A Disturbing Look at the Dairy Industry

AlterNet / By Tara Lohan

January 26, 2010

Most dairy enthusiasts would be horrified to know the conditions cows endure and how closely dairies are tied to veal operations and the rest of the meat industry.

The bucolic scene of Holsteins grazing on a grassy hill that adorns milk cartons and cheese wrappers is nothing more than fantasy these days. While the meat industry has come under intensive scrutiny (and with good reason) for the massive factory farm system of raising cattle in confinement, animals in the dairy industry are arguably worse off.

Eating milk, cheese, sour cream, ice cream, and other dairy yumminess is impossible to do with a clear conscience -- and I'm not referring to the fat or cholesterol. Calves born into the industrial grip of today's dairy industry have a road ahead of them that is short, but not merciful. Dairy cows are subject to brutal conditions before being sent to slaughter for beef and male calves are worth next to nothing in the dairy business. Some are simply left to die after birth. Many are slaughtered for low-grade "bob veal" a few days after they are born and will end up as cheap hot dogs or dog food.

While a small number of dairies are bucking the industrial trend, the vast majority of dairy products we eat come from factories that are nothing short of horrific in many cases.

Where Milk Comes From

We've become so far removed from the source of our food that many Americans are oblivious to where most of what they eat is actually coming from, dairy included. Yes, milk comes from cows. And how do cows get milk? Like other female mammals, they produce milk to feed their offspring. In the business of raising cows to produce as much milk as possible, which is the goal of most of the U.S. dairy industry, cows are kept in perpetual states of lactation and impregnation.

"One of the things people don't think about is the effort it takes a cow to produce milk," said Marlene Halverson who has worked on farm animal welfare issues for years. "The amount of energy and the physiological capacity to produce the kinds of yields that industrial dairy farming is demanding of cows today is huge." The average dairy cow on industrial farms produces roughly 20,000 pounds of milk a year -- 10 times more than she'd normally produce to feed a calf.

Professor John Webster, author of The Welfare of Dairy Cattle, wrote, "The amount of work done by the cow in peak lactation is immense ...To achieve a comparably high work rate a human would have to jog for about six hours a day, every day."

Sounds exhausting. And that's just the beginning. In between milkings, Halverson says, a high-producing dairy cow's udder will fill up with 6.5 gallons of milk. That makes walking with a cow's normal gait next to impossible because of the swollen size of the udder, greatly increasing the chances of lameness.

Of course, cows haven't always produced so much milk. As Nicolette Hahn Niman accounts in her book, Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms, early in our country's history, cows weren't even milked year round, but only in the months where there was good enough grass. "Like cured meats, butter and cheese were methods of preserving milk during the seasons of plenty for the cold months to come," she accounts.

And cows used to serve multiple purposes -- milk, meat, and labor. But increasingly cows were bred for single traits, such as milk production. After World War II, industrialization of our food system ramped up with the availability of cheap energy, pesticides, fertilizers, and mechanization. By 2005, Niman writes, cows' yields were increased by seven fold in a century's time -- mainly through manipulations of breeding and diet and the additions of antibiotics and hormones.

But the largest surge in so-called productivity came decades after WWII. "It was the 1970s when the dairy industry really started ramping up milk production in Holstein cattle," said Halverson. "Cattle before the 1970s were healthy, normal dairy cows, they didn't have issues with lameness, mastitis (a painful udder infection), and reproductive problems in huge amounts." All that selective breeding and milk demand has made the Holstein a much more fragile animal.

Under healthy conditions, it's not uncommon for a dairy cow to live between nine and 20 years while being productive in the herd, said Halverson. While many cows can even live to 25 years, today's dairy cows don’t even come close to that. "They are living two or three years and being culled," she said. The next stop from there is to live out the remaining days alongside beef cattle awaiting slaughter at a feedlot.

Life on the 'Farm'

The vast majority of dairy cows in the U.S., around 75 percent, will never graze in pasture and most won't spend any time outside. And most cows that are outside aren't nibbling on greener pastures, but are instead confined in barren dirt lots, a report by Farm Sanctuary details. This will sound familiar if you know anything about beef cattle raised in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

Like feedlot beef cattle, dairy cows aren't fed the diet nature intended for them and are instead pumped full of animal by-products and grains, which leads to metabolic disease (and more horrific things like Mad Cow). "Unlike omnivorous chickens and pigs, all cattle are naturally designed to live entirely from slowly and methodically foraging vegetation," wrote Niman in Righteous Porkchop. "Bovines in the wild spend most of their waking hours in a state of ambulant grazing, walking an average of 2.5 miles a day, all the while taking 50 to 80 bites of forage per minute. Life in a confinement dairy promised a cow an environment and a diet that violated her very evolution."

