Tags: health

Swine Flu in the lab

If the outbreak indeed turns into a global pandemic, as WHO seems to think, we can expect not only quarantines, but the imposition of martial law in the United States. In fact, the government has planned for just such a scenario for some time now.

In late 2007, the Bush administration issued a “directive” establishing a “National Strategy for Public Health and Medical Preparedness” based on Biodefense for the 21st Century (see PDF). HSPD 21, short for Homeland Security Presidential Directive (signing statement bypassing Congress), defines “catastrophic health event” as “any natural or manmade incident, including terrorism, that results in a number of ill or injured persons sufficient to overwhelm the capabilities of immediate local and regional emergency response and health care systems.”

HSPD 21 established an academic Joint Program for Disaster Medicine and Public Health housed at a National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. It teamed up the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Defense to “carry out respective civilian and military missions.”

Prior to this, in May of 2007, the U.S. military had the foresight to “plan for a possible avian flu pandemic that could kill as many as three million people in the United States in as little as six weeks,” according to Yahoo News. Guidelines and “planning assumptions for US military services and combatant commands” were published in a document entitled “Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza.”

“Possible scenarios include US troops being called in to put down riots, guard pharmaceutical plants and shipments, and help restrict the movement of people inside the country and across its borders,” Yahoo summarizes. “The plan envisions fast moving, catastrophic waves of disease that would overwhelm health facilities and cripple the ability of state and local authorities to provide even basic commodities or services.”

The military would be used to restrict traffic within states to contain the spread of the virus, according to the document. “It said the military will be called on to evacuate non-infected people from areas abroad that are having problems, and to help allies.” In other words, think FEMA during Hurricane Katrina — the relocations, the toxic camps, the confiscation of firearms.

A key military role will be to distribute medical supplies and medications and provide security for the production and shipment of vaccines on orders of the president.

DoD’s “Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza” proposes nothing less than the militarization of health care. In short, the military — provided to “augment civilian law enforcement” — will be used to vaccinate the population, as “directed by the president.”

As Michel Chossudovsky wrote in 2005, the “hidden agenda consists in using the threat of a pandemic and/or the plight of a natural disaster as a pretext to establish military rule” and “suspend Constitutional government and allow the Military to intervene in civilian affairs in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.”

Bush said as much when he announced that in the event of a flu outbreak in the U.S. he would consider using the military to “effect a quarantine” and place National Guard troops under federal, rather than state, control. Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and director of its National Center for Disaster Preparedness, told the Associated Press that a law enforcement role for the military would be an “extraordinarily Draconian measure.”

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