Another Bipartisan Multi-Billion Dollar Medical Boondoggle: How Biomedical Research Takes Congress And Our Money, Part 2
By Gary Krasner (07/29/04)
THE TRUTH ABOUT ANTHRAX & BIOWEAPONS
Infectious disease experts were perhaps among those hardest hit by the September 11th terrorist attack. In the months prior to the attack, many will recall that the only aspect of terrorism that was regularly discussed in the mainstream media was bioterrorism.
These virus experts - which also includes medical writers like the ever-present Laurie Garrett of Newsday - issued dire warnings about biological terrorism and new exotic microbial epidemics. But then on 9-11-01, their star had temporarily fallen after 3 thousand people perished from a “mere” fuel explosion, instead of biological agents.
Ironically, their past success in instilling inordinate fear of infectious diseases has hampered even their own attempts to mitigate public alarm about anthrax months later. Their cohorts in the media had similar difficulties. Except that the media’s struggle to put the threat in proper perspective has been hindered by their desire for high ratings and selling newspapers. They also didn’t know enough to distinguish the genuine killing potential of chemical agents, from the dubious threat of biological agents.
Here’s the truth of the matter. Anthrax is a livestock pathogen. The spores survive for about twenty years in the ground in rural areas. They normally have no effect upon humans, because a few anthrax spores cannot create an infection, and they do not come up from the ground in large quantities. A human must inhale about 10,000 spores to get sick. And such concentrations are never found in nature. Wool sorters inhale anthrax spores in small quantities continually (150-700 per hour), and only if they get a large dose will adverse symptoms begin (and some believe that their lung disease comes not from anthrax spores, but from exposure to a huge number of microscopic fibers, similar to asbestos workers). Some lab researchers working with anthrax who were interviewed by the media said that they often don’t even wear protective masks; they just make sure not to draw close to it and breathe in the stuff.
Anthrax is what’s called a “gram positive” bacterium. This means it has the type of cell walls which are harmless, unlike the cell walls of “gram negative” bacteria, which attack tissue. Therefore, anthrax can only attack tissue by producing a special toxin which it excretes as a waste product. One cell or spore does not produce enough toxin to start an infection. Epidemiologically, anthrax more closely resembles a chemical toxin for humans: it is dose-dependent and not contagious. Fatal human cases show almost no bacteremia at all. Yet for some animals, there is such a heavy bacteremia that it was once supposed that death occurred through capillary blockade.
THE EPIDEMIOLOGY
The reports of office or postal workers “testing positive” for anthrax are totally useless without comparing them to the normal background incidence of either asymptomatic carriers of the bacteria, or antibody positive individuals. A guess would be that there may be 10% of the population that are either carrying the numerous common wild strains, or who have residual antibodies from exposure to any strain of anthrax that occurred sometime during their lives, or from perinatal transmission, or even genetic inheritance. In New York City, for example, at one point, out of 1300 people who had been tested, only 4 people were found to have antibodies to anthrax. Without comparing that ratio to what would be found during normal times in urban areas, one cannot claim that the immune response to anthrax among those 4 people was the result of exposure from the recent mailings. (Excluding the cutaneous cases, of course.)
Increased surveillance in detection of anthrax spores in the environment is also creating something of a paradox. But only because we have no data on the normal presence of stray anthrax bacilli (virulent or not) - a microbe that appears naturally in certain environments. Some anthrax spores detected in very small quantities in “low profile” locations may not necessarily be coming from terrorists. Confirmation that the spores were processed in some fashion - electrostatic charge removed or coated with an anti-caking agent to help them remain suspended in the air - would rule out that they’re naturally derived. But non-medical journalists did not know to ask officials such questions.
Among those tested, the few with symptoms (fever, cough, muscle weakness) may really just have the flu or a bad cold. Certainly, that infant with the rash wasn’t unusual, particularly if he had recently received routine infant vaccinations. The anthrax wasn’t even found at the ABC News building where his mother had brought the baby. It was all assumptions: (baby with rash) + (network headquarters) = anthrax. The first man that had died came from a farming region where anthrax was common.
