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This is not a piece for Mad Cow Morning News, the well-circulated post-9/11 journalism of global crime researcher Daniel Hopsicker who used the punning title, but it is about global crime and the promotion of herd shots (“herd immunity”) in the Public Health lexicon of vaccinology. The Herd Shots are coming. Recent news from NPR is that testing for COVID-19, our CoV SARS ‘2’, is being deregulated from U.S. government oversight by FDA and will probably also apply to the vaccines –all hundred-and-something of them—prompting a commentator to remark that we’re entering the ‘wild west’ of public medicine. To my mind, the concepts of ‘herd immunity’ and ‘wild west’ go together. If we’re to have a vast globalized healthcare system, a One Health paradigm for the planetary livestock, a good starter strategy is to circle-the-wagons, take on all comers, and pioneer the way forward. Bring the babies, leave the dead and keep going.
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In COVID posts to come, I hope to take on a few comers; testers, vaccinators, regulators, profiteers, scientists, journalists and other perception managers. Our national propaganda radio is throwing everything-and-the-kitchen-sink in the name of CoV, including how some towns in America (in CA and TX, for example) have been “wiped off the map” by coronavirus –one of those midmorning, side-swiping NPR gems that fails to get replay, gosh darn-it. Do you know of any towns wiped off the map by CoV? I learned in 2012 after the Sandy Hook CT school shooting that NPR was then, and still is, the principal media partner of the EAS, Emergency Alert System, and coordinator of the communication network which extends itself to organizing ‘media performance evaluation’ symposia for event analyses. In the Sandy Hook case, the 2013 NPR symposium included the Boston Marathon Bombing: “Sandy Hook, Boston and Beyond”. Are we in the “Beyond” yet or beyond the Beyond? Maybe some pertinent contact-tracing is called for.
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The COVID Cassandras
Mass coronavirus outbreaks appear ‘scheduled’, if you will, on the heels of the 2003 SARS evaluations under the management of Jerome Hauer, the emergency operations and Kroll official with a background in Biological Warfare (BW) who became familiar on 9-11-01. The COVID predictions known to me were propagated by journalists in 2004. Naming here only two as examples; John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza (2004), and Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague (1994), both of these ‘knowledge-based’ journalists attained spokesman-like authority for their efforts. Mr. Barry, as a newly minted historian on the flu in 2004, announced his awareness of CoV as the next big pandemic on CSPAN’s Book TV while promoting The Great Influenza, providing the historic basis of pandemic ‘response’ to a then-unknown set of factors during WWI. We were to see the flu ‘plandemics’ in rapid succession –2005 bird flu, 2007 and 2009 swine-hybrid. Ms. Garrett, on the other hand, wrote her comprehensive epidemic thesis, The Coming Plague, as a graduate student with Harvard School of Public Health (1992-93), concurrently writing for Newsday magazine. Choosing journalism over a biology PhD, she went on to win a Pulitzer in 1996 covering Ebola in Africa. By 2004 Garrett had joined the Council on Foreign Relations where she created the CFR’s ‘Global Health Program’. Her educational background includes a BS in biology from UCBerkeley and graduate research at Stanford, at the time also becoming a notable radio reporter on HIV/AIDS. According to her website, serving the CFR from 2004-2017 (under CFR president Richard N. Haass, former Middle East advisor to Bushes I&II who contributed ‘Accelerating History’ to the COVID dialogue). Laurie Garrett is receiving acclaim for being a premier coronavirus Cassandra:
“I’m a double Cassandra,”**…. “I’ve been telling everybody that my event horizon is about 36 months, and that’s my best-case scenario… I’m quite certain that this is going to go in waves… It won’t be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats… It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then Houston and so on, and it’s going to affect how people think about all kinds of things… Did we go back to normal after 9/11? No. We created a whole new normal. We securitized the United States… And it affected everything. We couldn’t go into a building without showing ID… [and] couldn’t get on airplanes the same way ever again. That’s what’s going to happen with this… We need either a cure or a vaccine.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-prediction-laurie-garrett.html
**“Listed as a twice-ver “Cassandra”, in WARNINGS: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes (2017), Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy, HarperCollins Publishers.” https://www.lauriegarrett.com/about/
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Herd Immunity
Herd immunity is a theory of community resistance that supposes a majority (70-80%) of acquired immunity to a particular disease among its members is protective of the whole. The concept is of military value and origin.
