Top Epidemiologist Slams Swine Flu Fearmongering

Top Epidemiologist Slams Swine Flu Fearmongering
‘The whole industry is waiting for a pandemic’
Paul Joseph WatsonPrison Planet.comTuesday, July 21, 2009
A top epidemiologist has slammed the “dangerous fearmongering” behind the swine flu scare and dismissed it as nothing more than the product of an industry licking its lips at the prospect of a profitable pandemic.
In an interview with German news outlet Spiegel Online, epidemiologist Tom Jefferson chastised doomsday predictions about pandemics that seem to arrive almost every year now.
“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,” said Jefferson.
Jefferson states that pharmaceutical companies have built a machine around the impending pandemic and are already cashing in.
“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,” he adds.
Indeed, government proclamations about the inevitability of swine flu returning as a more potent threat this fall have helped fuel massive profits for pharmaceutical companies who are “reaping billions of dollars in extra revenue amid global concern about the spread of swine flu,” according to a Financial Times report.
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“Analysts expect to see a boost in sales from GlaxoSmithKline, Roche and Sanofi-Aventis when the companies report first-half earnings lifted by government contracts for flu vaccines and antiviral medicines,” states the article.
Jefferson points out that the swine flu could have gone largely unnoticed had it not been so strongly branded by the “machine” that profits from hyping it into something that we should all be afraid of.
“Don’t you think there’s something noteworthy about the fact that the WHO has changed its definition of pandemic?” asks Jefferson. “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.”
Jefferson highlights the fact that there are hundreds of viruses circulating, some of which are potentially deadly, that produce the same symptoms as influenza, such as rhinoviruses and RSV, which the public knows virtually nothing about because they haven’t had the same “machine” behind them as swine flu.
Why haven’t such viruses received anything like the attention given to swine flu? “It’s easy: They can’t make money with it,” says Jefferson. “With rhinoviruses, RSV and the majority of the other viruses, it’s hard to make a lot of money or a career out of it. Against influenza, though, there are vaccines, and there are drugs you can sell. And that’s where the big money from the pharmaceuticals industry is. It makes sure that research on influenza is published in the good journals. And that’s why you have more attention being paid there, and the entire research field becomes interesting for ambitious scientists.”
Jefferson also discussed why seasonal influenza vaccines were all but useless, because flu viruses mutate while the very vaccine to combat them is still in production, making the shot mostly ineffectual when actually administered, not to mention potential side-effects.
“The importance of influenza is completely overestimated. It has to do with research funds, power, influence and scientific reputations,” said Jefferson, adding that drugs like Tamiflu have also been linked with “psychotic reactions similar to those found in schizophrenics.”