The Post-Partisan Emporium

  How to Manufacture a Pandemic BY   DR CARL HENEGHAN AND DR TOM JEFFERSON How do you get people to take pharmacological action against something that hits them on average once a year and lasts a few days, like acute respiratory infections? They have been around since creation and are extremely familiar to everyone around the globe, including animals. Acute respiratory infections manifest themselves with a range of symptoms – from none all the way to pneumonia and death from respiratory failure. Thankfully this happens only in a small minority of cases. To sell, you have to have a market, but familiarity breeds contempt. So you have to create a market for your products, be they medicines, opinions, careers, research funds or whatever. One approach is to confuse a syndrome with a disease. This means using the  F-Word  ‘flu’, a terrible Anglo-Saxon colloquialism which is used all over the world, even by WHO and the U.S. CDC. Using the F-word, you are bundling up familiar signs and sympto

1918, I Love You We should not be worried about a return of the 1918 flu. It has never left. Brian Mowrey A new study reanimating the 1918 flu (not for the first time) has set off fresh hand-wringing about a return of the “deadly” virus behind the famous pandemic from both mainstream 1  and alt-media 2  sources. Forbes. This new round of naive alarm-ringing supplants a long tradition of stoking fears about a return of the 1918 virus or some sort of magical reboot of it in the form of a new strain, either from animal (“swine flu” and “avian flu”) or lab sources. The problem is, the 1918 flu virus has never left. The world of flu research, it turns out, is vast. As interpreting the evidence on OAS requires being familiar with that world, I have immersed myself in it over these last six weeks. My audit of the research proceeded chronologically so that modern beliefs that do not match the original evidence (like “OAS”) could be recognized. This puts me in the position of being able to asse