Was this really 11 years ago!?!? Re-reading this old article today, I was surprised how many boxes it ticks for today. It’s as if what is happening now is following the exact same script, amplified by social media and wall-to-wall media hype. So here is another flashback to the Swine Flu debacle of 2009.

For some important lessons from history, read on…

Anatomy of a nondemic

The history of pandemic flu is littered with false alarms. Fearful of a repeat of the great Spanish Flu of 1918, which was estimated to have killed upwards of 50 million people, the temptation to mobilise every resource and take every public emergency measure available is understandable.

Aren’t we lucky that we live in an age of the best medical technology ever to have existed, and that as a developed nation we are likely to be well supplied with the latest weapons against this new terror? Won’t this spare us from the worst ravages of swine flu?

Well, no: just the opposite seems to be the case.

Pandemic lessons from history

The Swine Flu outbreak of 1976 actually killed one person – yes one – a soldier in Fort Dix, whilst the vaccine that was launched against it killed 25 people and crippled thousands. It was only thanks to the scrapping of the plans for compulsory mass vaccination in light of this fiasco that many more were not harmed. Apparently the soldier had complained of feeling tired and weak, and the next day he died. One can only speculate that he was suffering acute fatigue or exhaustion as a result of his training, and in the military culture his vague symptoms may have been met with less than sympathetic care. Hence the existence of a novel invading organism might sit more comfortably with the military authorities, than a mistake in recognising a soldier who actually needed rest and care, and was not just malingering. But whatever did happen to this unfortunate recruit was a one-off, and the official explanation – dangerous contagion – is therefore not sufficient alone. The assumed ‘outbreak’ then spread outwards around this inadequate explanation by the mechanism of fear and word of mouth.

Then there was Bird Flu, found mainly amongst diseased battery poultry and their handlers, that was apparently going to spread around the whole world by healthy wild birds. Remember the news when it reached Germany, then Scotland? The ‘Dads Army’ arrows over maps of Asia and Europe seem laughable looking back. Again, attention was conveniently diverted away from the real source of the problem.

But what about all the deaths in 1918? Well, 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ coincided with the discovery that aspirin could be used as an antipyretic, and they used it on as many people as possible showing symptoms. It is thought that this new wonder drug is what caused many of the fatalities.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19788357

Quoting from the JAOA of 1919:

“In the United States, more than 28% of the population succumbed to the disease overall. In US military hospitals, the mortality rate averaged 36%, while the mortality rate in US medical hospitals fell between 30% and 40%, with the exception of a rate of 68% in medical hospitals in New York City.”

Medicine’s greatest challenge, or its biggest failure?

In contrast the non-medical osteopathic and homoeopathic hospitals were claiming a death rate nearer 0.25% for non-drug treatment. The fact that this particular outbreak caused many times more death than any other plague in history deserves explanation, and misguided but well-meaning medical treatment seems to offer such an explanation. Understandably though, one of history’s greatest medical disasters is not widely publicised as such.

Which leads us onto SARS by extension of the same principle. One hypothesis is that SARS is normal seasonal flu modified by antivirals (more on that later). Symptoms are reduced, in effect it is a glorified antipyretic. The patient feels better, goes back to work, but is still exhausted and fundamentally diseased, and two weeks later dies of sudden bacterial pneumonia. This event is taken as evidence of the virulence of the strain, rather than as a flaw in the approach. Once word gets out of this virulence, every sniffle is hit with big guns immediately and the prophecy of a nasty and novel epidemic then fulfills itself very neatly.

