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by Jim Secor

Steven Lendman begins, "Given today's hysteria over a non-existent Swine Flu threat and possible mandating of experimental, untested, toxic, and likely bioengineered vaccines, it's appropriate to review early fears about their dangers - when evidence first surfaced and concerns were raised" (Early and Current Fears about Vaccine Drugs at www.atlanticfreepress.com/...-/11324-early-and-current-fears-about-vaccine-dangers-.html). In this he is absolutely correct: first, there is no pandemic of swine flu, except, perhaps, amongst the snortings of the piggies who are pandering this fear. For the 1917-18 flu, about 25,000,000 died the first year. There have been, according to WHO, who is pandering this fearful hoax, several thousand infected this year with 625 dying. Generally, in any flu season, there are thousands upon thousands of sufferers and around 20,000 number of deaths/year. No health organization has blinked an eye at this, though people dying is never a pleasant thing to consider. But. . .people die of the common cold!

A pandemic, according to the OED is, generally, a global disease that kills an inordinately large proportion of the population. So, 2% of the population (as in 1918) is considered a large proportion. At today’s world population, 2% would be, roughly, 133+ million people. Now. . .there is also this thing called a mild pandemic, defined as a global disease that kills around 100,000 people in a short time. According to scientists and dictionary compilers, pandemics don’t start slowly; pandemics are swiftly spreading diseases, spreading from person to person not from animal to person. So. . .625 people have died in a year or so, amounting to 0.0000001% of the world population. A pandemic?

One should be asking: why are people in power trying to frighten us? The answer might lie in control, for to control anyone, you must lie to them. . .and we are being lied to.

Second, the new drugs are, indeed, inappropriately tested and bioengineered — and synthetic. Not only inappropriately tested but the testing has been done by the very companies that manufacture the drugs or by doctors they pay — and there is a fairly long recent history of lying and cheating, not reporting any or all of the ill-effects of these drugs. And the head of the FDA is a former big PHRMA employee. Tamiflu has already been shown to be. . .dangerous: but it is marketed anyway. Why? Well. . .what runs the world economy these days? That's right: greed! People who are all id and have no social ethic whatsoever, making the rapacious Gilded Age Robber Barons look like children playing spin the bottle. People know, as it is in even the mainstream press, that big PHRMA is extremely powerful in the running of the US government. . .and the US government has hogtied the UN, which has become kind of an international dissemination machine for The American Way. In the 1920's and 1930's F. Scott Fitzgerald and Anne Elizabeth showed the falseness, the baselessness of such values. Yet, we stick to it, believing whatever we're told no matter the reality on the ground. What is so great about being lied to? It sure as hell doesn't relieve you of responsibility.

Like the adjunct professor — a horrid position to be in but more and more the choice of universities that have come to be run like businesses and not paying benefits or offering any guarantees or support is ludicrously economically bottom line feasible — in the State of Washington who so wanted to land a tenured position that she got a Federal grant to study the flooding of the Yellow River (Huang he) in China recently. Sounds great but the Yellow River hasn't flooded for 20 years or so: but she read it in a book and proceeded to write about flooding of the Yellow River despite the reality of the situation. To hell with reality! To hell with scholarly ethics! I want, I want, I want. Id. Since lying, cheating and thieving are the way of the world today, she probably got her tenured position. Lying gets you status. It gets you control.

Big PHRMA has an excess of money to spread around, an excess of bought-and- paid for doctors (violating their Hippocratic Oath, seeing it more as a Hypocritic Oath), an excess of influence in government policy via bought-and- paid for politicians (our representatives) to disseminate all of the lies they wish. . .and Americans are so sold on authority telling them what to do, believing government is their mother-caretaker, that they will believe whatever it is is shoved up the pike. It is of no help, either, that the media suck up to Big PHRMA as well: where does much of their advertising come from, eh? Oh, surely not! Anybody remember when E-TV (educational TV) was called Esso TV because of the major, major support by, of all people, Esso (now Exxon-Valdez). Lying gets you money and control.

But after that, Lendman deteriorates. He generalizes not only from New York State to the rest of the country — fallacious reasoning — but from smallpox vaccination to all vaccinations. I think this is not critical thinking; it is overgeneralization, a favorite method of thinking in the US. . .and amongst the power elite, it seems. Charles Michael Higgins, whom he cites extensively, was a believer in spirituality, as was William White, believing that the spiritual laws of nature are the giver and disposer of things. Note carefully, though, in the argument put forth here: the deaths appear to not necessarily be due to the vaccine but to unsanitary conditions, a phrase that pops up consistently within Lendman's essay, which ought to give us pause. . . but not Lendman. Higgins wrote in the 1920's when alot of modern medicine was being questioned, even Sabin's vaccine was still under attack. Advances in medicine (and technology) seem to be consistently questioned and, in some cases, damned as they occur. They are breaking new ground, unsettling prior beliefs. How dangerous was radio. . .and magnetic waves and radio air waves? Remember when TV put out brain damaging waves? Microwaves (even now with their much diminished powering)? Transister radios and their ubiquitous earphones? Ghetto blasters? Computers? Cell phones? Central heating? (Recall, too, that telephones were supposed to carry germs because, when people talk, they spit spittle.) Toilet seats? Fresh air is also dangerous, you know, according to hospitals who enclose everyone in air conditioned and heated recirculated air. . .because fresh air (of which there is a dwindling supply, to be sure) carries "things." Hmm. . .why is it that people tend to recover better and last longer outside hospitals?