Dairies vary across the country, explains Gene Baur, president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary. In the Midwest and Northeast cows may spend some time outside in warmer months and then are kept tethered by the neck in "tie stalls" in the winter. In the Southwest and California, two booming dairy areas, cows are kept in "dry lots," that most closely resemble CAFO feedlots "where the cows are packed by the thousands in a series of barren, feces laden pens," said Baur. And then there are "freestall" dairies that are essentially giant, crowded warehouses, which are no fun either.

( "Graziers" -- farmers who are returning their animals to pasture -- are the exception. More on this below.)

If cows aren't done in by an unhealthy diet, horrible living conditions (which for some include walking and sleeping on concrete), overproduction of milk, lameness, mastitis (the number one reason for culling cows), then they are also forced to endure having their tails docked without -- a painful process that renders them defenseless against biting flies. And then there is the agony of having their newborns taken from them directly after birth. This has been detailed in reports of the noises mothers make when their calves are removed and stories of cows breaking free of operations and traveling miles to other farms to find their calves.

And for the calves, life is no picnic. Female calves will be kept for milking to replace other cows in the herd. And for male calves, it’s bleak. If they aren’t left to die or sent to slaughter within days, then it’s off to a veal operation, which are "virtually synonymous with animal cruelty," as Paul Shapiro Senior Director, End Factory Farming Campaign of the Humane Society said, and slaughtered around 4-5 months. And the rest are either raised for beef on the farm where they are born or sold to another beef operation and slaughtered around 13-14 months. In fact, "the veal industry was literally born out of the dairy industry," said Baur. "It was developed to take advantage of the unwanted male calves born to dairy cows."

And there are many. "In one recent year, about 4.5 million male calves were born in U.S. dairies," wrote Niman. "Of those, 42 percent were immediately sent to slaughter; over half went to confinement veal operations; the remainder to feedlots."

Halverson, who worked with 14 animal welfare scientists to design a set of high welfare husbandry criteria for a program her sister Diane created at the the Animal Welfare Institute, said they often recommend euthanasia on the farm for male calves. "It is the most humane way if the farmer or someone he or she knows isn't going to raise the calf -- it seems like a terrible waste, but when farms send their male calves to an auction house they may only get $10-15, if the calf sells at all -- it's not worth it in terms of the suffering of the animal."

The much-maligned veal industry, infamous for housing calves in tiny crates, has seen a small shift. Some farmers are engaging in "specialty veal" operations that have much more humane conditions for animals, sometimes even allowing them to remain on pasture with their mothers or in or to live in groups in large pens or hoop houses with other calves -- but these are few.

Usually the stories are much worse.

"We recently did an investigation at a bob veal plant in Vermont, it was certified organic, very small plant," said Shapiro. "Despite this, the abuse that we documented on camera was absolutely horrendous: skinning of animals alive, live animals on piles of dead animals outside, calves being beaten, being shocked with electric prods over and over, being dragged, kicked, all in front of a USDA inspector no less. When we released the results of the investigation the footage was so damning that the USDA shut the plant down -- it's been shut down for more than 3 months and a criminal investigation is still pending."

How Did Things Get So Bad?

The story of dairy's downhill slide is familiar throughout the food world. "There has been a real drive to get cheaper and cheaper food and that is one factor that led to factory farming, not only in the dairy industry but throughout all of agribusiness. We think of food as being cheap but in reality there are a lot of external factors that we don't really pay for when we go the supermarket," said Shapiro. "Those are increased animal suffering, increased environmental degradation, and increased food safety risks."

One of the drivers for that has been consolidation of the dairy industry. Farm Sanctuary reports that the total number of U.S. dairies has dropped 55 percent since 1991, but for operations where the herd size is over 100, it has increased by 94 percent. Megadairies with thousands of cows are now replacing smaller, family farms. In California there are now dairies with over 10,000 cows and the state's San Joaquin Valley is home to 2.5 million dairy cows, Niman reports.