Everything you need to know about Swine Flu

Firstly, H1N1 is the name for normal ‘flu’, and no pigs have been found sick with this strain of H1N1. At the time of writing, there have been 1000 deaths worldwide attributed to it, compare this to thousands every day dying of MRSA and C.Dif in hospitals, so it’s hard to imagine why the press got so excited about it, except that the press tend to bite, hook, line and sinker, onto everything that the CDC, WHO and DoH put out, without criticism. You could be forgiven for thinking the BBC is the marketing wing of Roche. Yet despite this excitement, confirmed sufferers of ‘Swine Flu’ seem to have only ‘very mild symptoms’. Apparently this is bad news because it means that it helps it spread easily, so we have to ask what would be good news? But early descriptions of ‘killer flu’ are just a wee a bit of an exaggeration really. Meanwhile the panic such news can create is huge. The pork industry worldwide has been badly hit, as has the economy of Mexico; Egypt launched a complete pig cull, involving obscene mass cruelty. People suffer from the spectre of epidemics alone, and we can only guess how many people will be harmed by fake flu drugs bought on the internet. Exaggeration of such matters is entirely irresponsible.

Why so much misinformation?

One explanation for crying wolf, as governments and health officials have time and again, is to draw attention away from other bad news, such as the economy, and when the crisis doesn’t materialise they can claim to have saved us: crisis is an opportunity to unpopular government. Remember how 9-11 became a ‘good day to bury bad news’? And they also don’t want to be seen to under-react – remember Hurricane Katrina. More sinister explanations are to create a self-fulfilling prophecy in order to spread disease by fear and knee-jerk medication of every sniffle going; with inappropriate measures that are themselves more harmful than the disease threat itself; to deal with stockpiles of medications that were vastly overestimated during previous false-alarms; to create new markets, products for industry (Baxter filed their H1N1 vaccine patent in 2008); to create a pretext for controlling movements of people, detention by quarantine of dissenters, and, at the outer reaches, even to reduce populations by a deliberately manufactured disease. Whatever the truth, there is a real risk that the official measures will do significantly more harm than good.

SARS, Avian Flu, Swine Flu – coincidence or design?

Next, a bit of history: on a global scale, SARS came to nothing. Marshall Smith: ‘In the last 20 years, in my research, articles and media interviews I have identified 12 fictitious medical problems which have resulted in massive billion dollar profits to a few pharmaceutical houses. All of the medical problems were either man-made or don’t exist, and were hyped and promoted by the CDC. All of them are characterized by including the words Disorder or Syndrome in their names. That’s because they are not legitimate diseases… Here we are only focusing on the latest hype, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS, a classic case of CDC bio-terrorism.’

Bird flu came to very little, but did create massive contracts for certain well-connected corporations. While governments and media thought this was going to land here on a duck, they overlooked the obvious, which is that bird flu is not a disease of healthy wild birds: it afflicts diseased battery fowl, living in appalling conditions, malnourished, over-medicated, crammed in by thousands in sheds, fighting each other, living and dying among their own faeces and the corpses of their companions, so sick, overfed and pumped with growth-promoters their legs snap under their own body weight; and of course a disease of the workers who man these sheds, breathing in the shit.

Catch the flu? Evidence says ‘no’

Next, flu isn’t even contagious!!! Yes, read it again, we’re not making this up. The theory of person-to-person transmission by virus is just that – a theory, and not a very good one. It is not borne out by experiment, no specific disease has ever been proved to be spread – or even caused – directly by a virus. No, really, it hasn’t. When a disease appears it is assumed that a ‘disease agent’ is involved, and that is enough, the ‘solid starting point’ onto which all other inquiry is attached and around which all other knowledge must orbit. When science so inconveniently fails to support the contagion theory, it is ignored. Mathematicians Hoyle and Wickramasinghe showed how patterns of spread are not supported by person-to-person transmission at all.

So why do people get sick at around the same time? There are other possible mechanisms to explain it, and they deserve an airing. The big correlates for flu presence are geography and meteorology, in other words, where you live and what the weather’s doing – hence, seasonal flu in local clusters.

Whilst we may think we have caught a cold from a friend or neighbour, there’s nothing to say we wouldn’t have got it anyway – we can never prove who gave it to us, but we tend automatically to look for anybody with similar symptoms and blame them, starting from the unquestioned assumption that somebody must have given us the bug.

And it’s seldom hard to find somebody with similar symptoms. But flu does not spread faster in areas of high population density, and living in a house full of sufferers does not increase our likelihood of going down with flu, compared to, say, living in a rural area in relative isolation. Even the Government’s Chief Medical Advisor, Sir Liam Donaldson admitted on Radio 4’s World at One programme on July 14th, ‘…the disease became common amongst people who’d had absolutely no contact with a case…’. This is quite an extraordinary admission really, without any attempt to explain how this could be.

