal sprays, mosquitoes, and genetically engineered fruits containing vaccine viruses. With every country in the world a potential buyer, health and safety considerations are suppressed for the sake of profits. Unless somehow this madness is stopped, the harm to our children and society will be catastrophic.
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

The Truth about Flu Shots

By Dr. Sherri Tenpenny

Global Research, August 1, 2009

Idaho Observer:, June 2009 - 2009-06-01

"By 1853, Parliament began passing laws to make the untested vaccine compulsory throughout the British Empire. Other countries of Europe followed suit. Once the economic implications of compulsory vaccinations were realized, few dared to disagree. Then, as now, the media were controlled by the vaccine manufacturers and the government, who stood to make huge money from the sale of these spurious vaccines." ~Dr. Tim O’Shea, "The Sanctity of Human Blood: Vaccination I$ Not Immunization"


On June 11, 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it had declared "Level 6" pandemic emergency with regard to the "swine flu." Shortly thereafter, on cue, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that we should expect mass vaccination in this country to begin as early as September, 2009. We have been covering the development of the global pandemic preparedness machinery in The IO since June, 1998. It is our belief that this machine has been in motion since March 28, 2009 and will not be stopped; that the global influenza pandemic the CDC and WHO have been predicting (planning) for at least a decade will be declared—whether people are pandemically sick and dying or not—and the global mass vaccination campaign for which they have been preparing since the 1970s swine flu fiasco will commence—soon. It is absolutely crucial that you share the following information with your friends, family and both elected and appointed bureaucrats within your community.
1. What are the ingredients of the annual flu shot?
• Egg proteins: including avian contaminant viruses such as avian leucosis
• Gelatin: known to cause allergic reactions and anaphylaxis - usually associated with sensitivity to egg or gelatin proteins
• Polysorbate 80 (Tween 80): can cause severe allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis
• Formaldehyde: known carcinogen
• Triton X100: a strong detergent
• Sucrose: table sugar
• Resin: known to cause allergic reactions
• Gentamycin: an antibiotic
• Thimerosal: 49.6 percent ethyl mercury (still in multidose vials)

2. Do flu shots prevent the flu?
Not in babies: In a review of more than 51 studies involving more than 294,000 children it was found there was "no evidence that injecting children 6-24 months of age with a flu shot was any more effective than placebo. In children over 2 years, it was only effective 33 percent of the time in preventing the flu. Reference:"Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy children." The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2 (2008).
Not in children with asthma: In a study of 800 children with asthma, where one half were vaccinated and the other half did not receive the influenza vaccine, the two groups were compared with respect to clinic visits, emergency department (ED) visits, and hospitalizations for asthma. CONCLUSION: This study failed to provide evidence that the influenza vaccine prevents pediatric asthma exacerbations. Reference: Christly, C. et al. Arch Dis Child. 2004 Aug 89 (8):734-738
Not in children with asthma (2): "The inactivated flu vaccine, Flumist, does not prevent influenza-related hospitalizations in children, especially the ones with asthma...In fact, children who get the flu vaccine are more at risk for hospitalization than children who do not get the vaccine." Reference: The American Thoracic Society’s 105th International Conference, May 15-20, 2009, San Diego.
Not in adults: In a review of 48 reports including 66,000 adults, "Vaccination of healthy adults only reduced risk of influenza by 6 percent and reduced the number of missed work days by less than one day (0.16) days. It did not change the number of people needing to go to the hospital or take time off work." Reference: The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. "Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults" 1(2006)
Not in the Elderly: In a review of 64 studies in 98 flu seasons of the elderly living in nursing homes, flu shots were non-significant for preventing the flu. For elderly living in the community, vaccines were not (significantly) effective against influenza, ILI (influenza-like illnesses) or pneumonia. Reference: The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. "Vaccines for preventing influenza in the elderly" 3(2006).

3. What about the new Swine (H1N1) Flu shot?
On June 11, 2009, WHO announced a Level 6 Pandemic
• A new report from a WHO advisory group predicts that global production of vaccine for the novel H1N1 influenza virus could be as much as 4.9 billion doses a year, far higher than previous estimates.
• The report states that vaccine makers are expected to produce about 780 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine for the northern hemisphere’s 2009-2010 flu season for the U.S.:
• 350 million doses will be ready by June 30, 2009
• 430 million doses will be ready by July 31, 2009
• Pandemic" H1N1 vaccine will be made in PER.C6 cells (human retinal cells) and contain either AS04 (by GlaxoSmithKline) or MF59 (by Novartis), an oil-in-water "squalene-based" adjuvant known to trigger severe autoimmunity in test animals (see chart below).
****************************************************************************
In May 2009, HHS contracted with the following companies to produce both antigen
and adjuvants for production of a 2009 pandemic H1N1 flu vaccine:

Orders for Bulk Supply of 2009 H1N1 Influenza Vaccine Antigen and Adjuvant

Reference: www.medicalcountermeasures.gov/BARDA/MCM/panflu/factsheet.aspx
• Federal health officials will probably recommend that most Americans get three flu shots this fall: One regular flu shot and two doses of the new swine flu vaccine being rushed to market.
• The "working hypothesis" of the CDC is that most Americans will need two swine flu shots to get full protection, although "the elderly (people born before 1957) may be able to get away with just one," said Dr. Anne Schuchat, the agency’s director of immunization and respiratory disease.

4. Is "Mandatory Vaccination" with the new swine flu possible?
• 1946: the United States Public Health Service was established and Executive Order (EO) 9708 was signed, listing the communicable diseases that could be corralled using quarantines. Between 1946 and 2003, cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, typhoid, smallpox, yellow fever and viral hemorrhagic fevers were added.
• April 4, 2003: EO 13295 added SARS to the list.
• April 1, 2005: EO 13295 amended to include "Influenza caused by novel or re-emergent influenza viruses that are causing, or have the potential to cause, a pandemic.
• The power to quarantine was delegated by the President to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to be determined at his or her discretion.
• The Secretary of HHS was given the power to arrange for the "apprehension and examination of persons reasonably thought to be infected." A cough or a fever could put a person at risk of being quarantined for an extended period of time and without legal recourse.
• January 28, 2003: Introduction of Project BioShield during President Bush’s State of the Union Address. This created a permanent "indefinite funding authority to develop medical countermeasures."
• New authority was given to the National Institutes of Health to accelerate research and development of drugs and vaccines. Emergency approval would be given to "fast tracked" drugs and vaccines deemed necessary in combatting a biological warfare attack or pandemic, bypassing standard safety testing by the Food and Drug Administration.
• December 17, 2006: Division E—Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREPA) was added as an addendum to the Defense Appropriations Bill HR 2863 at 11:20 pm on Saturday night, long after House Committee members had signed off on the bill and gone home for the holidays. Section (b)(1) states, "The Sec of HHS can make a determination that a ‘disease, health condition or threat’ constitutes a public health emergency. He or she may then recommend ‘the manufacture, testing, development, administration, or use of one or more covered counter measures...’ A covered countermeasure, defined in Division E, is a ‘pandemic product, vaccine or drug.’"
• Division E also provides complete liability protection for all drugs, vaccines or biological products deemed to be a "covered countermeasure" for an outbreak of any kind. Protection has been given to the drug companies forany product administered for any public health emergency declared by the Secretary of HHS.
• Pharma is now protected from all accountability, unless criminal intent to harm can be proven by the injured party. Drug companies are protected from lawsuits, even if they know the drug will be harmful. (Criminal intent would be nearly impossible to prove).

5. What can we do to protect ourselves and communities?
• Share this information with everyone you know
• Contact local first responders (EMTs, paramedics, firemen, doctors and nurses) and let them know what is in the shots since "they" will be the first ones to get it.
• Contact your county commissioners, sheriff and local police to discuss your concerns about the looming threat of mandatory vaccination, quarantine and confiscation of private property for either quarantine or drug/vaccine dispensing clinics. Consider taking them some homebaked cookies to get in the door while attaching a friendly face to the cause of liberty and our fundamental right to exempt ourselves from forced medical experimentation.
• Contact local city council members about our constitutional right to refuse a pandemic vaccine that has the potential to kill or maim without the recipient having any legal recourse.
• Write a small article or letter to the editor for local, community newspapers. Check out sample articles and letters on DrTenpenny.com and VacLib.org/basic/flu/swineflu.htm
• Have at least a month supply of food and water in your home and be prepared to voluntarily self-quarantine if given no other options.
• Stock up on Vitamin D3 (3,000 IU per person), Vitamin A, Vitamin C, colloidal silver and homeopathics for both preventing and treating the flu.
• Check out www.Oath-Keepers.org A .pdf of their oath for easy printing will be onwww.DrTenpenny.com  I am sharing this important oath with our local military recruitment offices, reservists and retired military people we know.
• Connect with other activist organizations such as www.CampaignForLiberty.com  – those who support 2nd amendment issues, environmental and "real" food safety issues, animal rights and health freedom issues. Work together to spread the word about their liberty issues while you encourage their involvement with the mandatory vaccine resistance movement. Every compulsory vaccination campaign in history has been a public health disaster. Note the quote from Dr. Tom O’Shea above. To allow organized medicine to continue compelling mass vaccination can only occur as a result of collective ignorance and cultural complacency.
As stated years ago by Margaret Mead, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has."

Dr. Sherri Tenpenny is an osteopathic physician and director of OsteoMed II and New Medical Awareness Seminars. She is the author of Fowl! Bird Flu – It’s not what you think and Saying No to Vaccines – A Resource Guide for All Ages. She is a popular and well known speaker, writer and radio guest. For more information, go towww.SayingNoToVaccines.com  or www.DrTenpenny.com  or call (440) 2391878.

Books being cooked to justify Level 6
According to the WHO as of June 19, 2009, 88 countries have reported the presence of a novel flu virus, with a total of 48,954 cases and 193 deaths worldwide attributed to the new "bug." WHO statistics for the U.S., which has the most reported cases of any one country, are 17,855 cases and 44 deaths. However, the CDC claims 21,449 cases and 87 deaths as of June 13 (In Mexico, the alleged epicenter of the current pandemic, the WHO reports a total of 9,007 cases and 118 deaths.) By looking on the CDC website, the case definition for those allegedly infected with the novel H1N1 virus changed on June 1, 2009, to include cases that are influenza-like illnesses (ILIs) that test positive for influenza A but negative for human H3 and H1; previously healthy adults 65 and older who are hospitalized for an ILI; a person who has an ILI that resides in a state without confirmed cases, but has traveled to a state or country where there are one or more confirmed or probable cases, or; a person with an ILI who has an epidemiologic link in the past 7 days to a confirmed case or probable case. The CDC is blatantly padding the numbers.
The CDC has also admitted that 71 percent of hospitalizations occurred in people with chronic underlying conditions such as cancer and autoimmune diseases. How many had received the annual flu vaccine was not revealed even though this past season’s flu vaccine contained "A/Brisbane/29/2007 (H1N1) -like virus (A/Brisbane/29/2007 IVR 148) and A/Brisbane/10/2007 (H3N2)-like virus (A/Uruguay/716/2007 NYMC X-175C)" and live flu viruses such as contained in FluMist are known to "mutate" while recipients are infectious for 21 days.
Although there was a lot of panic in Mexico over deaths attributed to the "novel" flu virus, Celia Alpuche, head of the main lab in Mexico that does influenza testing, told ScienceInsider that "There is no scientific evidence, up to date, that we have a different A (H1N1) virus other than human seasonal or swine-origin H1N1."
On April 25, 2009, Yeny Gregorio Dávila of Mexico City posted the following on the BBC News website: "As a doctor, I realise that the media does not report the truth. Authorities distributed vaccines among all the medical personnel with no results, because two of my partners who worked in this hospital (interns) were killed by this new virus in less than six days even though they were vaccinated as all of us were. The official number of deaths is 20, nevertheless, the true number of victims are more than 200. I understand that we must avoid to panic, but telling the truth it might be better now to prevent and avoid more deaths." It is apparent to anyone who understands the deadly nature of vaccines that the vaccine administered to the medical personnel in Mexico proved to be deadly.
But no proof that a novel H1N1 virus actually exists has been produced. Dr. Stefan Lanka from Klein-Klein-Aktion is offering €10,000 to anyone who is able to produce a scientific paper proving the existence of the alleged novel H1N1 flu virus. To date, not one scientist or public health official has come forward with the proof of a novel H1N1 flu virus and the media is generally uninterested in the fact that proof of a "virus" associated with a novel swine flu strain is nonexistent.

