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Pandemic:There you are, then, stuck with an expensive stock of TamifluTheir excellent article was followed that evening by a supposed debate held in Amsterdam in an eighteenth century conference hall dedicated to arts and sciences. On stage were:
Master of Ceremonies (MC) was the Rathenau Institute’s director Jan Staman. The MC opened with an explanation of what bird flu is, and why a pandemic among humans is feared. Bird flu is common among birds just as human flu is common among humans. Very rarely will a human catch this flu from fowl, particularly as that involves being exposed to the feces of the infected bird. There have been a few cases in the news recently, all involving people, often children, who had close contact with chickens. These were not in Europe but in Asia, and recently in Turkey. (In 2003 there was a death in the Netherlands attributed to bird flu. He was a veterinarian who worked closely with chicken farmers.) What is feared is that the bird flu virus will mutate into one that passes not from fowl to fowl or fowl to humans, but from humans to humans. If that happens, the virus is expected to spread like wildfire throughout the human population of the world. Some scientists estimate that this will happen within ten years, others within thirty years. On what they base these estimates other than wild guesses was not mentioned. Neither was the prospect that it might not happen. To punctuate the threat, a photograph purportedly of the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic was flashed onto an overhead screen. The scene was a field hospital where rows and rows of sick men lay on stretchers. The same picture is all over Google and credited to various sources such as health museums and the US military, depending on which image you click. Probably the debaters found it through Google too. Forty million people died in 1918, we were told. A high figure had obviously been strategically chosen. The many sources on the Internet put the figure between 20 million and 40 million. There’s a lot of difference between those two figures. It won’t have made a difference to the affected people and their families, but if we think that way, then four would also have been a lot. How these figures were compiled back in 1918 at the tail end of WWI was neither stated this evening nor to be found on Google. Two other flu pandemics were named, the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968. For both, figures of one to four million deaths were given, pretty sloppy figures considering the more modern times in which these epidemics occurred. Most Google sites mention only the low one million figure, not the four million, raising the suspicion that this figure is highly exaggerated. The usefulness of these figures other than scaremongering is elusive. We were assured that all three of these epidemics started in Asia, and spread from there to the rest of the world. This contradicts claims on the Internet that the so-called Spanish flu of 1918 seems to have originated in the US. Spain was in any case not the culprit. We were equally assured that all three of these diseases were mutated bird viruses. How would they know? In 1918 the existence of viruses was just being discovered. All three gentlemen on stage agreed on what is needed: more stockpiling of Tamiflu, more research on vaccines, more government agencies (jobs), in short, more of the taxpayers’ euros, zillions and zillions of them, for their fields of expertise. Coutinho warned how the Asian economy melted down from only 800 cases of SARS, hinting that forty million like in 1918 would be tantamount to an apocalypses. Of course the Asian economy did not melt down, only certain factions of it like tourism did, and only temporarily. Osterhaus warned that bird flu, after it has mutated into human flu, will be a lot more contagious than SARS. He had to explain the jump from 800 to 40 million somehow. A member of the audience asked what the individual citizen can do to prepare for the bird flu pandemic. The answer amounted to “nothing” and a repeat call for more state spending on pharmaceuticals, research, government agencies, and experts (like themselves). Another member of the audience pointed out that since the nineties of the twentieth century we have been inundated with a steady stream of disease scares whether from natural causes or bio-terrorism. What is behind these hypes? From the audience came a loud whisper, “The fall of communism. We need new enemies.” Osterhaus acknowledged that in a short time there had been AIDS, SARS, BCE, foot & mouth disease, and so forth (relatively little of which in the Netherlands). He proposed that intensive farming of animals might be the cause. Bannenberg noted that in the fifties we thought antibiotics would wipe out disease, but we used them irresponsibly and created super diseases instead. Nowadays, according to him, we know enough to prevent resistant strains by giving sick people several different drugs at once. Even more drugs. Some members of the audience were concerned that bird flu would spread especially in Africa because of all the poverty and AIDS (presumably) there. The professors assured us that bird flu would originate in Asia, not Africa, as people in Africa tend to die without diagnoses. In plain Dutch, that means that there's no point in scaring the Africans about bird flu, because they don’t have money to buy Tamiflu or vaccines anyway, contrary to the Asians and their rising tiger economies. Only Bannenberg showed much concern for Africa. He would, he works there. He asserted that whereas in the west one in five people receive flu shots, in Africa that’s only one in 1000. The six countries that produce vaccines slurp up 65% of the supply. He deplored that the WHO designated only $3 million for Tamiflu in all of Africa. Osterhaus lamented that a pandemic vaccine is a low priority for the pharmaceutical industries, and Coutinho posited that they will develop it only if the