Nexus - 1605 - New Times Magazine-pages

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A SHORT CHRONICLE OF NOVEL EPIDEMICS SHORT CHRONICLE NOVEL EPIDEMICS Threats of pandemics make big profits for pharmaceutical companies, but the drug Tamiflu, which is not designed to treat swine flu, is being wrongly used and is no longer effective against the season's dominant strains of influenza. Of pigs and men e are desperately in need of a new scientific discipline which we should name "prognosticology", the science that studies the way in which predictions are made in science. For the last three decades, there have been ample prognoses. Most of these have been proven wrong or have constituted false alarms. Especially in the realm of medicine, there seems to be a consistent mechanism that not only inaccurately predicts but also invents pandemics and projects their realisation into the near future. The swine flu "epidemic" is the latest product of this pandemic mechanism. And this mechanism that feeds on billions of dollars in grants is just a part of an even greater mechanism. It is a device of the "feartron", this unfailing political machine that creates and manipulates fear. n the public health domain, the mechanism pretty much started with the AIDS epidemic. Monstrously wrong prognoses and estimates were made, the world was seized with terror, and sexual behaviour was regulated by the state. The AIDS theoreticians made panic-inducing estimates and overhyped prognoses about the AIDS threat while receiving overwhelming support from celebrities. It is typical that Oprah Winfrey herself stated on her show in 1988 that "one out of five heterosexuals could be dead of AIDS by 1990". As a matter of fact, these predictions failed to such an extent that in 2008 the World Health Organization (WHO), under the overwhelming evidence of the actual numbers and of previous statistical abuse, was forced to declare the heterosexual AIDS pandemic over.’ The mechanism continued to create imaginary apocalyptic visions incriminating other viruses as terrifying killers. Hantaviruses, the West Nile virus, the SARS coronavirus and, more recently, bird flu strains of viruses have all been morphed by the pandemic industry into malevolent entities that could bring modern civilisation to an end, or at least to its knees. Trillions of dollars has been spent on drug purchases and on drug and vaccine development. In the case of the West Nile Virus, the spraying of New York with pesticides to get rid of the virus carriers, mosquitoes, caused a substantial ecological disaster.’ The SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) ghost pandemic disappeared within a year, in mid-2003, never to reappear. And hardly anyone remembers hantaviruses any more. From 2003 to 2009, fewer than 500 people were affected with bird flu, with fewer than 300 deaths,’ while the annual common flu death toll ranges from 250,000 to 500,000 worldwide.’ It is obvious that common sense, as well as humanity, is being targeted and victimised by "novel epidemics". Email: petrosarguriou@hotmail.com The new virus on the block The pandemics industry was desperately seeking for a new product, a fresh approach. It found this in Mexico with swine flu. NEXUS ¢ 11 by Peter Arguriou © 2009 AUGUST — SEPTEMBER 2009 www.nexusmagazine.com