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The Council of Foreign Relations Enters the Vaccine Biz

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Message Richard Gale

Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null

Progressive Radio Network, December 23, 2009

The closure of 2009 marks a unique moment in the history of America's healthcare and national health policies. First we were told that a pandemic of swine flu was upon us, which would make us all susceptible to a ravishing tide of medical complications and death. We were told pregnant women, young children and senior citizens should be first in line to receive the H1N1 vaccine, although no studies provided credible evidence of either the vaccine's efficacy or safety for these groups. We were also persuaded repeatedly by the CDC and the media to place our faith in the heroic attempts of the vaccine industrial complex, our federal health officials and the Obama administration to bring these vaccines to market as quickly as possible. In our state of New York, both the swine flu and seasonal flu vaccines were made mandatory to tens of thousands of healthcare workers. Indeed, as a nation, we rose to the occasion. One of the most prolific and expensive public health initiatives in American history was undertaken, and every major media outlet daily encouraged people to get vaccinated. So far, so good.

Then something odd happened. Physicians, scientists and journalists began to ask fundamental questions. What if the pro-vaccine advocates, the World Health Organization (WHO) and government authorities at the CDC, FDA and HHS are wrong? What hard proof is there that it was a pandemic? And what might happen if the H1N1 vaccine has not been tested thoroughly under sound, scientific protocol by the vaccine makers? Reports started to drift in from Australia, New Zealand and South America from the middle to the end of their flu season. Their data provided evidence that there was no pandemic in the southern hemisphere. In fact, the H1N1 flu virus was milder than their normal seasonal flues. That led to a more fundamental challenge to the universally accepted truth by the medical orthodoxy that vaccines are effective and safe. Once the investigative process was underway, dozens and then hundreds of learned voices from responsible scientists, journalists and activists began a pushback, a counter argument that not only were the H1N1 flu and seasonal flu vaccines not shown to be effective and safe by any reliable gold standard, but rather suspicions arose that the H1N1 scare was an intentionally designed hoax. Numerous articles and critiques appeared to deconstruct the influenza vaccine myths, parceling them into fragments of delusional data that had been paraded as dogma by the government and media.

The sad part of the story, with a few notable exceptions such as Sharry Attkinsson's CBS investigative report, is that the major media refused and continues to refuse to report about this. Instead, a counter-campaign has been launched that posits that anyone who questions the efficacy and safety of vaccines is irresponsible. People have been brought forth from the CDC, FDA, pharmaceutically funded think tanks, and researchers and university professors, many of whom receive consultant fees from vaccine makers, to convince the public in the political correctness of the vaccine hypothesis. Moreover, as the New York Times reports, our government's entire vaccine advisory committee has for years been stacked with medical lackeys invested heavily in the private vaccine industry through a variety of conflicting affiliations.

Later during the autumn months another turn of events occurred. Demonstrations in Albany, New York, with over a thousand healthcare workers, concerned parents and physicians at the steps of the capitol brought forth documentation and testimonials showing the New York health officials and policy makers were wrong about the efficacy and safety of the swine flu vaccine. Articles and commentaries challenging the vaccines filled thousands of blogs and websites. The activists were working together, each was filling in pieces of the puzzle. Countless emails and phone calls flooded the governor's and health commissioner's offices. Finally New York State blinked. Citing the excuse of a shortage in flu vaccines, state officials rescinded their mandatory vaccine requirement.

We are now at a critical turn of events when citizens are being exposed to the alternative science to vaccines. Adults and parents, not just in the US, but throughout the developed world, are not just saying no to the swine flu vaccine, but to all vaccines in general. Consequently, the vaccine industry and its supporter are starting their counter-charge. This strategy is perhaps best observed in a recent Newsweek article to denounce vaccine critics. This shrill piece of yellow journalism, which we will deconstruct below, turned Newsweek into a national platform for the vaccine industrial complex to salvage what remaining credible evidence there is to validate vaccine campaigns.

Much of contemporary pharmaceutical science and its supporting policies are built upon myths masquerading as facts. Hitler's close confidant in charge of the Nazi propaganda machine, Joseph Goebbels stated, "If you tell a lie long enough eventually it will be believed as truth, and the greater the lie, the more people will believe it." After eight years of lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Sadaam's involvement in 911, and now the false economic recovery being promulgated by bankers in the Treasury and Fed, Americans are becoming accustomed to the truth behind Goebbels' marketing schemes. And there is perhaps no other area of so-called scientific progress that has relied more on deceptive research and a distortion of facts and statistics than in modern medicine's religious belief in vaccines as a miracle to protect the world's population from infectious diseases. The fabrication, cherry picking and blatant corruption behind the vaccine research relied upon by the medical health complex to further its campaigns and launch inquisitorial assaults on the hundreds of thousands of families with children who have been injured by vaccination and the voices of reason who demand that government settle the heated debates concerning vaccine safety and efficacy with sound science has turned into a media war. And now even the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) has publicly come to the defense of the vaccine manufacturers. This undoubtedly raises the question, why in the world is the CFR getting involved in the vaccine biz?