But it's not just the size of operations that is problematic, it's the capitalization -- the money that is needed to sustain an industrial-style operation. A capital-intensive dairy system is 'inelastic.' "The farmer can no loner respond to changing market conditions by increasing or decreasing herd size or milk output," Niman wrote. "Instead, (just as we've seen with poultry and pig contract growing), farmers that have opted into the industrialized system are now servants to massive debt."

This means farmers end up subjecting their animals to the harshest conditions in efforts to produce more and more milk. A perfect example is the use of Recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) growth hormone, pushed by Monsanto, in efforts to increase yields. The results instead have been catastrophic for the health of cows, which is of course not good for business either. The industrial system has also given birth to the huge prevalence of the udder infection mastitis, which accounts for $2 billion in annual losses, Niman writes.

This style of raising animals has taken its toll on the environment as well, from air to water pollution, as well as contributing heavily to emissions of methane gas caused by cattle not eating their natural diet. One dairy in northern Minnesota has been described by the State Department of Health as a public health hazard, Halverson said. On days when winds bring the pollution from the dairy's manure pits to their residences, the neighbors have been advised by the Department to leave their homes and stay with relatives or in hotels in town. The industry's grip on state agencies has prevented this facility from being closed down -- instead it has received extensions from the pollution control board.

Too Much of a Bad Thing, Not Enough of a Good Thing

The irony of all this increased production is that it's unnecessary. Many people can argue for health reasons that we don't need dairy products to begin with, but as Niman writes, the industry has actually saturated itself. In 1986 the government actually paid dairy farmers to slaughter 10 percent of the U.S. herd.

"Responding to the ongoing dairy excess, the federal government has long purchased cheese, butter,and nonfat dry milk under a dairy price support program," Niman explained. "The products are stored and, to the extent possible, funneled into domestic and foreign feeding programs, including school lunches. What can't be poured into some type of program is put into storage. At times the dried milk surplus has been extreme. 'In 2002, storage costs alone for the powder peaked at $2.3 million a month,' said Michael Yost, associate administrator of the USDA's Farm Service Agency."

And while we have too much of a bad thing, we're lacking in the alternatives.

A small number of dairy farmers are returning their animals to the pasture system of using rotational grazing, allowing their animals outdoor pasture access as much of the year as possible and supplementing their diets in winter with hay, grain and silage. Halverson says many of these farms are moving away from selective breeding and are now cross-breeding Holsteins with more robust Normande and Jersey cattle. "They are not demanding as much milk from their cows. They get lower yields," she said. "But their costs are also lower because they are not so highly capitalized as dairy factories, needing lots of labor and paying enormous vet bills."

It's a choice that's also better for the environment and it results in a healthier product, to boot. It's also many steps up when it comes to the treatment of animals (although, of course, the cows in any operation don't make it out alive and male calves still have bleak prospects).

So, where to find these "graziers," as they're known?

The best bet is to check for local dairies where you live, find out if their animals are pasture raised, and then go see for yourself. Online resources like the Eat Well Guide and LocalHarvest.org are helpful in locating good dairies or stores that sell their products. And there are labels (some good and others misleading) to help make sense of what you're really getting.

There are also larger businesses, like Organic Valley, that have taken steps to improve the welfare of their animals. "Our dairy animals have the best life of any dairy animals in this country, that's for certain," said Wendy Fulwider, the company's animal husbandry specialist. "We do have pasture requirements, so they do get to spend a lot of time outdoors and they get excellent pasture to eat. They get exercise and sunshine and have the most nutritious milk. They are incredibly healthy."

The company is a cooperative of 1,350 farms and has a minimal requirement of 120 days on pasture per year, they follow the organic standards and don't use hormones like rBST. "Our cows live longer than conventional cows, they are healthier, they're not spending their entire life on concrete and they are eating minimal amounts, if any grain. It's not uncommon to have a 10- or 12-year-old dairy cow on our farms," said Fulwider.

Halverson agrees that the easiest way to feel better about the dairy you're getting is to look for the organic label. "But I realize there is controversy over organic dairies, especially in California where certain dairies have been accused of raising their cattle on feedlots essentially," she said.