state pays. Osterhaus added approvingly that Bush declared war on flu, dedicating $7 billion to it. Someone from the audience interjected, “Bush declares war on everything.” Coutinho complained that although the EU is rich enough, its civil servants lack awareness of the importance of preparing for the flu pandemic. Osterhaus supported him by complaining that in Europe pharma has to deal with thirty different little ministries of health instead of one colossal ministry like in the US. He related that he had been invited to the US by the defence department, homeland security, and the CIA, and praised them to the hilt. Naturally he didn't mention the Rumsfeld-Tamiflu connection. A member of the audience asked, if the US is so good at it, why don’t we just buy our drugs and vaccines from the US? Osterhaus said that when the pandemic comes, they’re not likely to sell to us, because they’ll need their supplies for themselves. Coutinho admitted several times that Tamiflu might not be useful, but, he said, the state should stockpile it anyway because right now it’s all we have. And of course, since the Tamiflu is probably useless, the state should at the same time invest heavily in developing vaccines. Another member of the audience asked how a vaccine can be developed for a disease that doesn’t (yet) exist. Osterhaus waved this objection away, saying that prototypes of vaccines could be tested already (on whom?) to eliminate the ones that cause too many side effects. He called for large-scale clinical trials. He admitted that we can’t know for sure whether the vaccines will work until the epidemic hits, by which time it will be too late, but held on to his prototype argument anyway. He recounted a flu vaccination program in the US some years back. The epidemic never came, but lots of people became sick and some died from the vaccine. This is supposed to convince us to want billions of our tax euros to be spent on vaccine research? One member of the audience wanted to know why we don’t prevent the whole problem by vaccinating chickens. There is already an effective vaccine for this, but the state prohibits chicken vaccination. The pros and cons of vaccinating chickens were discussed at length, including with member of the audience Philip van Dalen who heads the flu-team at our ministry of health, and works closely with the ministry of agriculture. One of the problems with vaccinated chickens is that they might be carrying the disease but not have symptoms, so nobody will know it, he said. Another problem is the expense, considering the short life span of a chicken. A member of the audience made a plea for more organic chicken farming. The professors felt that neither that nor vaccinating chickens would help, because the pandemic is expected to originate in Asia (which is virtually overrun with Dutch Tamiflu and vaccine peddlers). Osterhaus confessed that in Japan and Vietnam a few people had died from Tamiflu, but ascribed that to resistance against bird flu rather than anything wrong with the drug. Yet when the MC asked Coutinho what he would do if the pandemic hit, he said he would lock up his daughters. He didn’t say he would give them Tamiflu. Osterhaus answered that it wouldn’t work for him because his daughters wouldn’t let themselves be locked up. The conclusion arrived at in this non-debate is that the EU should spend billions of euros on stockpiling Tamiflu and paying for vaccine research. That there probably won't be any pandemic before the expiry date of the Tamiflu, that it probably wouldn't be effective even if there were, that it isn't possible to develop a vaccine for a non-existent virus, and that such drugs are often more harmful than the diseases they are supposed to treat or prevent is all beside the point. What nobody mentioned all evening is where all this money is to come from. Perhaps we could save on a real pandemic that will affect most of us sooner or later: old age. We could bump off our elderly people in nursing homes faster by starving and thirsting more of them to death. But that would free up only a few hundred thousand euros, as we don’t spend so much money on caring for the elderly in the first place. The professors' primary concern is clearly not our welfare, but justifying their own prestigious jobs and scratching pharma’s back. As to the Rathenau Institute which hosted this non-debate, it too exists from over 30 million of the taxpayers’ euros a year, supporting over thirty staff members, plus at the moment it has vacancies for an additional six. Drs. El-Karimy and Pasveer wrote an excellent article, but it contained no more than common sense. An article with identical content written by a lay person would of course not have made the paper. This is because although we deny it, the Netherlands is very much a class society. Those classes are determined not by birth (except for the royal family) nor by concrete achievement, but by diploma. Accumulate enough of them, largely at the taxpayers’ expense, and you will join the privileged class of people who are looked up to, believed, and funded. While in our country we have a shortage of physicians, nurses, and other people capable and willing to care for the sick and elderly, we have a huge surplus of professionals who are especially gifted in securing state subsidies for superfluous posts. This event was televised. The the next day our media reported that professors Coutinho and Osterhaus are warning that the Netherlands is unprepared for a flu pandemic, and that there will be many victims. Our government together with other European governments should invest large sums in developing flu vaccines. This is by the way not the first time they have appeared together in the media with this message. They seem to be a dream team drumming up business for the virus industry. Meanwhile, our minister of health lectures us about how health care has grown prohibitively expensive because ... we foolish lay people bother our doctors too often…
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