Then, there are those things we know for sure cause disease and death yet are easily had and viciously promoted in society: X-rays, tobacco, caffeine, alcohol, coal dust and other pollutants produced by this or that absolutely necessary and obligatory business, anti-depressants, make-up, nail polish, sun blocker, HFCS. . . ai-ee, the list is long. Can I stop here? What a paradox people and civilizations are!

Further undermining his argument, Lendman says that Higgins notes that "in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, typhoid vaccinations weren't used. Instead, for almost the first time, modern, effective sanitation and hygiene practices were employed, and few soldiers experienced typhoid fever. But in the WW I Gallipoli campaign, English soldiers got typhoid vaccinations. Unsanitary conditions prevailed, and many succumbed to typhoid and other infectious diseases." Going even further into shaky ground, Lendman writes that "On March 28, 1919, an official report from the Chief Surgeon of the AEF in the US Public Health was titled, 'Typhoid Vaccination no Substitute for Sanitary Precautions.' "

Sanitary conditions or vaccinations, Mr. Lendman? It is common knowledge that sanitary conditions prevent typhoid: the more unsanitary, the more probable the outbreak. Alfred Russel Wallace noted that the problems with vaccinations were not the vaccinations themselves but the terribly unsanitary conditions under which they were given. Unsanitary conditions create disease environments. One has to simply think of cholera. This is why hospitals are obsessive about cleanliness. The only good thing to come out of this swinish flu paranoia is an increased sense of the good of sanitation. In Hong Kong, on banisters and elevator buttons and door handles there are signs indicating that they are sanitized every so many hours (2-12 hours); though, from my observation, this is only cosmetic: they look like they've never been cleaned (probably no more than once/day). What do doctors tell us to do, no matter what? Wash our hands and cover our mouths. Moms tell us this, too.

I found out just how important this was when I had common variable auto- immune disease (my body was not making IgG, necessary to the making of T-cells). I did as requested, though my germs would have had no effect on infecting another (I had been raised well anyway, by a nurse-mother), but my friends, even after being told how dangerous this could be for me — their sneezing and coughing without putting hands over their mouths — still did not cover up. And. . . every time I got ill. Like clockwork. (Imagine being out in public!) Which is how this disease process works: you have no protection, no antibodies, and so you get ill at the drop of a hat. It was because of this disease process (unbeknownst to me) that I was becoming ill every six weeks for at least a year before diagnosis. This led to pneumonia at one point, increased asthmatic difficulties all the time; hospital visits and a course of six hrs/day for three days of IV. Of course, just keeping clean and making sure others were helping does not cure the disease: I took IV IgG (6 hrs/day x 3 days every month) and instituted acupuncture and returned to a state similar to normal in six months (I still catch colds easily, as I was told would be the lasting effect, though now I can fight them off. . .better.) In truth, I might just be one of the lucky ones, as medical science really isn't sure if IgG infusions actually work. Of course, alternative medicine in America is shit, so. . .

Anyway, Lendman continues to support his thesis by quoting other authorities, delving back into the vaults of time, especially the 1890's when even Pasteur's methods were scandalized. Citing works by Charles Schieferdecker who believed that hyropathy would "give men the age of 150 to 200 years" (James C. Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America, p. 84). Hydrophy was also supposed to cure rheumatoid arthritis, as attested to the recovery from this disease by a preacher after carrying out several baptisms in cold river water. Schieferdecker published Dr. CGG Nittinger's diatribe, filled with misconceptions and fixed statistics. William White we've already mentioned. Alfred Russel Wallace, though, is an interesting character; for after damning the studies damning vaccinations and pointing out their ineffectiveness as being from unsanitary conditions, turned coat. In 1890, he gave evidence before a Royal Commission investigating the controversy. But the Commission, after examining the material he submitted in support of his testimony, found errors of fact and questionable statistics. The Lancet, it seems, wrote that Wallace and others like him were being selective in their choice of statistics, ignoring large quantities of data that would undermine their position. Via these secondary sources, Mr. Lendman seems to think he has proven his point. He does not appear to have looked very carefully at his source. And he makes the same mistake they did: generalizing from smallpox vaccination to all vaccinations.