But more likely he died from the cipro (a potent antibiotic) that was administered to him. Only about a year prior to that, the NY Times reported that antibiotics could be leading to the deaths of 98,000 Americans each year. A month afterwards, researchers revised that number down to 36,000, partly by eliminating antibody-resistant infections from the total. Nevertheless, fully 10% of our own body weight consists of bacteria. Bacterial cells outnumber total body cells by ten to one. And only about 1% of all known bacterial strains are pathogenic to humans. The other 99% are beneficial to us, and indeed, vital to all life on earth. Therefore, the disruption in the vital equilibrium of normal bacterial colonies in our bodies from the use of general germicides like antibiotics adversely affects our biochemistry so extensively as to make such mortality estimates from antibiotic use virtually impossible.
For example, thousands die each year from the flu alone. But what actually kills them is often the blood toxemia from the anti-catarrhal effects of taking antipyretics and antibiotics intended to suppress the flu symptoms. Thus, when people supposedly die “from complications” of infectious diseases (i.e. pneumonia, flu, chicken pox etc.), it is never reported that the fatal “complications” arose from the suppression of symptoms (cough, fever, swelling, mucous, skin lesions, eruptions or rashes, etc.) derived from medical treatment (that most often includes antibiotics).
Bacterial disequilibrium from antibiotics may even be the cause of major diseases. The epidemic of Crohn’s disease in the last fifty years, for example, started with the introduction of antibiotics, and progressed in parallel with the increase in antibiotic consumption. One hypothesis is that a mutated form of normal bacterial flora morphs into genetically super-resistant bacteria under constant selection pressure from antibiotic usage. A British study that tested 3545 subjects showed that the relative risk of developing Crohn’s disease was threefold, and 2.5 fold for developing ulcerative colitis, after receiving live measles vaccination (vaccines contain antibiotics and other agents that have a germicidal effect).
Adding to the distortions of infectious agents as “killers” is the fact that drug effects are rarely cited as official “cause of death”, even when the cause is know to be a drug. And no comprehensive records are kept of medication-related deaths. Doctors and hospitals rarely report such deaths. Consider this colossal study published in The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA), April 14th, 1998. The paper analyzed 39 studies of ADRs (Adverse Drug Reactions) in the United States to estimate the incidence of serious and fatal adverse drug reactions in hospital patients. The authors estimated that on average, 2,216,000 hospital patients experienced a serious ADR, and 106,000 deaths were caused by ADRs annually in the United States - making these reactions the sixth, and possibly (at most) the fourth leading cause of death. Furthermore, these figures were NOT due to mistakes by doctors in prescribing drugs or by patients in using them. They were solely from the effects of drugs that were properly administered.
The NY Times of October 30, 2002 carried an article by Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, M.D. on a follow-up study performed by the Center for Disease Control on the 2001 anthrax scare in news media offices, the US Senate and the Postal Service. Federal Health officials recommended 60 days of antibiotic therapy to over 9,300 workers exposed to anthrax spores in 4 states and Washington, DC. Of these, 6,178 participated in the study. The study found that 56% of personnel advised to take a regimen of antibiotics to prevent the consequences of exposure to inhalation Anthrax, did NOT complete the full course of therapy advised. Despite this, no symptoms of anthrax toxicity had developed among them, including some people who took absolutely no antibiotics (13%, or 787). They didn’t even fill the original prescription for the antibiotic. That number didn’t include people who were told to stop taking antibiotics after laboratory tests determined they had NOT been exposed to anthrax,
Public health officials concluded that there must be “improved compliance” in the future. They felt “it underscored the importance of communicating risks to individuals and of counseling them.” A bit later, in December 2002, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, maintained that prophylactic antibiotic therapy was what stemmed any outbreaks of anthrax symptoms during the anonymous anthrax mailings.
