October 13, 2008 05:50 PM
Bird Flu Vaccine, Rightwing Paranoia
How stupidly, small-mindedly paranoid is this?
... deep inside an 86-page supplement to United States export regulations is a single sentence that bars U.S. exports of vaccines for avian bird flu and dozens of other viruses to five countries designated "state sponsors of terrorism." The reason: Fear that they will be used for biological warfare. Under this little-known policy, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria and Sudan may not get the vaccines unless they apply for special export licenses, which would be given or refused according to the discretion and timing of the U.S. Three of those nations — Iran, Cuba and Sudan — also are subject to a ban on all human pandemic influenza vaccines as part of a general U.S. embargo.
Even Bob Gates thinks it's "the nuttiest thing", when Indonesia does the same thing in reverse.
And the scientific community is not impressed.
They make "no scientific sense," said Peter Palese, chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He said the bird flu vaccine, for example, can be used to contain outbreaks in poultry before they mutate to a form spread more easily between people. "The more vaccines out there, the better," he said. "It's a matter of protecting ourselves, really, so the bird flu virus doesn't take hold in these countries and spread."The flu vaccine is a dead virus - you can't breed and mutate it and the scientific consensus is that the chances of using it to make a bioweapon are nil. But with a six month red-tape delay in sending vaccine to other nations, the chance that a mutation "in the wild" which isn't contained by having vaccine available and triggers a worldwide pandemic of a human-contagious strain of bird flu goes up astronomically.
Kumanan Wilson, whose research at the University of Toronto focuses on policymaking in areas of health protection, said it would be ironic if the bird flu virus morphed into a more dangerous form in one of those countries. "That would pose a much graver threat to the public than the theoretical risk that the vaccine could be used for biological warfare," he said.
Can someone in D.C. with a brain please do something about getting this dangerous idiocy overturned? They might start with officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who didn't know a damn thing about this dumbass policy until the AP asked them about it and who "privately expressed alarm". Over at science blog Effect Measure, writer Revere is unhappy.
The ethics of US foreign policy is again called into question when we use vaccines and medicines as tools to punish states we disagree with. The leaders of these states don't suffer. Only their citizens. Meanwhile, this merely vindicates that raging nutcase and incompetent, Indonesian health minister Siti Fadilah Supari, who first raised the issue of US bioweapons policy in the debate over sharing influenza viruses. Perhaps vindicates is the wrong word. More appropriately, it shows that the US has its own raging nutcases and incompetents, like U.S. Commerce Assistant Secretary Christopher Wall and his colleagues. Small minds, thinking tiny, in unison.That certainly sounds like the Bush administration. Previously posted in a slightly different form at Newshoggers
thank god its not swine flue!
Let us not forget that D Rumsfeild was on the board of directors for the Avion Flu Vac production company.
So, if Cuba has an attack of avian flu, the birds could spread it to the U.S. because they couldn't contain it in Cuba. Good thinking.
Who owns the patents for those vaccines?
Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.
Is that the same Donald Rumsfeld who as CEO of Searle, got on Reagan's transition team in 1981, personally appointed a friendly FDA commissioner, who then got Searle's product aspartame approved after 16 years of FDA refusal to allow its marketing because of a litany of serious side effects, and then walked off with a $12 million dollar bonus check for his efforts when Monsanto bought Searle?
Bingo!
Oh I don't Cernig. I believe there is an established procedure for re-animating dead viruses. Of course you need a laboratory on top of a castle and a convenient lightning storm. Also there are definite time constraints since the procedure must be completed before the villagers arrive with their torches. Still a paranoid government can't be too careful.
Hasa Diga Eebowai
LOL - funny.
Remember when we used to be the “good guys”? The white hat has faded to a grizzly grey. It's hard to tell which one is the "mad scientist" now.
Instead of helping these countries with the most basic minimalist support, this administration is acting like petulant children – we can help…we just won’t. Granted, Cuba, N Korea & Sudan all have blood on their hands; but they’re also bloodied. Not helping them with this hurts US.
They keep comparing the avian flu to the pandemic of 1914 that killed millions of people world-wide. You can't contain such things.
So by denying this treatment, we're in effect turning our enemies into biological bombs ticking away.