The CFR, co-chaired by Robert Rubin from the 2008-2010 Great Recession fame, has a strong interest in promoting Rockefeller's global health program to usurp the sovereignty of individual countries' national health policies. Besides the CFR's commitment to the WHO's global health agenda, among the Council's corporate members are three of the five largest pharmaceutical companies, each a major force in the vaccine industry: GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Pfizer. GlaxoSmithKline is now on the ropes after it's swine flu vaccine had been found responsible for dozens of deaths in Canada and Mexico with additional untold numbers suffering from further injuries[1]

In mid-October of 2009, the CFR convened an extended symposium moderated by CFR Senior Fellow for Global Health, Laurie Garrett, entitled "Pandemic Influenza: Science, Economics and Foreign Policy." The subtitle reflects what may appear to be an incongruent chain for addressing infectious pandemics. But it can be better appreciated when we realize the Council combines terrorism, nuclear weapon proliferation and infectious diseases under one of its strategic global divisions, "countering transnational threats." Moreover, the CFR is the perfect incubator for forging alliances between large multinational corporations and governmental and multilateral agencies, such as the WHO. After their public relations are swept away from public view, this remains the CRF's ultimate mission. In an interview with British epidemiologist Dr. Tom Jefferson from the prestigious Cochrane Database Collaboration in Rome, he worried about the close alliance between the WHO and vaccine executives who compulsively predict erroneous "apocalyptic forecasts" during every flu season. He noted that there exists a mysterious "swine flu committee of 12 who apparently advises the WHO Director General.[2] The great accommodator for such collaborations and strategic planning is none other than the CFR.

During a question and answer period, Tom Wilson, a self-proclaimed freelance hunter against AIDS dissidents and now scientists, researchers and public interest groups challenging vaccines, called those who refuse vaccination "crazies." Wilson recommended the pro-vaccine community create and launch clear sound-bites to denounce anti-vaccine advocates and organizations in order to convince people to be vaccinated. This summarizes quite well the content of Laurie Garrett's article, "The Long Term Evidence for Vaccines," subsequently appearing in the December 7th issue of Newsweek. The article is a litany of sound-bites, void of substantiating scientific references to support its statements, which the reader is expected to accept faithfully. There is not a single instance where Garrett mentions even a slight possibility that a vaccine might perhaps contribute to any one of a number of growing health epidemics in American children: asthma, compromised immune systems, neuro-degenerative disorders such as autism, cancers, diabetes, gastrointestinal complications, etc. In Garrett's universe, vaccines are sacred. They are divine gifts of human ingenuity to protect the world's population; therefore nothing sacred can be flawed because the CFR and the World Health Organization take humanity's best interests and vital health to heart. Or so the legend goes.

We may never know the full extent to which the CFR has acted behind the scenes to influence governments' and the World Health Organization's lies about a swine flu pandemic and the false figures of H1N1 infection and morbidity, nor whatever role it may have played in creating strategies to induce public fear as a means to enforce flu vaccination. Yet during the CFR's symposium as the US embarked on its herd inoculation of the American public with a potentially unsafe, fast-tracked H1N1 vaccine, questions were raised about how to best counterattack the citizenry's increasing disregard for health officials' warnings and the media's pro-vaccine assurances. The discussions included the idea of creating "an artificial shortage of the vaccine" because "that should cause people to want to get it." A respondent noted, much to the pleasure of the audience, that that had been tried "before with the flu vaccine and people lined up all night to get it." Was it just coincidence that this is what was to follow? It is not completely unreasonable to suspect the CFR has a role in steering some of the Obama administration's health policies. His cabinet is packed with CFR members, and his first selection for General Surgeon, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, is not only a member of the CFR but an unquestioning supporter of vaccination's war on public health. Even amidst the healthcare bill debate, there is clear evidence the CFR is representing its strong alliances with Big Pharma's financial interests. Only days before the vote in the Senate, an article appeared by CFR staff member Toni Johnson, "Generic Drugs: The Other Drug War," which categorically denounced more affordable generic and imported drugs as being a direct threat to the financial growth and well-being of the pharmaceutical industry.

Garrett calls her vaccines "precious." We could not help but think of the seemingly lost and meandering Golem in Tolkein's Ring Trilogy searching for an object that he was never meant to possess. Such is the history of vaccine efficacy and safety, a quest for a magic bullet to save humanity from infectious diseases. One can twist, turn and trump up the truth of vaccine efficacy and safety all one wishes, but still the statistics, which the pro-vaccine community continuously distorts through sound-bites, show that vaccines have done little to decrease rates of infections.

According to mortality figures from the British Office of National Statistics, measles and pertussis (whooping cough) began their rapid decline at the end of the nineteenth century. Both were down 99 percent from 1838 to the year the vaccines were introduced (pertussis in 1950 and measles in 1968). There is another example of an infectious disease that was far more deadly than smallpox that never had a widely accepted vaccine and yet eventually fell into obscurity. During the nineteenth century, scarlet fever was responsible for more deaths than measles, pertussis and smallpox. An ineffective vaccine was created in 1924 but disappeared after the introduction of penicillin.[2] What is important in the example of scarlet fever is that infectious diseases declined not because of vaccine miracles, but because of many other factors including improved health, cleaner water and sanitation, public utilities, better living and working conditions, improved nutrition and other medical advancements. This is the same for just about every infectious disease during the first half of the twentieth century that was already in rapid decline before the advent of their respective vaccines.

Garrett's vision of a world dominated vaccine dystopia is truly amazing. She is correct to sound-bite a potential relationship between prenatal and infant exposure to influenza and a sharp increase in later cognitive disorders, including schizophrenia. Yet her quip only presents an image of a glass half full. What is missing is another body of research showing that the flu vaccine elevates inflammatory cytokines in the mother's maternal and infant's fetal immune systems, especially IL-1 beta and IL-6, similar to infection by a wild virus. Both of these cytokines have been associated with abnormal brain development, including schizophrenia. Furthermore, IL-1 beta increases are not limited to flu infection or the flu vaccine, but also to hepatitis B, a vaccine that is given immediately after birth frequently when a newborn's brain is most vulnerable to viral and contaminant toxicity.[3]

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I am the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network in New York City and producer of the nationally syndicated Gary Null on public stations.

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