Thus, the pro-drug bias is pretty self-evident. This CDC study was obviously not a controlled cohort study. It neither proved nor disproved the efficacy of the prescribed antibiotics. An honest public health official (a theoretical construct, I’ll admit) could have had equal justification to conclude that the antibiotic therapy had had no beneficial effect. Yet no such conclusions were suggested, nor did they appear in the media.
So, what do we actually know about the anthrax letter attacks of late 2001, early 2002? All we really know is that some people were exposed to weaponized anthrax spores. Of the 2 dozen or so who became ill, and the half dozen or so who died, we don’t know how many became sick or died from their cipro treatment, or from the anthrax endotoxin itself.
THE EFFICACY OF MICROBE TESTING
Some health officials quietly acknowledged that detection methods that would absolutely establish exposure or infection to anthrax do not exist. No cultural or biochemical characteristics serve to differentiate the pathogenic strain of anthrax from the many non-pathogenic saprophytic sporulating bacilli. And applying multiple antibiotics to a culture - particularly in the absence of immune antibodies in the blood - to see if it stops the growth, is too general and provides insufficient identifying information about the strain of anthrax - only one of which is pathogenic. Therefore, the invitro testing of blood cultures or nasal swabs is unreliable.
Electron photomicrographs have also been somewhat overstated as a diagnostic tool. First, what you see is a static picture of the tissue sample (as is also the case with stained cultures) while it’s being bombarded with billions of electrons in a vacuum - which is obviously in the absence of normal immune system chemistry. What happened before and after the photo micrograph is not observed, and therefore not known. Were the cells invaded, or did they eat the virus as food? Also, the long and arduous preparation in making the sample “electron dense” introduces numerous artifacts, to the extent that it’s hard to be sure what you started out with. If that’s not enough, a computer graphic artist adds colors to the photo-image, because electron microscopes “see” in black & white only. Imagine that! But if you’ve seen the glossy foldout displays of viruses in Time magazine, then it was already imagined - by the photo retoucher and the graphics editor.
Other medical technologies used by microbiologists have their own unique limitations. Gene testing, such as the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) - involving the amplification of a molecular signal many thousand times - inevitably introduces quantitation errors. The character of the suspect gene is also in question since the test sample isn’t derived from purified virus. False positives are very high due to its ultra sensitivity and it was never intended to distinguish different strains of bacteria.
Noble Laureate, Kary Mullis, Ph.D., invented the PCR test for retroviruses. In his newly released documentary, “Deconstructing The Myth Of Aids”, journalist Gary Null asked Mullis to explain the apparent growing HIV epidemic. Dr. Mullis replied that what we were actually seeing was an “epidemic of HIV testing”. He meant that in the beginning of the crisis very few tests were given. But as the scope of testing dramatically increased, we started to see more positive results. This was not proof of a growing epidemic. Just of a growing number of tests to find HIV.
Likewise, medical surveillance for anthrax toxicity - the symptoms of which merely mimic the flu - increased dramatically in those months of the anthrax scare. Consequently, and not surprisingly, investigators found a handful of sick people that they attributed to anthrax. In the absence of the anthrax scare, cases with these symptoms would hardly be noticeable. As such, doctors wouldn’t have bothered to test them for anthrax, and these cases would have otherwise been recorded as an acute cold or flu, and treated with common antipyretics or antibiotics, with the same consequent deaths from that symptom-suppressing treatment.
Appendix 2 (at bottom of article) contains David Crowe’s fine short essay, “Manufacturing Certainty”, which goes to the heart of the matter. It elaborates on the fallacies and limitations of various forms of microbe testing and the false “certainties” that are based on them. You’ll be astounded that this so-called science determines how billions in public dollars are spent and how life-critical medical decisions are made.
WEAPONIZING ANTHRAX
Another contrivance then was that terrorists might weaponize anthrax by drying a slurry and grinding it to particles 1-5 microns in size. (The bacteria are 1 by 3 microns.) The first problem is that the gunk would dry like glue; and after grinding, it would still be glue. Even if it were washed first, the bacteria would be sticky and would dry like glue. The second problem is that bacteria do not tolerate grinding. They are as fragile as egg shells. Grinding is how they are broken apart for biochemical tests. Even if only 1% were broken, the result would be a sticky gum, not a powder; and more like 99% would be broken before getting 5 micron particles.