“…the disease became common amongst people who’d had absolutely no contact with a case…”

Sir Liam Donaldson

Trial of Spanish Flu fails to demonstrate transmission

But the contagion of flu has actually been put to the test, one of the only human trials of actual infection. In the Deer Island experiment of 1918, full pardons were offered to prisoners in exchange for being ‘infected’ experimentally with Spanish Flu. They injected, squirted, spluttered and swabbed for weeks, yet not a single subject caught so much as a sniffle – but then they wouldn’t of course, these people had everything to live for. The one person who got sick and died was the doctor in charge of the experimental facility! Could it be that a prerequisite for catching Spanish Flu is belief in its deadly properties and certainty that we are at risk if exposed? In other words, laughing at it really is the best medicine, as well as getting plenty of rest, good nourishment, clean water, positive outlook etc.

Every disease, every outbreak has its context

And just like the battery fowl in their sheds in the Far East, the human spirit worldwide was at a very low ebb after the First World War, a nightmare of a ‘war to end all wars’, where persons of working and fighting age were collectively exhausted. Like the chicken shed, this is the necessary terrain for disease to exist, it’s the big link that medical science seems to overlook, painting us all as helpless victims of any tiny malevolence that gets past our thin defences. For over a century we have chosen to look to factors beyond our control for the causes of disease, in order to avoid facing up to the responsibility we have to supply ourselves with the basic necessities of a healthy life; sometimes against considerable social and economic pressure to do otherwise. Rudolph Virchow, the father of pathology, eventually declared at the end of his life, that germs seek out their natural habitat as do mosquitoes, “inhabiting the stagnant pond but not themselves making it stagnant”. This explains why we are not all dead – despite being exposed daily to practically every germ known to man – because the healthy human organism is not suitable terrain for disease. So while we may be partly victims of things beyond our control, we are also very much victims of our own actions and inactions, collective and individual, living in near permanent toxic circumstances: we must already be diseased in order to ‘get’ a disease.

So where better a terrain for disease than Mexico City, with a vast and rapidly growing population, squalid living conditions for many, and terrible problems with air and water pollution? And again, the world is at a low ebb, this time economically: bread-winners there will be overstretched, exhausted, and more poorly nourished, as they were in Europe following WW1. It’s no surprise that at any time a few thousand people in a city of 20 million might feel unwell, and a few hundred might even die through being unable to take the basic measures for ordinary flu – time to rest without worry, hydration with clean water, a safe and sanitary environment to recover.

So what is so different now? Is there in fact any kind of outbreak to speak of?

How many people really are suffering from some kind of novel disease? At this time it seems there is very little firm evidence of much happening at all. Even the definition of swine flu is incredibly vague. Prior to ‘pandemic’ status, fever, lower respiratory tract infection, and a recent visit to Mexico – or even contact with another sufferer – were enough; no science needed. Hence sufferers of quite normal seasonal events were diagnosed simply because someone they know had a cold while on holiday. What I had in May would have been diagnosed as Swine Flu had I coincidentally been to Mexico. This is because it is simply not practicable to test everybody. For the first few months only one lab in the world was able to confirm infection – the lab of the CDC, which was also the sole authority and the main source of information on swine flu.

This casual approach to diagnosis has meant more serious problems have been missed, actually leading to death.

But here’s where it gets more sinister; a GP now tells us that her surgery has a stock of Swine Flu swab kits – but they are not allowed to use them. It’s as if the official strategy is to assume the worst in every case. So we have a switch from confirmed diagnosis, to clinical diagnosis, and now to self-diagnosis: everyone we know who has actually phoned up the new National Pandemic Flu Service has been offered Tamiflu after describing vague flu-like symptoms. At times the call centre is staffed by 16-year olds – schoolchildren are responsible for diagnosis!