Vaccinations: Deadly Immunity
"Government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks"

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Global Research, July 23, 2009

Rollingstone.com - 2005-07-20

Global Research Editor's note

We bring to the attention of our readers this 2005 article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published by Rollingstone.com. 

The article sheds light on the collusion between Big Parma and the US government and the dangers associated with vaccines produced by major pharmaceutical companies. This article is of particular relevance to the current debate on the H1N1 swine flu virus and plans by the WHO, The Obama Administration and Big Pharma to develop a swine flu vaccine. 

The article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. documented "the government's efforts to conceal alarming data about the dangers of vaccines." 

For a review of Global Research articles on the H1NI Swine Flu Pandemic, click here. 

Michel Chossudovsky, July 23, 2009

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. investigates the government cover-up of a mercury/autism scandal
In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Georgia. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to fifty-two attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.
The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.
Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. "You can play with this all you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results "are statistically significant." Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's first day, was even more alarmed. "My gut feeling?" he said. "Forgive this personal comment -- I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on."
But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line. "We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits," said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. "This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country." Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that "given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible hands." Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared that "perhaps this study should not have been done at all." He added that "the research results have to be handled," warning that the study "will be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the control of this group."
In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children's health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten's findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been "lost" and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.
Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections given to American infants -- but they continued to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines -- including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely given to eleven-year-olds.
The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in Washington. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood transcripts -- and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the "Eli Lilly Protection Act" into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. The measure was repealed by Congress in 2003 -- but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to Frist.
Even many conservatives are shocked by the government's effort to cover up the dangers of thimerosal. Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. "Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic," his House Government Reform Committee concluded in its final report. "This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin." The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of "institutional malfeasance for self protection" and "misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry."
The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed. I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. Privately, I was skeptical.
I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and I certainly understood the government's need to reassure parents that vaccinations are safe; the eradication of deadly childhood diseases depends on it. I tended to agree with skeptics like Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, who criticized his colleagues on the House Government Reform Committee for leaping to conclusions about autism and vaccinations. "Why should we scare people about immunization," Waxman pointed out at one hearing, "until we know the facts?"
It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation's pre-eminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real. Five of my own children are members of the Thimerosal Generation -- those born between 1989 and 2003 -- who received heavy doses of mercury from vaccines. "The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage," Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. "Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in twenty-five years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children."
More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among eleven children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.
Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by thimerosal-tainted vaccinations. They argue that the increase is a result of better diagnosis -- a theory that seems questionable at best, given that most of the new cases of autism are clustered within a single generation of children. "If the epidemic is truly an artifact of poor diagnosis," scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley, one of the world's authorities on mercury toxicity, "then where are all the twenty-year-old autistics?" Other researchers point out that Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative "load" of mercury than ever before, from contaminated fish to dental fillings, and suggest that thimerosal in vaccines may be only part of a much larger problem. It's a concern that certainly deserves far more attention than it has received -- but it overlooks the fact that the mercury concentrations in vaccines dwarf other sources of exposure to our children.
What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading detectives have gone to ignore -- and cover up -- the evidence against thimerosal. From the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been overwhelming. The preservative, which is used to stem fungi and bacterial growth in vaccines, contains ethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. Truckloads of studies have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates and other animals after they are injected with vaccines -- and that the developing brains of infants are particularly susceptible. In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children still suffered brain damage years later. Russia banned thimerosal from children's vaccines twenty years ago, and Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed suit.
"You couldn't even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe," says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky. "It's just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage."
Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage -- and even death -- in both animals and humans. In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to twenty-two patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected -- a fact Lilly didn't bother to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosal's safety "did not check with ours." Half the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative "unsatisfactory as a serum intended for use on dogs."
In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it "poison." In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly's own studies discerned that thimerosal was "toxic to tissue cells" in concentrations as low as one part per million -- 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as "nontoxic" and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, ten babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.
In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within twenty-four hours of birth, and two-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.
The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that six-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. "The best way to go," he added, "is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives."
For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money. Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this "cost consideration," Merck ignored Hilleman's warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received eleven vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of twenty-two immunizations by the time they reached first grade.
As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. "What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?" Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999. "Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?"
But by that time, the damage was done. At two months, when the infant brain is still at a critical stage of development, infants routinely received three inoculations that contained a total of 62.5 micrograms of ethylmercury -- a level 99 times greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies -- including one published in April by the National Institutes of Health -- suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury.
Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that the additional vaccines were necessary to protect infants from disease and that thimerosal is still essential in developing nations, which, they often claim, cannot afford the single-dose vials that don't require a preservative. Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDC's top vaccine advisers, told me, "I think if we really have an influenza pandemic -- and certainly we will in the next twenty years, because we always do -- there's no way on God's earth that we immunize 280 million people with single-dose vials. There has to be multidose vials."
But while public-health officials may have been well-intentioned, many of those on the CDC advisory committee who backed the additional vaccines had close ties to the industry. Dr. Sam Katz, the committee's chair, was a paid consultant for most of the major vaccine makers and was part of a team that developed the measles vaccine and brought it to licensure in 1963. Dr. Neal Halsey, another committee member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies and received honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis B vaccine.
Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such conflicts of interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the CDC "routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on intellectual advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines," even though they have "interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight." The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisers who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine "had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine."
Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged to me that he "would make money" if his vote eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist's direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. "It provides no conflict for me," he insists. "I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent was trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children in this country. It's offensive to say that physicians and public-health people are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions that they know are unsafe for children. It's just not the way it works."
Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances. Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children's health, proud of their "partnerships" with pharmaceutical companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering children's health. They are often resentful of questioning. "Science," says Offit, "is best left to scientists."
Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of interest. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of the FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize the danger posed by the added baby vaccines. "I'm not sure there will be an easy way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until now," Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, "will also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use" of thimerosal in child vaccines.
If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood. But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science. The agency turned its database on childhood vaccines -- which had been developed largely at taxpayer expense -- over to a private agency, America's Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research. It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between thimerosal and brain disorders. The CDC "wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe," Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM's Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. "We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect" of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee's chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was "inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation" between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result "Walt wants" -- a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.
For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had worked for. "We've got a dragon by the tail here," said Dr. Michael Kaback, another committee member. "The more negative that [our] presentation is, the less likely people are to use vaccination, immunization -- and we know what the results of that will be. We are kind of caught in a trap. How we work our way out of the trap, I think is the charge."
Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines. "Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal," Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University gathering in May 2001. "In order to undo the harmful effects of research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of autism, we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety." Douglas formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings about thimerosal's risks.
In May of last year, the Institute of Medicine issued its final report. Its conclusion: There is no proven link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines. Rather than reviewing the large body of literature describing the toxicity of thimerosal, the report relied on four disastrously flawed epidemiological studies examining European countries, where children received much smaller doses of thimerosal than American kids. It also cited a new version of the Verstraeten study, published in the journal Pediatrics, that had been reworked to reduce the link between thimerosal and autism. The new study included children too young to have been diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs of the disease. The IOM declared the case closed and -- in a startling position for a scientific body -- recommended that no further research be conducted.
The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one. Rep. David Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves on the House Government Reform Committee, attacked the Institute of Medicine, saying it relied on a handful of studies that were "fatally flawed" by "poor design" and failed to represent "all the available scientific and medical research." CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the truth, Weldon told me, because "an association between vaccines and autism would force them to admit that their policies irreparably damaged thousands of children. Who would want to make that conclusion about themselves?"
Under pressure from Congress and parents, the Institute of Medicine convened another panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink Data Sharing program. In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the way the VSD had been used in the Verstraeten study, and urged the CDC to make its vaccine database available to the public.
So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access. Dr. Mark Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and his son, David, spent a year battling to obtain the medical records from the CDC. Since August 2002, when members of Congress pressured the agency to turn over the data, the Geiers have completed six studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in children. One study, which compares the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between 1981 and 1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a "very significant relationship" between autism and vaccines. Another study of educational performance found that kids who received higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation. Another soon-to-be published study shows that autism rates are in decline following the recent elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines.
As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism. In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more interesting studies himself. Searching for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines -- the kind of population that scientists typically use as a "control" in experiments -- Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who refuse to immunize their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three -- including one child adopted from outside the Amish community -- had received their vaccines.
At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of thimerosal. While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the risks, the Iowa legislature was carefully combing through all of the available scientific and biological data. "After three years of review, I became convinced there was sufficient credible research to show a link between mercury and the increased incidences in autism," says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a Republican who oversaw the investigation. "The fact that Iowa's 700 percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more and more vaccines were added to the children's vaccine schedules, is solid evidence alone." Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed by California. Similar bans are now under consideration in thirty-two other states.
But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected collagen. Even more alarming, the government continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal to developing countries -- some of which are now experiencing a sudden explosion in autism rates. In China, where the disease was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that there are now more than 1.8 million autistics. Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines. The World Health Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders "under review."
I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine. "The CDC is guilty of incompetence and gross negligence," says Mark Blaxill, vice president of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned about the role of mercury in medicines. "The damage caused by vaccine exposure is massive. It's bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco, bigger than anything you've ever seen."
It's hard to calculate the damage to our country -- and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases -- if Third World nations come to believe that America's most heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning their children. It's not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by America's enemies abroad. The scientists and researchers -- many of them sincere, even idealistic -- who are participating in efforts to hide the science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics. They are badly misguided. Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world's poorest populations.
NOTE: This story has been updated to correct several inaccuracies in the original, published version. As originally reported, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations before 1989, but the article failed to note that they were innoculated a total of eleven times with those vaccines, including boosters. The article also misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms - an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury. Finally, because of an editing error, the article misstated the contents of the rotavirus vaccine approved by the CDC. It did not contain thimerosal. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.
An earlier version of this story stated that the Institute of Medicine convened a second panel to review the work of the Immunization Safety Review Committee that had found no evidence of a link between thimerosal and autism. In fact, the IOM convened the second panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink Data Sharing program, including those raised by critics of the IOM's earlier work. But the panel was not charged with reviewing the committee's findings. The story also inadvertently omitted a word and transposed two sentences in a quote by Dr. John Clements, and incorrectly stated that Dr. Sam Katz held a patent with Merck on the measles vaccine. In fact, Dr. Katz was part of a team that developed the vaccine and brought it to licensure, but he never held the patent. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.
CLARIFICATION: After publication of this story, Salon and Rolling Stone corrected an error that misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms ? an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury. At the time of the correction, we were aware that the comparison itself was flawed, but as journalists we considered it more appropriate to state the correct figure rather than replace it with another number entirely.
Since that earlier correction, however, it has become clear from responses to the article that the forty-percent number, while accurate, is misleading. It measures the total mercury load an infant received from vaccines during the first six months, calculates the daily average received based on average body weight, and then compares that number to the EPA daily limit. But infants did not receive the vaccines as a ?daily average? ? they received massive doses on a single day, through multiple shots. As the story states, these single-day doses exceeded the EPA limit by as much as 99 times. Based on the misunderstanding, and to avoid further confusion, we have amended the story to eliminate the forty-percent figure.
Correction: The story misattributed a quote to Andy Olson, former legislative counsel to Senator Bill Frist. The comment was made by Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to the senator. Rolling Stone and Salon.com regret the error.