On eight separate occasions between 1990 and 1993, Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult tried to spray anthrax and botulinum toxins from trucks and rooftops in Tokyo, and each time it failed. No one was infected, or at least no one died. The main reason: The terrorists had problems developing effective spray nozzles for aerosolizing the agents in the 1 to 5 micron range necessary for them to lodge in the lungs.
The lethality of such airborne attacks depends largely on the size of the particle dispersed. Particles in the 1 to 5 micron diameter deposit efficiently in the lungs, while submicron particles tend to be exhaled. Particles above 5 microns tend to become trapped in the upper respiratory tract, where higher doses are required to start an infection. Those above 20 microns in diameter tend to settle to the ground quickly and, as a result, do not travel far downwind.
Anthrax bugs can also be delivered in the form of liquid slurries. Gastrointestinal anthrax is rapidly fatal in many cases. But experts say reservoirs aren’t an attractive target for terrorists, because they’d have to dump large amounts of biological agents to overcome dilution. Also, water supplies are filtered and chlorinated to kill naturally occurring microorganisms, which would neutralize anthrax and other bacteria. In fact, terrorist contamination of water supplies is extremely rare, according to a study of such cases by Jessica E. Stern, author of “Would Terrorists Turn to Poison?”
HOW EFFECTIVE ARE BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS ?
Aum Shinrikyo is the only example of a terrorist group that tried a biological weapon for mass murder. The cult ended up turning to a chemical - sarin gas - to attack Tokyo subway commuters, killing 12 and hospitalizing about 1,000. In fact, threats or actual use of chemical or biological weapons account for only 52 cases out of more than 8,000 in the RAND Chronology of International Terrorism since 1968. Many are just scares. Wilkening counts more than 120 anthrax hoaxes alone which have been reported in the media nationwide since October 1998.
The apocalyptic-type of fanatics want to kill as many people as possible. Radical Islamists want to achieve that too, but also wish to make a big media splash in the process. Hence, huge explosions with many dying violently and suddenly are more to their liking. By contrast, people dying slowly and quietly in hospital beds with skin rashes or bronchial conditions doesn’t make the front pages.
Biological warfare generally, is a flawed concept. The only route usually considered is airborne, because bombs and missiles create the delivery system. There is no natural disease in existence which is propagated in that manner. Even the airborne diseases require close contact with the source (infected person). The reason is because wind disperses the agents too thinly, and gravity brings them down too rapidly. Increasing the quantities massively will get a few persons, but only a few. Those actually infected on a battlefield can keep on shooting and killing for at least 2 weeks, until the infection either kills them or their immune system defeats the infecting agent. Who needs two weeks of that when a chemical agent can kill and maim instantly?!
Furthermore, very few of the diseases which are mentioned as biowarfare agents are suitable for airborne dissemination. Brucellosis is not. It is disseminated through body fluids. Plague is not. It is carried by insects from the blood of one animal to another. The insects do not pick it up from the ground. Decades ago, government scientists even released airborne cholera in the NYC subway system, with no effects. The only way biological warfare agents can be used in a significant manner to create disease is to inject them into the victims.
“CONTROLLED” EXPERIMENTS
And even then, mortalities are not likely caused by the biological agents themselves. Biological pathogens used in serums on test animals, for example, contain toxic preservatives and adjuvants that are injected directly into their bloodstreams - bypassing normal immune system barriers. These injected agents also contain protein growth mediums that supports the pathogenic cultures. In the absence of digestive juices in the bloodstream, they immediately start decomposing and yielding known endotoxins from normal protein putrefaction. Consequently, animals often succumb to blood toxemia or septicemia and die. Their deaths are erroneously attributed to the pathogen being tested.
