Originally posted by OmegaPoint
And your overblown fear mongering is helping how?

How about everybody just take a nice breath of fresh air, and RELAX! Then, turn OFF the TV, and make sure you give and recieve at least four hugs per day, and then maybe we can BEGIN to figure out how to make this world a better place for one and all.

A hallmark of the great 1918-10 influenza pandemic was the virus's ability to kill young adults and children. ....

The influenza virus was otherwise well protected by a tough protein-and-fat armor made of two layer sof viral enveloping: one layer was almost entirely composed of the human heart's nemesis, cholesterol. ....

The virus (1918 Flu) appears to have swept the world in three waves, over less than two years time, gaining virelence with each new assault.....

The appearance of the Fort Dix virus, dubbed A/Newjersey/H1N1 caused consideralbe anxiety inside the U.S. Public Health Service. "By every available scientific measure, the Shope strain was indistinushable from the 1918 strain, and also indisinguishable from the Fort Dix strain." ...

... influenza viruses unusually rich in neuraminidase proteins were more easily spread from person to person. ...

Several scientists argued that swine strains, in particular, appeared in 90-100 year cycles ...

... there had been a long spring-to-summer silence (of the flu) following the first flu outbreaks of 1918 - a silence that was followed in September by the greatest pandemic of the early twentieth century. "To decide not to do something, to decide to go on pause because the virus went on pause, " Osborn argued in long conference alls to fellow scientists, "would be utterly irresponsible." ....

Swine influenzas, Cox would later explain, were particularly worrisome because peigs were highly permissive hosts, capable of harboring influenzas froma wide range of animals, birds, and humans. Inside the swine, variuos influenza strains shared genes, and recombined, resulting in major antigen shifts. ...

Stated as certainties, rather than hypothetical conjectures, were the following points listed under the memo's heading "FACTS" : The virus found at Fort Dix is 'antigenically related to the influenza virus which has been implicated as the cause of the 1918-19 pandemic which killed 450,000 American people; every American undre the age of fifty 'is probably susceptible to this new strain"; severe flu epidemics occur at approximately ten year intervals." ....

... (1918) influenza deaths were usually produced not by the virus but secondarily by bacterial infections that took advantage of the weakened immune defenses of influenza-infected lunchs. Bacterial penumonia ...

... a minimum of 85 percent of high-risk populations would have to be vaccinated to ensure society's protection against an analogous epidemic ....

The CDC continued to downplay the association between the vaccine and the syndrome (Guillain-Barre), though agency insiders had already concluded that the Guillain-Barre rate among those vaccinated against Swine Flu was at least four times that in the unvaccinated population. ...

The researchers concluded that America's normal, inexplicable Gullain-Barre rate was about one case in every million people per year, for an expected 1976 total of some 215 cases. But among Swine Flu vaccine recipients, the attack rate was about ten times greater, at one case every 100,000 Americans. ....