Kennedy Report Sparks Controversy


"Deadly Immunity," our story about the link between mercury in vaccines and the dramatic rise in autism among children [RS 977/978], sparked intense reaction from the medical establishment and several leading news organizations. The story, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. -- part of an ongoing collaboration with Salon.com -- documented the government's efforts to conceal alarming data about the dangers of vaccines.
What is most striking is the lengths to which major media outlets have gone to disparage the story and to calm public fears -- even in the face of the questionable science on the subject. In a segment on World News Tonight titled "A Closer Look," ABC pointed out that Kennedy is "not a scientist or a doctor" and dismissed his extensive evidence as nothing more than "a few scientific studies." The network also trotted out its medical editor, Dr. Timothy Johnson, to praise the "impeccably impartial Institute of Medicine" and to again state that Kennedy is not a scientist.
The New York Times, in a front-page story on the subject, devoted only one line to Kennedy's article, which it said accused public-health officials and drugmakers of "conspiring" to hide the data on autism -- a word that our story neither used nor implied. (The Wall Street Journal, in an op-ed attacking the article, was even more misleading, using the word "conspiracy" four times.) The Times then went on, for more than a full page, to portray concerns over vaccines as nothing more than the misguided fears of parents who suffer from "scientific illiteracy," unable to understand the medical studies that prove immunizations to be safe. It depicted studies reviewed by the Institute of Medicine as definitive without even bothering to address the host of serious questions raised about their validity: conflicting diagnoses of autism, mixed-up data from HMOs and research skewed to exclude many sick kids.
Rolling Stone and Salon fact-checked the article thoroughly before publication, insisting on primary documentation for every statement in the story, and posted links to the most significant materials online to enable readers to judge for themselves. The final article contained six errors. These ranged from inadvertently transposing a quote and confusing a drug license for a patent to relying on a figure that incorrectly calculated an infant's exposure to mercury over six months, rather than citing the even more dangerous amount injected on a single day. (The mistakes were corrected online as soon as they were discovered and can be viewed in detail at both RollingStone.com and Salon.com.)
It is important to note, however, that none of the mistakes weaken the primary point of the story. The government's own records show that it has failed to do the science necessary to put to rest reasonable concerns about vaccines. If the scientists had simply done their job rather than covering their tracks, there would be no controversy today. Instead, the government cannot even provide a definitive figure of the number of cases of autism among American children -- a number obviously critical to any serious scientific investigation -- and yet expects the public to believe that it has ruled out any link between vaccines and an illness it does not even track.
"Science," as one doctor in our story insisted, "is best left to scientists." But when the scientists fail to do their job, resorting to closed-door meetings and rigged studies, others in society have not only a right but a moral obligation to question their work. In the coming years, further research may indeed demonstrate that mercury in vaccines is not responsible for the rise in autism. For now, though, we can only raise a very real and legitimate alarm -- and hope that the government's well-documented mishandling of its own research did not needlessly jeopardize the health of hundreds of thousands of children.

WHO moves forward in secrecy to accomplish forced vaccination and population agenda

By Jane Burgermeister

Global Research, July 21, 2009

birdflu666.wordpress.com

The WHO has refused to release the Minutes of a key meeting of an advisory vaccine group – packed with executives from Baxter, Novartis and Sanofi – that recommended compulsory vaccinations in the USA, Europe and other countries against the artificial H1N1 “swine flu” virus this autumn.
In an email this morning, a WHO spokesperson claimed there are no Minutes of the meeting that took place on July 7th in which guidelines on the need for worldwide vaccinations that WH0 adopted this Monday were formulated and in which Baxter and other pharma executives participated.
Under the International Health Regulations, WHO guidelines have a binding character on all of WHO’s 194 signatory countries in the event of a pandemic emergency of the kind anticipated this autumn when the second more lethal wave of the H1N1 virus — which is bioengineered to resemble the Spanish flu virus — emerges.
In short: WHO has the authority to force everyone in those 194 countries to take a vaccine this fall at gunpoint, impose quarantines and restrict travel.
There is verifiable, clear and unambiguous proof that WHO supplied the live bird flu virus to Baxter’s subsidiary in Austria, which was used by Baxter to manufacture 72 kilos of vaccine material in Febuary.
Baxter subsequently sent this material out to 16 labs in four countries under a false label designating the contaminated product as vaccine material, so nearly triggering a global pandemic.
Because Baxter must adhere to strict biosafety level 3 regulations when handling a dangerus virus such as the bird flu virus, the production and distribution of so much pandemic material cannot have been an accident but must have been done by Baxter with criminal intent.
The Austrian police are now investigating after I filed criminal charges in April.
It is increasingly clear that WHO and Baxter are just elements in a much bigger criminal organisation that is moving forward in a synchronised and coordinated way to fulfil the “elite” agenda of global population reduction in the coming months and years while putting in place a global government of which WHO will be an arm.
WHO, a UN agency, appears to play a key role in coordinating the activities of labs, vaccine companies and governments to achieve the goal of population reduction and political and economic take over of North America and Europe:
- First, WHO gives funds, support and cover to labs such as the CDC to bioprospect for pathogens, bioengineer them to make them more deadly, and also patent them.
- Second, WHO gives those same deadly bioengineered pathogens to companies such as Baxter in Austria, so that Baxter could use those viruses to deliberately, systematically contaminate vaccine material. If the contamination of the 72 kilos had not been detection on time by a lab technician in the Czech Republic, millions of people would have caught the “bird flu” from the injections.
- Third, in the event of a pandemic, WHO orders a compulsory vaccines for all 194 countries, following “recommendations” by an advisory vaccine group on which executives of Baxter also sit.
- Fourth, WHO awards Baxter, Novartis, Sanofi and other companies lucrative contracts to supply those vaccines.
Furthermore, WHO acquires new global authority on an unseen scale in the event of a pandemic.
Under special pandemic plans enacted around the world including the USA, in 2005, national governments are to be dissolved in the event of a pandemic emergency and replaced by special crisis committees, which take charge of the health and security infrastructure of a country, and which are answerable to the WHO and EU in Europe and to the WHO and UN in North America.
If the Model Emergency Health Powers Act is implemented on the instructions of WHI, it will be a criminal offence for Americans to refuse the vaccine. Police are allowed to use deadly force against “criminal” suspects.
Through their control of these special pandemic crisis committees with the power to enact legislation to be set up most countries, the WHO, UN and EU become the de facto government of a large part of the world.
Mass murder and death will also bring economic collapse and disruption, starvation and wars – and these events will lead to a further population reduction.
To sum up: WHO helps create, distribute and then release the deadly pandemic virus, and this pandemic virus allows WHO to assume control of governments in North America and Europe and also order forced vaccination on populations by the very same companies that have distributed and released the deadly viruses in the first place and all under under the pretext of protecting populations from a pandemic they have created.
The corporate mainstream media owned by the same “elite” group which funds WHO is systematically concealing from the general public the nature of the real danger of these H1N1 jabs by withholding from them key information concerning the interrelated activities of this group of organisations for their mutual profit.
As a result, most people still believe that the H1N1 virus is a natural swine flu when even WHO has officially dropped the term “swine” in tactic acknowledgement of its artificial origin.
Most people still believe the vaccine companies can deliver a cure when the vaccine companies are preparing a lethal series of shots containg live attenuated virus, toxic metals and other poisons.
The two-dose H1N1 shots are designed to disable the immune system and then load that system with a live virus in a process that mirrors the one described in two of WHO’s 1972 memoranda where the technical means for turning vaccines into killers is outlined.
The Strecker Memorandum also reveals that WHO has been actively searching for ways to weaken the immune system.
The best protection against the H1N1 virus that has now been released and that will inevtiably become more lethal as it mutates in autumn is colloidal silver and also vitamins to strengthen the immune system, face masks and other such measures.
However, none of the governments in North America or Europe have stocked up on colloidal silver or announced sensible health measures to contain the coming lethal wave.
Instead, there are growing signs, they will use the panic to terrify people into taking the toxic vaccines which are sure to cause injury or damage because of the presence of heavy metals alone.
This mass vaccination will moreover alllow ever more lethal strains to emerge and also provide a cover for a release of bird flu virus or other pathogens.
This is why steps need to be taken now to stop the mass vaccinations anticipated in autumn by taking legal action to block the distribution of vaccines and/or laws allowing govenrments to force people to take vaccinations.
An investigation into this international corporate crime syndicate has to be conducted in every country because it has its tentacles in every country, and to try to initiate this in the USA, I filed charges with the FBI against WHO and the UN among other defendants in June. I included President Obama among the defendants because I believe the time has come to identify and isolate the core members of this international corporate criminal group which has annexed high government office in the USA, and put them in prison once and for all, and there are reports that Obama has direct financial links with Baxter that need to be investigated by law enforcement.
There is evidence the Austrian Health Minister and other officials have been helping Baxter to cover its tracks.
Also, there is clear evidence that elements of the Austrian media are involved in actively spreading lies and misinformation to lull people into a false sense of security concerning Baxter’s manufacture and distribution of pandemic material in Austria this February.
Vital is for individuals and local authorities need to take effective measures to protect against the coming lethal wave of the H1N1 virus to minimise its impact.
To find to out about the charges I have filed so far in German and English in Austria also with the FBI, please check the wakenews website.
http://wakenews.net/html/jane_burgermeister.html  
janeburgermeister@gmx.at

Martial Law and the Militarization of Public Health: The Worldwide H1N1 Flu Vaccination Program

By Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, July 26, 2009

"The flu season is upon us. Which type will we worry about this year, and what kind of shots will we be told to take? Remember the swine flu scare of 1976? That was the year the U.S. government told us all that swine flu could turn out to be a killer that could spread across the nation, and Washington decided that every man, woman and child in the nation should get a shot to prevent a nation-wide outbreak, a pandemic."  (Mike Wallace, CBS, 60 Minutes, November 4, 1979)
"The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children....
"It's hard to calculate the damage to our country -- and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases -- if Third World nations come to believe thatAmerica's most heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning their children.It's not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by America's enemies abroad." (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vaccinations: Deadly Immunity, June 2005)
"Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in twenty-five years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children."( Patti White, School nurse, statement to the House Government Reform Committee, 1999, quoted in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vaccinations: Deadly Immunity, June 2005)
"On the basis of ... expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met. I have therefore decided to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from Phase 5 to Phase 6. The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic. ... Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), Press Briefing  11 June 2009)
 "As many as 2 billion people could become infected over the next two years — nearly one-third of the world population." (World Health Organization as reported by the Western media, July 2009)
"Swine flu could strike up to 40 percent of Americans over the next two years and as many as several hundred thousand could die if a vaccine campaign and other measures aren't successful." (Official Statement of the US Administration, Associated Press, 24 July 2009). 
"The U.S. expects to have 160 million doses of swine flu vaccine available sometime in October", (Associated Press, 23 July 2009)
"Vaccine makers could produce 4.9 billion pandemic flu shots per year in the best-case scenario", Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), quoted by Reuters, 21 July 2009)
Wealthier countries such as the U.S. and Britain will pay just under $10 per dose [of the H1N1 flu vaccine]. ... Developing countries will pay a lower price." [circa $400 billion for Big Pharma] (Business Week, July 2009)

