WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Anne Underwood
Newsweek
Updated: 6:06 p.m. ET Oct. 7, 2005
Oct. 7, 2005 - Scientists have
long puzzled over the exceptional lethality of the 1918 flu, which killed
between 20 million and 50 million people worldwide. What features of the
viral genome enabled it to become both highly transmissible and lethal at the
same time? Some of those questions were answered this week, with the publication
of twin papers in the journals Nature and Science. In Nature, Jeffery
Taubenberger of the Pentagon's Armed Forces Institute of Pathology announced
that he had completed sequencing the genome of the 1918 flu. At the same time,
Terrence Tumpey, senior microbiologist at the Influenza Branch of the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, reported in Science that he and his
colleagues had used Taubenberger’s sequence to reconstruct the actual 1918
virus, a living copy of the germ that killed millions.
Fears that it could escape into the environment or be
appropriated by bioterrorists made it a controversial move. But Tumpey says the
risk was worth the trade off because of the information we stand to learn from
the virus. What was particularly chilling about the last killer flu was that it
appeared to come, with only minimal changes, from an avian virus--bringing a new
urgency to the current flu sweeping Southeast Asia. Tumpey spoke with NEWSWEEK's
Anne Underwood about his findings. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What is the
significance of these twin papers?
Terrence Tumpey: For the first time we have a
truly avian pandemic influenza virus that we can study. Not only did we want to
rescue the virus, but also characterize some of the important viral proteins
that made it so exceptionally virulent.
And we know for sure now
that this was a purely avian virus, not a hybrid. Was it really changes of just
25-30 amino acids out of 4,400 in the viral RNA that transformed the virus into
a killer?
That’s Jeff Taubenberger’s work, but it appears that way. The dogma until [the
current bird flu struck in] 1997 was that pandemics were caused by shuffling of
genes between avian and mammalian viruses. But both the current bird flu
outbreak and the 1918 virus appear not to be a human/avian reassortant virus,
but an avian virus that made minimal changes to infect humans directly.
Thankfully, bird flu virus hasn’t figured
out how to spread yet. The 1918 virus did.
Does this confirm our
worst fears about current bird flu?
It’s hard to know whether or not the current flu will emerge into the human
population and spread efficiently. But it’s a good guess
that with enough time, it will figure out how to transmit human to human.
If so, it will fit the three criteria of a pandemic: a novel subtype, a subtype
to which the population has no immunity and high transmissibility.
Why was it important to
create a living virus from the sequence?
There is little information in the sequence itself that tells us why it would be
so deadly. We see from the sequence that it is avianlike, but there are not any
obvious molecular smoking-gun features that we can point to and say, "That is
the reason why it killed so many people."
Reconstructing the virus helps us do that and identify targets for vaccines and
antiviral drugs. The knowledge we’re gaining to protect public
health far outweighs the hypothetical risk of working with this strain or
providing the information to the public......
THE 1918 INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC WAS A
VACCINE-CAUSED DISEASE
E. McBean
(Vaccination The Silent Killer p28)
Very few people realize that the worst
epidemic ever to hit
America, the
Spanish Influenza
of 1918 was the after effect of the massive nation-wide
vaccine campaign.
The doctors told the people that the disease was caused
by germs. Viruses were not
known at that time or they would have been
blamed. Germs. bacteria and
viruses, along with bacilli and a few other
invisible organisms are the
scapegoats which the doctors like to blame for
the things they do not
understand. If the doctor makes a wrong diagnosis
and treatment, and kills the
patient, he can always blame it on the germs,
and say the patient didnt get
an early diagnosis and come to him in time.
If we check back in history to
that 1918 flu period, we will see that it
suddenly struck
just after the end of World War I when our soldiers were
returning home from
overseas. That was the first war in which all the known
vaccines were
forced on all the servicemen. This mish-mash of poison drugs
and putrid protein
of which the vaccines were composed, caused such
widespread disease
and death among the soldiers that it was the common talk
of the day, that
more of our men were being killed by medical shots than by
enemy shots from
guns. Thousands were invalided home or to military
hospitals, as
hopeless wrecks, before they ever saw a day of battle. The
death and disease
rate among the vaccinated soldiers was four times higher
than among the
unvaccinated civilians. But this
did not stop the vaccine
promoters. Vaccine has always
been big business, and so it was continued
doggedly.
