USGS map of the United States showing reported cases of West Nile virus infection by county in 2012. Cumulative total of the entire country: 1,590 cases. (Current as of Aug. 28, 2012).^[1]

U.S. West Nile virus (WNV) neuroinvasive disease incidence. Current 9-4-2012

The West Nile virus quickly spread across the United States after the first reported cases in Queens, New York in 1999. The virus is believed to have entered in an infected bird or mosquito, although there is no clear evidence. The disease spread quickly through infected birds. Mosquitoes spread the disease to mammals. It was mainly noted in horses but also appeared in a number of other species. The first human cases usually followed within three months of the first appearance of infected birds in the area except where cold weather interrupted the mosquito vectors. Since the virus has become widely established in the U.S., an average of 130 deaths a year occurred.

Differences in surveillance and reporting between health departments and generally increased surveillance as the disease spread cause some problems in direct comparison of the number of cases and the mortality rate. The reported number of infected in 2009 was 720, but the estimated total number of infected the same year was 54,000.^[2] The true mortality rate is thought to be much lower because most cases are so mild they go undiagnosed. Some estimates put severe cases at only 1% of all cases. It is believed that the elderly or people with weak immune systems are most vulnerable to serious illness or death if bitten by a mosquito infected by West Nile.^{[3][unreliable medical source?]} Most but not all mild cases go undiagnosed. In addition, some more severe but non-neuroinvasive cases are not reported to the CDC. Some mild cases are discovered during blood donation screening. 1,039 West Nile-tainted blood donations were discovered between 2003 and mid-2005. 30 cases of West Nile from blood transfusion were known, the majority from 2002 before blood screening was instituted.

In the first ten years since the virus arrived in the U.S., over 1,100 deaths occurred with human cases reported from every U.S. state except Maine, Alaska and Hawaii. (Animal cases have been occasionally found in Maine and in Puerto Rico.)^[4] In 2012, there was a widespread outbreak with the highest death toll and second-highest total case numbers. Maine and Puerto Rico reported one case each, the first time the disease was reported in those places.^[5]

Discovery in the United States

In August 1999, [Deborah Susan Asnis (born 1956)], an infectious disease specialist at Flushing Hospital Medical Center in Queens, noticed two male patients who were suffering from similar, unusual symptoms. The two patients, aged 60 and 75 respectively, were exhibiting sudden paralysis in their arms and legs, as well as disorientation and high fevers.^[6][7] Lab testing also showed elevated numbers of white blood cellswithin the spinal fluid of both males.^[6] Neither of the patients were responding to antiviral drugs.^[7] Possible early hypothesizes included botulism, viral encephalitis, Guillain–Barré syndrome, or meningitis, but none of these illnesses exactly matched the symptoms.^[6] Asnis decided to pursue a more concrete diagnosis by contacting authorities and other colleagues.^[6]

[Deborah Susan Asnis (born 1956)] contacted [Dr. Marcelle C. Layton (born 1958)], the New York City Department of Health's chief epidemiologist, on Monday, August 23, 1999, to report her patients' symptoms.^[6] Layton advised Asnis to send samples of the patients' blood and spinal fluid to the New York State Department of Health in Albany for further analysis.^[6] By Friday, August 27, 1999, just four days after Asnis had contacted Layton, two additional patients had been identified in Queens.^[6] The number rose to eight by Sunday, August 29, at Flushing Hospital Medical Center and other hospitals in Queens.^[6] All of the early patients resided within a few miles of one another. They were also frequent gardeners in the evenings.^[6]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.) initially identified the mystery illness as St. Louis encephalitis on September 3, 1999.^[6] The city of New York began widespread spraying for mosquitos later that same day.^[6] However, laboratory testing continued to determine a definitive cause of the symptoms.

