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.
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.<
“>Jefferson: I’m just using it istayed 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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