Cost of swine flu "pandemic" - socalled. £1.2bn

Sorry for being late in posting this. For posterity, as so many of us publicly warned the authorities not to go down this route but they did, I think it is important to remember the cost of this fiasco. It is also illustrative to see what very much looks like a whitewash when what the public needed was an honest account of what the Labour Government and their medical advisors at the time did wrong and how many people suffered as a result.

http://news.uk.msn.com/uk/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=153993463

Swine flu pandemic cost UK £1.2bn

Dame Deirdre Hine discusses the report into the UK's response to the swine flu pandemic

The swine flu pandemic cost Britain more than £1.2 billion despite being much less severe than feared, a Government-commissioned review has found.

Warnings that 65,000 people in the UK could die in a worst-case scenario proved far too pessimistic - and the actual death toll during the outbreak was 457.

An inquiry into the handling of the emergency concluded that the Government's response was "proportionate and effective". [Comment: Well they would say that wouldn't they?]

But it criticised the restrictive contracts with drug companies which have left a stockpile of over 20 million unused doses of swine flu vaccines for England alone. The review revealed that Britain spent £654 million preparing for a possible flu pandemic, and £587 million responding to last year's H1N1 outbreak - a total of £1.24 billion. This included £1.01 billion on drugs, among them anti-virals, vaccines and antibiotics, as well as £115.4 million on items like face masks and respirators.

Critics questioned why the bill for tackling the pandemic was so large, with one describing Britain's response as a "hugely expensive farce". But Dame Deirdre Hine, a former chief medical officer for Wales who led the review, defended the cost. "I think we have got to set these figures, which seem enormous, against the potential for saving lives," she told reporters. "It is fairly clear that there probably were lives saved of very young people, young children and so on." [Comment: let's have the evidence, and also the stats for those who died and those injured by the vaccine]

After the H1N1 outbreak in April last year, the Government made plans to buy up to 132 million doses of swine flu vaccine, enough to give everyone in the UK two doses. But the contracts it signed with drug manufacturers GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Baxter were too inflexible, the review found. Baxter agreed to a "break clause" allowing the Government to cancel its order for some of the doses but GSK refused.

The Department of Health said it ordered 90 million vaccine doses from GSK, of which it eventually agreed to take 34.8 million. It also placed an order for 36 million doses with Baxter, 9.2 million of which were purchased before the contract was cancelled. About 4.88 million doses of the vaccine were given to people in England in priority groups such as pregnant women and sufferers of asthma, diabetes and heart disease.

The Department of Health said it still held just over 20 million doses of swine flu vaccine for England, with shelf lives that run out by October 2011. Dame Deirdre's review team said commercial confidentiality prevented them from revealing how much money would have been saved if the Government's vaccine contracts had included break clauses. But their report said: "The lack of such a clause in the advance purchase agreements for both contracts consequently exposed the Exchequer to some risk."

Mark Wallace, campaign director of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "The swine flu response has proved to be a hugely expensive farce. Serious questions must be asked about why so much was spent on combating a threat that turned out not to be very serious. It's unacceptable to hide the details of this massive bill behind the excuse of commercial confidentiality. We need full details and full answers about this scandalous waste of money."

NHS funding for orthodox medicine risks misleading patients

Yes, I am deliberately transposing the words "NHS funding for homeopathy risks misleading patients" which Sir John Beddington allegedly said.

It was reported in the Guardian, which, one assumes, is proud of producing a regular flow of anti-homeopathy articles,

"Sir John Beddington, the government's chief scientific adviser, said patients might believe homeopathic treatments could protect them against serious illnesses, or treat existing conditions, because GPs and hospitals are allowed to prescribe them on the NHS."