And the range of known symptoms covers so many normal events, that practically everybody will ‘have it’ some time this year on this basis. Changing these criteria has coincided with both a drop in the seasonal temperature and the start of the summer holidays, both times when colds and flu are likely to occur as normal physiological processes, and, Hey Presto! A massive surge in cases in a few short weeks. The latest is that the surge has ‘plateaued’ – well it’s no surprise: redefining the diagnostic criteria will only create so many more new cases.

Diagnosis by assumption, and outbreak by policy, pandemic by semantic jiggling.

But what does confirmation of infection really mean anyway? It means that somebody showing symptoms has produced a positive test. We would think from the media that rows of clever people are peering down microscopes at little viruses and going “yes, that one’s definitely Swine Flu, it has H1N1 stamped on it, and now I can see it pushing the fever switch”, or perhaps a drop of blood is put in the analyser and up comes a report with the name of the virus, its photo, next-of-kin details, address of the hotel where it’s staying etc. The reality is that there is a lot of guesswork, deduction, assumption, and, quite frankly, mythology involved in the process of identifying any causative organism. Chemical markers, DNA sequences, cellular debris, bits of protein, antibodies, that have become associated with certain symptom pictures, are all seen as signposts pointing towards the suspect infection, yet these are very tenuous and indirect associations with little firm basis. And tracking them down is not straightforward by any means, sometimes markers for other infections are seen on the way, but discarded because they are not of interest.

Germs and diseases, chickens and eggs

In fact we are filled with all kinds of germs all the time, most causing us no harm whatsoever. Around 90 percent by number of cells in our bodies are bacteria, and we’d cope poorly without them. So if we have all the symptoms of swine flu and the germ is detected, we are deemed to have swine flu. If the germ is not detected, we have something else, don’t we? If we have the germ but don’t get symptoms, we must be ‘carriers’, right? And of course it mutates, doesn’t it, always staying one step ahead, so we might be looking for a different thing instead.

So…

We can have: the germ and not the disease; the disease and not the germ; both; neither; or another germ altogether. And all these situations can be called Swine Flu!

Does this not seem to be really stretching a theory? It does to me. It’s hard to see where there is any consistent relationship between the germ and the disease. We’re just classifying and reclassifying findings according to beliefs: epidemic – no epidemic! It’s magic!

But wait a minute, we know that the disease must be caused by a virus… and that the virus causes disease. Actually, we don’t – we’ve just seen that we don’t. The only proof of this exists in self-referential arguments: assumptions are the starting point for a process that proves those same assumptions. Louis Pasteur gave us germ theory, and every piece of standard microbiology is constructed upon it, in turn showing the truth of Pasteur’s germ theory! As soon as we allow ourselves to question this almighty great white holy cow, the whole thing falls apart.

In fact, Pasteur was a terrible self-publicist, who launched a poorly researched theory onto the world which happened to sit quite well with a public largely ignorant of biology. His ideas became a goldmine for pharmaceutical companies, and a refuge for the state; quick-fixes to the complex problems of disease are a very attractive package, and the politically very thorny issues of a fundamentally toxic society can be put off for as long as we all have faith in Pasteur. Except for the small matter that disease remains, and that the ‘solutions’ are not saving us, they are killing us.

It’s all very well quoting numbers of ‘confirmed cases’; first, the presence of virus is deduced by indirect means. Patients with certain markers are seen as having something distinct from other people with exactly the same manifestations. But there is no baseline measure of the existence of the same markers in healthy people; we can’t go back to 2008 and see if those markers are normal prior to the outbreak. In short, we’re finding a virus we haven’t seen before because we’re looking for a virus we haven’t looked for before! There is no epidemic, spread by a virus or otherwise! None. Zilch. Zip. It’s fabricated. Baloney. Made up. It’s hysteria or conspiracy – you decide.