There is natural immunity and there is acquired immunity but there is no evidence of naturally acquired herd immunity in people unless “childhood diseases” count. The phenomenon would be localized and temporary. In developed countries like the U.S., the public health mandate is to eradicate childhood diseases and thereby eliminate any naturally acquired herd immunity, if it exists as such. The rhetoric of herd immunity as ‘public health’ is purely elitist, and the very concept of herd immunity from novel emerging microbes is a false one. It was Laurie Garrett’s own work in The Coming Plague that convinced me of the nonexistence and unattainability of herd immunity in humans. The Public Health position is that there is one global scourge that interventions have prevented, but just one: smallpox***, the treatment of which became the original sacred “cow” that lent its name to the practice of vaccines –use of the ‘vaccinia’ cowpox virus countermeasure. Smallpox eradication is of recent vintage: “On May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly formally declared that ‘the World and all its peoples have won freedom from smallpox…which only a decade ago was rampant in Africa, Asia, and South America.’” –p47, The Coming Plague. Ironically, the history of smallpox epidemics and the vaccines to prevent them argue neither for nor against the concept of herd immunity, but only the for-and-against practice of vaccination. The disease caused by the alleged variola virus, Laurie Garrett maintains, has been around, and around, for two thousand years with variable virulence. We’ve been poised since 9-11 to expect a re-emergence of smallpox, possibly in the form of biological warfare, discounting any notion of acquired herd immunity. I’m not hearing much nowadays about re-vaccinating for smallpox as it would be unseemly to “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” at such a time when the hard sell is on for new vaccine technology. Pre-COVID vaccine success stories, such as smallpox and polio, had a very short run at the beginning of our CoV pandemic, but appear to have been dropped like hot rocks.
***Smallpox, according to Janine Roberts’s book, Fear of the Invisible, notes that, “By 1871 some 97% of the population of the UK were vaccinated or immune from already having suffered smallpox, according to evidence given to a Parliamentary Select Committee. But just as this report was published, a major Europe-wide smallpox epidemic spread, killing some 22,062 in England and Wales and over 124,900 in Germany. Shockingly, this epidemic seemed to mostly target the vaccinated. Other steps clearly had to be taken… The public authorities of Leicester…uniquely combined greatly improving hygiene, water and food supplies…[with] imposing a citywide program of strict quarantine and disinfection. This had startling success… ‘The result is that in every instance the disease has been promptly and completely stamped out at a paltry expense.’ It was not only smallpox that it stopped. They also eliminated most cases of measles and other infectious diseases. Leicester had remarkably achieved this while discarding vaccination completely, for the city authorities said they had found it hazardous and no help. Their [persistent] results seemed to bear this out. ‘Our smallpox death-rate was only 89 per million in 1893, with little vaccination; while [nationwide, with vaccination] it was 3,523 per million in 1872.” –p43
Biological Warfare and Vaccines
UK research journalist Janine Roberts also relates that, “In 1978, John Martin, the Professor of Pathology I [met] at the 1997 workshop [on HIV/AIDS], examined a bulk shipment of polio vaccine. He reported, ‘I worked at the time as Director of the Viral Oncology Laboratory at the Bureau of Biologics… There was a lot of extraneous DNA in the vaccine. I sent electron micrographs to three outside experts to ascertain if these were the the dreaded Type C retroviruses or not. The answers came back no, but there was so much debris and DNA in the vaccine that it was impossible essentially to do a nice clean prep of the viral vaccines, of the viruses. That was my first indication that, in fact, the vaccines were rather crude.’ But when he reported this vaccine contamination, he was most surprised to be told by his employer that ‘vaccine manufacturing was an essential component of industry, this [the U.S.] country’s protection against potential biological warfare… It’s an economically risky business. If one criticizes [the vaccine makers] too much and they stop production, then all the production will go [to other countries and] would then be bought out by the Russians, and then there will be biological warfare.’ “ –p33, Fear of the Invisible, by Janine Roberts, 2008. Dr. Martin got a privileged earful that day. Most medical scientists are kept clueless in line with the secrecy and deniability of BW no matter their awareness, but also as a measure of ‘openness’ in research. The authors of 1988’s Gene Wars, Military Control Over the New Genetic Technologies write that “even the DoD acknowledges that in BW research the difference between offense and defense is purely a matter of intent. Moreover, this largely holds true for development, testing, production, and training. Creating a truly effective weapon from an infectious agent requires intensive work to understand and master the microorganism… A primary goal of this book is to put the U.S. military’s intent and actions into scientific and historical perspective. At issue is the DoD track record on honesty, openness, concern for public health, and commitment to arms control…[which] we will show…is replete with subterfuge, reckless experimentation, and rogue actions and… violations of… legal and moral norms.” –pp26-27, Gene Wars, by Charles Piller and Keith R. Yamamoto, 1988.