War without borders, a great depression, a military adventure in the Middle East, a massive concentration of wealth resulting from the restructuring of the global financial system.
The unfolding economic and social dislocations are far-reaching.
People's lives are destroyed.
The World is at the juncture of the most serious crisis in modern history.
Bankruptcies, mass unemployment, the collapse of social programs, are the untold consequences.
But public opinion must remain ignorant of the causes of the global crisis.
"The worst of the recession is behind us";
"There are growing signs of economic recovery",
"The Middle East War is a 'Just War'", a humanitarian endeavor,
Coalition forces are involved in "peace-keeping," we are "fighting terrorism with democracy"
"We must defend ourselves against terrorist attacks" 
Figures on civilian deaths are manipulated. War crimes are concealed.
People are misled on the nature and history of the New World Order.
The real causes and consequences of this Worldwide economic and social collapse remain unheralded. Realities are turned up side down. The "real crisis" must be obfuscated through political lies and media disinformation.
It is in the interest of the political powerbrokers and the dominant financial actors to divert public attention from an understanding of the global crisis.
How best to achieve this goal?
By artificially creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation which serves to weaken and disarm organized dissent directed against the established economic and political order.
The objective is to undermine all forms of opposition and social resistance.
We are dealing with a diabolical project. The public must not only remain in the dark. As the crisis worsens, as people become impoverished, the real causes must be replaced by a set of fictitious relationships.
A crisis based on fake causes is heralded: "the global war on terrorism" is central to misleading the public's understanding of the Middle East War, which is a battle for the control over extensive reserves of oil and natural gas.
The antiwar movement is weakened. People are unable to think. They unequivocally endorse the "war on terrorism" consensus. They accept the political lies. In their inner consciousness, terrorists are threatening their livelihood. 
In this framework, the occurrence of "natural disasters", "pandemics", "environmental catastrophes" also plays a useful political role. It distorts the real causes of the crisis. It justifies a global public health emergency on humanitarian grounds.
The Worldwide H1N1 swine flu pandemic: Towards a Global Public Health Emergency? 
The Worldwide H1N1 swine flu pandemic serves to mislead public opinion. 
The 2009 pandemic, which started in Mexico in April, is timely: it coincides with a deepening economic depression. It takes place at a time of military escalation. 
The epidemiological data is fabricated, falsified and manipulated. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an epidemic of worldwide proportions now looms and threatens the livelihood of millions of people.
A "Catastrophic Emergency" is in the making. The WHO and the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) are authoritative bodies. Why would they lie?  The information released by these organizations, although subject to statistical errors, could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be falsified or manipulated.
People believe that the public health crisis at a global level is real and that government health officials are "working for the public good."
Press reports confirm the US government's intent to implement a mass H1N1 vaccination program in Fall-Winter of 2009. A major contract for 160 million doses has been established with Big Pharma, enough to inoculate more than half  the US population. Similar plans are ongoing in other Western countries including France, Canada, the UK.
Volunteers are being recruited to test the swine flu vaccine during the month of August, with a view to implementing a nationwide vaccination program in the Fall.
Manipulating The Data
There is ample evidence, documented in numerous reports, that the WHO's level 6 pandemic alert is based on fabricated evidence and a manipulation of the figures on mortality and morbidity resulting from the N1H1 swine flu.
The data initially used to justify the WHO's Worldwide level 5 alert in April 2009 was extremely scanty. The WHO asserted without evidence that a "global outbreak of the disease is imminent". It distorted Mexico's mortality data pertaining to the swine flu pandemic. According to the WHO Director General Dr. Margaret Chan in her official April 29 statement: "So far, 176 people have been killed in Mexico". From what? Where does she get these numbers? 159 died from influenza out of which only seven deaths, corroborated by lab analysis, resulted from the H1N1 swine flu strain, according to the Mexican Ministry of Health. 
Similarly in New York city in April, several hundred children were categorized as having the H1N1 influenza, yet in none of these cases, was the diagnosis corroborated on a laboratory test. 
"Dr. Frieden said. Health officials reached their preliminary conclusion after conducting viral tests on nose or throat swabs from the eight students, which allowed them to eliminate other strains of flu."
Tests were conducted on school children in Queen's, but the tests were inconclusive: among theses "hundreds of school children", there were no reports of laboratory analysis leading to a positive identification of the influenza virus. In fact the reports are contradictory: according to the reports, the Atlanta based CDCP is the "only lab in the country that can positively confirm the new swine flu strain — which has been identified as H1N1." (Michel Chossudovsky, Political Lies and Media Disinformation regarding the Swine Flu Pandemic, Global Research, May 2009, last quotation is from the New York Times,  April 25, 2009)  
Influenza is a common disease. Unless there is a thorough lab examination, the identity if the virus cannot be established. 
There are numerous cases of seasonal influenza across America, on an annual basis. "According to the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the flu kills up to 2,500 Canadians and about 36,000 Americans annually. Worldwide, the number of deaths attributed to the flu each year is between 250,000 and 500,000" (Thomas Walkom, The Toronto Star, May 1, 2009). 
What the CDCP and the WHO are doing is routinely us re-categorizing a large number of cases of common influenza as H1N1 swine flu. 
"The increasing number of cases in many countries with sustained community transmission is making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for countries to try and confirm them through laboratory testing. Moreover, the counting of individual cases is now no longer essential in such countries for monitoring either the level or nature of the risk posed by the pandemic virus or to guide implementation of the most appropriate response measures. (WHO, Briefing note, 2009)
The WHO admits that laboratory at a country level testing is often absent, while emphasising that lab confirmation it is not for data collection, with a view to ascertaining the spread of the disease:  
A strategy that concentrates on the detection, laboratory confirmation and investigation of all cases, including those with mild illness, is extremely resource-intensive. In some countries, this strategy is absorbing most national laboratory and response capacity, leaving little capacity for the monitoring and investigation of severe cases and other exceptional events. ... For all of these reasons, WHO will no longer issue the global tables showing the numbers of confirmed cases for all countries.  However, as part of continued efforts to document the global spread of the H1N1 pandemic, regular updates will be provided describing the situation in the newly affected countries. WHO will continue to request that these countries report the first confirmed cases and, as far as feasible, provide weekly aggregated case numbers and descriptive epidemiology of the early cases. (Ibid)
At a June 2009 WHO press conference, the issue of lab testing was raised:
Marion Falco, CNN Atlanta: My question may be a little basic but if you are not, and so forgive me for that, if you are not requiring testing in the countries that already have well established numbers of cases, then how are you distinguishing between seasonal flu and this particular flu. I mean how are you going to separate the numbers?
Dr Fukuda, WHO, Geneva: It is not that we are recommending not doing any testing at all. In fact when the guidance comes out, what it will suggest is what countries are to do is tailor down their testing so that they are not trying to test everybody but certainly keeping up testing of some people for exactly the kinds of reasons that you bring up. When people get sick with an influenza-like illness it will be important for us to know whether is it caused by the pandemic virus or whether is caused by seasonal viruses. What we are indicating is that if you ratchet down the level of testing we will still be able to figure that out and so we do not need to test everybody for that, but we will continue to recommend some level of testing – at a lower level of people who continue to get sick. SeeTranscript of WHO Virtual Press Conference, Dr Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security and Environment, WHO, Geneva, July 2009, emphasis added).
"Figure that out"? What the foregoing statements by the WHO suggest is that:
1) the WHO is not collecting data on the spread of H1N1 based on systematic lab confirmation;
2) the WHO in fact discourages national health officials to conduct detection and laboratory confirmation, while also pressuring the countries' public health authorities to duly deliver to the WHO on a weekly basis the data on H1N1 cases.
3) The WHO in its reporting only refers to "confirmed cases" (see relevant tables). It does not distinguish between confirmed and non-confirmed case. It would appear that the "non-confirmed" cases are categorized as confirmed cases and the numbers are numbers then used by the WHO to prove that the disease is spreading. 
The swine flu has the same symptoms as seasonal influenza: fever, cough and sore throat. What is happening is that the widespread incidence of the common flu is being used to generate the reports delivered to the WHO pertaining to the H1N1 swine flu.  Nonetheless, in the tabulated release of country level data, the WHO uses the term: "number of laboratory-confirmed cases", while also admitting that the cases are, in many cases, not confirmed. 
Worldwide Pandemic
The WHO establishes trends on the spread of the disease, essentially using unconfirmed data. Based on these extrapolations, the WHO is now claiming, in the absence of laboratory confirmation, that "as many as 2 billion people could become infected over the next two years — nearly one-third of the world population." In turn, in the US, the Atlanta based Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggests that"swine flu could strike up to 40 percent of Americans over the next two years and as many as several hundred thousand could die if a vaccine campaign and other measures aren't successful." (AP, July 24, 2009). 
How did they come up with these numbers? 
The CDC estimate has nothing to do with an assessment of the spread of the H1N1 virus. It is based on a mechanical pro-rata extrapolation of trends underlying the 1957 pandemic, which resulted in 70,000 deaths in the US. The presumption here is that the H1N1 flu has the "same transmission path" as the 1957 epidemic.
Creating a Crisis where there is No Crisis
The underlying political intent is to use the WHO level six pandemic to divert public attention from an impending and far-reaching social crisis, which is a largely the consequence of  a deep-seated global economic depression. 
On the basis of ... expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met. I have therefore decided to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from Phase 5 to Phase 6. The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic. ... Calling a pandemic is also a signal to the international community. This is a time where the world's countries, rich or poor, big or small, must come together in the name of global solidarity to make sure that no countries because of poor resources, no countries' people should be left behind without help. ...The World Health Organization has been in contact with donor communities, development partners, resource poor countries, and also drug companies as well as vaccine companies. Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), Press Briefing, 11 June 2009
How best to tame the Nation's citizens, to rein in people's resentment in the face of mounting unemployment?
Create a Worldwide pandemic, instil an atmosphere of anxiety and intimidation, which demobilizes meaningful and organized public action against the programmed enrichment of a social minority. The flu pandemic is used to foreclose organized resistance against the government's economic policies in support of the financial elites. It provides both a pretext and a justification to adopt emergency procedures. Under the existing legislation in the US, Martial Law, implying the suspension of constitutional government, could be invoked in the case of  "A Catastrophic Emergency" including a the H1N1 swine flu pandemic.
Martial Law
Legislation inherited from the Clinton administration, not to mention the post 9/11 Patriot Acts I and II, allow the military to intervene in judicial and civilian law enforcement activities. In 1996, legislation was passed which allowed the military to intervene in the case of a national emergency. In 1999, Clinton's Defense Authorization Act (DAA) extended those powers (under the 1996 legislation) by creating an "exception" to the Posse Comitatus Act, which permits the military to be involved in civilian affairs "regardless of whether there is an emergency". (See ACLU athttp://www.aclu.org/NationalSecurity/NationalSecurity.cfm?ID=8683&c=24 )
The issue of a pandemic or public health emergency , however, was not explicitly outlined in the Clinton era legislation.
The Katrina disaster (2005) constitutes a dividing line, a watershed leading de facto to the militarization of emergency relief:
"The disaster that struck New Orleans and the southern Gulf Coast has given rise to the largest military mobilization in modern history on US soil. Nearly 65,000 US military personnel are now deployed in disaster area, transforming the devastated port city into a war zone,"(Bill Van Auken, Wsws.org, September 2005).
Hurricanes Katrina (August 2005) and Rita (September 2005) contributed to justifying the role of the Military in natural disasters. They also contributed to shaping the formulation of presidential directives and subsequent legislation. President Bush called for the Military to become the "lead agency" in disaster relief:
".....The other question, of course, I asked, was, is there a circumstance in which the Department of Defense becomes the lead agency. Clearly, in the case of a terrorist attack, that would be the case, but is there a natural disaster which -- of a certain size that would then enable the Defense Department to become the lead agency in coordinating and leading the response effort. That's going to be a very important consideration for Congress to think about. (Press Conference, 25 Sept 2005 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BUS20050925&articleId=1004 )
Militarization of Public Health: The Avian Flu
The 2005 bird flu crisis followed barely a month after Hurricane Rita. It was presented to the US public as an issue of National Security. Following the 2005 outbreak of avian flu, president Bush confirmed that the military would be actively involved in the case of a pandemic, with the authority of detaining large numbers of people:
"I am concerned about avian flu. I'm concerned about what an avian flu outbreak could mean for the United States and the world. ... I have thought through the scenarios of what an avian flu outbreak could mean....
The policy decisions for a president in dealing with an avian flu outbreak are difficult.  ...
If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country? And how do you, then, enforce a quarantine?
... One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move. So that's why I put it on the table. I think it's an important debate for Congress to have.
... But Congress needs to take a look at circumstances that may need to vest the capacity of the president to move beyond that debate. And one such catastrophe or one such challenge could be an avian flu outbreak. (White House Press Conference, 4 October, 2005, emphasis added)
On the day following Bush`s October 4, 2005 Press Conference, a major piece of legislation was introduced in the US Senate. The Pandemic Preparedness and Response Act.
While the proposed legislation was never adopted, it nonetheless contributed to building a consensus among key members of the US Senate. The militarization of public health was subsequently embodied in the John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007. 
"Public Health Emergency" and Martial Law: The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007. H.R. 5122
New legislation is devised.  The terms  "epidemic", and  "public health emergency" are explicitly included in a key piece of legislation, signed into law by President Bush in October 2006.
Lost in the midst of hundreds of pages, Public Law 109-364, better known as the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122) includes a specific section on the role of the Military in civilian affairs. 
Section 1076 of this legislation entitled "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies" allows the President of the United States the deploy the armed forces and the National Guard across the US, to "restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States" in the case of  "a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency": 
SEC. 1076. USE OF THE ARMED FORCES IN MAJOR PUBLIC EMERGENCIES.
(a) Use of the Armed Forces Authorized-
(1) IN GENERAL- Section 333 of title 10, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:
`Sec. 333. Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law
`(a) Use of Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies- (1) The President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service, to--
`(A) restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that--
`(i) domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order; and
`(ii) such violence results in a condition described in paragraph (2); or
`(B) suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such insurrection, violation, combination, or conspiracy results in a condition described in paragraph (2).
`(2) A condition described in this paragraph is a condition that--
`(A) so hinders the execution of the laws of a State or possession, as applicable, and of the United States within that State or possession, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State or possession are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
`(B) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.
`(3) In any situation covered by paragraph (1)(B), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.
`(b) Notice to Congress- The President shall notify Congress of the determination to exercise the authority in subsection (a)(1)(A) as soon as practicable after the determination and every 14 days thereafter during the duration of the exercise of that authority.' (See ext of HR5122  http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:6:./temp/~c109bW9vKy:e939907:http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-5122&tab=summary
These far-reaching provisions allow the Armed Forces to override the authority of civilian federal, state and local governments involved in disaster relief and public health. It also grants the Military a mandate in civilian police functions. Namely the legislation implies the militarization of law enforcement in the case of a national emergency.
"Catastrophic Emergency" and "Continuity of Government,": The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51/HSPD 20 

