Analyzing a swine flu conspiracy theory

[MikeWB]

Analyzing a swine flu conspiracy theory

H1N1 Virus (Wikicommons)
Yesterday, I received an e-mail via a Latin American journalists' list-serve. "Urgent! See this documentary before it's taken down from YouTube!" I clicked on the message, and the link. It took me straight to the YouTube video embedded at the end of this post, titled "Operación pandemia" or "Operation Pandemic." It has an amazing 5,000,000+ views. It's also very professionally made, slick even.

However, the logic within the documentary lacks the same rigor as the production values. Basically the film makes the case that Tamiflu, one of the drugs being deployed to protect against swine flu or H1N1, was developed by a biotech company called Gilead Sciences, and that prior to serving in the second Bush administration as defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld served on Gilead's board, which is true.

Gilead licensed Tamiflu, a drug prescribed for seasonal and swine flu, to Swiss drug maker Roche, which pays Gilead a nice portion of the royalties on the medicine. So? The film says the avian flu and swine flu scares, viewed chronologically, constitute an escalating campaign meant to scare the world into protecting themselves against flu, in order to fatten these firms' corporate wallets. It's also true Gilead and GlaxoSmithKline stock prices have been boosted by swine flu. But the film fails to connect the dots on just how Gilead (in a dark alliance, maybe, with Secretary Rumsfeld and some diabolical P.R. firm?) prompted government and international health agencies to whip up flu fears.

But conspiracy theorists no longer feel the need to posit a nefarious secret society colluding to cause evil. Increasingly, their theories indulge in a logic that might be summed up as "conspiracy on auto-pilot." In these conspiracies, there's limited agency, or none at all, in the sense responsibility is too diffuse to pin down. Through a confluence of interests, the parties to conspiracy– governments, businesses, influential individuals– take part without knowing at all what they're a part of. If this swine flu conspiracy were true, Gilead or Glaxo might have set it in motion by subtly priming the public to fear avian flu, and later H1N1. They may have done so legally, through lobbying or a public awareness campaign. But in the end, pharmaceutical companies, public health officials and government leaders might not really be "in" on anything when they wring their hands about swine flu.

Another example of this new breed of conspiracy theory is the "water takeover plot," also popular in Latin America. This theory posits a corporate and rich-country grab for world water as a hedge against future water wars. These water grabs might have been set in motion, "innocently," by the CIA disseminating some report or other. But ultimately, the transnational developers and international NGOs establishing control over developing world watersheds, often with ecological motivations, wouldn't know they're mere puppets. In fact, corporations and powerful goverments might not realize they're facilitating a water takeover either.

To summarize– since no one's pulling the strings, no proof is required, and the enemies can be satisfyingly abstract: capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, corporations, etc. In any case, here's the Operación Pandemia video.

[youtube:3gfhs8pj]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKwk8Kq8QXA[/youtube]3gfhs8pj]

[kolnidre]

Interesting, and helpful for analysing how those who don't just dismiss "conspiracies" out of hand nonetheless eagerly dismiss them.

The real conspiracy lies in the control of information. Thus, by taking over the entire paradigm or body of information that makes up modern medicine, everyone has been misdirected. It began with the erroneous germ theory, which Pasteur reportedly disavowed late in life, and was a fait accompli with the Rockefeller/Flexner takeover of allopathic medicine.

How can you address health and disease if you're never looking in the right place - like nutrition, prevention, and natural immunity - for answers?

So why do so many players go along with the "unseen hand" as this writer terms it? They believe the lie, and it's in their interest to preserve the lie. Not to mention the alternatives to the lie are too unpopular, isolating, impoverishing and potentially dangerous where vested interests are concerned.

Eustace Mullins makes this clear in Murder By Injection, but it's manifestly evident by observing the origins, development, and domination of allopathic medicine.

Hope I didn't stray too far from the meat of this thread. The perpetrators' claims of innocence and ignorance all the time are really stretching the credulity of all sentient beings.

BTW, does anyone else suspect it's possible that the "new" H1N1 vaccine the five or six big pharma firms have been licensed to rush to trial and market (without liability) is really just all or partially derived from unused batches left over from 1976, when somewhere around 180 million doses were prepared?