In May 2006 the White House released a 228-page plan, the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza: Implementation Plan, essentially informing states and communities that they will have to rely on themselves if a pandemic occurs, with the federal government assuming only an advisory role. If a pandemic does occur it could, in the worst case, infect up to 30 percent of the population and kill up to two million people, the plan says, predicting a 40 percent absentee rate at school and in the workplace, according to the Center for Infectious Disease & Research (CIDRAP) and the Homeland Security Council. The federal government predicts that without containment measures, the number of cases of pandemic flu would double every three days.
Though no official U.S. policy has been announced, vaccine rationing is suggested by medical ethicists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as reported by Reuters, BBC and Science. Progress is being made but, to date, there is no effective vaccine for H5N1. The virus appears to have jumped the species barrier in a small number of cases, particularly in a family cluster in Sumatra in May 2006, but fortunately has not gained a foothold in human-to-human transmission sufficient for vaccine manufacturers design a vaccine for a specific mutation.
The NIH recommendation suggested that healthcare workers be the first to receive any vaccine that may become available, followed by teens and young adults. Like the 1918 flu pandemic, the H5N1 virus is striking many teens and young adults, segments of the world’s population that are normally less affected by customary, annual flu epidemics. Some medical ethicists have suggested that persons aged 13-40 be the first of the general population to receive a vaccine. Questions remain as to whether medical facilities around the world can produce enough vaccine if one can be found. As of mid-2006, those plants could produce approximately 900 million doses per year for a current world population of more than 6.61 billion. The obvious question not likely to be answered quickly is, who should get the vaccine first?
Yet what was not reported was the rest of the story, the untold story, of the apparent affects on human mortality if or when a pandemic occurs. While being careful not to alarm the public or cause undue panic, state and federal officials, the pubic at large and every nation on Earth are faced with a troubling potential that goes largely unspoken. That potential concerns the numbers of deaths that may occur if or when human-to-human transmission ignites sufficiently for H5N1 to trigger a pandemic.
Comparisons to the 1918 flu are widely made by public health officials for a host of reasons, not the least of which has been the rapid spread of the virus through populations of chickens, domestic and wild birds from southeast Asia, to Indonesia and central Asia and into Africa, the Middle East and parts of Europe. If the 1918 comparison holds true and if a pandemic does occur, the death rates in the United States, for example, could extend farbeyond the two million deaths predicted by the White House.
The reason for this is simple. It has long been estimated that 25 percent of the U.S. population became infected with the H1N1 virus of 1918 (The White House at the time of the report estimated a 30 percent infection rate, worst case, for an H5N1 pandemic). The U.S. population in 1918 was estimated to be 104 million. Consequently, 26 million people became infected. Of those, an estimated 650,000 died. While staggering, those figures represent a mortality rate of only 2.5 percent.
In stark contrast, today’s H5N1 virus has a mortality rate of more than 55 percent! If an H5N1 pandemic were to occur and if infection and death rates are in fact comparable to 1918, the picture begins to look dramatically different. Adjusting for today’s U.S. population, now at approximately 300 million, the number of infected, at a rate of 25 percent (the 1918 rate), would reach 75 million. And projecting a continued H5N1 mortality rate of 55 percent, deaths in the United States alone would total more than 41 million. If such a scenario were to manifest, the United States would indeed need the young healthy adults to receive any available vaccine in order to rebuild society, literally. The myriad impacts nationally and globally are incalculable.
It is unknown why the federal government chooses to use such dramatically under-estimated figures for human mortality. And it is more than curious why establishment science and the national media do not report these inconsistencies. Some may believe it to be a form of purposeful denial, while others might call it conspiracy. Denial may well fit the bill since the sheer numbers of those ill and dying would shut down business and government. And providing correct figures might cause panic if or when a pandemic occurs. As for conspiracy, there are plenty of those around. But not even the cartelized corporate/government/academic forces and their interlocking boards could withstand the profit drain of a pervasive pandemic and the killing power of one of nature's simplest life forms.