The U.S. federal government revised its diagnosis from St. Louis encephalitis to West Nile virus on September 27, 1999, citing research by [Dr. Duane J. Gubler (born 1939)], a C.D.C. expert on arborviruses, as well as several bird deaths in the Bronx, located to the north of Queens.^[6]

Dr. Deborah Asnis was credited by health experts with the early identification of West Nile virus in the United States.^[6] Her actions likely prevented a more widespread outbreak.^[6][7] In their 2003 book, The New Killer Diseases: How the Alarming Evolution of Germs Threatens Us All, authors Elinor Levy and Mark Fischetti praised Dr. Asnis' response to the symptoms, writing that, "Asnis did something other doctors might not have bothered to do."^[6] They elaborated that, "One of the worst problems with our disease-detection system is that many doctors never report cases of strange symptoms, either because they are unsure of the disease they are facing, they're ignorant of the reporting requirement, or they simply never get around to it. Deborah Asnis was highly conscientious."^[6]

Recent cases

During the years between 1999 and 2010, an estimate of 3 million people have been infected in the United States. Highest incidence rates are observed in states of the central great plains, with South Dakota, Wyoming and North Dakota leading in incidence.^[8]

During the 2012 West Nile virus outbreak in Texas, 1,868 cases were reported. Male patients, persons >65 years of age, and minorities were at highest risk for neuroinvasive disease. At total of 1,868 cases including 844 (45%) WNND (West Nile neuroinvasive disease) cases and 89 deaths (case-fatality rate 5%). Dates of onset ranged from May 1, 2012, through December 6, 2012. The outbreak peaked during week 33 (mid-August) with 225 reported cases, which is historically the same peak for all reported WNV cases in Texas during 2002–2011. The median time from date of symptom onset to date of official report to TxDSHS was 27 days (range 6–274 days). Of the 254 counties in Texas, 135 (53%) reported a WNV case. The overall incidence rate for the state was 7.8 cases per 100,000 population. Almost half of the cases were reported from the northeastern quadrant of the state, including the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex (902 [48%] cases): Dallas (396 [21%]), Tarrant (259 [14%]), Collin (64 [3%]), and Denton (183 [10%]) counties. These 4 counties had a combined incidence rate of 16 cases per 100,000 population.^[9]

Cases

[...]

Sources: Final Cumulative Maps & Data for 1999–2018, Preliminary Maps & Data for 2019, and West Nile Virus Disease Cases by State 2020, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

*2019 also had 104 presumptive cases observed in blood donors

** as of December 15, 2020, also 127 presumptive cases observed in blood donors

Maps of progression

The following maps show the progress of human cases of West Nile across the United States. States are colored according to the percentage of all U.S. West Nile cases they represented in that year. Zero percent (no cases) is colored white; less than 1% is blue; between 1% and 5% is green; between 5% and 10% is yellow, and greater than 10% of cases in a year is red.

Poisoning the Big Apple

Two years before what we now know simply as “9/11,” a terrorist attack hit New York – or so we were told. U.S. government officials announced that Saddam Hussein had sent some arcane virus that was killing birds – mostly crows – and that could be transmitted to people by mosquitoes. Panic ensued. The mysterious disease threatened to infect and kill people throughout the metropolitan area.

Ecologists and bird-watchers had tried to call attention to clusters of dead crows for months earlier in 1999, mostly around the Fort Totten area. Fort Totten is situated on the northern shore of Queens, some 200 miles as the crow flies from the Plum Island Animal Disease Center – a high security government lab researching dangerous pathogens similar to West Nile virus.

The infected areas also overlapped the path of emissions spewing from New Jersey’s oil refineries, raising questions for some (but ignored by most in the NYC Department of Health) over the possibility of air pollution as the cause of – or at least a contributing factor in – the bird deaths.5 Health and government officials released incorrect and ever-changing information about the nature of the disease, which fueled panic. At first the birds were said to have died from St. Louis Encephalitis, then West Nile-’like’ virus, and finally West Nile virus.