Coinciding with the passage of the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, a National Security Presidential Directive was issued in May 2007, (National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51/HSPD 20) .
NSPD 51 /HSPD 20 is a combined National Security Directive emanating from the White House and Homeland Security. While it is formulated in relation to the domestic "war on terrorism", it also includes provisions which allow for Martial Law in case of a natural disaster including a flu pandemic.
The thrust and emphasis of NSPD 51, however, is different from that of Section 1076 of HR 5122. It defines the functions of the Department of Homeland Security in the case of a national emergency and its relationship to the White House and the Military. It also provides the President with sweeping powers to declare a national emergency, without Congressional approval.
The directive establishes procedures for "Continuity of Government" (COG) in the case of a "Catastrophic Emergency". The latter is defined in NSPD 51/HSPD 20 (henceforth referred to as NSPD 51), as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions."
"Continuity of Government," or "COG," is defined in NSPD 51 as "a coordinated effort within the Federal Government's executive branch to ensure that National Essential Functions continue to be performed during a Catastrophic Emergency."
The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government. In order to advise and assist the President in that function, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counter terrorism (APHS/CT) is hereby designated as the National Continuity Coordinator. The National Continuity Coordinator, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), without exercising directive authority, shall coordinate the development and implementation of continuity policy for executive departments and agencies. The Continuity Policy Coordination Committee (CPCC), chaired by a Senior Director from the Homeland Security Council staff, designated by the National Continuity Coordinator, shall be the main day-to-day forum for such policy coordination. (National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51/HSPD 20,  emphasis added)
This Combined Directive NSPD /51 HSPD 20 grants unprecedented powers to the Presidency and the Department of Homeland Security, overriding the foundations of Constitutional government. NSPD 51 allows the sitting president to declare a ?national emergency? without Congressional approval  The adoption of NSPD 51 would lead to the de facto closing down of the Legislature and the militarization of justice and law enforcement.
NSPD 51 grants extraordinary Police State powers to the White House and Homeland Security (DHS), in the event of  a "Catastrophic Emergency".
A flu pandemic or public health emergency is part of the terms of reference of NSPD 51. "Catastrophic Emergency" is broadly defined in NSPD 51 as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions" 
"The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government. In order to advise and assist the President in that function, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counter terrorism (APHS/CT) is hereby designated as the National Continuity Coordinator. The National Continuity Coordinator, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), without exercising directive authority, shall coordinate the development and implementation of continuity policy for executive departments and agencies. The Continuity Policy Coordination Committee (CPCC), chaired by a Senior Director from the Homeland Security Council staff, designated by the National Continuity Coordinator, shall be the main day-to-day forum for such policy coordination. (National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51/HSPD 20, emphasis added)
The directive acknowledges the overriding power of the military in the case of a national emergency:  The presidential directive "Shall not be construed to impair or otherwise affect... the authority of the Secretary of Defense over the Department of Defense, including the chain of command for military forces from the President, to the Secretary of Defense, to the commander of military forces, or military command and control procedures". 
Since their enactment two years ago, neither the John Warner Defense Authorization Act nor NSPD 51 have been the object of media debate or discussion.
NSPD 51 and/or the John Warner H.R.5122 could be invoked at short notice following the declaration of a national health emergency and a nationwide forced vaccination program. The hidden agenda consists in using the threat of a pandemic and/or the plight of a natural disaster as a pretext to establish military rule, under the facade of a "functioning democracy".
Vaccination: From H5N1 to H1N1
A nationwide flu vaccination program has been in the pipeline since 2005.
According to the Wall Street Journal (Oct 1, 2005), the Bush administration had asked Congress for an estimated $6-10 billion "to stockpile vaccines and antiviral medications as part of its plans to prepare the U.S. for a possible flu pandemic." A large part of this budget, namely 3.1 billion was used  under the Bush administration to stockpile the antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu), of which the intellectual property rights belong to Gilead Science Inc, a company headed by Don Rumsfeld prior to becoming Secretary of Defense under the Bush administration. 
Consistent with its role as "lead agency", more than half of the money earmarked by the Bush administration for the program was handed over to the Pentagon. In other words, what we are dealing with is a process of militarization of the civilian public health budget. Social sector budgets are now being transferred to the Department of Defense. The money for a public health program is controlled by the Department of Defense, under the rules of DoD procurement.
"The US Senate voted [September 3, 2005] yesterday to provide $4 billion for antiviral drugs and other measures to prepare for a feared influenza pandemic, but whether the measure would clear Congress was uncertain.
The Senate attached the measure to a $440 billion defense-spending bill for 2006, according to the Associated Press (AP). But the House included no flu money in its version of the defense bill, and a key senator said he would try to keep the funds out of the House-Senate compromise version. The Senate is expected to vote on the overall bill next week.
Almost $3.1 billion of the money would be used to stockpile the antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu), and the rest would go for global flu surveillance, development of vaccines, and state and local preparedness, according to a Reuters report. The government currently has enough oseltamivir to treat a few million people, with a goal of acquiring enough to treat 20 million"
(CIDRAP, http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/panflu/news/sep3005avian.html)
The threat of the H5N1 bird flu pandemic in 2005 resulted in multibillion dollar earnings for the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. In this regard, a number of major pharmaceutical companies including GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, California based Chiron Corp, BioCryst Pharmaceuticals Inc, Novavax and Wave Biotech, Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding, had already positioned themselves. In 2005,.a Maryland-based biotechnology company MedImmune which produces "an inhaled flu vaccine" had positioned itself to develop a vaccine against the H5N1 avian flu. Although it had no expertise in the avian flu virus, one of the major actors in the vaccine business, on contract to the Pentagon, was Bioport, a company part owned by the Carlyle Group, closely linked to the Bush Cabinet with Bush Senior on its board of directors.
Forced Vaccination under a Public Health Emergency? Multibillion Financial Bonanza for the BioTech Conglomerates
The 2005 bird flu hoax was in many regards a dress rehearsal. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic is a much larger multibillion dollar operation. A select number of biotech and pharmaceutical companies have been involved in negotiations behind closed doors with the WHO and the US Administration. Key agencies are the Atlanta based Center for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which have close ties to the pharmaceutical industry. The conflicts of interest of these agencies is brought to light in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s  detailed study entitled Vaccinations: Deadly Immunity, June 2005:
"The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed. I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. ... "The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage," Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. "Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in twenty-five years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children." Robert F. Kennedy Jr,  Vaccinations: Deadly Immunity, June 2005. 
The WHO is planning for the production of 4.9 billion dose, enough to inoculate a large share of the World's population. Big Pharma including Baxter, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis and  AstraZeneca have signed procurement contracts with some 50 governments. (Reuters, July  16, 2009). For these companies, compulsory vaccination is a highly lucrative undertaking: 
"The WHO has refused to release the Minutes of a key meeting of an advisory vaccine group "packed with executives from Baxter, Novartis and Sanofi" that recommended compulsory vaccinations in the USA, Europe and other countries against the artificial H1N1 "swine flu" virus this autumn.
In an email this morning, a WHO spokesperson claimed there are no Minutes of the meeting that took place on July 7th in which guidelines on the need for worldwide vaccinations that WH0 adopted this Monday were formulated and in which Baxter and other Pharma executives participated.
Under the International Health Regulations, WHO guidelines have a binding character on all of WHO's 194 signatory countries in the event of a pandemic emergency of the kind anticipated this autumn when the second more lethal wave of the H1N1 virus "which is bioengineered to resemble the Spanish flu virus" emerges.
In short: WHO has the authority to force everyone in those 194 countries to take a vaccine this fall at gunpoint, impose quarantines and restrict travel." (Jane Burgermeister, WHO moves forward in secrecy to accomplish forced vaccination and population agenda,  Global Research, July 2009).
On May 19th, the WHO Director General and senior officials met behind closed doors with  the representatives of some 30 pharmaceutical companies.
"In a perfect world the planet's leading pharmaceutical companies could produce 4.9 billion H1N1 swine flu vaccinations over the course of the next year. This is the World Health Organization's latest assessment. WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan met with 30 pharmaceutical companies on Tuesday and briefed reporters on a WHO plan to secure vaccinations for poor countries who lack sufficient infrastructure to fight a possible pandemic. (Digital Journal, 19 May 2009)
According to recent report in Business Week, "Wealthier countries such as the U.S. and Britain will pay just under $10 per dose, the same price for the seasonal flu vaccine. Developing countries will pay a lower price, (Business Week, July 2009). The WHO suggests that the 4.9 billion doses will not suffice and that a second inoculation will be required.
4,9 billion doses at about ten dollars ($10.00) a shot and somewhat less in the developing countries, represents a windfall profit bonanza for Big Pharma of the order of 400 billion dollars in a single year. And the WHO claims that one dose per person may not suffice...  
Dangerous Life Threatening Vaccine: Who owns the Patent?
While the production has been entrusted to a select number of companies, it would appear that the intellectual property rights belong to Illinois based pharmaceutical giant Baxter. Baxter is central in the negotiations between the US Administration and the World Health Organization (WHO). Moreover, "a full year before any reported case of the current alleged H1N1" Baxter had filed for a patent for the H1N1 vaccine:
Baxter Vaccine Patent Application US 2009/0060950 A1. (See William Engdahl, Now legal immunity for swine flu vaccine makers, Global Research, July 2009). Their application: states:
“the composition or vaccine comprises more than one antigen... such as influenza A and influenza B in particular selected from of one or more of the human H1N1, H2N2, H3N2, H5N1, H7N7, H1N2, H9N2, H7N2, H7N3, H10N7 subtypes, of the pig flu H1N1, H1N2, H3N1 and H3N2 subtypes, of the dog or horse flu H7N7, H3N8 subtypes or of the avian H5N1, H7N2, H1N7, H7N3, H13N6, H5N9, H11N6, H3N8, H9N2, H5N2, H4N8, H10N7, H2N2, H8N4, H14N5, H6N5, H12N5 subtypes."
The application further states, “Suitable adjuvants can be selected from mineral gels, aluminium hydroxide, surface active substances, lysolecithin, pluronic polyols, polyanions or oil emulsions such as water in oil or oil in water, or a combination thereof. Of course the selection of the adjuvant depends on the intended use. E.g. toxicity may depend on the destined subject organism and can vary from no toxicity to high toxicity."
With no legal liability, could it be that Baxter is preparing to sell hundreds of millions of doses containing highly toxic aluminium hydroxide as adjuvant? (Ibid)
The Los Angeles Times has reassured the US public with an article entitled: What are the odds that H1N1 will kill you? One might also ask, what are the odds that the H1N1 vaccine will kill you?
National Emergency Centers Establishment Act: H.R. 645
If Martial Law or a National emergency were to be adopted in the context of a Public Health emergency, what we would be dealing with is the "forced vaccination" of millions of people as well as the establishment of internment facilities for people who have been quarantined.
In this regard, it is worth noting that in January 2009, a piece of legislation entitled the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act (HR 645) was introduced in the US Congress.The bill calls for the establishment of six national emergency centers in major regions in the US to be located on existing military installations, which could be used to quarantine people in the case of a public health emergency or forced vaccination program. 
The bill goes far beyond previous legislation (including H.R 5122). The stated purpose of the "national emergency centers" is to provide "temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster." In actuality, what we are dealing with are FEMA internment camps. HR 645 states that the camps can be used to "meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security." (Michel Chossudovsky,Preparing for Civil Unrest in America Legislation to Establish Internment Camps on US Military Bases, Global Research, March 2009)
There has been virtually no press coverage of HR 645, which is currently being discussed by several congressional committees. 
These "civilian facilities" on US military bases are to be established in cooperation with the US Military. Modeled on Guantanamo, what we are dealing with is the militarization of FEMA internment facilities.
Once a person is arrested and interned in a FEMA camp located on a military base, that person would in all likelihood, under a public health emergency, fall under the de facto jurisdiction of the Military: civilian justice and law enforcement including habeas corpus would no longer apply.
HR 645 could be used, were it to be adopted, in the case of public health emergency. It obviously bears a direct relationship to the economic crisis and the likelihood of mass protests across America. It constitutes a further move to militarize civilian law enforcement, repealing the Posse Comitatus Act.
In the words of Rep. Ron Paul:
"...the fusion centers, militarized police, surveillance cameras and a domestic military command is not enough... Even though we know that detention facilities are already in place, they now want to legalize the construction of FEMA camps on military installations using the ever popular excuse that the facilities are for the purposes of a national emergency. With the phony debt-based economy getting worse and worse by the day, the possibility of civil unrest is becoming a greater threat to the establishment. One need only look at Iceland, Greece and other nations for what might happen in the United States next." (Daily Paul, September 2008, emphasis added)
The proposed internment camps should be seen in relation to the broader process of militarization of civilian institutions. The construction of internment camps predates the introduction of HR 645 (Establishment of Emergency Centers) in January 2009.
"Military Civil Support": The Role of US Northern Command in the Case of a Flu Pandemic
US Northern Command has a mandate to support and oversee civilian institutions in the case of a National Emergency.
In addition to defending the nation, U.S. Northern Command provides defense support of civil authorities in accordance with U.S. laws and as directed by the President or Secretary of Defense. Military assistance is always in support of a lead federal agency, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Military civil support includes domestic disaster relief operations that occur during fires, hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes. Support also includes counter-drug operations and consequence management assistance, such as would occur after a terrorist event employing a weapon of mass destruction.
Generally, an emergency must exceed the management capabilities of local, state and federal agencies before U.S. Northern Command becomes involved. In providing civil support, the command operates through subordinate Joint Task Forces.
(See US Northcom website at http://www.northcom.mil/index.cfm?fuseaction=s.who_civil ).
The Katrina and Rita hurricane disasters played a key role in shaping the role of US Northern Command in "military civil support" activities. The emergency procedures were closely coordinated by US Northern Command out of the Peterson Air Force Base, together with Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA.
During Hurricane Rita (September 2005), US Northern Command Headquarters was directly in control of the movement of military personnel and hardware in the Gulf of Mexico, overriding, as  in the case of Katrina, the actions of civilian bodies. The entire operation was under the jurisdiction of the military rather than FEMA. (Michel Chossudovsky, US Northern Command and Hurricane Rita, Global Research, September 24, 2005)
Northern Command would, as part of its mandate in the case of a national emergency, oversee a number of civilian functions. In the words of Preident Bush at the height of the Rita hurricane,  "the Government and the US military needed broader authority to help handle major domestic crises such as hurricanes." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff subsequently classified Hurricane Rita as an "incident of national significance," which justified the activation of a so-called "National Response Plan"(NRP). (For further details, consult the complete document athttp://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/NRPbaseplan.pdf 
Within the broader framework of "Disaster Relief", Northern Command has, in the course of the last two years, defined a mandate in the eventuality of a public health emergency or a flu pandemic. The emphasis is on the militarization of public health whereby NORTHCOM would oversee the activities of civilian institutions involved in health related services.
According Brig. Gen. Robert Felderman, deputy director of USNORTHCOM’s Plans, Policy and Strategy Directorate: “USNORTHCOM is the global synchronizer – the global coordinator – for pandemic influenza across the combatant commands”(emphasis added)  (See Gail Braymen, USNORTHCOM contributes pandemic flu contingency planning expertise to trilateral workshop, USNORTHCOM, April 14, 2008, See also  USNORTHCOM. Pandemic Influenza Chain Training (U) pdf)
 “Also, the United States in 1918 had the Spanish influenza. We were the ones who had the largest response to [a pandemic] in more recent history. So I discussed what we did then, what we expect to have happen now and the numbers that we would expect in a pandemic influenza.”
The potential number of fatalities in the United States in a modern pandemic influenza could reach nearly two million, according to Felderman. Not only would the nation’s economy suffer, but the Department of Defense would still have to be ready and able to protect and defend the country and provide support of civil authorities in disaster situations. While virtually every aspect of society would be affected, “the implications for Northern Command will be very significant.”
“[A pandemic would have] a huge economic impact, in addition to the defense-of-our-nation impact,” Felderman said. The United States isn’t alone in preparing for such a potential catastrophe. (Gail Braymen, op cit)
It is worth noting that Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) has developed, over the past few years, a clearly defined mandate in the eventuality of a flu pandemic.
Also of relevance, was the repatriation of combat units from the war theater to assist US Northern Command in the case of a national emergency including a flu pandemic. In the last months of the Bush administration, the Department of Defense ordered the recall of the 3rd Infantry's 1st Brigade Combat Team from Iraq. 
The BCT combat unit was attached to US Army North, the Army's component of US Northern Command (USNORTHCOM). The 1st BCT and other combat units would be called upon to perform specific military functions in the case of a national emergency or natural disaster including a public health emergency:
"The Army Times reports that the 3rd Infantry’s 1st Brigade Combat Team is returning from Iraq to defend the Homeland, as "an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks." The BCT unit has been attached to US Army North, the Army's component of US Northern Command (USNORTHCOM). (See Gina Cavallaro, Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1, Army Times, September 8, 2008, emphasis added).