It was a shorter war than the
vaccine-makers had planned on, only about a
year for us, so
the vaccine promoters had a lot of unused,
spoiling
vaccines left over
which they wanted to sell at a good profit. So they did
what they usually
do, they called a meeting behind closed doors, and
plotted the whole
sordid program, a nationwide (worldwide) vaccination
drive using all
their vaccines, and telling the people that the soldiers
were coming home
with many dread diseases contracted in foreign countries
and that it was the
patriotic duty of every man, woman and child to get
"protected" by
rushing down to the vaccination centers and having all the
shots.
Most people believe their
doctors and government officials, and do what
they say. The result was, that
almost the entire population submitted to
the shots without question, and
it was only a matter of hours until people
began dropping dead in agony,
while many others collapsed with a disease of
such virulence that no one had
ever seen anything like it before. They had
all the characteristics of the
diseases they had been vaccinated against,
the high fever, chills, pain,
cramps, diarrhea, etc. of typhoid, and the
pneumonia like lung and throat
congestion of diphtheria and the vomiting,
headache, weakness and misery
of hepatitis from the jungle fever shots, and
the outbreak of sores on the
skin from the smallpox shots, along with
paralysis from all the shots,
etc.
The doctors were baffled, and
claimed they didnt know what caused the
strange and deadly disease, and
they certainly had no cure. They should
have known the
underlying cause was the vaccinations, because the same
thing happened to
the soldiers after they had their shots at camp. The
typhoid fever shots
caused a worse form of the disease which they called
para-typhoid.
Then they tried to suppress the symptoms of
that one with a
stronger vaccine
which caused a still more serious disease which killed and
disabled a great
many men. The combination of all
the poison vaccines
fermenting together in the
body, caused such violent reactions that they
could not cope with the
situation. Disaster ran rampant in the camps. Some
of the military hospitals were
filled with nothing but paralyzed soldiers,
and they were called war
casualties, even before they left American soil. I
talked to some of the survivors
of that vaccine onslaught when they
returned home after the war,
and they told of the horrors, not of the war
itself, and battles, but of the
sickness at camp.
The doctors didnt
want this massive vaccine disease to reflect on them, so
they, agreed among
themselves to call it Spanish Influenza. Spain was a far
away place and some
of the soldiers had been there, so the idea of calling
it Spanish
Influenza seemed to be a good way to lay the blame on someone
else.
The Spanish resented having us name the world scourge on them. They
knew the flu didnt originate in
their country.
20,000,000 died of
that flu epidemic, worldwide, and it seemed to be almost
universal or as far
away as the vaccinations reached. Greece and a few
other countries
which did not accept the vaccines were the only ones which
were not hit by the
flu. Doesnt that prove something?
At home (in the
U.S.) the situation was the same; the only ones who escaped
the influenza were
those who had refused the vaccinations.
My family and 1
were among the few who
persisted in refusing the high pressure sales
propaganda ,and none of us had
the flu not even a sniffle, in spite of
the fact that it was all around
us, and in the bitter cold of winter.
Everyone seemed to have it. The
whole town was down sick and dying. The
hospitals were closed because
the doctors and nurses were down with the
flu. Everything was closed,
schools, businesses, post office everything.
No one was on the streets. It
was like a ghost town. There were no doctors
to care for the sick, so my
parents went from house to house doing what
they could to help the stricken
in any way they could. They spent all day
and part of the night for
weeks, in the sick rooms, and came home only to
eat and sleep. If germs or
viruses, bacteria, or any other little organisms
were the cause of that disease,
they had plenty of opportunity to latch
onto my parents and "lay them
low" with the disease which had prostrated
the world. But germs were not
the cause of that or any other disease, so
they didnt "catch" it. I have
talked to a few other people since that
time, who said they escaped the
1918 flu, so I asked if they had the shots,
and in every case, they said
they had never believed in shots and had never
had any of them. Common sense
tells us that all those toxic vaccines all
mixed up together in people,
could not help but cause extreme
body-poisoning and poisoning of
some kind or another is usually the
cause of disease.
Whenever a person coughs or
sneezes, most people cringe, thinking that the
germs are being spread around
in the au and will attack people. There is no
need to fear those germs any
more, because that is not the way colds are
developed. Germs cant live
apart from the cells (host) and cant do harm
anyway, even if they wanted to.
They have no teeth to bite anyone, no
poison pouches like snakes,
mosquitoes or bees, and do not multiply, except
in decomposed substances, so
they are helpless to harm. As stated before,
their purpose is useful, not
destructive.
The 1918 flu was the most
devastating disease we ever had, and it brought
forth all the medical bag of
tricks to quell it, but those added drugs, all
of which are poisons, only
intensified the over-poisoned condition of the
people, so the treatments
actually killed more than the vaccines did.