)O(
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Mon, 10/13/2008 - 18:21 — Peter G
Is in the book, Victor Frankenstein was a medical undergraduate student doing his work in the attic of something like a college dormitory. By the time the critter was coming alive, the rain had turned into a slow drizzle, when by the light of his shortening candle, he saw the yellow eyes flickering.
)O(
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Sounds like Our Friend getting up in the night for yet another pee.
Hasa Diga Eebowai
Everybody remembers the movie…
In Shelly’s book, the abomination didn’t die at the hands of the mob. Lacking a soul, and intent on revenge, the creature follows Victor around the world seeking retribution (yeah, Frankenstein was the scientist – not the monster).
Me thinks it’ll be much easier for "The Birds" to follow us here – a la Hitchcock.
Actually, there really wasn't any mob at all, except when once the critter walked into a town by daylight, and they chased him out. Whether he had a soul or not was problematic, because the book took the stance that the science of Luigi Galvani, and his nephew Giovanni Aldini (who conducted public experiments with executed criminals with galvanic piles) might be all that is needed for human life, with no supernaturalism needed.
However, in her 1818 text, it was clear Mary Shelley was goofing on the Rousseuesque Natural Man, Napoleonic politics of reforming humanity, and even her own father William Godwin, and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley grand ambitions for man. She seemed to be pushing that pure intellectualism is bound to failure due to our own imperfections, and can lead to disruption of familial ties.
And as for the critter not having a soul it's interesting that his favorite book was Paradise Lost, where he was torn between identifying with Adam, and identifying with the Fallen Angel, only he fell through no fault of his own. He also like totally grokked on The Sorrows of Werther, and Plutarch Lives.
However, you're right, it ended with a chase across the globe similar to William Godwin's book Caleb Williams. They had such scenes that would seem odd to us today, of frightened Eastern European peasants speaking of the deformed giant, robbing them at gunpoint, armed with multiple guns and bandoliers.
However by the time of her 1827 handwritten notes in the margins of a friend's copy of her book, and her final 1831 edition, Mary Shelley romanticized Victor Frankenstein after her late husband, and came up with the moral message that it was about what happens to a man who defies God, although her husband was kicked out of Oxford for writing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism, however believing in the occult at the same time. It was Percy's own reading that provided Victor's early reading in the book: Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim (known as Paracelus), Albertus Magnus and Cornelius Agrippa, all of whom I've read. Lord Gordon George Byron used to josh Percy on how he disbelieved in God, heaven and hell, but believed in spirits.
Some scholars see Byron as the protean monster in Mary's book, because one he had the deformity of a club foot that he was deeply ashamed of, he had a marked pallor which he carefully sustained by drinking vinegar everyday (thus also making him the prototype of the vampire in general and Lord Ruthevan in particular in the 1819 novel by his travelling physician John Polidori), and Mary may've been attracted to the lord herself, while sensing and resenting the lord's attraction to and was reciprocated by her illicit lover Percy (they weren't married yet). Meanwhile John Polidori was deeply attracted to Byron too and was jealous of Percy. Mary's own half-sister, Claire Clairmont, was pregnant, and no one knew whether the father was Lord Byron or Percy Shelley.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Your recollection is impressive – my memory is not so good even when sober.
I always interpreted the lack of a name given to the creature symbolic of it’s being more machine-like than human. The monster had all of the intelligence of man, created by man, but with no humanity. Without these there was only suffering. It was the alienation and suffering that the monster wanted revenge for. Well, that’s what I remember (been a while since I read it).
Actually- in the film the monster died by his own hand- not the angry mob.
"We belong dead."
That was one of the unanswered question raised by the book. That frustrated critics of the time, how a 19 year old girl was raising so many questions, but unlike her parents, no solutions. The whole book comes across as ambiguous.
When Thomas Potter Cooke was starring as the monster in the 1820's play The Presumption of Frankenstein (he already played the monster in another version of the play,The Man and the Monster, although I could be off on the order of appearance)church groups were protesting outside the theatre on the subject's blasphemy.
Cooke was an ex-seaman with an impressive built, in his mid-thirties, and would also play Lord Ruthevan the vampire. But he played the monster well into his 70's, and even early on experienced what Karloff did. Walking down the street, and havingpeople saying, "There goes Frankenstein."