Four people in New York City died from what was said to be West Nile encephalitis that first year, a disease previously unknown in the U.S. (Encephalitis is an inflammation of the brain that could be caused by exposure to pesticides and other toxins as well as by certain viruses and bacteria.) Far fewer died in this “emergency” than from diseases caused or exacerbated by the massive aerial and truck-based pesticide spraying. Strangely – and this information had to be pried a year later from Dept. of Health officials with a crowbar – not a trace of West Nile virus was found in the brain tissue of those who’d died, even though studies at Yale showed that “people who develop full-blown cases of West Nile encephalitis . . . are those in whom the virus has penetrated the blood-brain barrier.” The virus should have been found in the brain of anyone suffering or having died from West Nile.6

“September 4th, 1999 was an extremely important day in the history of New York City,”7 one keen analyst noted. Indeed, the future history of our city, and the country as well, was about to change. I was in Prospect Park in Brooklyn on that first day of spraying in September, 1999. It was a warm day near the end of summer. Hundreds of people were out in the park sunbathing, reading, kissing, walking their dogs. Kids were everywhere playing baseball and soccer. Suddenly, helicopters buzzed just above the tree line and you could see the Malathion – an organophosphate pesticide invented as a nerve gas by the Nazis in World War II – spewing out in substantial bursts.

The Mayor of New York City at that time, Rudy Giuliani, ordered the toxic pesticide Malathion sprayed from helicopters, airplanes and trucks, poisoning the entire population, wildlife, soil, parks and waterways. It killed bees, butterflies, fish, birds, and, in the Long Island Sound, lobsters. The spraying killed mosquitoes’ natural predators (dragonflies, frogs, and bats – a bat can eat 1,500 mosquitoes in a single night.8) They drenched Prospect Park that afternoon, spraying the malathion over and onto hundreds of children. There were some police cars patrolling, but none of them warned people to get out of the park or stay off the streets. I ran like a lunatic trying to get the kids away from the spray. And then I ran out of the park.

They sprayed the subways, food markets, sewer system, schools, religious institutions, daycare centers and restaurants. Spraying also occurred over or near open waterways, poisoning fish and marine life and wreaking havoc with delicate ecosystems. They sprayed up and down 125th Street in Harlem early in the evening. A scientist (Jonathan Logan) and a videographer (Roy Doremus) from the Brooklyn Greens followed the trucks and filmed pregnant women being sprayed there which was included as evidence in a lawsuit filed by the newly formed No Spray Coalition in conjunction with several other organizations in the summer of 2000.9 Reporters covering the suit saw the video in court and that night every TV newscast broadcast the alarming footage. The government also sprayed Jewish people in Boro Park as they walked to Shul on Yom Kippur, creating panic, memories of the Holocaust – and outrage. They sprayed over lakes and rivers in reckless disregard for the warnings required by the EPA against spraying over or near water.10 The neurotoxins drifted out over the bays and Long Island Sound, and into the Atlantic Ocean.

Mayor Giuliani held daily press conferences at his bunker in World Trade Center #7 surrounded by maps and graphs and armed guards, whipping up hysteria and enabling officials to circumvent civil liberties and manipulate the media and public. This was a building which, unknown to most of us at the time, also housed, a few floors above, the largest CIA offices in the country outside of Langley VA, and all the Securities and Exchange Commission files on Enron and other corporate scandals, which were scheduled to be heard shortly after 9/11. (Most of those files were destroyed in the attacks on the World Trade Center.) In the beginning Giuliani and others pinned the upsurge of mosquito-borne ailments and the handful of cases of West Nile encephalitis on Saddam Hussein, just as officials were later to claim – similarly, with nary a shred of evidence – that Saddam was behind the Anthrax attacks following 9/11. During the military build-up to the Gulf War in 1990-91, then-President George Bush publicly condemned the threatened use of chemical and biological weapons by Saddam Hussein, who was depicted as “worse than Hitler,” while privately shipping those very pathogens to Iraq. The U.S. military, under the guise of fearing an Iraqi attack with biological and chemical weapons, inoculated hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers with experimental anthrax and nerve gas vaccines that had never before been tested on people in field conditions. Hundreds resisted, and many were quietly court-martialed.