HIN1 Pandemic: Mulitbillion Dollar bonanza for Big Pharma
GlaxoSmithKline: A Swine Flu Windfall?

Global Research, July 26, 2009

businessweek.com

GlaxoSmithKline: A Swine Flu Windfall? 

British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline has orders for its swine flu vaccine from 16 countries and is in talks with 50 more By Kerry Capell
Europe Airlines Face Traveler Crash Fears Who Is New Porsche Boss Michael Macht? Intel Appeals EU Antitrust Ruling BP: Iraq Oil Deal is Start of Something Big Europe Issues New Bank Guidelines Story Tools post a comment e-mail this story print this story order a reprint suggest a story digg this save to del.icio.us linkedin connections British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is set to reap billions as fear of the swine flu pandemic grows. The world's second-largest drug company has secured orders from 16 countries for 195 million doses of the vaccine it is developing against the H1N1 virus, which has killed more than 740 people worldwide.
The Brentford (England)-based drugmaker began production of its new flu vaccine in June and is on track to begin shipping the first doses in September. At a July 22 briefing to announce the company's second-quarter results, CEO Andrew Witty confirmed the number of orders is expected to be "substantially more" as the company currently is in discussions with 50 countries. While Britain has ordered 60 million doses of the vaccine, according to Witty, the U.S. has paid GSK $250 million to supply it with "pandemic products" such as the individual ingredients used in the vaccine. These include the antigen that prompts an individual's immune response and GSK's adjuvent technology, a sort of booster used to increase the vaccine's yield and potency.
GSK also announced it expects to increase annual production of its inhalable anti-viral flu treatment Relenza threefold, to 190 million doses, by yearend. Relenza sales for the three months ended June 30 were $99 million, up from just $5 million in the second quarter of 2008. Since the beginning of 2006, GSK has invested $2.5 billion to put in place the technology and capacity needed to meet demand. "Short of putting beds in the labs, we are throwing just about every resource we have into this," Witty says.
The Competition Heats Up Witty reckons continued demand for GSK's flu drug and vaccine will likely boost sales in the second half of this year. GSK is one of several companies, including Novartis (NVS), Sanofi-Aventis (SNY), and Baxter International (BAX), racing to develop a swine flu vaccine.
While Witty says he is confident that GSK will meet its commitments, the company's total production capacity is still unknown. That's because the current strain of the swine flu virus is yielding less of the active ingredient or antigen needed to produce the vaccine than expected. (Because each flu virus varies, different strains produce varying levels of antigens.) Novartis also has conceded that the virus it's growing for its swine flu vaccine is producing a lower-than-expected yield. But Witty says based on current production levels, GSK should still be able to meet its commitments to governments around the world by early 2010.
With countries stepping up efforts to combat the pandemic, GSK's bottom line is likely to get a boost. However, Witty says that margins on both Relenza and the new vaccine are likely to be modest. GSK has a differentiated pricing structure for the new vaccine. Wealthier countries such as the U.S. and Britain will pay just under $10 per dose, the same price for the seasonal flu vaccine. Developing countries will pay a lower price, while GSK will donate 50 million doses of the vaccine to the World Health Organization for distribution to the world's poorest countries.
Generics Hurt U.S. Sales Still, even the boost in sales of GSK's flu treatment and vaccine were not enough to offset the rapid slowdown in U.S. prescription drug sales due to competition from generic drugs. In the three months ended June 30, GSK's sales rose 15%, to $11 billion, on the back of the sterling's weakness against major currencies such as the dollar. In constant currency terms, sales fell by 2% mainly due to the performance of the company's U.S. pharmaceuticals business, where sales plummeted by 15%, to $3.8 billion, as former top sellers such as epilepsy treatment Lamictal faced generic competition. Net profits surged by 12%, to $2.5 billion.
The results, says Sanford C. Bernstein pharmaceuticals analyst Timothy Anderson, were slightly better than expected in large part thanks to the weakening of the British pound against the dollar. Witty acknowledged "there was still a lot more work to do" but claimed the company was "making progress in the right direction."

Vaccinations: Deadly Immunity
"Government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks"

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Global Research, July 23, 2009

Rollingstone.com - 2005-07-20

Global Research Editor's note

We bring to the attention of our readers this 2005 article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published by Rollingstone.com. 

The article sheds light on the collusion between Big Parma and the US government and the dangers associated with vaccines produced by major pharmaceutical companies. This article is of particular relevance to the current debate on the H1N1 swine flu virus and plans by the WHO, The Obama Administration and Big Pharma to develop a swine flu vaccine. 

The article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. documented "the government's efforts to conceal alarming data about the dangers of vaccines." 

For a review of Global Research articles on the H1NI Swine Flu Pandemic, click here. 