Volumes have also been written showing that animals make poor medical models for human diseases. Animals react to drugs, vaccines, and chemicals very differently than humans, and also differently to other animal species. Guinea pigs die from penicillin, but they can safely eat strychnine - a deadly poison for humans, but not for monkeys. Aspirin kills cats, but sheep can swallow enormous quantities of arsenic. Poor animal models are sometimes the reason drugs are recalled from the marketplace, but only after a high enough death toll among humans is finally noticed. It all amounts to a waste of human and animal life.
There’s also evidence indicating how easily stressed lab animals succumb to illnesses and die, from the poor conditions of their captivity, and the artificial food and environment they’re subjected to. There may be more to the humorous one-liner than meets the eye: “It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats”. These factors and more make animal studies very poor analogs to human health, and often contribute to faulty conclusions about the risk for humans from chemical toxins, and especially from biological pathogens.
Pathogenicity is also a function of the general state of health of the host, or target group. For example, the U.S. Government Bulletin, Hygienic Laboratory, No. 123, February 1921, is a series of telling experiments that were conducted by U.S. Government doctors to determine the true “contagious” character of “influenza.” To achieve their objective, the experimenters subjected great numbers of volunteer Navy personnel to “exposure” by various “known methods of transmission”: Ten volunteers were inoculated with secretions from the nose and throat and with blood from typical cases of influenza. Thirty men were inoculated by spray, swab or both of the nose and throat. Ten volunteers were placed close to selected patients who had the flu and were then exposed by being coughed in the face. The exposure continued for thirty minutes. Fifty volunteers were subjected to the same procedure at another location. One hundred were sprayed and dosed with cultures of the most virulent strains of flu possible to obtain and observed for seven days. The results were: “no appreciable reactions”.
In nature, under normal conditions, maintaining health depends on keeping the host and the pathogenic microbe in equilibrium. It does not merely involve the total elimination of the latter. Yet that remains the simplistic approach that influences conventional medicine today.
Renowned bacteriologist, Rene Dubös (inventor of streptomycin; 1968 Pulitzer Prize winner) wrote a great deal on the limitations of the conventional Germ Theory, and on the artificial/erroneous outcomes from laboratory experiments. In his classic, “Mirage Of Health” (1959), page 89, he wrote:
“The ease and predictability with which Pasteur, Koch, and their followers produced disease at will in experimental animals seem miraculous in view of the difficulties that have so often been encountered in subsequent attempts to produce disease in man. Their success seems incompatible with the course of natural events. The fact of the matter is that Pasteur and Koch did not deal with natural events, but with experimental artifacts. The experimenter does not produce nature in the laboratory. He could not if he tried, for the experiment imposes limiting conditions on nature; its aims are to force nature to give answers to questions devised by man. Every answer from nature is therefore more or less influenced by the kind of questions asked.”
“The art of the experimenter is to create models in which he can observe some properties and activities of a factor in which he happens to be interested. Koch and Pasteur wanted to show that microorganisms could cause certain manifestations of disease. Their genius was to devise experimental situations that lent themselves to an unequivocal illustration of their hypothesis - situations in which it was sufficient to bring the host and the parasite together to reproduce the disease. By trial and error, they selected the species of animals, the dose of the infectious agent, and the route of inoculation, which permitted the infection to evolve without fail into progressive disease. Guinea pigs always develop tuberculosis if tubercle bacilli are injected into them under the proper conditions; introduction of sufficient rabies virus under the dura of dogs always gives rise to paralytic symptoms. Thus, by the skillful selection of experimental systems, Pasteur, Koch, and their followers succeeded in minimizing in their tests the influence of factors that might have obscured the activity of the infectious agents they wanted to study. This experimental approach has been extremely effective for the discovery of agents of disease and for the study of some of their properties. But it has led by necessity to the neglect, and indeed has often delayed the recognition, of the many other factors that play a part in the causation of disease under conditions prevailing in the natural world - for example, the physiological status of the infected individual and the impact of the environment in which he lives.”