The U.S. government knew the extent of Iraq’s biological and chemical arsenal. After all, hadn’t Donald Rumsfeld visited Iraq in 1983 on behalf of the Bechtel corporation, which was seeking to build an oil pipeline from Iraq to the Gulf of Aqaba via Jordan, and shaken Saddam’s hand to seal the various trade agreements between the U.S. and Iraq? But now, in reckless disregard of the truth (and of their own culpability in providing pathogens to Saddam), U.S. and city officials speculated – this was in September 1999, two years before 9/11, remember – that Iraq manufactured the virus said to be causing the disease, infected mosquitoes with it, and then shipped those mosquitoes overseas to be released in New York City. This scenario surely strained credulity, especially since the signature of U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush, in his capacity as head of the CIA and later as Vice President and President, appeared on documents approving U.S. shipments to Iraq of toxic varieties of E.coli and Salmonella bacteria, and organisms that cause Anthrax, West Nile, gas gangrene and brucellosis. 11 But somehow the obvious “follow up” questions were never asked, and Bush and Donald Rumsfeld escaped criticism over their sale of toxic organisms to Iraq.

There was no evidence for the claim of Iraqi involvement in the West Nile situation, just as there was no Iraqi connection to the events of 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, or anthrax scare. But that didn’t matter. A larger game was afoot, and any truths standing in the way of profits and desired political outcomes would be sprayed, bulldozed and bombed, and its proponents ridiculed until their message was rendered unrecognizable to the average citizen. New Yorkers were told to prepare for emergency measures around West Nile and that without such measures thousands of people were likely to die.

Meanwhile, thousands of people were being sickened by the spraying. But that didn’t stop officials from the City and the federal Centers for Disease Control from ordering the City to spray repeatedly with a toxic barrage of Fyfanon ULV (96.5 percent Malathion). The ULV stands for “Ultra Low Volume,” which officials spun as “safer – it’s low volume.” In actuality, ULV is much worse – its extremely fine droplets (low volume) hang in the air longer and penetrate deeper into the lungs. They also sprayed the synthetic pyrethroids Scourge (resmethrin) and Anvil 10+10 (sumithrin), which in humans as well as in insects impair the endocrine system, mimic hormones such as estrogen, and may cause breast cancer, prostate cancer, erectile dysfunction, miscarriages and asthma, and drastically lower sperm counts.12 In addition, the pesticides sprayed over New York contained piperonyl butoxide – a “synergist” which slows the body from breaking down and excreting the pyrethroids, dramatically increasing their toxicity.13 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lists piperonyl butoxide as a possible cancer-causing agent. Also in the toxic mix are unlabeled “inert” ingredients, mostly petroleum and benzene compounds.14

Nine years earlier, the manufacturer of U.S. military uniforms had soaked them in permethrin, a similar pyrethroid. The pesticide is thought to be one of the factors contributing to Gulf War Syndrome in tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers, although the U.S. government claims that the syndrome does not exist, despite brain scans of veterans who became ill after serving in the Gulf War that clearly “show evidence of significant brain cell loss.”15

The British government says that Gulf War Syndrome is a result of organophosphate (i.e., Malathion) poisoning. Using Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy scanning techniques, which detect changes to the brain at the chemical and molecular levels, some researchers have now succeeded in linking Gulf War soldiers’ exposure to pesticides and nerve gas to debilitating brain damage.16 Sick Gulf War veterans had 20% fewer brain cells in the brain stem than healthy veterans (the brain stem is a structure that links the brain with the rest of the body, allowing normal motor and organ functions). The sick veterans also showed a 12% loss in the right basal ganglia and 5% loss in the left basal ganglia. The basal ganglia are associated with the control of motor functions.17

Instead of a pesticides hotline for people to call who were sickened by the spraying, the City Department of Health set up a “West Nile virus telephone answering service”. The No Spray Coalition taped some of these calls, and submitted transcripts of them as part of its lawsuit. These tapes show that the hotline was answered by ill-informed operators 200 miles away in Pennsylvania (non-unionized, which is one of the reasons the City outsourced this “service”), who were only allowed to take information from those suspected of having contracted West Nile virus; they refused to take information from callers who were sickened by the spraying itself, and had no advice to offer them.