I think Beddington is a fool (here I am being polite because I'm an Englishman) to trot out a comment which suggests that a proven alternative and safe form of medicine, unlike the current socalled orthodox medicine, doesn't work. Oh, sorry, I forgot for a moment that he's terribly important - Professor of Applied Population Biology (What?) and is (Labour appointed) Chief Scientific Adviser at £165,000 pa. And, like the hierarchy of the BMA, clearly wants homeopathy killed, which incidentally would make orthodox medicine's monopoly on healthcare complete. Aren’t monopolies meant to be unlawful? Why isn’t the Office of Fair Trading investigating the anti-competitive practices of the BMA?

If Beddington took the trouble to check, he'd find that loads of (“scientifically trained”) doctors through the last couple of hundred years have chosen voluntarily to go over to prescribing homeopathic remedies for the very reason that their orthodox remedies weren't curing their patients. In fact some orthodox remedies were killing or maiming them. These doctors have written loads of books about their experiences. And loads of doctors have cured with homeopathy serious, life threatening illnesses where the conventional medicine of the day had no answers, and used homeopathics effectively prophylactically. And I'm not just talking about curing patients in epidemics eg cholera, typhus, Yellow fever, dyptheria in the old days (see http://www.whale.to/v/winston.html), but recently in Cuba's leptospirosis epidemic in 2007

So, Prof B, just read these snippets:

"One physician in a Pittsburgh hospital asked a nurse if she knew
anything better than what he was doing, because he was losing many
cases. "Yes, Doctor, stop aspirin and go down to a homeopathic
pharmacy, and get homeopathic remedies." The Doctor replied: "But that
is homeopathy." "I know it, but the homeopathic doctors for whom I have
nursed have not lost a single case."--W. F. Edmundson, MD, Pittsburgh"

“In Cuba, Leptospirosis is recorded by an efficient national surveillance programme. Its incidence correlates closely with heavy rainfall and subsequent flooding. In late 2007, in response to a developing epidemic, and with only enough vaccine to treat 15,000 high-risk people, the government decided to treat the entire population of the region, over one year of age, with a homeopathic medicine. This was prepared from the inactivated causative organism by the Cuban National Vaccine Institute.

The homeopathic medicine was given to the 2.3 million population of the provinces usually worst affected. Within a few weeks the number of cases had fallen from the forecast 38 to 4 cases per 100,000 per week, significantly fewer than the historically-based forecast for those weeks of the year. The 8.8 million population of the other provinces did not receive homeopathic treatment and the incidence was as forecast. The effect appeared to be sustained: there was an 84% reduction in infection in the treated region in the following year (2008) when, for the first time, incidence did not correlate with rainfall. In the same period, incidence in the untreated region increased by 22%.” http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/197128.php

Doesn't that make you wonder whether you are talking nonsense, Prof B? Oh, I interrupted you .....

"I have made it completely clear that there is no scientific basis for homeopathy beyond the placebo effect and that there are serious concerns about its efficacy," Professor Beddington told the Commons science and technology committee today.

“He went on to warn that government funding for homeopathy risked legitimising unproven treatments and that patients could harm their health by choosing these over conventional vaccines and medicines.”

Well, Prof B, did you ever hear of something called the swine flu pandemic on which the last Labour Government wasted over £1.2bn of the taxpayer's money and risked harming the health of the British nation with the swine flu vaccine? Perhaps you've forgotten about the nasty side effects it had on so many, and perhaps you've forgotten that homeopathy doesn't have adverse side effects, and that homeopaths are daily called upon to treat the adverse effects of orthodox drugs? The efficacy and safety of that vaccine for all was unproven at the time this country's Government and medical authorities enthusiastically endorsed it. And do you recall the massive percentage of GPs and nurses who when polled said they would never take the vaccine themselves?

What’s that?

“Professor Beddington cited the case of a man who caught malaria after being advised to take a homeopathic preparation to protect against the disease.”

Well, Prof B, there is no orthodox malaria drug which has protected 100% of those given it by their doctors from malaria. And their side effects? Maybe you didn’t know that an orthodox-doctor-prescribed malaria drug ruined my honeymoon and made me so sick that I couldn’t move for days and only got better when I stopped taking it. Yes, I WAS BEING POISONED.