THE BIAS
Since allopathic trained people run the health bureaucracies, every inflammatory (catarrhal) symptom of bodily elimination is assumed to be an infectious disease. All evidence of malnourishment, toxemia, or a toxicological agent is dismissed in favor of a microbiological agent - which are plentiful and are readily available candidates to blame. For the public health investigator, obscurity comes with the former. But the latter will accompany research grants, a published article in a leading journal, medical awards, recognition and prestige, and profits from patentable test kits, techniques for growing the strains, treatments or vaccines. And of course, blaming a microbial agent (as opposed to a chemical toxin) for a disease will always engender importance to the institutions involved with infectious disease, and make the public feel dependent upon their expertise, products, services, and technical counsel.
Therefore, the bias in favor of attributing cause to microbiological agents rather than toxicological chemicals is too great to ignore, and high time it’s openly acknowledged. “Appendix 1” contains a short list of this historic bias, and the tragic consequences of it.
REALITY: A “PROBLEM” FOR BIOLOGISTS
While anthrax spores are resistant to heat and dryness, they’re no match for rain. A downpour would wash most of them out of the air, where they’d become relatively harmless. Also, humidity and ultraviolet light decay the bugs. So does oxygen. Anthrax and botulinum spores multiply only in the absence of oxygen.
These problems and more ranks anthrax and other biological agents as very poor battlefield weapons. Uncontrolled variables as wind direction, lengthy duration between infection and death, and all the rest makes biologicals much more inferior as weapons than are chemical agents, which can at least kill immediately and are more resilient to weather and decompose more slowly. It is therefore rank stupidity to subject soldiers heading to the battlefield with the debilitating and crippling effects of vaccines for small pox, or anti-toxins for botulism, anthrax, and other biological agents. Those who can make it onto the battlefield after all that are still not left in optimum health to deal with the rigors of fighting in a war.
Another aspect beyond normal biodegradability, is the “problem” of bacterial Pleomorphism. Rod-shaped anthrax bacillus, for example, can literally transform into the spherical coccus from exposure to ultraviolet light. Pleomorphism refers to the transformation of one distinct strain of bacteria into other strains within a single life cycle. For example, the virulent tubercle bacillus could be made to degenerate into harmless non “acid-fast” cocci, and then into “diphtheroid” coccobacilli, just by altering their food or environment. This bacteriological phenomenon was observed throughout the history of bacteriology by the noted biologists Antone Bechamp, Altman, Cohn, DeBarry, Dienkowski, Fremy, Galippe, Lankester, Koch, Kurth, Manwaring, Nagelli, Portier, Rosenow, Serval, Zops, Metchnikoff, J.Tissot, Raymond Rife, and currently, Gaston Nessons.
Since all strains of bacteria can potentially share all bacterial genes, then strictly speaking, there are no fixed species in the bacterial world. According to Canadian bacteriologists, Sorin Sonea and Maurice Panisset (The New Bacteriology. Boston:Jones & Bartlett, 1983), all bacteria are one organism, one entity capable of genetic engineering themselves on a planetary scale.
“Fixed species of bacteria” is the fundamental precept of the biomedical model of specific etiology of disease (classifying a specific germ as the singular causative agent of a specific disease). Stability of the strain is also essential for it is to be effective bioweapon. But Pleomorphism implies that conventional infectious disease theory is based upon a faulty construct. Indeed, highly processed and concentrated biological pathogens aside, in the natural environment, the prior state of health of the host will usually determine the virulence of any natural exposure.
THE HISTORY OF ANTHRAX
Finally, the mythos of anthrax originates with Louis Pasteur - a self-promoter who helped orchestrate the anthrax fables. The following story is not found in the movies and popular fiction about Pasteur, but it’s one of many found in “Bechamp or Pasteur” (©1923 Ethel Douglas Thompsom) and other books on the history of medicine.
