Book Review by Sofia Smallstorm
FOWL: Bird Flu - It's Not What You Think
by Dr. Sherri J. Tenpenny
Back in 2004 (which feels like a long time ago), media airwaves put out over 1000 messages in one week (September 21-28) - or one every 15 minutes - urging people to get flu shots. And that was just for regular influenza - not bird flu or swine flu, which might be considered "newer and escalated" experiments.
As we know, repetition cements belief. A basic rule of marketing is that people will buy if they have been exposed between 5 and 8 times. The more we hear things and talk about them, the more these topics become part of our perceived reality. Terrorism. Global warming. Swine flu.
"Fowl" is a masterful laying out of how a giant myth was created. Written by a board-certified physician, it is perhaps one of our finest resources on the subject of "pandemic," which comes from the Greek pandemos - "of all the people." (To me, the word sounds like "pandemonium" and "epidemic" mixed - which also applies!) Dr. Tenpenny has a gentle, magical way with words, making the book an absolute pleasure to be with as you work your way from "Drifting and Shifting: How Viruses Change" to "Mandatory Vaccination: Is it possible?" to the real unveiling contained in its pages, which was so eye-opening I haven't stopped talking about it.
Plywood is made of thin wooden sheets glued crosswise upon each other. The result is a very strong material. Few of us realize how similarly layered global strategy is - campaigns conducted on separate stages that all fit together. Although the title "Bird Flu - It's Not What You Think" sounds underdone, to say the least, it's an accurate way to describe the wide turn the bird-flu highway takes when you travel it all the way to its Far Eastern origins.
For years in America, the trumpets have blared to make people afraid of oncoming pandemics. Smallpox, SARS, avian flu. But the real world is a place where a negative can't be proven, and when things don't happe n or reach us, we have to be reminded of their existence. If you get a flu shot and you don't get the flu, does it mean the vaccination helped you? If you don't get a flu shot and you get the flu, does it mean a flu shot would have protected you? If you get a flu shot and get the flu, does it mean the shot didn't work or you got a different strain of flu? While we swirl around in the unprovables, our media puts all of its muscle into keeping us conditioned. Tenpenny highlights a 2005 made-for-television movie: "The show "Smallpox" was produced in documentary style, creating a fictionalized "look back" to the year 2002 when a smallpox outbreak killed 60 million people. The tag line for the movie was, "It's all true. It just hasn't happened yet."
It's all true. It just hasn't happened yet. Wow! and thanks for letting us know!
So here in the US the hype is about big, bad diseases that "jump species" (bird to human, pig to human) that will lay everyone flat and gobble up lives when they finally get here. Here in the US it's about "protective" vaccines that are untested, that don't do a thing to prevent disease, but that do cause a vast array of neurological damage, if you bother to do any research yourself. The topic of the hype - first bird flu, now swine flu - changes to keep the notion of "evolving danger" fresh. But back there, in Asia, where "bird flu" first showed up, the name of the game was not vaccines. It was agribusiness. This is the paydirt delivered by "Fowl" - the tracking of bird flu to a whole different kind of theater at the other end of the world.
Here's what happens ... Tenpenny calls it "The Killing Fields." World health agencies announce an "outbreak" of avian flu in a certain country. Then government agents swoop down on villages and seize thousands of healthy chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys, in a prevention effort known as "culling." Writes Tenpenny: "Culling is based on the 1920s assumption that once a viral outbreak has occurred among a flock, the only way to eliminate the virus is to eliminate the host. ... Methods include burning, drowning, gassing and live burial." Helpless villagers watch as their food supply is destroyed before their very eyes. What happens next? In come the agri-giants - Cargill, Perdue, ConAgra and Tyson Foods - ready to set up shop with GMO birds.
The takeover is not limited to the Far East. Remember hoof-and-mouth disease in Britain? "Raids on U.K. farms occurred throughout 2001 to eliminate cattle, sheep and other hoofed animals," writes Tenpenny. "In 2001 Tyson Foods ... acquired IBP, the U.K.'s largest beef processor, in a hostile takeover that included $4.7 billion in cash, stock, and debt."
And why are the animals dying in the first place? "Fowl" goes into this at length, with surprising news. "Creating a model that blames wild birds for spreading the virus to domestic chickens [and] then on to humans is simply a convenience." It appears that migratory birds have picked up chemical toxicity from heavily polluted lakes, pesticides, nuclear radiation, and even from Agent Orange used in the Vietnam war ... and are dying as a result of weakened immunity. Bird flu (H5N1) then becomes "a contributing factor to the demise of birds loaded with toxicities, rather than the causative factor," writes Tenpenny.
We all know that immune systems of animals and humans are compromised by environmental toxicity. Today many people in the Far East show extremely high levels of dioxins in their bodies, with influenza outbreaks occurring in areas that correspond with herbicide spraying by the US military between 1965 and 1971. Likewise, birds and their eggs have high dioxin content. As "Fowl" explores the correlation between chemical poisoning and illness, we also learn about the famous "germ theory" of disease - a mechanistic premise that serves the Big Pharma design of matching germs to specific drug treatments.
Today's buzz about swine flu centers on a notorious adjuvant known as squalene. Adjuvants are vaccine "enhancers," and the oil molecule squalene (MF59) is a key component of what Tenpenny calls "a whole new generation of vaccines intended for mass immunization around the globe." Squalene is being used in 2009 swine-flu vaccine lots. It was also used in the anthrax vaccine given to US troops during the Gulf War. Many of those soldiers now suffer from a range of neurological disorders referred to as "Gulf War Syndrome."
Are you thinking yet? Rather than forwarding emails and Internet posts of dubious origin, vaccine skeptics might better serve their own interests by delving into real research and facts. "Fowl" put both history and mystery in perspective for me. If you're only going to read one book (or you weren't planning to read anything at all) - this is absolutely the one. DON'T MISS IT.