)O(
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Can someone in D.C. with a brain please do something about getting this dangerous idiocy overturned?
Perhaps they do have brains. Perhaps their brains function quite well, it's just that they serve evil.
Bush propaganda was a great tool for the last 8 years. Here's a little more on how they used it:
http://www.ronnierayjenkins.com/topics/deathi...
Wait. They're afraid they'll be used offensively or defensively...?
The Horror of Frankenchicken!!!
)O(
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Read these reports. Are we being prepared and acclimated for a brand new flu that kills 7 out of 10 people? Do those predicting a pandemic know something we don't know? I trust no one anymore. The globalist criminals have outlined their agenda and are moving aggressively towards a global governance. What better way than a worldwide pandemic and economic collapse to gain complete control. The Shock Doctrine is in play my fellow citizens. Will they pull off their end-game?
Ask question! Demand Answers!
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=35356
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2008/s216732...
Craziest McCain/Palin Cartoon you'll ever see! @
http://www.youtube.com/tomryanfilms
The fight with Indonesia was all about intellectual property rights. The US wants every country to send them samples and test results, but insists that any vaccine developed is property of the US. So a pharmacy company can charge whatever the hell they can get away with. Indonesia withheld their samples. I'm not sure if they got cut a deal. I think it was Effects Measure from about 2 years ago that was tracking the story.
Re: Bird Flu Vaccine, Rightwing Paranoia
Actually The Birds was written by Daphne Du Maurier.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
If the govt is worried about others getting these vaccines for terror - should we trust the govt to be injecting these into us?
This ol weapon is so used and abused, that the repubs. have plain old worn it out. Cry wolf?,didn't any of them read this in the 3rd grade? Chicken Little?...next they'll say that Democrat/Terrrrrusts caused THE BIG BANG!!!
There are 6 billion people living on this earth. Bird flu has killed about 150 of those people. It is sad for those people, but to try to scare the rest of us 6 billion is, to me, trying to use the Shock Doctrine.
As a comparison- aspirin kills 300-500 Americans each year.
...bird flu isn't just a scare tactic. We have to be ready for it *before* it becomes a serious threat, because we won't have time to do so if or when it does. Influenza already kills tens of thousands of Americans annually (usually the very young and very old). A new version that could kill a high percentage of those infected is a terrible threat, even if it was only as infectious as a normal human flu. Influenzas of birds tend to make the most vicious strains - theoretically because they have to be much more infectious than human versions in order to secure a foothold in a bird's lungs.
When such an infectious strain combines itself with a variety that is very good at attacking humans, such as a swine or full human version (which they have been known to do by infecting a subject that is also infected with one of those), you end up with a highly infectious agent that knows very well how to connect with human tissue. The 1918 flu's predominant mortality was as a result of just this kind of highly infectious nature - it moved in so quickly that a large surface area of the lung was destroyed in very short order by the individual's own immune system (our system has a first-line defense of releasing cytokines to wipe out infected cells - this symptom is called "ARDS", and is the same thing that Hantavirus kills with). So much lung tissue is lost to cytokines that the person either drowns in the associated bleeding/leakage, or they die of hypoxia (not being able to get enough oxygen).
Being proactive about bird flu is a necessity - it may seem like overplaying the problem, but the nature of the threat is extremely dire. Using standard risk-assessment practices, the odds of the problem becoming real combined with the potential damage it could cause makes it pretty plain that we have to pay attention. The socioeconomic impact of a highly fatal global pandemic poses enough risk that it can't just be glossed over.
T
When I said "our system has a first-line defense of releasing cytokines to wipe out infected cells - this symptom is called "ARDS", and is the same thing that Hantavirus kills with", I should clarify:
That cytokine reaction isn't itself the symptom, it is just the mechanism that creates the symptom. As an example, cytokines are often the cause of a sore throat - your immune system wipes out a little too much tissue and your throat becomes "raw."
ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome) is caused when an overreaction of cytokines destroys a large portion of lung tissue, causing flooding and interfering with the ability to breathe.
T
well, duh. that's the point. when the chickens in the embargoed countries trigger that worldwide pandemic, the smartypants will be able to righteously point and declare "those dirty brown people did this to us" and promptly send planes with bombs to take care of the problem.