To boast the claimed efficacy of his anthrax vaccine, Pasteur held a public demonstration at Melun, France in 1881. “Pasteur’s assistants injected his formula into 25 sheep, left another 25 unprotected and then injected all 50 with virulent anthrax bacteria. He triumphed; only the vaccinated sheep survived,” writes Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., in his article on Pasteur in the Science section of The New York Times, (5/16/95).
The “Miracle of Melun,” as Paul DeKruif refers to it, was a grand personal triumph for Pasteur. It was accomplished in front of a vast throng of people comprising not only farmers and veterinarians, but councillors, senators, and other dignitaries-VIP’s who only exhibited themselves to the public at the weddings and funerals of royalty. France called Pasteur her “greatest son” and conferred on him the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor. Paul DeKruif writes: “…agricultural societies, horse-doctors, poor farmers whose fields were cursed with the poisonous virus of anthrax - all sent telegrams begging him for thousands of doses of the life-saving vaccine…”
However, it began to appear that “The Miracle of Melun” was no miracle at all, and that the vaccine was a killer. DeKruif writes, “Gradually, it was hardly a year after the miracle of Melun disturbing letters began to pile up on his desk; complaints from a dozen towns of France and from places in Hungary. Sheep were dying from anthrax - not the natural anthrax they had picked up in dangerous fields - but anthrax they had got [sic] from those vaccines that were meant to save them!”
The Hungarian government was so alarmed by the devastation wrought by Pasteur’s anthrax vaccine that it strickly forbid its use, and the Sanitary Commission of the Hungarian Government in 1881issued a scathing report which stated in part: “The worst diseases, pneumonia, catarrhal fever, etc., have exclusively struck down the animals subjected to injection. It follows from this that the Pasteur inoculation tends to accelerate the action of certain latent diseases and to hasten the mortal issue of other grave affections.”
The complaints against the anthrax vaccine became so numerous and from so many different quarters that Pasteur’s biographer wrote that he dreaded opening his letters and “shut his ears to snickers that sounded from around corners.” He tells that the most cruel blow came “from the laboratory of that nasty little German Koch [Robert Koch] in Berlin,” who sent “a cold, terribly exact scientific report,” which “ripped the practicalness of the anthrax vaccine to tatters.”
CONCLUSION:
The threat of bioterrorism and lethality of biowarfare is exaggerated through a combination of ignorance, propaganda, and inordinate fears of infectious disease. Researchers, who should know better and often do, are paid to study the subject, so they don’t admit the futility of it. And people without medical backgrounds don’t feel qualified to evaluate false claims. During the anthrax scares following 9-11, I recall there were some biowarfare experts that tried to be candid about the low level of threat that anthrax posed. However, CDC and other health officials had grossly overstated the threat. They want the public to be frightened enough of microbial pathogens to: (1) acquiesce to increased public funding for basic medical research, treatments and prophylactics, (2) value the role of infectious disease “experts” and elevate their status in society, and (3) validate their simplistic disease paradigm (germ=disease; drug=cure; vaccine=prevention) into which the medical profession has invested so much, and relies upon to sustain public perception of their importance. A fearful public dependent on medical salvation is what sustains the biomedical complex. In the distant past, fear of our mortality sustained the dominant religious institutions of their day. Modern medicine has supplanted religion, with a belief system just as powerful.
One cannot assess the efficacy of Project Bioshield in a vacuum. This article explored some of the critical backdrop issues: a realistic assessment of the threat that biological weapons actually pose; the motives and machinations of the biomedical industry; and the flaws and (past) failures in financing the attendant vaccination campaigns. - - - END.
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT: Technical information in the “weaponizing Anthrax” section were based on Paul Sperry’s Worldnetdaily.com article, and Gary Novak’s website, “www.whatreallyhappened.com”.
APPENDIX 1 - Excerpt from Peter Duesberg’s “Inventing The AIDS Virus” (Regnery, 1996):
Thousands of lives have been sacrificed due to the bias in favor infectious disease theory. The following are some examples:
- Scurvy was thought to be a microbial disease in the 19th Century, before it was found to be a Vitamin C deficiency.