Michel Chossudovsky, July 23, 2009

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. investigates the government cover-up of a mercury/autism scandal
In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Georgia. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to fifty-two attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.
The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.
Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. "You can play with this all you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results "are statistically significant." Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's first day, was even more alarmed. "My gut feeling?" he said. "Forgive this personal comment -- I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on."
But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line. "We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits," said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. "This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country." Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that "given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible hands." Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared that "perhaps this study should not have been done at all." He added that "the research results have to be handled," warning that the study "will be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the control of this group."
In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children's health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten's findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been "lost" and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.
Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections given to American infants -- but they continued to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines -- including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely given to eleven-year-olds.
The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in Washington. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood transcripts -- and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the "Eli Lilly Protection Act" into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. The measure was repealed by Congress in 2003 -- but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to Frist.
Even many conservatives are shocked by the government's effort to cover up the dangers of thimerosal. Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. "Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic," his House Government Reform Committee concluded in its final report. "This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin." The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of "institutional malfeasance for self protection" and "misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry."
The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed. I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. Privately, I was skeptical.
I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and I certainly understood the government's need to reassure parents that vaccinations are safe; the eradication of deadly childhood diseases depends on it. I tended to agree with skeptics like Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, who criticized his colleagues on the House Government Reform Committee for leaping to conclusions about autism and vaccinations. "Why should we scare people about immunization," Waxman pointed out at one hearing, "until we know the facts?"
It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation's pre-eminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real. Five of my own children are members of the Thimerosal Generation -- those born between 1989 and 2003 -- who received heavy doses of mercury from vaccines. "The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage," Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. "Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in twenty-five years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children."
More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among eleven children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.
Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by thimerosal-tainted vaccinations. They argue that the increase is a result of better diagnosis -- a theory that seems questionable at best, given that most of the new cases of autism are clustered within a single generation of children. "If the epidemic is truly an artifact of poor diagnosis," scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley, one of the world's authorities on mercury toxicity, "then where are all the twenty-year-old autistics?" Other researchers point out that Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative "load" of mercury than ever before, from contaminated fish to dental fillings, and suggest that thimerosal in vaccines may be only part of a much larger problem. It's a concern that certainly deserves far more attention than it has received -- but it overlooks the fact that the mercury concentrations in vaccines dwarf other sources of exposure to our children.
What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading detectives have gone to ignore -- and cover up -- the evidence against thimerosal. From the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been overwhelming. The preservative, which is used to stem fungi and bacterial growth in vaccines, contains ethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. Truckloads of studies have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates and other animals after they are injected with vaccines -- and that the developing brains of infants are particularly susceptible. In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children still suffered brain damage years later. Russia banned thimerosal from children's vaccines twenty years ago, and Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed suit.
"You couldn't even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe," says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky. "It's just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage."
Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage -- and even death -- in both animals and humans. In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to twenty-two patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected -- a fact Lilly didn't bother to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosal's safety "did not check with ours." Half the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative "unsatisfactory as a serum intended for use on dogs."
In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it "poison." In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly's own studies discerned that thimerosal was "toxic to tissue cells" in concentrations as low as one part per million -- 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as "nontoxic" and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, ten babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.
In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within twenty-four hours of birth, and two-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.
The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that six-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. "The best way to go," he added, "is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives."
For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money. Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this "cost consideration," Merck ignored Hilleman's warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received eleven vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of twenty-two immunizations by the time they reached first grade.
As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. "What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?" Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999. "Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?"
But by that time, the damage was done. At two months, when the infant brain is still at a critical stage of development, infants routinely received three inoculations that contained a total of 62.5 micrograms of ethylmercury -- a level 99 times greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies -- including one published in April by the National Institutes of Health -- suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury.
Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that the additional vaccines were necessary to protect infants from disease and that thimerosal is still essential in developing nations, which, they often claim, cannot afford the single-dose vials that don't require a preservative. Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDC's top vaccine advisers, told me, "I think if we really have an influenza pandemic -- and certainly we will in the next twenty years, because we always do -- there's no way on God's earth that we immunize 280 million people with single-dose vials. There has to be multidose vials."
But while public-health officials may have been well-intentioned, many of those on the CDC advisory committee who backed the additional vaccines had close ties to the industry. Dr. Sam Katz, the committee's chair, was a paid consultant for most of the major vaccine makers and was part of a team that developed the measles vaccine and brought it to licensure in 1963. Dr. Neal Halsey, another committee member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies and received honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis B vaccine.
Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such conflicts of interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the CDC "routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on intellectual advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines," even though they have "interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight." The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisers who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine "had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine."
Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged to me that he "would make money" if his vote eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist's direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. "It provides no conflict for me," he insists. "I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent was trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children in this country. It's offensive to say that physicians and public-health people are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions that they know are unsafe for children. It's just not the way it works."
Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances. Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children's health, proud of their "partnerships" with pharmaceutical companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering children's health. They are often resentful of questioning. "Science," says Offit, "is best left to scientists."
Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of interest. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of the FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize the danger posed by the added baby vaccines. "I'm not sure there will be an easy way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until now," Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, "will also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use" of thimerosal in child vaccines.
If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood. But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science. The agency turned its database on childhood vaccines -- which had been developed largely at taxpayer expense -- over to a private agency, America's Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research. It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between thimerosal and brain disorders. The CDC "wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe," Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM's Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. "We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect" of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee's chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was "inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation" between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result "Walt wants" -- a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.
For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had worked for. "We've got a dragon by the tail here," said Dr. Michael Kaback, another committee member. "The more negative that [our] presentation is, the less likely people are to use vaccination, immunization -- and we know what the results of that will be. We are kind of caught in a trap. How we work our way out of the trap, I think is the charge."
Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines. "Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal," Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University gathering in May 2001. "In order to undo the harmful effects of research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of autism, we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety." Douglas formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings about thimerosal's risks.
In May of last year, the Institute of Medicine issued its final report. Its conclusion: There is no proven link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines. Rather than reviewing the large body of literature describing the toxicity of thimerosal, the report relied on four disastrously flawed epidemiological studies examining European countries, where children received much smaller doses of thimerosal than American kids. It also cited a new version of the Verstraeten study, published in the journal Pediatrics, that had been reworked to reduce the link between thimerosal and autism. The new study included children too young to have been diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs of the disease. The IOM declared the case closed and -- in a startling position for a scientific body -- recommended that no further research be conducted.
The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one. Rep. David Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves on the House Government Reform Committee, attacked the Institute of Medicine, saying it relied on a handful of studies that were "fatally flawed" by "poor design" and failed to represent "all the available scientific and medical research." CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the truth, Weldon told me, because "an association between vaccines and autism would force them to admit that their policies irreparably damaged thousands of children. Who would want to make that conclusion about themselves?"
Under pressure from Congress and parents, the Institute of Medicine convened another panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink Data Sharing program. In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the way the VSD had been used in the Verstraeten study, and urged the CDC to make its vaccine database available to the public.
So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access. Dr. Mark Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and his son, David, spent a year battling to obtain the medical records from the CDC. Since August 2002, when members of Congress pressured the agency to turn over the data, the Geiers have completed six studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in children. One study, which compares the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between 1981 and 1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a "very significant relationship" between autism and vaccines. Another study of educational performance found that kids who received higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation. Another soon-to-be published study shows that autism rates are in decline following the recent elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines.
As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism. In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more interesting studies himself. Searching for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines -- the kind of population that scientists typically use as a "control" in experiments -- Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who refuse to immunize their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three -- including one child adopted from outside the Amish community -- had received their vaccines.
At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of thimerosal. While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the risks, the Iowa legislature was carefully combing through all of the available scientific and biological data. "After three years of review, I became convinced there was sufficient credible research to show a link between mercury and the increased incidences in autism," says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a Republican who oversaw the investigation. "The fact that Iowa's 700 percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more and more vaccines were added to the children's vaccine schedules, is solid evidence alone." Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed by California. Similar bans are now under consideration in thirty-two other states.
But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected collagen. Even more alarming, the government continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal to developing countries -- some of which are now experiencing a sudden explosion in autism rates. In China, where the disease was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that there are now more than 1.8 million autistics. Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines. The World Health Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders "under review."
I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine. "The CDC is guilty of incompetence and gross negligence," says Mark Blaxill, vice president of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned about the role of mercury in medicines. "The damage caused by vaccine exposure is massive. It's bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco, bigger than anything you've ever seen."
It's hard to calculate the damage to our country -- and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases -- if Third World nations come to believe that America's most heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning their children. It's not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by America's enemies abroad. The scientists and researchers -- many of them sincere, even idealistic -- who are participating in efforts to hide the science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics. They are badly misguided. Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world's poorest populations.
NOTE: This story has been updated to correct several inaccuracies in the original, published version. As originally reported, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations before 1989, but the article failed to note that they were innoculated a total of eleven times with those vaccines, including boosters. The article also misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms - an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury. Finally, because of an editing error, the article misstated the contents of the rotavirus vaccine approved by the CDC. It did not contain thimerosal. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.
An earlier version of this story stated that the Institute of Medicine convened a second panel to review the work of the Immunization Safety Review Committee that had found no evidence of a link between thimerosal and autism. In fact, the IOM convened the second panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink Data Sharing program, including those raised by critics of the IOM's earlier work. But the panel was not charged with reviewing the committee's findings. The story also inadvertently omitted a word and transposed two sentences in a quote by Dr. John Clements, and incorrectly stated that Dr. Sam Katz held a patent with Merck on the measles vaccine. In fact, Dr. Katz was part of a team that developed the vaccine and brought it to licensure, but he never held the patent. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.
CLARIFICATION: After publication of this story, Salon and Rolling Stone corrected an error that misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms ? an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury. At the time of the correction, we were aware that the comparison itself was flawed, but as journalists we considered it more appropriate to state the correct figure rather than replace it with another number entirely.
Since that earlier correction, however, it has become clear from responses to the article that the forty-percent number, while accurate, is misleading. It measures the total mercury load an infant received from vaccines during the first six months, calculates the daily average received based on average body weight, and then compares that number to the EPA daily limit. But infants did not receive the vaccines as a ?daily average? ? they received massive doses on a single day, through multiple shots. As the story states, these single-day doses exceeded the EPA limit by as much as 99 times. Based on the misunderstanding, and to avoid further confusion, we have amended the story to eliminate the forty-percent figure.
Correction: The story misattributed a quote to Andy Olson, former legislative counsel to Senator Bill Frist. The comment was made by Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to the senator. Rolling Stone and Salon.com regret the error.