Gene Baur paints a harsher picture. "The vast majority of dairy is from industrial type operations. Even Horizon, which is an organic-type farm is basically a factory farm," he said. "What they have done and what other large agribusinesses have done, is work to lower the standards for what is organic and so even Horizon I would call a factory farm."

Both Dean Foods' Horizon and Aurora Farms have come under attack from groups claiming they violate organic standards because of their animals' lack of access to pasture.

Niman sees hope for the future in graziers, which are better for the environment, animals and health.

Still, the safest best would be to skip the dairy altogether. "People should be thinking more about their food choices and eating in a way that is consistent with their own values and their own interests," said Baur. "I believe for most people that will mean not eating animal products because the way these animals are treated is brutal and all their lives end in a violent way, which is bad for the animals and for people. If people ate in a way consistent with their own values they wouldn't be supporting that system. Also people should eat in a way consistent with their own interests and eat in a way that is healthy, that does not lead to heart disease and cancer -- that also means not eating animal food but choosing plant food."

No matter what people's eating choices, there is always room for improvement. "There are a variety of ways to improve animal welfare each time you sit down to eat. For example, the alternatives to dairy that are out there are more plentiful and better than there have been. Now, any supermarket you go to is going to have a wide variety of soy and rice milks and other alternatives," said Shapiro. "At the same time there are dairy producers who don't engage in many of the practices that we talked about.

"So, whether they are interested in reducing or eliminating consumption of dairy or looking for higher standards of animal welfare dairy products, I think all of those are good options for consumers. It's not to say that anyone is going to be totally cruelty-free in our diets, even the strictest vegans, it is to say that each one of us can move in a better direction when it comes to our food choices and making them more ethical no matter where we are on that spectrum."

Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction

by Chris Hedges

Corporate forces have carried out a coup d'état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Much of the outrage expressed, is the outrage of those who prefer a choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of "inverted totalitarianism."

Inverted totalitarianism represents "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry," Wolin writes in "Democracy Incorporated." Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.

Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by "power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions," Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation. This exploitation ensures that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people's right to petition the government. The court again ratified the concept that corporations are persons, except in those cases where the "persons" agree to a "settlement." Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government while, according to this twisted judicial reasoning, not "admitting any wrongdoing." There is a word for this. It is called corruption.

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.

There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on "American Idol." Mass emotions are directed toward the raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.

Our transformation into an empire, as happened in ancient Athens and Rome, has seen the tyranny we practice abroad become the tyranny we practice at home. We, like all empires, have been eviscerated by our own expansionism. We utilize weapons of horrific destructive power, subsidize their development with billions in taxpayer dollars, and are the world's largest arms dealer. And the Constitution, as Wolin notes, is "conscripted to serve as power's apprentice rather than its conscience."

Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media's censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.

"It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today's media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism," Wolin writes. "Recall that an element common to most 20th century totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility towards the left. In the United States, the left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of ‘the left wing of the Democratic Party,' never of democrats."

Liberals, socialists, trade unionists, independent journalists and intellectuals, many of whom were once important voices in our society, have been silenced or targeted for elimination within corporate-controlled academia, the media and government. Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and later at Princeton, is arguably the country's foremost political philosopher. And yet his book was virtually ignored. This is also why Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, along with intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, are not given a part in our national discourse.

The uniformity of opinion is reinforced by the skillfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paints all dissidents as "soft" or "unpatriotic." The "patriotic" citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarized state. This means no questioning of the $1 trillion in defense-related spending. It means that the military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in American history.

The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion.

Thousands of Americans died, even after receiving H1N1 vaccine shots

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor (NaturalNews)

The CDC is engaged in a very clever, statistically devious spin campaign, and nearly every journalist in the mainstream media has fallen for its ploy. No one has yet reported what I'm about to reveal here.It all started with the CDC's recent release of new statistics about swine flu fatalities, infection rates and vaccination rates.

According to the CDC:
• 61 million Americans were vaccinated against swine flu (about 20% of the U.S. population). The CDC calls this a "success" even though it means 4 out of 5 people rejected the vaccines.
• 55 million people "became ill" from swine flu infections.
• 246,000 Americans were hospitalized due to swine flu infections.
• 11,160 Americans died from the swine flu.