I doubt you’d want to believe it, but I recently had a patient who’d contracted typhoid while on holiday (confirmed by tests). The reason I had him – for homeopathic treatment – was because orthodox medicine wasn’t curing him. In fact he was feeling very ill indeed, had a lot of nasty symptoms, and was getting very concerned. Two homeopathic remedies and three days later he was feeling so much better he returned to work. In homeopathy we are used to such cases. But do you see us saying that all of orthodox medicine should be scrapped? Not often. But then, we homeopaths generally have open minds. I’m sorry that you don’t. Hence the headline for this posting.

Your Human Rights to Health are under attack!

This is an incredibly important topic for everyone who believes as this blog does that it is a basic human right not to have your Government or a Government sitting in Belgium tell you what you can or cannot put into your mouth or use in any other way you reasonably choose, or deny or restrict any individual the right of access to natural herbs or supplements to treat themselves, or their patients if they are a natural therapist.

I've extracted below the whole of an article at the URL mentioned. It's written from a US perspective but it's nonetheless applicable to us all in EU.

Fine for those who are not "into" treating themselves with natural remedies with little or no side effects, and who prefer to trot along to doctor trusting him/her to make decisions for them about stuffing some noxious chemicals down them. I'm happy for them if they are comfortable with the "what synthetic drug can I sell you?" system and turn a blind eye to the side effects. But for the large minority of us who don't buy into that system, who do our homework on what natural substances are available for us to self-treat safely and effectively, or who wish to consult a natural therapist on that subject, and have them prescribe us accordingly, this level of control is totally unacceptable. Natural healthcare has been effectively and safely used for generations without the burdensome controls now being imposed, and there is no reason to change this.

Let's all support the Alliance for Natural Health's legal challenge to the new EU laws, and let's have some public naming and shaming. It's high time that the bumpkins who have the impudence to interfere in our lives in this way were "outed" so that we can where possible deprive them of any future influence over us and try and make their lives very much less comfortable.

http://healthfreedoms.org/2010/11/09/traditional-medicines-to-become-illegal-in-europe/

In less than a year, virtually all medicinal herbs will be illegal in the European Union.

It sounds like a bad April Fool’s joke, but it’s not. On the first of April next year, thousands of products associated with traditional medicine will become illegal throughout the European Union.

April 1, 2011, is the date the Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Directive (THMPD) comes into force throughout Europe. Many herbal products—including those already sold safely as food supplements—will need to be registered under THMPD if they are to be made available. But registration involves a series of eligibility and technical challenges as well as prohibitive costs, so a large number of traditional medicines will be prevented from being registered. This is especially true if the medicines are made by smaller companies with low annual sales volumes—a fairly common occurrence with traditional medicines.

In their take-no-prisoners strategy to wipe out every penny of competition and gain complete control of the health of the people, Big Pharma and Agribusiness have scored a major win in Europe. Similar, potentially devastating battles are also underway in the U.S.

How can this be happening?

The secret weapon used by drug companies is trade law. According to Gaia Health:
“Rather than treating food and traditional medicines as human rights issues, they have been treated as trade issues. That makes the desires of large corporations the focus of food and herbal law, rather than the needs and desires of people.
It’s this twisting that has resulted in the FDA’s making outrageously absurd statements, such as claiming that Cheerios and walnuts quite literally become drugs simply because of health claims made for them.”

A related concern is that laws and regulations that are enacted in Europe often influence US policy—and a negative outcome over there is a dangerous precedent that could be adopted here at home. So preserving access in the EU is absolutely critical to our own health freedoms.

Our colleagues at the Alliance for Natural Health International (ANH-Intl), together with the European Benefyt Foundation (EBF), have established a joint working group to coordinate their response to this issue. They plan a three-pronged attack:

1. Force a judicial review of THMPD as being an unsuitable vehicle for assessing traditional medicines. Not a single Ayurvedic or traditional Chinese medicine product has been registered under it. This will be expensive—please see the ANH website about how you can help - at http://www.anh-europe.org/about-us.

