Below e-mails received by 5th Estate Editor confirms Kobe University virologists Yoshihiro Kawaoka and his then student Teridah Ernala Ginting were weaponizing H1N1 in 2009 - just in time for the pandemic
THE 5TH ESTATE
By Robert S. Finnegan
06/28/2012
Tuesday, 5 May, 2009 20:35
From:
"Ida - Teridah Ernala" <ida_lutu@yahoo.com>
To:
seanews1@yahoo.com
Robert,
I'm doing reverse genetic technology also in my research. Currently, I'm creating an H1N1 human virus and manipulating the genes to study its transmission capability.
My professor is Yoshihiro Kawaoka, he and Neumann established this technology in 1997. The same technique which Taunberger used to ressurrect 1918 virus.
This whole story made me think about what I am right now.
Ida [Teridah Ernala Ginting]
REUTERS
By Sharon Begley
06/25/2012
* Up to 579,000 deaths, not 18,500
* 51 percent of fatalities in Africa, southeast Asia
* Elderly accounted for just 20 percent of deaths
NEW YORK, June 25 (Reuters) -
The swine flu pandemic of 2009 killed an estimated 284,500 people, some 15 times the number confirmed by laboratory tests at the time, according to a new study by an international group of scientists.
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Kawaoka also weaponised H5N1 at illegal Kobe lab |
The study, published on Tuesday in the London-based journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, said the toll might have been even higher - as many as 579,000 people. The original count, compiled by the World Health Organization, put the number at 18,500. Those were only the deaths confirmed by lab testing, which the WHO itself warned was a gross underestimate because the deaths of people without access to the health system go uncounted, and because the virus is not always detectable after a victim dies.
The new study also shows the pandemic's impact varied widely by region, with 51 percent of swine flu deaths occurring in Africa and southeast Asia, which account for only 38 percent of the world's population.
"This pandemic really did take an enormous toll," said Dr. Fatimah Dawood of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who led the study. "Our results also suggest how best to deploy resources. If a vaccine were to become available, we need to make sure it reached the areas where the death toll is likely to be highest."
Tuesday, 5 May, 2009 20:02
From:
"Ida - Teridah Ernala" <ida_lutu@yahoo.com>
To:
seanews1@yahoo.com
Robert,
Regarding to the Mexican flu, I have feeling that we cannot blame the pigs. There's impossible a new strain suddenly pop-up into the world. It take hundred of years to complete the evolution. I assumed there was something wrong with the vaccination they used in Mexico, or some lab strain 'escaped'.
Ida [Teridah Ernala Ginting]
The so-called "swine flu" caused by the H1N1 influenza virus, infected its first known victim in central Mexico in March 2009. By April it had reached California, infecting a 10-year-old, and then quickly spread around the world, triggering fears and even panic.
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Weaponized H1N1 created at Kobe by Kawaoka and Ernala |
The CDC warned Americans not to travel to Mexico if they could avoid it. Egypt ordered the slaughter of all the country's pigs in a misguided attempt to contain the virus, which was in fact spread from person to person.
The fears reflected the unusual nature of the virus, which contained bits and pieces of bird, swine and human flu viruses, a combination never before detected.
Scientists were unsure how transmissible or deadly this mongrel flu would be, but early signs were ominous: the World Health Organization declared swine flu a pandemic in June 2009, when labs had identified cases in 74 countries.
Such lab-based identification is the gold standard, but every expert acknowledges that it misses more cases than it catches.
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Ron Fouchier, the influenza researcher at the head of team that created a weaponized H5N1 avian influenza strain transmissible in humans at Wisconsin University and Kawaoka colleague recently decried the controversy surrounding his work |
One reason is that "some people who contract flu do not have access to health care," said CDC's Dawood, so their illness and even death goes unnoticed by authorities. Another reason is that the virus is not always detectable by the time a victim dies.