Kennedy Report Sparks Controversy


"Deadly Immunity," our story about the link between mercury in vaccines and the dramatic rise in autism among children [RS 977/978], sparked intense reaction from the medical establishment and several leading news organizations. The story, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. -- part of an ongoing collaboration with Salon.com -- documented the government's efforts to conceal alarming data about the dangers of vaccines.
What is most striking is the lengths to which major media outlets have gone to disparage the story and to calm public fears -- even in the face of the questionable science on the subject. In a segment on World News Tonight titled "A Closer Look," ABC pointed out that Kennedy is "not a scientist or a doctor" and dismissed his extensive evidence as nothing more than "a few scientific studies." The network also trotted out its medical editor, Dr. Timothy Johnson, to praise the "impeccably impartial Institute of Medicine" and to again state that Kennedy is not a scientist.
The New York Times, in a front-page story on the subject, devoted only one line to Kennedy's article, which it said accused public-health officials and drugmakers of "conspiring" to hide the data on autism -- a word that our story neither used nor implied. (The Wall Street Journal, in an op-ed attacking the article, was even more misleading, using the word "conspiracy" four times.) The Times then went on, for more than a full page, to portray concerns over vaccines as nothing more than the misguided fears of parents who suffer from "scientific illiteracy," unable to understand the medical studies that prove immunizations to be safe. It depicted studies reviewed by the Institute of Medicine as definitive without even bothering to address the host of serious questions raised about their validity: conflicting diagnoses of autism, mixed-up data from HMOs and research skewed to exclude many sick kids.
Rolling Stone and Salon fact-checked the article thoroughly before publication, insisting on primary documentation for every statement in the story, and posted links to the most significant materials online to enable readers to judge for themselves. The final article contained six errors. These ranged from inadvertently transposing a quote and confusing a drug license for a patent to relying on a figure that incorrectly calculated an infant's exposure to mercury over six months, rather than citing the even more dangerous amount injected on a single day. (The mistakes were corrected online as soon as they were discovered and can be viewed in detail at both RollingStone.com and Salon.com.)
It is important to note, however, that none of the mistakes weaken the primary point of the story. The government's own records show that it has failed to do the science necessary to put to rest reasonable concerns about vaccines. If the scientists had simply done their job rather than covering their tracks, there would be no controversy today. Instead, the government cannot even provide a definitive figure of the number of cases of autism among American children -- a number obviously critical to any serious scientific investigation -- and yet expects the public to believe that it has ruled out any link between vaccines and an illness it does not even track.
"Science," as one doctor in our story insisted, "is best left to scientists." But when the scientists fail to do their job, resorting to closed-door meetings and rigged studies, others in society have not only a right but a moral obligation to question their work. In the coming years, further research may indeed demonstrate that mercury in vaccines is not responsible for the rise in autism. For now, though, we can only raise a very real and legitimate alarm -- and hope that the government's well-documented mishandling of its own research did not needlessly jeopardize the health of hundreds of thousands of children.

WHO moves forward in secrecy to accomplish forced vaccination and population agenda

By Jane Burgermeister

Global Research, July 21, 2009

birdflu666.wordpress.com

The WHO has refused to release the Minutes of a key meeting of an advisory vaccine group – packed with executives from Baxter, Novartis and Sanofi – that recommended compulsory vaccinations in the USA, Europe and other countries against the artificial H1N1 “swine flu” virus this autumn.
In an email this morning, a WHO spokesperson claimed there are no Minutes of the meeting that took place on July 7th in which guidelines on the need for worldwide vaccinations that WH0 adopted this Monday were formulated and in which Baxter and other pharma executives participated.
Under the International Health Regulations, WHO guidelines have a binding character on all of WHO’s 194 signatory countries in the event of a pandemic emergency of the kind anticipated this autumn when the second more lethal wave of the H1N1 virus — which is bioengineered to resemble the Spanish flu virus — emerges.
In short: WHO has the authority to force everyone in those 194 countries to take a vaccine this fall at gunpoint, impose quarantines and restrict travel.
There is verifiable, clear and unambiguous proof that WHO supplied the live bird flu virus to Baxter’s subsidiary in Austria, which was used by Baxter to manufacture 72 kilos of vaccine material in Febuary.
Baxter subsequently sent this material out to 16 labs in four countries under a false label designating the contaminated product as vaccine material, so nearly triggering a global pandemic.
Because Baxter must adhere to strict biosafety level 3 regulations when handling a dangerus virus such as the bird flu virus, the production and distribution of so much pandemic material cannot have been an accident but must have been done by Baxter with criminal intent.
The Austrian police are now investigating after I filed criminal charges in April.
It is increasingly clear that WHO and Baxter are just elements in a much bigger criminal organisation that is moving forward in a synchronised and coordinated way to fulfil the “elite” agenda of global population reduction in the coming months and years while putting in place a global government of which WHO will be an arm.
WHO, a UN agency, appears to play a key role in coordinating the activities of labs, vaccine companies and governments to achieve the goal of population reduction and political and economic take over of North America and Europe:
- First, WHO gives funds, support and cover to labs such as the CDC to bioprospect for pathogens, bioengineer them to make them more deadly, and also patent them.
- Second, WHO gives those same deadly bioengineered pathogens to companies such as Baxter in Austria, so that Baxter could use those viruses to deliberately, systematically contaminate vaccine material. If the contamination of the 72 kilos had not been detection on time by a lab technician in the Czech Republic, millions of people would have caught the “bird flu” from the injections.
- Third, in the event of a pandemic, WHO orders a compulsory vaccines for all 194 countries, following “recommendations” by an advisory vaccine group on which executives of Baxter also sit.
- Fourth, WHO awards Baxter, Novartis, Sanofi and other companies lucrative contracts to supply those vaccines.
Furthermore, WHO acquires new global authority on an unseen scale in the event of a pandemic.
Under special pandemic plans enacted around the world including the USA, in 2005, national governments are to be dissolved in the event of a pandemic emergency and replaced by special crisis committees, which take charge of the health and security infrastructure of a country, and which are answerable to the WHO and EU in Europe and to the WHO and UN in North America.
If the Model Emergency Health Powers Act is implemented on the instructions of WHI, it will be a criminal offence for Americans to refuse the vaccine. Police are allowed to use deadly force against “criminal” suspects.
Through their control of these special pandemic crisis committees with the power to enact legislation to be set up most countries, the WHO, UN and EU become the de facto government of a large part of the world.
Mass murder and death will also bring economic collapse and disruption, starvation and wars – and these events will lead to a further population reduction.
To sum up: WHO helps create, distribute and then release the deadly pandemic virus, and this pandemic virus allows WHO to assume control of governments in North America and Europe and also order forced vaccination on populations by the very same companies that have distributed and released the deadly viruses in the first place and all under under the pretext of protecting populations from a pandemic they have created.
The corporate mainstream media owned by the same “elite” group which funds WHO is systematically concealing from the general public the nature of the real danger of these H1N1 jabs by withholding from them key information concerning the interrelated activities of this group of organisations for their mutual profit.
As a result, most people still believe that the H1N1 virus is a natural swine flu when even WHO has officially dropped the term “swine” in tactic acknowledgement of its artificial origin.
Most people still believe the vaccine companies can deliver a cure when the vaccine companies are preparing a lethal series of shots containg live attenuated virus, toxic metals and other poisons.
The two-dose H1N1 shots are designed to disable the immune system and then load that system with a live virus in a process that mirrors the one described in two of WHO’s 1972 memoranda where the technical means for turning vaccines into killers is outlined.
The Strecker Memorandum also reveals that WHO has been actively searching for ways to weaken the immune system.
The best protection against the H1N1 virus that has now been released and that will inevtiably become more lethal as it mutates in autumn is colloidal silver and also vitamins to strengthen the immune system, face masks and other such measures.
However, none of the governments in North America or Europe have stocked up on colloidal silver or announced sensible health measures to contain the coming lethal wave.
Instead, there are growing signs, they will use the panic to terrify people into taking the toxic vaccines which are sure to cause injury or damage because of the presence of heavy metals alone.
This mass vaccination will moreover alllow ever more lethal strains to emerge and also provide a cover for a release of bird flu virus or other pathogens.
This is why steps need to be taken now to stop the mass vaccinations anticipated in autumn by taking legal action to block the distribution of vaccines and/or laws allowing govenrments to force people to take vaccinations.
An investigation into this international corporate crime syndicate has to be conducted in every country because it has its tentacles in every country, and to try to initiate this in the USA, I filed charges with the FBI against WHO and the UN among other defendants in June. I included President Obama among the defendants because I believe the time has come to identify and isolate the core members of this international corporate criminal group which has annexed high government office in the USA, and put them in prison once and for all, and there are reports that Obama has direct financial links with Baxter that need to be investigated by law enforcement.
There is evidence the Austrian Health Minister and other officials have been helping Baxter to cover its tracks.
Also, there is clear evidence that elements of the Austrian media are involved in actively spreading lies and misinformation to lull people into a false sense of security concerning Baxter’s manufacture and distribution of pandemic material in Austria this February.
Vital is for individuals and local authorities need to take effective measures to protect against the coming lethal wave of the H1N1 virus to minimise its impact.
To find to out about the charges I have filed so far in German and English in Austria also with the FBI, please check the wakenews website.
http://wakenews.net/html/jane_burgermeister.html  
janeburgermeister@gmx.at

Big Pharma: Baxter Files Swine Flu Vaccine Patent a Year Ahead of Outbreak
By Lori Price
Global Research, July 18, 2009 - legitgov.org

Barack Opharma issues the ultimate bad news during his weekly Friday night bad news dump: Legal immunity set for swine flu vaccine makers 17 Jul 2009 The last time the government embarked on a major vaccine campaign against a new swine flu, thousands filed claims contending they suffered side effects [paralysis, death] from the shots. This time, the government has already taken steps to head that off. Vaccine makers and federal officials will be immune from lawsuits that result from any new swine flu vaccine, under a document signed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, government health officials said Friday. The document signed by Sebelius last month grants immunity to those making a swine flu vaccine, under the provisions of a 2006 law for public health emergencies.
Baxter Files Swine Flu Vaccine Patent a Year Ahead of Outbreak --US20090060950A1 to Baxter International filed 28th August 2008 By Lara 10 Jul 2009 Baxter Vaccine Patent Application US 2009/0060950 A1 --'In particular preferred embodiments the composition or vaccine comprises more than one antigen.....such as influenza A and influenza B in particular selected from of one or more of the human H1N1, H2N2, H3N2, H5N1, H7N7, H1N2, H9N2, H7N2, H7N3, H10N7 subtypes, of the pig flu H1N1, H1N2, H3N1 and H3N2 subtypes, of the dog or horse flu H7N7, H3N8 subtypes or of the avian H5N1, H7N2, H1N7, H7N3, H13N6, H5N9, H11N6, H3N8, H9N2, H5N2, H4N8, H10N7, H2N2, H8N4, H14N5, H6N5, H12N5 subtypes.'
Baxter can take no more H1N1 flu vaccine orders 16 Jul 2009 While at least 50 governments have placed orders or are negotiating with drug companies for supplies of flu vaccine against the [their] fast spreading H1N1 strain, the lone U.S.-based maker has already taken on as much as it can handle. Baxter International Inc said on Thursday it has taken orders from five countries, including Britain, Ireland and New Zealand, for a total of 80 million doses of H1N1 vaccine and will not take any more.
'Clearly we believe this demand has the potential to translate into a significant opportunity.' Baxter 2Q Profit Up 7.9%; Full-Year Guidance Raised 16 Jul 2009 Baxter International Inc. posted a stronger-than-expected 7.9% rise in second-quarter profit with help from improved margins and product sales that continued to avoid any hits from the economic downturn. The medical-products maker boosted its 2009 earnings guidance while saying the increase doesn't reflect at this point any contribution from making a vaccine for the H1N1 flu strain. Baxter reported a second-quarter profit of $587 million, or 96 cents a share, up from $544 million, or 85 cents a share, a year earlier.
Baxter working on vaccine to stop swine flu, though admitted sending live pandemic flu viruses to subcontractor By Lori Price 26 Apr 2009 The OMFG moment of the century: Illinois-based Baxter working on vaccine to 'stop' swine flu outbreak in Mexico 25 Apr 2009 Specialty drug maker Baxter International Inc. will work with the World Health Organization to develop a vaccine that could stem [foment] an outbreak of a deadly swine flu strain in Mexico. Baxter spokesman Christopher Bona said Saturday that the Deerfield, Ill.-based company has asked the WHO for a sample of the flu strain. He says Baxter has patented technology that allows the company to develop vaccines in half the time it usually takes -- about 13 weeks instead of 26.
Baxter admits sending live avian flu viruses to subcontractor --Baxter admits contaminated seasonal flu product contained live bird flu virus 27 Feb 2009 The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses. And an official of the World Health Organization's European operation said the body is closely monitoring the investigation into the events that took place at Baxter International's research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria.
Human trial of swine flu vaccine 'soon' 15 Jul 2009 The federal government has defended its policy of not following the United Kingdom's lead and rushing out a swine flu vaccine. Biopharmaceutical company CSL will start clinical vaccine trials on 240 healthy adults in Adelaide next week. The vaccine is due to be rolled out in October.