Epidemiologist slams the swine flu fearmongering

Last updated on: July 24, 2009 at 9:45 am by Lynn Hayes

Epidemiologist slams the swine flu fearmongering 2009-07-24T09:45:52-04:00 Lynn Hayes

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Following up on my “Conspiracy Corner” post from last week, an interview on the Spiegel Online website with Tom Jefferson shows that it’s not just conspiracy nuts that are spectacle of the latest attempt to frighten humans around the world. Dr. Jefferson is associated with Cochranes Vaccine Field, an organization based in Italy which was founded to facilitate the gathering of evidence on vaccines and their effects so it appears he knows what he’s talking about.

The inception of this latest Swine Flu hysteria came at the beginning of the conjunction of Chiron (healing) to Neptune (illusion), so there are some astrological correlations here. But beyond that, I believe that it’s important to open the curtain and reveal the truth whenever possible; hence my fascination with this topic.

Here’s an excerpt of the interview, read the whole thing here.

SPIEGEL: Do you consider the swine flu to be particularly worrisome?

Jefferson : It’s true that influenza viruses are unpredictable, so it does call for a certain degree of caution. But one of the extraordinary features of this influenza — and the whole influenza saga — is that there are some people who make predictions year after year, and they get worse and worse. None of them so far have come about, and these people are still there making these predictions. For example, what happened with the bird flu, which was supposed to kill us all? Nothing. But that doesn’t stop these people from always making their predictions. Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.

SPIEGEL: Who do you mean? The World Health Organization (WHO)?

Jefferson: The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies. They’ve built this machine around the impending pandemic. And there’s a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions! And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding.

SPIEGEL: On your Italian homepage, there is a “pandemic countdown” that expires on April 1. Don’t you think the situation calls for just a bit more seriousness?

Jefferson: I’m just using it ironically to expose the false certainty that we are fed. Will one-third of the world’s population get swine flu? Nobody can say for sure right now. For now, at least, I don’t really see any fundamental difference, no difference in the definition between this and a normal flu epidemic. Swine flu could have even stayed unnoticed if it had been caused by some unknown virus rather than an influenza virus.

SPIEGEL: Do you think the WHO declared a pandemic prematurely?

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

SPIEGEL: But, year after year, 10,000-30,000 people in Germany alone die from influenza. In the Western world, influenza is the most deadly infectious disease there is.

Jefferson: Hold on! These figures are nothing more than estimates. More than anything, you have to distinguish between an influenza-like illness and a genuine flu, the real influenza. Both of them have the same symptoms: a sudden high fever, a sore throat, coughing, rheumatic pain in the back and legs, possible bronchitis and pneumonia. But real flues, real influenzas are only caused by influenza viruses, while there are more than 200 different viruses that cause influenza-like illness. When it comes to figures related to so-called flu deaths, you always get other causes of death caused by other viruses mixed in. Now, in the case of elderly people who die of pneumonia, nobody would do a postmortem to figure out if it was really an influenza virus that killed them. Approximately 7 percent of influenza-like illness cases are caused by influenza viruses. It’s a very small percentage. What I know is that real influenza is systematically overestimated.

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