Based on these statistics, the CDC is now desperately urging people to get vaccinated because they claim the pandemic might come back and vaccines are the best defense.But here's the part you're NOT being told.The CDC statistics lie by omission. They do not reveal the single most important piece of information about H1N1 vaccines: How many of the people who died from the swine flu had already been vaccinated?
Many who died had already been vaccinatedThe CDC is intentionally not tracking how many of the dead were previously vaccinated. They want you (and mainstream media journalists) to mistakenly believe that ZERO deaths occurred in those who were vaccinated. But this is blatantly false. Being vaccinated against H1N1 swine flu offers absolutely no reduction in mortality from swine flu infections.And that means roughly 20% of the 11,160 Americans who died from the swine flu were probably already vaccinated against swine flu. That comes to around 2,200 deaths in people who were vaccinated!

How do I know that swine flu vaccines don't reduce infection mortality? Because I've looked through all the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials that have ever been conducted on H1N1 vaccines. It didn't take me very long, because the number of such clinical trials is ZERO.That's right: There is not a single shred of evidence in existence today that scientifically supports the myth that H1N1 vaccines reduce mortality from H1N1 infections. The best evidence I can find on vaccines that target seasonal flu indicates a maximum mortality reduction effect of somewhere around 1% of those who are vaccinated. The other 99% have the same mortality rate as people who were not vaccinated.

So let's give the recent H1N1 vaccines the benefit of the doubt and let's imagine that they work just as well as other flu vaccines. That means they would reduce the mortality rate by 1%. So out of the 2,200 deaths that took place in 2009 in people who were already vaccinated, the vaccine potentially may have saved 22 people.
61 million injections add up to bad public health policySo let's see: 61 million people are injected with a potentially dangerous vaccine, and the actual number "saved" from the pandemic is conceivably just 22. Meanwhile, the number of people harmed by the vaccine is almost certainly much, much higher than 22. These vaccines contain nervous system disruptors and inflammatory chemicals that can cause serious health problems.

Some of those problems won't be evident for years to come... future Alzheimer's victims? .Injecting 61 million people with a chemical that threatens the nervous system in order to avoid 22 deaths -- and that's the best case! -- is an idiotic public health stance. America would have been better off doing nothing rather than hyping up a pandemic in order to sell more vaccines to people who don't need them.Better yet, what the USA could have done that would have been more effective is handing out bottles of Vitamin D to 61 million people. At no more cost than the vaccines, the bottles of vitamin D supplements would have saved thousands of lives and offered tremendously importantly additional benefits such as preventing cancer and depression, too.

The one question the CDC does not want you to ask
Through its release of misleading statistics, the CDC wants everyone to believe that all of the people who died from H1N1 never received the H1N1 vaccine. That's the implied mythology behind the release of their statistics. And yet they never come right out and say it, do they? They never say, "None of these deaths occurred in patients who had been vaccinated against H1N1."
They can't say that because it's simply not true. It would be a lie. And if that lie were exposed, people might begin to ask questions like, "Well gee, if some of the people who were killed by the swine flu were already vaccinated against swine flu, then doesn't that mean the vaccine doesn't protect us from dying?"
That's the number one question that the CDC absolutely, positively does not want people to start asking.So they just gloss over the point and imply that vaccines offer absolute protection against H1N1 infections. But even the CDC's own scientists know that's complete bunk. Outright quackery. No vaccine is 100% effective. In fact, when it comes to influenza, no vaccine is even 10% effective at reducing mortality. There's not even a vaccine that's 5% effective. And there's never been a single shred of credible scientific information that says a flu vaccine is even 1% effective.So how effective are these vaccines, really? There are a couple thousand vaccinated dead people whose own deaths help answer that question: They're not nearly as effective as you've been led to believe.They may not be effective at all.

Crunching the numbers: Why vaccines just don't add upThink about this: 80% of Americans refused to get vaccinated against swine flu. That's roughly 240 million people.Most of those 240 million people were probably exposed to the H1N1 virus at some point over the last six months because the virus was so widespread.How many of those 240 million people were actually killed by H1N1? Given the CDC's claimed total of deaths at 11,160, if you take 80% of that (because that's the percentage who refused to be vaccinated), you arrive at 8,928. So roughly 8,900 people died out of 240 million. That's a death rate among the un-vaccinated population of .0000372With a death rate of .0000372, the swine flu killed roughly 1 out of every 26,700 people who were NOT vaccinated.