- The high mortality of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 was thought to be a contagious disease. Dr. Roger Cunningham isolated the gene fragment, hemophilus Influenza from secretions of the sick. Instead of being contagious, this microbe is a normal inhabitant of our upper respiratory tract that flourishes after we get ill; not before.
- The U.S. Public Health Service insisted for over 10 years in the 1920s that pellagra was infectious, rather than a vitamin B deficiency as had been proposed by Joseph Goldberger (Bailey, 1968).
- Tertiary syphilis is commonly blamed on treponemes, but is probably due to a combination of treponemes and long-term mercury and arsenic treatments used prior to penicillin, or merely to these treatments alone (Brandt, 1988; Fry, 1989).
- ”Unconventional” viruses were blamed for neurological diseases like Kreutzfeld-Jacob’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and kuru (Gajdusek, 1977). The now extinct kuru was probably a genetic disorder that affected just one tribe of natives from New Guinea (Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992). Although a Nobel Prize was given for this theory, the viruses never materialized and an unconventional protein, termed “prion,” is now blamed for some of these diseases (Evans, 1989c; Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992).
- Shortly after this incident, a virus was also blamed for a fatal epidemic - the SMON epidemic - of neuropathy, including blinding, that started in the 1960s in Japan, but it turned out later to be caused by the prescription drug clioquinol (Enterovioform, Ciba-Geigy) (Kono, 1975; Shigematsu et al., 1975).
- In 1976 the CDC blamed an outbreak of pneumonia at a convention of Legionnaires on a “new” microbe, without giving consideration to toxins. Since the “Legionnaire’s disease” did not spread after the convention and the “Legionnaires bacillus” proved to be ubiquitous, it was later concluded that “CDC epidemiologists must in the future take toxins into account from the start” (Culliton, 1976). The Legionnaire’s disease fiasco is in fact the probable reason that the CDC initially took toxins into account as the cause of AIDS (Oppenheimer; 1992).”
- ”The pursuit of harmless viruses as causes of human cancer, supported since 1971 by the Virus-Cancer Program of the National Cancer Institute’s War On Cancer, was also inspired by indiscouragable faith in the germ theory (Greenberg, 1986; Duesberg, 1987; Shorter, 1987; Anderson, ‘99’; Editorial, ‘99’; Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992).
- It was claimed in the 1960s that the rare Burkitt’s lymphoma was caused by the ubiquitous Epstein-Barr virus, 15 years after infection (Evans, 1989c). But the lymphoma is now accepted to be non-viral and attributed to a chromosome rearrangement (Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992).
- Further, it was claimed that noncontagious cervical cancer is caused by the widespread herpes virus in the 1970s, and by the widespread papilloma virus in the 1980s - but in each case cancer would occur only 30 to 40 years after infection (Evans, 1989c). Noninfectious causes like chromosome abnormalities, possibly induced by smoking, have since been considered or reconsidered (Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992).
- In addition, Ubiquitous hepatitis virus was proposed in the 1960s to cause regional adult hepatomas 50 years (!) after infection (Evans, 1989c). In the 1980s the rare, but widely distributed, human retrovirus HTLV-I was claimed to cause regional adult T-cell leukemias (Blattner, 1990). Yet the leukemias would only appear at advanced age, after “latent periods” of up to 55 years, the age when these “adult” leukemias appear spontaneously (Evans, 1989c; Blattner; 1990; Duesberg and Schwartz, 1992).
APPENDIX 2 Science Article
MANUFACTURING CERTAINTY
By David Crowe
June 23, 2003
AVAILABLE TO READ AT ANY ONE OF THESE LINKS:
http://davidcrowe.ca/SciHealthEnv/ManufCertainty.html
http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/0725_hiv_sars_test.html
http://www.aliveandwell.org/html/questioning/manufacturing_certainty.html
http://www.virizen.net/htm/671.html
http://www.vaccinationnews.com/DailyNews/2003/June/23/ManufacturingCertainty23.htm
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