The City took no precautions to warn asthma sufferers, people with compromised immune systems, cancer, allergies, or those facing repeated exposure (homeless people, subway workers, spray truck drivers), let alone everyone else, about the dangers of the pesticides. Instead, Mayor Giuliani vilified those opposing the spraying as “environmental terrorists” who “like to get you angry because it gets them on television.” Office of Emergency Management coordinator [Dr. Jerome Maurice Hauer (born 1951)], who had been appointed by Giuliani at the behest of the Manhattan Institute, a NeoCon think tank, dismissed concerns over the pesticides spraying as “irresponsible environmental hysteria and stupidity. ‘If they took a deep breath [of Malathion?] and looked at what we did and what pains we went through to ensure that we did it right and recognize that human life is at stake, they’d get the perspective.’”18 Giuliani, Hauer, and Health Commissioner Neal Cohen repeatedly assured the citizenry that pesticides spraying was harmless. “There is absolutely no danger to anyone from this spraying. ... There are some people who are engaged in the business of wanting to frighten people out of their minds,”19 the Mayor charged.

The Mayor went on to reject protests over the hazards of spraying, saying, “There’s no point in not spraying, because there’s no harm in spraying. So even if we’re overdoing it, there’s no risk to anyone in overdoing it.” Giuliani’s irresponsible and misleading statements so angered then-New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer that, responding to numerous complaints by anti-pesticide activists, Spitzer and others in his office admonished city officials over their claims that the pesticides were “safe.”20 The Attorney General warned the Mayor that private companies making such claims would be in violation of federal and state law. But Giuliani persisted. “I’ve been sprayed 7 times, and I’m perfectly healthy,” Giuliani said in October of 1999. Over the next few years, Mayor Giuliani, Police Chief Howard Safir, and a half-dozen other City officials were diagnosed with prostate cancer; eight members of the No Spray Coalition died from cancers and other disorders caused or exacerbated by the spraying. Immunecompromised illnesses such as common colds, flu and asthma increased dramatically over the spraying months. The longer term consequences of the spray campaign will emerge slowly over the lifetimes of those exposed.

In years that followed, the City claimed it “will use a very low rate of Anvil 10+10 containing pyrethroid, phenothrin and synergist, piperonyl butoxide, for its adult mosquito control efforts. Thorough environmental review and epidemiologic analyses conducted subsequent to spray events have shown that the public in general is not expected to experience symptoms given the low level of exposure that may occur during the spraying events.”21 However, the City provided no evidence whatsoever to support such a claim. It ignored numerous reports of people who did get sick from mosquito sprays. In 2003, the Centers for Disease Control reviewed poisoning reports due to WNV spraying from the only nine states in the country that collected such data at the time and which sprayed for West Nile-carrying mosquitoes. The CDC found 262 cases. The majority of cases resulted in respiratory (66%) and neurological (61%) reactions.22

Beyond Pesticides – a national organization headquartered in Washington D.C. (formerly known as the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides) and a co-Plaintiff in the No Spray, et al. lawsuit – reviewed a federal General Accounting Office report that examined claims relating to the reported incidence of illnesses due to pesticide exposure, and concluded:

Pesticide poisonings in the U.S. are not well tracked and are commonly misdiagnosed, unreported, and severely underestimated. Physicians receive little training on identifying poisonings and even when correctly diagnosed, rarely are they reported to authorities. EPA recognizes that poisonings are underreported and that the lack of national data on the extent of pesticide illnesses is a problem. It is therefore wholly imprudent for public officials to dismiss the hazards of broadcast spraying and the need for safer practices simply because pesticide poisonings are not making headlines.23

And Beyond Pesticides reported studies that linked pyrethroids to chronic illnesses such as endocrine disruption, cancer and birth defects. Unfortunately, the EPA does not currently assess endocrine disruption potential of chemicals, although required to by law. So what studies is the NYCDOH referring to when it writes that it had performed “thorough environmental review and epidemiologic analyses” in determining the numbers and effects of pesticides exposure in New York City from the spraying?

