by Lynn Hayes
In early August the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology met in Washington DC to discuss the science that will constitute President Obama’s science agenda over the next few months. At the time, chairman John Holdren made no comment about the H1N1 flu virus, although the virus was on the agenda. Council member Harold Varmus
said that,
Varmus said that while there is concern that the H1N1 virus is following a pattern similar to the devastating 1918 Spanish flu virus — mild in the spring and deadly upon its return in the fall — so far there is no indication that the H1N1 virus will become more dangerous.
A memo from budget director Peter Orszag and John Holdren setting priorities for the 2011 budget made no mention of the H1N1 virus.
Yesterday, however, it was a different story:
Swine flu, also known as H1N1, may infect as much as half of the population and kill 30,000 to 90,000 people, double the deaths caused by the typical seasonal flu, according to the planning scenario issued yesterday by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Intensive care units in hospitals, some of which use 80 percent of their space in normal operation, may need every bed for flu cases, the report said. …
President Barack Obama was urged by his scientific advisory council to speed vaccine production as the best way to ease the burden on the health care system. Initial doses should be accelerated to mid-September to provide shots for as many as 40 million people, the panel said in a report released yesterday.
Pressure is being applied from somewhere.
If you want to get really paranoid, remember that John Holdren, head of the White House science advisory council, has a special interest in population control issues. The H1N1 virus is most dangerous to healthy people in their 20s and 30s, the people of prime childbearing years. This is unheard of in the virus world, but if you were engineering a virus for population control how much more effective could you get?
posted August 25, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever find out if any of these zillions of conspiracies are true. Or what % is true, etc.
posted August 25, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Fun with dire predictions! How many scares and panics and stampedes can you list? Quite a few didn’t quite live up to their billing: killer bees… hantavirus… Ebola… SARS… bird flu… now swine flu. More and more I think jm of Raging Universe is right about fear being something we humans are addicted to.
A real depopulation bomb, though, if it comes to pass.
posted August 25, 2009 at 9:21 pm
While I certainly am convinced that the swine flu hysteria is all manufactured (like the virus itself), you need to reread your own post. It says that NINE VARIETIES OUT OF HUNDREDS ARE “RESISTANT TO” THE VACCINE. That is “resistant to,” not “sensitive to.”
posted August 26, 2009 at 5:18 am
Wether this thing is a conspiracy for population control or not, I doubt any hysteria is manufactured. The first two Jupiter Neptune conjunctions correlated to peaks in the number of reported cases. Occuring in the southern hemisphere winter and flu season, this has translated to countries like Austraia being the worst hit so far, with more than one in every thousand people infected. In one island Aboriginal community, more than one in ten is infected.
The vaccines will come a bit too late for the southern hemisphere flu season, but hopefully just in time for the northern hemisphere.
http://funkastrology.co.uk/blog2/?p=74
posted August 26, 2009 at 7:05 am
Here are some statistics: The CDC says that 36,000 Americans die every year from complications of the flu and 200,000 people are hospitalized. That’s the ordinary garden-variety flu. 500 people have died in the US so far from H1N1 and 44,000 people are infected. I’m not that great at math, but that seems well below the yearly average and it appears that H1N1 is actually less deadly than the common flu.
In Australia, 34,000 people have been infected and 132 have died. I don’t have stats for a normal flu year.
It will be interesting to see what happens this fall.
posted August 26, 2009 at 7:07 am
Smartest one, thank you for your correction. I guess I was the one who got a little hysterical.
I’ll correct the post.
posted August 26, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Lynn Hayes,
Your statistics aren’t comparing apples to apples. The seasonal flu data might be backed by decades of data. The CDC normally records 1 case of Human H1N1 every 2 years. Just this year 44,000 have been confirmed having H1N1.
This means H1N1 is spreading like a California wildfire.
posted August 26, 2009 at 6:55 pm
As a friend of mine once said, “If you beat the data hard enough they will confess to anything.”