Of course, most people will just accept Lendman's authorities without checking into these people's pasts. A very important part of critical thinking, so dangerous to the status quo that it is not taught in schools or universities any more. Why question authority?

Indeed, if Lendman had been thorough, he'd have noted the fact that it's thought the Egyptians had a vaccine; the earliest known vaccine was in India circa 1500 BCE; the Chinese had one around 1000 BCE; in the Middle Ages the Arabs were vaccinating people. But in Europe of the 17-18th centuries, the germ theory of disease was unknown. Nor does he mention that in 1857-59, while these anti-vaccination people were blathering on, a smallpox epidemic killed 14,200; a second in 1863-65 killed 20,059. In 1872, nearly 45,000 people died from smallpox. However, it is worth noting that in 1878-97, the city of Leicester dropped vaccinations and forced better sanitary conditions with a great decrease in smallpox cases. Good for smallpox but for all other vaccinations as well? Most all of the anti-vaccination sites I ran into generalized from smallpox to all other disease vaccinations. Lendman is not out of company.

Not once does Lendman — or his sources — make the distinction between viruses and bacteria: generally speaking, not much good comes from any inoculation against viral infections. If there were, don't you think we'd have one for eradication of the common cold? Mr. Lendman is also unaware, it seems, that some of these harmful bacteria are in our bodies to begin with and without them (like E. coli) we'd be in very serious trouble (E. coli in the intestines helps with digestion: too much and you get ill). The hair of the dog, as vaccinations/inoculations are, has always been a point of contention with the medical establishment — but not with the drinkers of the world: a little in the morning of whatever it was that killed off some of your brain cells the prior evening is considered good for you.

I guess in all this, Lendman forgets that the recent rise in polio and measles (the killing rubella kind) is because parents decided, in their wisdom (well, the diseases hadn't been around for 40 years), not to inoculate their children. Do people occasionally get sick with or possibly due to (or despite) the vaccinations? Yes. But 2-3 illnesses as opposed to hundreds of thousands is kind of a no-brainer. But these vaccinations weren't developed until after the middle of the 20th century.

Lendman here is running on the emptiness of the Christian Right that maintains that since condoms are only 80%+ effective, nobody at all should use them. That is to say, those 80 saved people are unimportant, certainly worth less than the 20 others infected, which means, of course, in this kind of thinking, that a 100% chance of infection is much preferred to 20%. Have I got that right? Having an 80% chance of saving some of the population from infection is not a worthwhile endeavor: only 100% will do, so stop using these devices altogether. Umm. . .whatever in this world is 100%, outside of life and death? (That is, if you're alive you're 100% alive and if you're dead you're 100% dead.) The problem here, though, is that condoms are also a form of birth control: use them properly and you have an 80-90% probability of not becoming pregnant. (And the problem here is that consensual, co-habitation sex is different from consensual or not consensual random sex, which is all the Christian Right can see, obsessed as they are with sex sex sex.)

So, Mr. Lendman, what is it to be? A few failures, as it were, or hundreds of thousands of successes? (I'm not talking of smallpox vaccinations here, I'm talking of the ones you generalize to from smallpox.) You have engaged in the logical fallacy of exclusion and self-selected sampling: choosing only certain elements of a situation and leaving vital facts or information out to create a false impression. You neglected, in your own giving way to the pandering of fear, to mention the many who didn't die or get ill from vaccinations, those who were "saved." Very similar to the statistics used to justify the Iraq and Afghanistan wars ex post facto — or to point up how dangerous, via American deaths, fundamental Islam is. What about the dead Iraqis and Afghanis? What of the millions of displaced people from Iraq and Afghanistan? What about the deaths due to fundamental Islam before 9/11? You never once turn your attention to the vaccines that do work. . .and have nothing to do with smallpox.


Hmm. . .aren't you part of the hysteria, Mr. Lendman? There have been no "early fears" over these new vaccines you hook up to the present hysteria over Swine Flu because these vaccines are recent history. Most all of the ingredients you cite as being in vaccines are modern, too — and most probably post development of these vaccines. And your sources are not supportive of your argument, your stats are incomplete, your exclusion of facts is glaring and your thinking is fallacious generalization. But you write alot and your name's known and you're considered some kind of authority, so who cares? Right?

If you were going to damn the current outbreak of vaccines, then you should have limited your historical delving to the modern era: the now. The recent flu vaccines of chicken and swine. (Why nothing for SARS, a flu-like disease?) There's certainly enough evidence to support your theory that these present-day faux pandemic vaccines are dangerous without stooping to such poor scholarship and damning every vaccine because of one.

Bad boy, Mr. Lendman.

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