2. Change the EU food supplement regulations. The current regulations say that herbal products previously sold as food supplements are to be reclassified as medicines; a food or herb preparation is considered “novel” (and thus banned from sale) if it cannot be proved that one or more of its ingredients had been used significantly in the EU before May 1997; and health claims made by many herbal products are banned, limiting consumer choice.

3. Facilitate a new regulatory framework for traditional medicinal products to replace THMPD and expand its scope. This would regulate not only over-the-counter herbal medicines, but practitioner-prescribed and pharmacy-dispensed supplements as well. The European Benefyt Foundation has been working to develop such a framework for over a year.

40 UK children killed by MMR – and the true picture could be 10 times worse

Now it's beginning to leak out ... The Sunday Times reported

Forty children have died after a routine vaccination such as MMR and 2,100 more have suffered a serious reaction, UK health authorities have been forced to disclose this week – and these figures are just the tip of the iceberg.

Two of the vaccinated children have been left with permanent brain damage, and 1500 others have suffered neurological reactions, including 11 cases of brain inflammation and 13 cases of epilepsy and coma. Overall, there have been more than 2,100 adverse reactions to a childhood vaccine in the UK in the last seven years.

The UK’s Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) was forced to reveal the figures following a request from a journalist under freedom of information legislation.

The true picture is likely to be far worse. The MHRA cases are only those that doctors have reported; if the doctor does not believe the vaccine has caused the reaction, he will not report it. It is suspected that just 10 per cent of all deaths and reactions from vaccines are ever reported; if so, this means that 400 children have died from a vaccine and 21,000 have suffered an adverse reaction in the UK alone. The true situation will be far worse in countries such as the US where childhood vaccination is compulsory.

Last month, the UK government was forced by a court to pay damages to a mother whose son was left with severe brain damage after an MMR vaccination. Another 500 similar cases are currently going through the UK courts.

These figures represent a major setback in the relationship between doctors and parents. Most parents have accepted the reassurances of doctors and health authorities that the vaccines are safe, and that they are doing the best for their child and the community.

(Source: Sunday Times, October 24, 2010).

If you were sane and Minister for Health wouldn't you on receiving the above info immediately call a moratorium on the MMR vaccine? Would it take you even 10 secs to make that call? Just how much "collateral damage" does it take before our public servants and doctors do the right thing? Would one of their own children dying convince them? The saddest part about all this is there are books and books out there spelling out the known dangers of these vaccines, but the hierarchy of the orthodox medical profession just doesn't want to know. Time for a new broom, plus some good old fashioned naming and shaming.

And have a look at http://safe-medicine.blogspot.com/2010/10/flu-vaccine-over-3000-miscarriages.html also

50 Homeopathy Blogs Worth Reading

At http://www.mastersinpublichealth.net/50-homeopathy-blogs-worth-reading/ you'll find someone has already done the arduous task of compiling loads of good sites related to homeopathy. Well worth a browse.

MMR jab resulted in autism symptoms says US court awarding high compensation

The splendid WDDTY emag reports

Childhood vaccines are linked to autism - and here's $20m to prove it

15 September 2010
Vaccines we give to our children are definitively linked to autism. A US court has this week awarded a family a payment of up to $20m as compensation for their daughter who suffered autism after she was given multiple vaccines, including the MMR. The parents of Hannah Poling, now a 13-year-old girl, will receive an immediate $1.5m compensation payment followed by annual sums of $500,000 to pay for her care. The award could easily reach $20m, say prosecutors. Hannah was a normal and healthy child until she was given five vaccinations, including the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) shot, in 2000. Her health declined rapidly and she developed fevers, stopped eating, didn’t respond to stimulus, and started to display symptoms of autism, her parents said. Although the US government accepted liability in 2007, the settlement figure has only recently been agreed. Pro-vaccine groups are quick to point out that Hannah’s is a special case, and that it doesn’t prove an MMR-autism link. They say that Hannah suffered from a rare mitochrondrial disorder that predisposed her to autism. The condition was the result of the vaccine, but was not caused by it, they say. However, there are around 4,800 other vaccine-damage cases waiting to be heard in US courts and, as Time magazine once suggested, it’s not unreasonable to assume that some of the other children could also have Hannah’s same underlying problem. (Source: CBS News, September 9, 2010)