With the advent of Big Biotech in the early 1970s, a dramatic change in the emerging global disease patterns became evident in the records of WHO and partners –I discovered those changes perusing their public documents in 2007 when I took up polio research. The push to World Government, it seems, has consistently been inflamed since the ‘70s by devastating outbreaks of killer disease. BW can never be ruled out. Gene Wars uses a then-current U.N. definition of BW as “ ‘living organisms, whatever their nature… which are intended to cause disease or death in man, animals and plants, and which depend for their effects on the ability to multiply in the person, animal or plant attacked.’” The authors note ,” The major forms of BW –each potentially deadly—are bacteria, viruses, rickettsia and fungi.” –p21, and “viruses are considered the most efficacious BW agents. Because different viruses often cause similar symptons, viral diseases are often difficult to diagnose… Viruses could also be used as effective vectors for one or more powerful tox-genes implanted through rDNA techniques.” –96, ibid. Chemical and Toxin weapons are included in their review but not radiological and electronic weapons which are no less a part of the historical gene-war ‘unconventional’ spectrum. I’m citing Piller and Yamamoto, however, for presenting a short example of presumptive clandestine BW which compares to an ultra- briefly- mentioned event in Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague describing what had been, in the 1980s, a recent die-off of Australian rabbits. The same event, recorded for different purposes, makes for a fine side-by-side comparison. The subject is global crisis due to escalating occurrences of widespread emerging diseases:
From 1994, The Coming Plague [Introduction], p5: “On May 1, 1989, the [top medical] scientists gathered in the Hotel Washington, located across the street from the White House, and began three days of discussions aimed at providing evidence that the disease-causing microbes of the planet, [p6]far from having been defeated, were posing ever-greater threats… For three days scientists presented evidence that validated… viruses were mutating at rapid rates; seals were dying in great plagues as the researchers convened; more than 90 percent of the rabbits of Australia died in a single year following the introduction of a new virus to the land; great influenza pandemics were sweeping through the animal world; the Andromeda strain nearly surfaced in Africa in the form of Ebola virus; megacities were arising in the developing world….[and] rain forests were being destroyed… [and]the very real possibility that lethal, mysterious microbes would, for the first time, infect humanity on a large scale and imperil the survival of the human race.” –pp5-6, ibid.
From 1988, Gene Wars (Ch5): “An example [of BW] suggested by Rand Corporation analyst Raymond Zilinskas shows how an agent… might work: Rabbits are not native to Australia. After they were carelessly introduced there in 1859, their characteristic explosive proliferation soon spawned a major pest control problem. By the 1940s the voracious creatures were driving scores of farmers to bankruptcy. The Australians attempted many methods of control, including the erection of a 1,100 mile-long ‘rabbitproof’ fence. None of these was successful for long. The rabbits were ultimately defeated, however, through infection by myxoma virus, causative agent for the disease myxomatosis. Myxoma is a model BW agent. The virus is harmless to all species except the rabbit. And for the type of rabbit targeted in Australia it was highly virulent, causing 90 percent fatalities and sterility in many of the survivors. ‘For the purpose of decimating rabbit populations, the agent is stable and easily dispensed,’ Zilinskas said. Although an effective vaccine exists for the disease, the rabbits, of course, had no access to it.” –pp94-95.
Examples of BW deployment, and the later exploitative use of the result for propaganda, rarely come clearer than this one.
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And what about people?
“Many leading scientists now believe that new biotechnologies can develop effective prophylaxis for any individual disease or toxin. Indeed, viral vaccine development is the largest stated goal of the DoD biotechnology program.” –p103, Gene Wars, 1988.
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So, are we here yet? –giving a shot to any ‘body’ that has a shot so everybody can take a shot.
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Jennifer Lake's Blog 