Just because you don't want to be known as a conspiracy theorist doesn't mean some conspirators aren't out to get you.

The first time I heard the ironic truism "Just because you know you're paranoid doesn't mean someone out there isn't out to get you" it fell from the lips of my third-level supervisor who was quipping to someone else within my earshot. Nowadays, the mainstream media constantly runs articles leading us to believe that only Muslim terrorists are out to get us and that any "conspiracy theorists" who think differently are paranoid kooks.

But what if the most dangerous terrorists are actually powerful global corporations and rogue groups within our government who have been responsible not only for the 9/11 attacks but all sorts of other nasty things ...like staging a pandemic?

According to a neighbor of ours down here in San Carlos who watches nothing but Mexican TV every night, two months before the first case of H1N1 swine flu was reported in March of 2009 as having been contracted by a 5-year-old boy in the tiny town of La Gloria, down wind of the larger pig-raising town of Xaltepec, about half way between the coast of the State of Veracruz and the City of Puebla, Mexican TV extensively covered the opening of a "billion dollar" plant for manufacturing vaccines located some place "between Puebla and Veracruz."

The company name is AstraZeneca. Wikipedia tells much about AstraZeneca, but nothing about a new vaccine plant in Mexico. An AstraZeneca web site gives the address of its Mexican Operations as Lomas Verdes, Naucalpan on the western outskirts of Mexico City.  So there seems to be no public record of the exact location of the "billion dollar" plant that Mexican TV was picking up on months before -- and after -- the appearance and rapid spread of swine flu 2009 H1N1.

By June 2009 this new virus was declared a "phase 6" pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) by arbitrarily changing the rule to mean essentially any new disease that may spread around the world irregardless of its communicability or mortality rate. In fact, by that time data from the southern hemisphere had shown that the new swine flu has a lower mortality rate and complications rate than the annual flu.

But by falsely raising the alarm to phase 6, WHO was able to act on the authority granted to it by the UN to command that the entire world be vaccinated -- an edict that would grant the world's pharmaceutical industry a multi-billion-dollar windfall by guaranteeing big-time buyers of their untestested -- and unneeded -- vaccines comprising most of the developed countries of the world. I've extensively chronicaled this history in an earlier post.

Would it be too paranoid to believe that the global pharmaceutical industry in collusion with the WHO would spread a virus to make us sick (and an an unpredictable number of us dead) in order to boost their profits by many billions of dollars? Or are you totally unable to believe anyone would do such a dastardly thing ...even when they clearly have the motive, means, and opportunity?

Personally, I subscribe to this quote attributed to Edmund Burke:

“There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.”

Does anyone remember that the 1918 pandemic flu virus was resurrected in 2005?  Well, it was ...with the help of the body of an infected woman exhumed from the Alaska permafrost.

Flash forward to last month:

Below I reproduce parts of a "News of the Week" article appearing in the 26 March 2010 issue of the prestigious magazine Science. For easier reading and better focus on my point, I have suppressed in my redacted version below (1) many highly technical portions of the article that are neutral to the case I'm suggesting, (2) comments by researchers in the pay of the pharmaceutical industry, and (3) some scientists' counter-intutive speculations to the effect that maybe evolution really can run backwards.

For anyone wishing to read the entire article, I've made it available for downloading here.

Please study the included figure at least until you come to understand what it is that I'm thinking.

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www.sciencemag.org   SCIENCE   VOL 327   26 March 2010

SWINE FLU PANDEMIC

What’s Old Is New: 1918 Virus Matches 2009 H1N1 Strain

The “novel” H1N1 swine influenza virus that last year caused the first human pandemic in 4 decades has one feature that is hardly novel: Its surface protein, hemagglutinin (HA) — which spikes cells and starts an infection — closely matches the HA in the H1N1 virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic. Separated by 91 years, the two strains of the highly mutable virus ought to be vastly different. This newfound similarity answers many mysteries about the 2009 pandemic, including why it largely spared the elderly. The new findings from different research groups also suggest intriguing explanations for how the 1918 influenza virus has evolved since it swept across the globe in several waves, killing more than 50 million people by the winter of 1919. And the investigators are proposing provocative—some say far-fetched—vaccination strategies to preempt future pandemics.
...
One study published 24 March in Science Translational Medicine shows that even though nearly a century separates the widespread circulation of the two viruses in humans, mice given a vaccine against the 1918 strain produced antibodies that “neutralized” the novel 2009 strain. When the team flipped the experiment and used a 2009 pandemic vaccine in mice, the immune response stopped the 1918 virus. “We kind of did a double take,” says virologist Gary Nabel, head of the Vaccine Research Center at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, and the lead researcher on the project.
...
When Nabel, Terrence Tumpey of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, and their co-workers focused on the amino acids in a discrete region of the HA tip that plays a critical role in binding to cells, they discovered a 95% similarity between the old and new pandemic strains. Comparisons between seasonal and the pandemic strains in this region found less than 70% similarity.
...

...“The closest related structure that we have to the current 2009 swine flu is the 1918 structure,” says [structural biologist Ian Wilson of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California], who also analyzed sequences from many other influenza viruses that have circulated in humans between those two pandemics.