Well, to anyone with half a brain and at least one ear it's been obvious for years that multiple vaccine jabs taken over a short period, or "multi-vaccines" (many vaccines in one jab like the MMR or DPT), are in themselves such a violent assault on the immune system compared with a single vaccine that they are likely to have awful side effects for a percentage of the recipients. That's not to say that I approve even of single vaccines in most cases; many vaccines, for more people than realise it, come at a high price down the road (permanently lowered general immune system), as well as at best conferring only a temporary protection for some of those jabbed.

Any chance of the troglodytes in the BMA conceding that anytime soon and apologising to Dr Andrew Wakefield for hounding him for so many years? Not an earthly.

Oh, and did the statement above - "(the autism) condition was the result of the vaccine, but was not caused by it" - get a hollow laugh from you? That sort of wordsmithing generally comes from a law school or political spinmaster training.

This all comes in the same week as we hear that the UK medical system is planning to use up unwanted stocks of its untested swine flu vaccine on the elderly this winter. The same stuff that contains thiosermal, a mercury-based preservative which GPs practice staff said patients reported to have "caused headaches, sleeplessness and stomach cramps" (and how many not immediately obvious other disorders?)last winter. Come on, the UK's GPs. Take some time to read up about the poisons inside vaccines, and how the stats reveal conclusively that due to better hygiene the diseases being targeted were already largely on their way out BEFORE those vaccines were introduced.

Unsafe Vaccines - recent news on MMR and HPV vaccines

The WDDTY magazine recently reported the following

MMR vaccine isn't safe after all, UK government forced to concede
01 September 2010

After years of reassuring parents about the safety of the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, the UK government has finally had to concede that it can have serious side effects. A UK court has ruled that the vaccine caused severe brain damage in a boy, now aged 18, and has ordered the government to pay compensation. The ruling brings to an end a lengthy campaign by the boy’s mother, Jackie Fletcher, who created the pressure group JABS to help other parents win compensation for their vaccine-damaged children. Jackie’s son, Robert, was just 13 months old when he had the MMR vaccination. From being a healthy baby who was developing normally, he started to suffer epileptic fits and became unresponsive. He is now severely disabled. Jackie and her family have been awarded £91,000 in compensation. The judgement also sends out hope to the thousands of parents in the UK who are also fighting for compensation. (Source: Sunday Times, August 29, 2010).

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Parents want HPV vaccine banned after it wrecked health of their daughters
01 September 2010

A group of American mothers wants the HPV vaccine Gardasil banned after it ruined the health of their teenage daughters. The ‘safe’ vaccine – supposed to protect against cervical cancer – has harmed thousands of girls and a small number have died directly after having the shot. The girls have suffered a range of serious side effects, from seizures, strokes, auto-immune disorders, chronic fatigue, hair loss, headaches, heart pain, weak muscles, vision and hearing loss and paralysis.

Marian Greene, whose daughter was affected by Gardasil, has set up a website – http://www.truthaboutgardasil.org – where other mothers can document the side effects suffered by their daughters.

One of the mothers, who sits on the group’s board, has said her own daughter died after being given the vaccine. Merck, Gardasil’s manufacturer, maintains it is safe and effective. Since the US’s drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), approved the vaccine in 2006, around 40 million doses have been administered to teenage girls around the world. Merck now want to vaccinate teenage boys as well – while Truth About Gardasil wants it banned. (Source: The Truth About Gardasil; http://www.truthaboutgardasil.org)