Duesberg and Bird-Flu Armageddon
A number of us asked renowned virologist, Peter Duesberg, about the near-hysteria in the media concerning the coming Bird-flu pandemic. What follows was his brief and blunt response. No wonder the power-brokers and the money-makers in the pharmaceutical world and science journals want to keep this man quiet. Check out his website at duesberg.com.
"The reason why the Flu was so successful in 1918 was primarily the "terrain", namely the millions of immuno-deficient hosts and hostesses starved and stressed by 4 years of war.
Secondly, one can speculate that the 1918 flu strain may also have been a "new" recombinant to the 1918 population and thus more successful than a more established seasonal strain may have been. As I found in 1968, flu, unlike practically all other animal viruses, has multiple RNA segments, equivalent to multiple chromosomes and thus can readily form new recombinants--this is why we have seasonal flus, but have measles, mumps, polio, pox etc. only once in a lifetime.
Thirdly, the odds that the Centers for Disease Control alias World Health Organization ever predicts an epidemic prior to its arrival are not good. In the past several years they have predicted numerous epidemics or "pandemics" such as the flu, the hanta-virus, anthrax, the rotavirus, the Ebola virus, the West Nile virus, "mad cow" epidemic, the Sars-virus epidemic, an epi-pandemic of "random, eg. heterosexual non-drug user-AIDS"—but none of these ever materialized (see, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery publishing, Washington DC, 1996). The last one that came close to an epidemic was polio in the 1950s and that was not predicted by American public health scientists.
Fourth, the currently hyped prospective Flu pandemic has long missed its chances. It has been hyped almost daily in the San Francisco Chronicle [and everywhere else—jim mcguiggan] since last November. But all that happened was a dead chicken in Nigeria, a hamster in Germany, two sick (dead?) kids in Turkey, a euthanized swan in Sweden, several dead or euthanized chickens in Iraq (yes Iraq!), etc. That is not the pattern of a potential killer microbe. All "new" killer viral or microbial epidemics of the past have spread exponentially within weeks to months and then declined exponentially owing to the induction of immunity or death of susceptible hosts--take Albert Camus' "The Plague" as a classical example.
The current Flu propaganda is thus a mix of ignorance and and self-interest and an exploitation of general ignorance. Exploitation, that is, by the CDC, WHO, the vaccine, pill and test-kit manufacturers of our universities and pharmaceutical companies who must sell their ageing vaccine stocks before they decompose and their Tamiflu pills before the summer. And there’s our "science" journalists, who need to fill their daily columns.
But despite hyping dozens of microbial Godots—no Godot has come since polio. People are just too well nourished these days, and thus have optimally maintained immune systems for microbes to attack more than just the fringes of the ever growing human herd. That in fact is their historical share.
The 150 million+ Flu pandemics are hype for fund-raising by the ever more costly science/health armies in search for real enemies. Their success is based on the invisible monsters of the microbial epidemics of the (earlier) times, when nutrition lacked vitamins, proteins and sanitation or was lacking all together—and on the never failing microbial and viral horror fantasies of our science writers, politicians and Hollywood producers."
