Nurses File Lawsuit Over Mandatory Flu Vaccine

The management of the current swine flu pandemic is becoming farcical. Peacenik doesn't know what good public health policy is anymore. The Star recently reported that there is a surge of swine flu cases in the Greater Toronto Area. The second wave has arrived. Peacenik was galvanized. Ready to wear Peacenik's N-65 medical mask everywhere.

Then there was the story that the vaccine manufacturers weren't going to be legally liable for any problems with flu shots. The Canadian taxpayer was going to be liable. Whaaaaat?

Then of course there is the preliminary story that seasonal flu shots increase the likely hood of getting swine flu. This story has not been debunked. Is it true? And of course there won't be any vaccine until the flu season is winding down in November.

And all the fights agains mandatory flu shots. Does anyone know what the best approach is? Peacenik doesn't. Have a good weekend.

Update: Peacenik just spoke to a colleague who just returned from speaking with her doctor. Peacenik's colleague asked the doctor if she should get the seasonal flu shot. The doctor said he just returned from a conference about the swine flu and the doctor was confused. Didn't really know what the answer was and said 'on balance if your are healthy you should get the seasonal flu shot". A doctor just gets back from a swine flu conference and is hazy about whether to take the shot or not. Peacenik is not the only one in the dark.

by KOMO News Staff

The nurses' union said in a statement that it supports a voluntary vaccination program, but that any mandatory policy should be overseen by the state or federal government. (Image: KOMO News)

SEATTLE - A union representing 16,000 registered nurses in Washington state has filed a federal lawsuit against MultiCare Health System for implementing a mandatory flu vaccination policy.

"This new policy will force nurses to get the flu vaccination or to wear face masks as a condition of employment and may result in the firing of nurses who do not comply with the policy," the union said in a statement.

Read on...

Swine Flu: Behind the Hype

punditman says...

Punditman doesn't have time to go into exquisite detail about his concerns regarding the swine flu vaccine or the origins of the virus, (which he has done many times already in this space), so Punditman will be brief.

There is certainly a lot to be concerned about when it comes to Swine Flu. But not necessarily for the reasons that we are being told. Thankfully, not everyone is buying into all the fear and hype. Many healthcare workers are refusing the shot. According to Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, which represents 20,000 hospital workers,"If there is an attempt to make it mandatory, I think you would see civil disobedience." Good on them, and good for Hurley for standing up for the rights of his union members.

Punditman saw Hurley interviewed on the CBC on the weekend and was pleasantly surprised at his candid assessment of what is really wrong with this picture. I am not quoting him, but paraphrasing: namely, hospitals are underfunded, overcrowded and germ-infested and rather than government putting all their energies into a vaccine with dubious efficacy and possibly dangerous effects, (especially for pregnant women workers), they should fix the hospital crisis! That would be the best strategy to contain a pandemic.

Speaking of the vaccine, rather than lining up for a shot of GlaxoSmithKline's squalene-laced vaccine, (linked to Gulf War Syndrome), perhaps folks should redirect their concerns? A good place to start is here or here. Those links oughta scare you a helluva lot more than the virus itself.

H1N1 Pandemic: Pentagon Planning Deployment of Troops in Support of Nationwide Vaccination

The epidemic that never was: Policy-making and the swine flu scare

According to CNN, the Pentagon is "to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall, according to Defense Department officials."

"The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The officials would not be identified because the proposal from U.S. Northern Command's Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.

The plan calls for military task forces to work in conjunction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There is no final decision on how the military effort would be manned, but one source said it would likely include personnel from all branches of the military.

It has yet to be determined how many troops would be needed and whether they would come from the active duty or the National Guard and Reserve forces.

Civilian authorities would lead any relief efforts in the event of a major outbreak, the official said. The military, as they would for a natural disaster or other significant emergency situation, could provide support and fulfill any tasks that civilian authorities could not, such as air transport or testing of large numbers of viral samples from infected patients.

As a first step, Gates is being asked to sign a so-called "execution order" that would authorize the military to begin to conduct the detailed planning to execute the proposed plan.

Orders to deploy actual forces would be reviewed later, depending on how much of a health threat the flu poses this fall, the officials said." (CNN, Military planning for possible H1N1 outbreak, July 2009, emphasis added)

The implications are far-reaching.

The decision points towards the militarization of civilian instituions, including law enforcement and public health. The Pentagon is already planning on the number of troops to be deployed in the case of a pandemic. A nationwide vaccination program is already planned for the Fall. The pharmaceutical industry is slated to deliver 160 million vaccine doses by the Fall, enough doses to vaccinate more than half of America's population.

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Deadly Immunity

punditman says...
Yep, dear reader, you may have noticed that Peacenik is absent from the blog these past few days. You would be correct. He's off at his summer cottage preparing for whatever it is you prepare for at your summer cottage. Personally I drink beer and prepare for nothing when I am on vacation, but I expect a full report in the near future from Peacenik's survivalist compound. He does have lots of beer, so I assume Peacenik is in a fine mood as he prepares for the end of whatever it is that is ending.