The mental midgets in the government are successfully using these vaccines as biological weapons. By withholding them, they effectively create a scenario where infected people without access to them, will become walking virus bombs. What happens to brown children outside our borders is of no consequence of ours?
This is one time Chimpy was right. Oceans no longer protect us from pandemics. If there ever was a pandemic, large populations of unvaccinated people would act like safe havens where the virus could continue to live and eventually mutate.
Is there not one politician with a heart or a brain?
Thanks
Obvious ominous motive to consider,
I wouldn't rule out bio-warfare experiments on troops. It has happened before.
Have the troops (Special Forces, etc) fire canisters of a biological agent (that the troops have been vaccinated against) into one of these countries labeled as "terrorists" by the war planners and known to have no access to vaccine. You would get a two-fer testing both the agent and the vaccine.
Remember all the pilots and others being forced to be vaccinated (with untested unapproved dangerous vaccines for anthrax and possibly others) prior to the Iraq invasion. I wonder if the original plan called for testing our bio-agents on the Iraqis but was abandoned when too many inspectors, Intel, civilians and military knew that Sadaam had no biological weapons.
The most plausible motives need to be high on the list in the differential diagnostic process. I'm just sayin.
Peace,
JK
That'd obviously be a monumentally stupid idea. The only thing ominous about it is the level of stupidity required to consider such a theory legitimate.
Experiments in biologicals are (a) not done on humans, and (b) not done in the wild, because even the most Machiavellian scientist recognizes that it is too easy for a bug to escape its original testing ground and come back to bite the experimenter. Once loose, such bugs are like wildfire - the only way to stop them is to cease giving them live humans. That's why the Soviets kept Obolensk cordoned off for miles, in case something got loose (as well as keeping nosy people out).
The military staff who were vaccinated for anthrax were treated with tested and approved vaccines, JK. Take your conspiracy BS and stuff it back up your bum where you got it. I'm just sayin.
was to bomb the Canary Islands
In a real pandemic, that policy would be genocidal, a back door way of committing ethnic "cleansing". If anybody actually enforced that policy, they would have to be brought to justice.
Mon, 10/13/2008 - 20:13 — BennyP
You're quoting the monster's last line from the sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, where he orders the doctor to leave with his Bride saying first to the doctor, "You live," and turning to his hissing bride and Dr. Praetorius (shades of M. Krempe?)...we stay, we belong dead."
In the book, he told Captain Walton, he would go to the Northern most pole (they were already in the vicinity,) build a funeral pyre and burn himself to death, but you only see him leave the boat, supposedly to do so.
In the original talkie version with Karloff a mob attacked him by settinig the windmill he was inside on fire, and he was mute. By the time Son of Frankenstein rolled around, the monster was mute, but had gained the friendship of a revengeful sheep-herder who survived a hanging, but had a broken neck, Ygor, played by Bela Lugosi. Fritz the hunchback was the character played by Dwight Frye who assisted the doctor in the original. He later played a killer who assisted Frankenstein in the sequel. named Carl.
Of course between Cooke and Karloff was the 1910 Edison Company Frankenstein played by Charles Ogle, and one still lost called Life Without a Soul (1915), starring Percy Darrell Standing as "the Creature."
)O(
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
I goofed on the title of TP Cooke's Play, it was Presumption: Or The Fate of Frankenstein (I'm still half-asleep, I have to wake up at 4:45 am everyday.)
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/frankenstein/IIIA4...
Charles Ogle as the Critter
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thum...
But to get the Frankenstein mythos in alignment with the Avian Flu story, is the moral of both can be explained in this fashion. Whatever decision you make is like Bugs Bunny rolling a snowball down a snowy hill toward Elmer Fudd, and buy the time it gets to him it's a large snow boulder just creaming him. The academic way would be to say say that any error of judgment grows exponentially. One could even liken it to meteorologist's Chaos Theory.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
The government has been blathering about this Bird Flu thing for years ...it's pure bullshit. "Oh, dear, what if it mutates"...well, oh dear, what if it DOESN'T! The fact that Cheney is the former CEO of the company that got a 2 billion dollar contract (NO-BID) to make Tamiflu, which it has been proven DOES NOT WORK...gee, might that have something to do with this bald-faced attempt to terrorize the public?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1mV_5-bRPo
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
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