In fact, studies show the opposite of the City’s claims: Endocrine disruptors, even in very small doses (such as those in ultra low volume (ULV) Pyrethroids), can cause neurological, developmental and reproductive health problems in both humans and animals.24 These studies rule out the City’s “dose makes the poison” argument for the safety of ULV pesticides, and warrants greater precautionary approaches. But the City ignored this data in making its sweeping and false claims about the pesticides’ effects. The City made unsubstantiated assertions to claim to have met the criteria for granting itself a waiver to Local Law 37, which aimed to significantly reduce the amount of pesticides used and which passed the City Council in 2005; it hoped that no one would actually check and expose the fraudulent basis for its claims. Clearly, the City was not being truthful when it claimed that it performed a “thorough environmental review and epidemiologic analyses ... showing that the public in general is not expected to experience symptoms given the low level of exposure that may occur during the spraying events.” Such claims fly in the face of a great deal of scientific and health-related research, and here are being misused to justify the NYC DOH’s granting to itself waivers of Local Law 37’s prohibitions vis . vis pesticides spraying.

Members of the Brooklyn Greens – the founding local of the New York State Green Party – were joined by other Greens from around the City and elsewhere who were outraged at being subjected to the toxic spraying and the lies being broadcast by Giuliani, et al. They quoted from Cornell University professor David Pimentel, who argued that “ground spraying in general is a waste of money. Most ground spraying is political and has very little to do with effective mosquito control;” and Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides, who wrote: “We have asked the EPA for the data on pesticide product effectiveness (efficacy) for public health mosquito control and have been told that there is none.”25 More than 70 people filled a classroom in Harlem to participate in the No Spray Coalition’s first public forum organized by cofounder Valerie Sheppard. They proposed simple safety-oriented procedures, and contributed sufficient funds to get the Coalition off the ground. The group met every few weeks, and gleaned much of its early information from Feldman and his organization. Similar clusters were emerging as part of a nationwide grassroots movement opposing pesticides; they discovered and read the City’s Comprehensive Mosquito plan and challenged its conclusions point by point at hearings everywhere. At local forums, the group proposed at first:

[... page 17 - 24 ... ]

ambiguous.)

THE INSTRUCTIVE CASE OF DR. OMAR SHAFEY

r. Marcelle Layton contributed to the pesticide drumbeat

with an article on the spray campaign in the CDC’s journal,

Morbidty and Mortality Weekly Report. But even here,

in the supposedly objective halls of science, political intrigue

abounds: Layton’s report was chosen at the last-minute to replace

a very critical article about spraying Malathion by Florida epidemiologist

Dr. Omar Shafey, who headed the Florida Department

of Health’s Division of Environmental Hazards and Health

D

25

Effects. Shafey submitted a study, “Surveillance for Acute Pesticide-

Related Illness During the Medfly Eradication Program –

Florida, 1998,” which detailed 138 reported cases of pesticide-related

illnesses among Florida residents following intensive Malathion

spraying there.

Dr. Shafey’s findings were slated to appear in the October 22,

1999 issue of MMWR. But on October 19 – two days before publication

– Dr. Steven Ostroff, then Acting Deputy Director for Science

and Public Health at the CDC, called John Ward, M.D., the

editor of the MMWR, and convinced him to bump the article critical

of spraying and replace it with Layton’s. It

[..]

Dr. Shafey continued his research on workers exposed to

pesticides on the job. But two years later, he was fired by the Florida

Department of Health for an alleged over-charge of $12.50 on a

travel-reimbursement voucher. (The inspector

[...]

company announced it was

starting on page 31 ...

Genetically engineered bacteria AND untested antidote/vaccines? New bioweapons and resistance to them? Chemical and biological warfare? Mass vaccinations to military personnel of untested vaccines? – a “vaccine” that, we now learned, the U.S. government believed could be aerosolized and sprayed over large populated areas, and so it required extensive testing?

Government-orchestrated health scares have enabled biowarfare “drills”, research and development. And drills have enabled toxic substances to be released into the air, water and soil. The scares turn out to be essential not for protection but for stripping away freedoms and establishing an Orwellian surveillance infrastructure, in the name of “health” and “fighting bioterrorism.”