In the meantime, Punditman says that Punditman has noticed yet another article about the dangers of vaccines and yet another Big Pharma/government cover-up. This 2005 article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shows the depth of collusion between Big Parma and the US government. Punditman thinks this is highly relevant because of the current "debate" on the swine flu virus, plans to develop a vaccine and make you and your loved ones get jabbed either through mandatory vaccinations under emergency powers or through intense social pressure. Yep, that's what I predict at this juncture. Actually, I've noticed that there's no debate at all going on in the mainstream media. All is well in the corporate-media-medical matrix. It's just online wingnuts like me that are raising eyebrows and sounding alarms.

When your views run contrary to accepted wisdom, the usual progression goes something like this: First, skeptics and critics are ignored. That's the pure censorship phase and this is where we are currently with swine flu. Contrary opinion is 100% absent from mainstream discourse. It is sort of how punditman feels when he mentions the 1976 swine flu vaccine fiasco that led to crippling disease and death for thousands and ensuing lawsuits. He gets that "eyes glazed over" look from unaware, frivolous-TV-viewing folk who pass themselves off as thinking monkeys. Then, if we skeptics get louder, we'll be labeled wingnuts. That's the next step. Then, with enough pressure, perhaps the powers that be will listen to our legitimate concerns. I think.

Of course by then it could be too late and the damage could be done, with untold numbers maimed by an unsafe vaccine for a threat that may have originated in a lab.

And of course, punditman could be completly wrong too.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. investigates the government cover-up of a mercury/autism scandal

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
(June 20, 2005)

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Georgia. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to fifty-two attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. "You can play with this all you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results "are statistically significant." Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's first day, was even more alarmed. "My gut feeling?" he said. "Forgive this personal comment -- I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on."

But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line. "We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits," said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. "This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country." Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that "given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible hands." Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared that "perhaps this study should not have been done at all." He added that "the research results have to be handled," warning that the study "will be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the control of this group."

In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children's health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten's findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been "lost" and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.

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Sarkozy’s Secret Plan for Mandatory Swine Flu Vaccination

punditman says...There are those who post or comment here or who read this blog who may disagree with Punditman on this one. There are those who may disagree with Punditman for even posting this article. That is fine. Punditman invites lively discussion about things for which nobody really has a definitive answer. The motto of this blog is to cut through fog, expose lies and help unravel the Media-Industrial-Military-Financial Complex. Punditman would like to add to that, the medical -pharmaceutical complex.

The article below questions the orthodoxy of Big Pharma, along with vaccinations of both animals and people and the recent panics surrounding Mad Cow, Bird Flu, and yes, Swine Flu. Is swine flu really a pandemic? Punditman says No. Does Punditman think the author, F. William Engdahl, is a nutbar? No reason to think so. Are mandatory vaccinations a good idea? Are they safe? What do you think? Punditman doesn't feel safe.

by F. William Engdahl

The French Government is developing secret plans to impose mandatory vaccination of the entire French population, allegedly against possible Swine Flu disease according to reports leaked in a French newspaper. The plan is without precedent and even defies recommended public health advice. Pharmaceutical giants benefit from the move, as the Swine Flu increases the trend towards the militarization of public health and use of needless population panic to advance the agenda.

According to a report in the May 30 edition of the French newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, the Sarkozy government has authorized spending of an estimated €1 billion to buy vaccines allegedly to combat or protect against H1N1 Swine Flu virus. The only problem is that to date neither the WHO nor the US Government’s Center for Diseases Control (CDC) have succeeded to isolate, photograph with an electron microscope and chemically classify the H1N1 Influenza A virus. There is no scientifically published evidence that French virologists have done so either. To mandate drugs for a putative disease that has not even been characterized is dubious to say the least.

Even more bizarre is the admission by the US Government’s Food & Drug Administration, an agency responsible for health and safety of its citizens, that the ‘test’ is approved for premature release to test for H1N1 is not even a proven test. More to the point, there is no forensic evidence in any of the deaths reported to date that has been presented that proves scientifically that any single death being attributed to H1N1 Swine Flu virus was indeed caused by such a virus. European epidemiologists believe the deaths reported to date are ‘coincidental’ or what are called opportunistic infections.

What we know conclusively is that the people who died often had prior respiratory complications of an undisclosed nature. People die every day with respiratory diseases. In the USA alone some 36,000 flu-related deaths are recorded yearly with no undue panic or alarm. Most are elderly or patients with lung diseases. To date in all France, 24 people have been identified by health authorities as even having ‘symptoms’ of H1N1. It is worth noting that the WHO and CDC list the symptoms of H1N1: temperature, coughing, headache, runny nose. Hmmmmm. Do you know anyone with such Swine Flu symptoms? Also worth noting is that in the counting of the more than 15,000 ‘confirmed’ H1N1 Swine Flu cases worldwide the vast majority made miraculous recovery within three to seven days, just as in the case of a bad cold.

The goal: Militarization of Public Health

Increasingly it is becoming clear that the successive waves of mass panic created in recent years by CDC, WHO and leading government agencies has an ulterior motive. We have been hit with mass panic over eating beef when cattle in the UK and elsewhere developed fatal illness that was called BSE or ‘Mad Cow’ disease. Later evidence emerged that BSE was the result of vaccination of the cows to kill harmless insects that got under the animal’s skin. More recently, after reports of incidence of what is called ‘Blue Tongue’ disease in cows, sheep and goats in Belgium and Holland in 2006, animal veterinary authorities in Germany, Switzerland and Austria imposed mandatory vaccination or treatment with drugs allegedly to protect the animals from bites by insects allegedly carrying the usually harmless illness.

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