Flu is a solution, not a problem

But what of the people who have died? Well this is very tragic, but let that not make us forget the fearful phrase, uttered around nearly every case, almost as an afterthought – ‘underlying health problems’. Whatever this means is never discussed in the news, but really this must be key to understanding why these people died. Policy is to give the most aggressive treatment to people with ‘underlying health problems’, yet these are the people most at risk of unpredictable reactions to treatment. From a natural healer’s viewpoint flu is a solution, not a problem, and every problem has a context, and context is everything. Germs are the result of the process, not the cause. It has been known for years that suppression of flu processes (fever) can lead to other problems; eg. eczema and asthma. What we call flu is the body’s repair mechanism; it is no more the cause of death than the AA man is the cause of breakdowns. But it would be churlish to speculate on specific deaths at this time.

The mind is the first organ to be infected

Space doesn’t permit a detailed alternative explanation of contagion here, except to point out that it seems to be mostly a mixture of illusion, psychology, and common environmental influence. Ethel D Hume describes the cases of two men bitten by the same mad dog. One of the men died of Rabies within days, the other left on a sea voyage unaware of the death of the first. He returned home fifteen years later, and was told of the fate of the first man, whereupon he too developed Rabies and died. Anecdotally, if you tell a tribesman he’s going to die, he will die. My own experience is that since I stopped believing in the germ theory of disease, I haven’t caught a single cold from another person: I still get colds, but in my own time, according to other patterns of which I am becoming aware.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s study rightly points out the role of the environment, but they then spoil it by inferring that this means flu comes from outer space. Basing a speculative hypothesis on sound findings is acceptable, depending on how such hypotheses are then treated. Importantly, we should be mindful not to lose their essential message, that other explanations for outbreaks are possible besides person-to-person spread. What their inferences do show, however, is that just like the rest of us, they too are under the influence of Pasteur. They fail to flag-up as potentially false the assumption that, wherever ‘influenza’ does come from, it must be an attack, an external ‘influence’. In fact they cling so strongly to this idea they do not even realise they are doing it. Germ theory is the solid starting point of the modern philosophy of medicine, except that the time has come for it to be poked and prodded and tested to see if it really is so solid.

Jumping on the Pand-Waggon

So much for outlandish theories and conspiracies… but they’re not! According to CDC, tamiflu doesn’t work for normal ‘seasonal flu’ (read ‘H1N1’), and according to doctors at bird flu ‘ground zero’ in Vietnam, it’s useless against H5N1. So if it is useless, why sell it? Well, it’s not remotely unlike pharmaceuticals companies to keep marketing useless products. Despite a steady stream of data showing that seasonal flu vaccination achieves very little and risks a lot, there is also always a spokesperson willing to say something illogical in response, like ‘but old people are vulnerable, so we have to continue vaccinating’. They might as well say ‘two plus two equals banana’.

Whilst the call for mass vaccination is coming from the WHO, in the USA the National Vaccine Information Centre is quite reasonably warning against launching a hastily developed vaccine. So aside from the fact that flu vaccines are useless, if there really is a crisis looming it is a massively dangerous experiment to launch a new vaccine so rapidly – as Dr Mercola puts it, one that is ‘turbocharged’ with novel adjuvants (read ‘poisons’) – and to test it first on the world’s doctors and nurses, shortly followed by those with existing health problems, pregnant women, and children. I’m not alone in thinking this is bona fide madness. Where is the rationale for prioritising pregnant women? The lack of vaccine safety and efficacy is a huge subject, it can only be touched upon here. Suffice to say that in any case it is entirely antithetical to any real understanding of health; the route to robust health does not lie in beating up the immune system.

But beyond that, the entire premise of medicating and vaccinating is wrong: we are not germs’ helpless victims; germs show up when the conditions are right for them. Bacteria appear when tissue is diseased (toxic, deregulated, or disorganised), or when we are expelling waste, they feed on the rubbish. Antibiotics in effect kill off the clean-up squad. So we reabsorb, our bodies electing for mild general toxic problems instead. It is not healing, it is just another homeostatic response to our attack on an earlier homoeostatic response.

Viruses are not living things at all, there is little evidence that they consist of anything more than cellular debris – the broken up cell membrane is identifiable as our own, pieces of DNA from the chopped-up nuclei of our cells become packaged within to prevent it from causing havoc in the body. Waste DNA on the loose inside us would cause mayhem, hence it must be bundled up for safe transport to the outside. Antivirals work by stopping pieces of our cell membranes breaking off this way: we are told viruses use this mechanism to ‘disguise themselves’.