NYC’s Office of Emergency Management became the model for the Department of Homeland Security. Federal agencies pumped millions of taxpayer dollars into the pesticides industry and giant pharmaceutical corporations. They submitted legislation that would require the mass-inoculation of the entire population for smallpox to “fight terrorism.” After the attacks on September 11, 2001, DHS and other federal agencies urged cities across the country to spray toxic pesticides over their populations and ecosystems to prevent West Nile. These included heavily populated areas that had not had any indication of West Nile virus and then sent survey-takers door-to-door in certain communities to take blood samples and DNA, to gather statistics for the development of vaccines.

The author of those policies was none other than [Dr. Jerome Maurice Hauer (born 1951)] who, by the time of the 9/11 attacks, had left the OEM and was coordinating security with Kroll Associates, Inc. for the World Trade Center. 47 Hauer has long ties to the U.S. military’s secret biological warfare development programs. In 1998, he introduced his buddy, Col. [Dr. Thomas Patrick Monath (born 1940)] – a virologist with a long history with U.S. government secret forces and genetically engineered vaccines – to President Clinton. Monath, Hauer, Rockefeller University president [Dr. Joshua Lederberg (born 1925)] (RU had been experimenting with the supposedly “unknown” WNV for decades), and [Dr. John Craig Venter (born 1946)] (president of The Institute for Genomic Research and co-owner of the Human Genome Project) had been pressuring President Clinton to spend billions on a nationwide vaccine program against germ warfare. With Clinton’s support, they stumped for funds for Monath’s company, Oravax (now Accambis), for production of a West Nile vaccine – this was before that disease hit New York City and become known in the United States. 48 “Coincidentally,” Monath’s company announced it was “almost ready” in developing a vaccine for West Nile encephalitis – at just the moment (Oh Lucky Day!) the disease was first detected in birds at the Bronx Zoo and as Hauer and Giuliani were about to begin their mass spray campaign. (Oravax was awarded a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health the following summer to create a live viral vaccine for West Nile, using the yellow fever vaccine as its base.) Oravax, according to Monath, was also working on Dengue fever at the time that Cuba complained that the U.S. was engaging in bioterrorism against it by spreading mosquito-borne illnesses there. A mysterious outbreak of Dengue fever also hit Hawaii at that time.

Some have suspected that the discovery of West Nile disease and the readiness of the vaccine were not a coincidence, that political and economic motives intersected and reinforced each other, and that West Nile virus was released to create a market for the vaccine as well as to engage in bioterrorism preparedness drills and experiments. “The theory I and a number of other activists have been suggesting,” writes researcher Patricia Doyle, “is that the entire WNV panic has been created specifically in order to justify the mass distribution of this very vaccine throughout the entire U.S. Oravax was granted a license by the U.S. Army bio-warfare lab in Ft. Detrick in 1996 (Monath was previously a researcher at the same lab) to manufacture a Japanese encephalitis vaccine derived from a genetically-altered virus the Army itself created. WNV is a variation of Japanese encephalitis. Numerous medical and scientific institutions, many run by the Federal government, have been quietly experimenting with WNV in NYC and the surrounding area for decades. Most of this research involved biowarfare applications.”49

It was Hauer who, more than anyone else, persisted in raising the “foreign terrorism” conjecture for West Nile virus (claiming that Saddam Hussein was behind it) long after that disinformation and attempt at public manipulation had been discredited, and left it to Monath to push for financial subsidies to his company to manufacture the vaccine. Hauer was next hired as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services on – please note the date – Sept. 10th, 2001. Together with Tommy Thompson (the secretary of the agency), it was Hauer who told the White House staff and President Bush to begin taking the drug Cipro, made by Bayer, ostensibly for Anthrax exposure.50 The date of that recommendation? The morning of September 11th, 2001.

