David J

David J. Sencer, M.D.
CDC Swine Flu 1976

Quotes
"THE FLU JAB SCAM The flu, being truly an infectious disease, often proved itself most valuable to the CDC. Although the winter following the end of World War I was the last time a flu epidemic caused widespread death, the CDC has pushed annual flu vaccinations up to the present day. At times, the agency has even rung the alarm over an impending flu crisis, hoping to use memories of the 1918 epidemic to gain emergency powers and impose mass vaccinations. By using such tactics in 1957 over the Asian flu, the CDC managed to wrangle extra money out of Congress to expand the EIS and crash-produce a vaccine. But the flu season was already winding down by the time the vaccine was ready, and the flu itself turned out to have been as mild as in any other year.
    By 1976, CDC director David Sencer wanted to try again, though on a grander scale. After one soldier in Pennsylvania died of a flu-related pneumonia in January, Sencer predicted that a pig-borne human virus nicknamed the "swine flu," would soon devastate the United States.
    Panicked with visions of impending doom, Congress moved to authorize the CDC's immunization plan for every man, woman, and child in the country. Unexpectedly, the legislation suddenly stalled when the insurance companies underwriting the vaccine discovered that it had seriously toxic side effects.
THE "LEGIONAIRES DISEASE" SCAM
    Sencer had to do something fast. He immediately set up a "War Room" in Auditorium A at the CDC headquarters, and put the EIS network on full alert to search for any disease outbreak that might resemble the flu. Within weeks, the War Room received word of a pneumonia cluster among men just returning home from the Philadelphia convention of the American Legion. Several Philadelphia-based EIS officers and alumni had detected the outbreak, and acted as a fifth column that not only helped arrange an invitation for the CDC to come in, but also took their orders from the arriving team of CDC and EIS Officers. Even the New York Times staff writer sent to cover the story, Lawrence Altman, was himself an EIS alumnus.
    The CDC team allowed media rumors to circulate that this Legionnaires' disease was the beginning of the swine flu. Within days, Congress decided to pass the vaccine bill. Only later did the CDC admit that the legionnaires had not been infected by the flu virus, too late to stop the immunization program. Some 50 million Americans received the vaccine, leading to more than a thousand cases of nerve damage and paralysis, dozens of deaths, and lawsuits awarding almost $100 million in damages. In the ultimate irony, no swine flu epidemic ever materialized; the only destruction left behind by the phantom swine flu resulted from the CDC's vaccine.
    The agency later blamed Legionnaires' disease on a common soil bacterium, one that clearly fails Koch's postulates for causing the disease and is therefore actually harmless. The legionnaires' deaths are not so hard to understand, since the pneumonias struck elderly men, many of whom had undergone kidney transplant operations, and who had become particularly drunk during the Bicentennial celebration - the classic risks for pneumonia. Thus Legionnaires' disease" is not an infectious condition, but merely a new name for old pneumonias."---Bryan J. Ellison