Don’t shoot the dustman!

So targeting the virus is like solving the problem of domestic waste by banning the sale of bin bags, targeting bacteria is like shooting the dustmen. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if a vaccine disaster actually became labeled as a success; people who have been vaccinated against an illness, but later go on to develop that illness nevertheless, do not show up in the statistics for that illness. They may present to their doctor with symptoms of Swine Flu, but be told that it is unlikely to be Swine Flu because they have been vaccinated against it. Their case is not notified to the authorities, and an incorrect picture emerges. This happens with Typhoid, which becomes ‘Paratyphoid’ or Dysentery if it occurs after vaccination, and Polio, which becomes ‘Aseptic Meningitis’ in the same way. Indeed, it does need explaining why vaccines are exempt from the usual gold-standards of evidence for safety and efficacy. The only placebo-controlled RCT conducted on a vaccine was for BGC, and not only was no protective effect found whatsoever, vaccinated individuals were more likely to develop TB. According to Tom Jefferson, coordinator of the Cochrane Vaccines Field, ”There’s a huge gap between policy and evidence” [with influenza].

Trials of antivirals are not independent, and are geared at testing the short-term effects only – to the point where symptoms are abated – or prophylactic effect in healthy subjects, like most trials they deliberately remove as much context as possible. Tamiflu is not even a very good palliative; half of all children given Tamiflu suffer unpleasant side-effects, and now deaths from adverse reactions are beginning to come to light. Viral resistance to Tamiflu is now reported, which is another way of saying ‘we’re beginning to notice it doesn’t work’. In time unnecessary antivirals could cause untold death and misery, as aspirin did before, not to mention the rubbish people might panic-buy from the internet. And in a ‘mild illness’, what is this supposed to achieve anyway?

Now it appears that massive stockpiles of drugs left over from bird-flu are on the point of expiry, read ‘lose billions in value if not used immediately’. So how mysterious that this spring H5N1 appeared contaminating flu vaccine destined for Europe. Surely that couldn’t be deliberate? Oh no? In the 1980s Bayer dumped blood products in Europe and Japan that it knew to be contaminated with HIV. I wouldn’t say that the pharmaceutical industry is completely rotten, but its history is such that every single concern should be subject to the closest of scrutiny.

It’s not even clear what swine flu is, if anybody really has anything novel at all – even pigs haven’t got it. It’s supposed to be mild in most people, so if there’s something deadly going around… well, there simply isn’t. The way to spread ‘it’ is to tell everybody it is highly contagious, to protect themselves, and suppress any fever at the first sign. It is even suggested that this is a deliberately manufactured disease. But it seems more likely that this is a non-event, fed by too much incomplete and conflicting information, watered by vested interests and germinated in the soil of ignorance and fear. Marshall Smith interestingly describes 1918 as a pandemic spread by telephone! So, how much worse could a fear-based disease be when spread by the internet?

You can’t fight physiology and win

So, far from being saved by medicine, the dangers of pandemic flu are likely to be increased or even created by it, from the lack of understanding of illness, to the combative methods employed. Flu is a normal process, medicine has nothing to offer which really changes it for the better. Fear and panic are the biggest risk. History shows that the less we interfere with flu the better. Our understanding as natural healers tells us it is a healing process, it is a necessary stage of recovering from difficult times – war, recession, domestic difficulty… The ancient advice is still the best; during times of wellness to nurture an adequate reserve of rest, good nutrition, strength of spirit and moderate exercise; when flu strikes to heed the message it sends, trust our symptoms, call in sick, keep warm, rested and hydrated, fast under guidance if we are able, rest up until fully recovered, and value the changes it portends.

As healers then, we need to be aware of how to make our patients more comfortable during a bout of flu, and how much we have to offer in the recovery of our patients. We need to know when they require urgent medical care, but also when it is best to help them stay out of hospital and leave nature alone to run its course.

[Reworked]