So even if you skipped the vaccine, you had a 26,699 out of 26,700 chance of surviving.Those are pretty good odds. Ridiculously good. You have a 700% greater chance of being struck by lightning in your lifetime, by the way.What it all means is that NOT getting vaccinated against the swine flu is actually a very reasonable, intelligent strategy for protecting your health. Mathematically, it is the smarter play.Because, remember: Some of the dead victims of H1N1 got vaccinated. In fact, I personally challenge the CDC to release statistics detailing what percentage of the dead people had previously received such vaccines.

There is no doubt that many of those who died from H1N1 were previously vaccinated. The CDC just doesn't want you to know how many (and they hope you'll assume it's zero).
Where are all the real journalists?I find it especially fascinating that the simple question of "How many of the dead were previously vaccinated?" has never been asked in print by a single journalist in any mainstream newspaper or media outline across the country. Not the NY Times, not WashingtonPost.com, not the WSJ, LA Times or USA Today. The MSM today, in other words, is often quite pathetic. Far from the independent media mindset that used to break big stories like Watergate, today's mainstream media is little more than a mouthpiece for the corporatocracy that runs our nation. The MSM serves the financial interests of the corporations, just as the CDC and WHO do. That's why they're all spouting the same propaganda with their distorted stories about H1N1 swine flu.


Nations scrap orders for GSK swine flu jab
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/nations-scrap-orders-for-gsk-swine-flu-jab-1869653.html


Influenza A: "They Organized the Psychosis"Wednesday 06 January 2010
by: Jean-Emmanuel Ducoin L'Humanité

President of the Council of Europe's Health Commission, German Wolfgang Wodarg, alleges serious irregularities in the production, officials approvals and distribution of the influenza A vaccine.

Scandals of State(s)
And what if financial waste were to become a scandal of state ... and of many states? By dint of retracing the trail of the anti-influenza A shots, the debate over public policies during a pandemic is being utterly transformed into a vast denunciation of the collusion between laboratories and governments. We hardly doubt that, secretly, while laying low in the shadows, lobbyists did whatever necessary to convince decision makers to buy their vaccinations in massive quantities. Did these servants of the great trusts direct, and in consequence, manipulate the conditions of purchase? The troubling facts that we are publishing [see below] contain that which should arouse our most intense scrutiny. Our questions, moreover, are now shared ... and not by just anybody! The Council of Europe's Health Commission, no less, has, in fact, just voted for an official investigation to evaluate the influence of pharmaceutical groups on governments' and even the World Health Organization's choices ...Also See: Bruno Odent Influenza A: They

Organized a Psychosis
France is on the front line. And for good reason. Since she's been in office, [French Minster of Health] Mrs. Bachelot and the members of her office, frequently accused of collusion with business circles, have rarely been short of any zeal in rolling out the red carpet for the medicine men listed on the stock exchange. Favoring "complete-vaccination," a variant of Sarkozyist "complete-security," France consequently purchased - without any transparency - far more doses of vaccine than did comparable countries. Moreover, since the summer, the government has been lying to us: the official cost, 869 million euros, is nothing but the tip of the iceberg, to which must be added the purchase of masks, publicity costs and also the exorbitant amount of expenses contributed by local governments, hospitals etc.: probably over 2 billion euros in all! Even the independence of the Groupe d'expertise et d'information sur la grippe [Group for Flu Appraisal and Information] (Geig), an official body of the Ministry of Health, arouses indignation: it is 100 percent financed by five laboratories ...Ninety-four million doses for five million people who chose to be vaccinated: cherchez the blooper! After having conducted the matter like a Napoleonic battle, the government beats a retreat to the point of negotiating (on what conditions?) the cancellation of half the order for vaccines ... At the hour of reckoning, a wind of panic blows through the Palace. For who will have benefited from this collective hysteria? The laboratories, obviously: spending 870 millions euros on four of them was no longer a precautionary principle, but a veritable financing plan!

The main beneficiaries? GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Novartis et Sanofi-Aventis: over a billion euros of additional revenues in the fourth quarter for the GSK, between 350 and 500 millions for the two others ... Not only did the organized psychosis fill their coffers, but governments, transformed into super-sales-reps, are taking responsibility for assuring their products' resale! In a global market estimated at 600 billion dollars (it has doubled in ten years), everyone will have understood that for the laboratories the stakes resemble a trade war in which anything is allowed.