LACK OF DATA LOWBALLS FATALITIES
To get around these obstacles, epidemiologists resort to statistical models. They typically take the number of deaths from pneumonia and complications of underlying cardiovascular disease - both caused by influenza - during non-flu periods, count the number during a pandemic, and attribute the excess to the flu.
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The brains behind Unit 731, Shiro Ishii (who also bears an uncanny resemblance to Kawaoka) lived in peace and quiet to the ripe old age of 67, when he died of throat cancer. The United States felt that the research into germ warfare was too valuable to lose and so cut a deal with the Japanese. In 1947, Douglas MacArthur, the General of the US Army, wrote to Washington that “additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as ‘War Crimes’ evidence" |
Unfortunately, "vital statistics data are non-existent or sparse in many lower-resource countries," said Dawood, making this approach infeasible.
Dawood and her colleagues - from Vietnam, Kenya, New Zealand, Denmark and five other countries - tried a different method.
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Set up as a top-secret biological and chemical weapons facility during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War Two, Unit 731 has been referred to as the Asian Auschwitz. Through the practice of lethal human experimentation, the unit is thought to have been responsible for the deaths of up to 200,000 civilians and military personnel – the vast majority Chinese and Korean nationals, but also South East Asians, Pacific Islanders and Allied POWs. In the sprawling six kilometer-square complex in the city of Harbin (now part of Northeast China) those behind the sickening ‘research’ developed some of the most cruel and sadistic experiments ever to be conducted on human victims. These included vivisection, amputations, germ warfare tests, explosive weapons testing, and much more |
They started with hard data, such as numbers from health workers going door to door in rural villages and asking about flu-like symptoms and testing nasal and throat swab samples, to estimate the proportion of a country's population infected with 2009 H1N1. Such data were available from 13 countries - wealthy, such as Denmark, and poor, like Vietnam.
Then the scientists estimated the fraction of patients who died in each country. They started with solid data on death rates from respiratory illnesses in five wealthy nations.
Since someone with, say, pneumonia has a lower chance of dying if treated in a top hospital in Hong Kong than at a rural clinic in Vietnam, the scientists applied a "multiplier" to the raw data from poor countries.
That is, they assumed that more people with flu-caused pneumonia died in developing nations than developed ones.
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Teridah Ernala Ginting "confessed" to H1N1, H5N1 weaponization over a years-long correspondence with 5th Estate editor Robert S. Finnegan |
These estimates and assumptions can introduce errors, critics note. Newly released mortality data from Mexico, for instance, show that H1N1 killed even more people than the new study estimates, said Lone Simonsen of George Washington University School of Public Health, co-author of a commentary on the study. Estimates of deaths from Japan and Singapore, in contrast, may be too high.
Overall, however, the under- and over-estimates probably even out, said Simonsen, making the global estimate - of 15 times more deaths than those confirmed at the time - about right.
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Kobe University, Japanese authorities refuse to comment on Kawaoka |
The results paint a picture of a flu virus that did not treat all victims equally. It killed two to three times as many of its victims in Africa as elsewhere. Overall, the virus infected children most (4 percent to 33 percent), adults moderately (0 to 22 percent of those 18 to 64) and the elderly hardly at all (0 to 4 percent).
Even though the elderly were more likely to die once infected, so few caught the virus that 80 percent of swine flu deaths were of people younger than 65.
In contrast, the elderly account for roughly 80 percent to 90 percent of deaths from seasonal influenza outbreaks. They were probably spared the worst of 2009 H1N1 because the virus resembled one that had circulated before 1957, meaning people alive then had developed some antibodies to it.
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Kawaoka and Fouchier defending their weaponization of H5N1 and other eradicated viruses |
The relative youth of the victims meant that H1N1 stole more than three times as many years of life than typical seasonal flu: 9.7 million years of life lost compared to 2.8 million if it had targeted the elderly as seasonal flu does.
H1N1 had begun petering out by November 2009, and the WHO declared the epidemic at an end the following August.
Editing by Michele Gershberg and Xavier Briand.
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