MARC SIEGEL, MD is a practicing internist, an Associate Professor at the New York University School of Medicine and a fellow in the Master Scholars Society at New York University.

Dr. Siegel is a weekly columnist for The New York Daily News, frequent contributor to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, and a member of the board of contributors at USA Today.

Dr. Siegel is a syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. Dr. Siegel appears regularly on CNN, the NBC Today Show, and the Fox News Channel. Dr. Siegel was a contributor to the U.S. Senate Finance committee investigation of the 2001 bioterror crisis.

Trust me... i'm a doctor!

By describing the problem as if it were already occurring, public-health authorities do a real disservice. The more vivid the description, the more a reaction on a grand scale seems indicated. Instead of worrying about heart disease or stroke, our true killers, we obsess on a remote risk. Some "experts" use the once-in-50-years statistic to argue that a new pandemic like the one that killed more than 50 million people in 1918 is inevitable. Yet that scourge occurred in the wake of a devastating war, with the poorest of hygiene and living conditions. Today's technology, by contrast, could produce vaccine and anti-virals and cordon off large areas in a hurry.

And there is no way of knowing when such a mutation will occur. The current bird flu can't pass easily from human to human, a fact often obscured by the snowballing attention. Remember SARS? We obsessed on the way that new killer cold virus flew around a hotel in Toronto infecting people. Some worried about getting infected by touching an elevator button. Sillier still, dread spread against everything and everyone Asian - with some New Yorkers even avoiding Chinese restaurants.

The real virus was fear.

A year later, scientists discovered that SARS actually doesn't transmit at all readily. The worry was ill-founded. That fact didn't get quite the same top-of-the-news coverage as the original alarms - a void that left many too ready to engage our hysteria the time around. - MARC K. SIEGEL

Let's start with SARS. [The SARS case] was portrayed based on hypothetical information, which turned out [to be] wrong. Back in 2003, people postulated, "This [SARS] is a cold-like virus, it's a corona virus, this thing is going to be able to be passed easily by touch. Therefore--a lot of therefores were in the equation--therefore, it can go on planes, it can go from one sector to another, [all] these fancy theories could work. But the problem is that SARS turn[ed] out to be a bug that is not easily transmitted. And nobody bothered to add that to the equation at the end. So basically it's a problem of not having a memory and not integrating follow-up information into our perspective going forward when the next so-called threat comes along. That's A.

B, too many assessments [were made] based on hypotheticals and theories. C, it's ignoring and taking resources away from already known killer epidemics out there.

I see bird flu in the same vein as I see SARS. Bird flu is a potential epidemic that could be very harmful to humans. But here's what's often not exercised in the bird flu equation. No. 1, for bird flu to be transmitted easily from human to human, it requires a mutation. No. 2, there's no way to know if that mutation is going to occur. Saying that you don't know if something will occur or not is not sexy, so that gets passed over. But you can't pass over that because it's the difference between a potential and an actual problem. You've never heard public-health officials say they know what the chances of that occurring are. Nobody knows. There are all kinds of theories. The only thing they know is that [flu epidemics] tend to occur once every fifty years or so, and it's been a while, so it may occur now. But that's not good enough to be scaring a whole society.

The second point I would make...is that they keep using World War I as an example, 1918 [when a worldwide epidemic of Spanish influenza killed 50 million people]. But in 1918, A, there were no ready vaccines. B, people were huddled together in poor public health conditions. C, there was a world war going on. D, they didn't have the technology we have now. - CFR Interview with Dr. Marc Siegel on Epidemics

Council Fellow Laurie Garrett's rebuttal to Siegel interview

August 18, 2005

Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes a rebuttal to Marc Siegel's views on epidemics.

[Dr. Siegel] demands absolute certainty before he will accept risk; well, that was Condoleezza Rice's excuse for rejecting Richard Clarke's memorandum warning of an Al Qaeda attack in August 2001. He rejects preparatory action in advance of a proven threat, arguing most of it is too expensive. In truth, the pandemic flu preparedness budget is miniscule-the last White House request was for less than $180 million. In contrast, [Siegel] could have raised these arguments to address the well over $3 billion spent to date to prepare America for a smallpox terrorist attack, an eventuality most experts in the field consider so remote as to be virtually impossible.

In the case of smallpox, the government argued that it's true the germ had been eradicated and the only living samples of the virus were in high-security labs in Russia and the United States. However, the Soviets violated the agreement and moved their samples to a notorious bio-weapons lab in Siberia where mutant strains of the virus were developed. That lab's weapons work has been shut down-but the samples could have been stolen or sold to evildoers. - cfr.org

So the CFR say - "...it was The Russians which leaked out the only living samples of the lethal smallpox virus from 1918!"...hmmm...now that is interesting

Last night, WNED in New York (a PBS member-supported TV station) broadcast a gripping documentary: "Secrets Of The Dead: The Killer Flu".

A number of experts working in the field said clearly that they expected the return of the horrific 1918 Spanish Influeza vrus, or a variant of it - one British expert predicted that event as occurring within the next 5 or 10 years.

When you reflect on the fact that the 1918 flu pandemic swept away 40-60 million people around the globe in three separate waves over just six months and THAT before the dawning of mass air travel!), you can envisage both the scale of the potential calamity and how utterly unprepared we are to deal with it.

Every continent would be visited with the same deadly scythe - Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australia.

The anguish would probably also be accentuated by the resulting collapse of the world economy (a very real possibility: the 1918 Flu almost had that effect in England and Germany, but disappeared just before their economies and production went over the brink because of deaths, disruption and sickness absenteeism).

One intriguing note, though: the documentary appeared to state clearly that NO samples of the 1918 flu had been recovered from the bodies of victims buried in the permafrost.

But if you go to the news reports on the excellent '1918 Flu' page at http://www.survivalistskills.com/1918FLU.HTM, they appear to state exactly the opposite - and that, furthermore, the samples thus obtained were sent to the US Army's Biological Warfare section (now re-named) at Fort Detrick and to the equivalent British biological warfare centre! [Porton Down] That appears to be a puzzling and potentially disturbing discrepancy, since the expedition which apparently recovered the tissue samples from Svarlbard Island, in Arctic Norway, was mounted three or four years ago at least.

comment on JON RAPPOPORT article via Josef hasslberger

Writing in the British Medical Journal (21/1/1928 p116) Dr L Parry questions the vaccination statistics which revealed a higher death rate amongst the vaccinated than the unvaccinated and asks:

"How is it that smallpox is five times as likely to be fatal in the vaccinated as in the unvaccinated?

"How is it that in some of our best vaccinated towns - for example, Bombay and Calcutta - smallpox is rife, whilst in some of our worst vaccinated towns, such as Leicester, it is almost unknown?

"How is it that something like 80 per cent of the cases admitted Into the Metropolitan Asylums Board smallpox hospitals have been vaccinated, whilst only 20 per cent have not been vaccinated?

"How is it that in Germany, the best vaccinated country in the world, there are more deaths in proportion to the population than In England - for example, in 1919, 28 deaths in England, 707 In Germany; In 1920, 30 deaths In England, 354 In Germany In Germany In 1919 There were 5,012 cases of smallpox with 707 deaths; in England In 1925 There were 5,363 cases of smallpox with 6 deaths. What is the explanation? - Smallpox by Ian Sinclair.

SMALLPOX VACCINE AS AIDS TRIGGER By Jon Rappaport