Hauer then went on to head the federal Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness,51 created in June 2002. He used his position as a bully pulpit to stump for emergency mandatory vaccination programs and hammer them into place. He was the main force behind legislation known as the Model Emergency Health Powers Act, which establishes a bioterror preparedness “czar” – Hauer clearly envisioned himself in that role – with authority to order mandatory vaccinations of health care workers and first responders (police, fire-fighters, soldiers, medical personnel) and “quarantine” facilities for those who fall victim to smallpox or other “emergency” diseases, as well as to keep track of and round up those who refuse to take the smallpox vaccine and incarcerate them in the same facilities as people who contracted the highly contagious smallpox. The legislation has been submitted federally as well as to state legislatures across the country, where much of it has already been passed piece by piece. By 2009, the camps had already been constructed by Halliburton – the infamous corporation that Dick Cheney had headed. [REF 52]

On the federal Centers for Disease Control’s website, one lone footnote cites four different vaccines to be administered for smallpox, not just the one that many older folks got in the 1950s – and even that was more dangerous than we were led to believe. Three of the four kinds of vaccines would be genetically engineered and administered to unsuspecting people, despite having never been tested. Basically, the CDC – now headed by Thomas Frieden, who until 2009 directed NYC’s Department of Health – is proposing a massive experiment on a population driven to hysteria by the government and media. “At the end of the day, the numbers [of first responders receiving mandatory smallpox vaccinations] could be significantly greater than 500,000,” Hauer said. [REF 53]

At first, a panel of outside experts – the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices – rejected the proposal to mandate smallpox vaccinations to the general public. But Hauer and several other officials overruled that moderating recommendation and produced a firestorm within the Bush administration over the question of mandatory emergency vaccinations. Hauer recommended “that a phased approach be used, starting with 500,000 and then moving in steps to 10 million.”[REF 54] But in a decision of unheralded courage and historical importance, the California Nurses Association – now a national labor union – heroically refused to allow themselves or their patients to be vaccinated with these unnecessary experimental vaccines, igniting a resistance movement across the political spectrum that threw a wrench into the gears. In blocking the government’s “emergency” forced vaccination program for smallpox, the nurses saved tens of thousands of lives and pointed the way for new forms of resistance in the post-9/11 era.

[...]

REFERENCES/FOOTNOTES

• [...]

• Ref/Footnote 53 : Ceci Connolly, “Smallpox Vaccination for Medical Workers Proposed,” Washington Post, Sept. 4, 2002.

• Ref/Footnote 54 : Lawrence K. Altman and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Smallpox Vaccine Backed for Public,” NY Times, Oct. 5, 2002. The article offers an inside glimpse into a split in the thinking of the Bush administration, noting that “Vice President [Richard Bruce Cheney (born 1941)] favors a mass vaccination approach, while Mr. Bush favors a more moderate approach.” Strangely, [Dr. Jerome Maurice Hauer (born 1951)] is said to have been removed from his position as head of the Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness “primarily for conflicts he had with [Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby (born 1950)] over whether the risks of smallpox vaccination were worth the benefit. Hauer charged that the Office of the Vice President was pushing for the universal vaccination despite the vaccine's health risks, primarily exaggerate the risk of biological terrorism.” This, despite the long record of Hauer’s aggressive advocacy of mandatory vaccination and exaggeration of the risk of biological terrorism.

  • • • https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/05/us/threats-and-responses-the-bioterror-menace-smallpox-vaccine-backed-for-public.html

      • 2002-10-05-nytimes-bioterror-menace-smallpox-vaccine-backed-for-public.pdf

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OraVax Inc. of Cambridge just signed a licensing agreement to bolster the company's development of a vaccine for Japanese encephalitis, a mosquito-borne virus endangering billions of people in Asia.

The deal with St. Louis University's Chimeric Flavivirus Vaccines gives OraVax access to the Yellow Fever virus, an effective vaccine with an extraordinary ability to replicate, according to the company.

With the school's chimeric vaccine technology, OraVax will try to meld the fast-growing quality of the Yellow Fever virus vaccine with the company's vaccine against Japanese encephalitis, dengue, hepatitis and other viruses.

The encephalitis vaccine is just one of the four the company vowed to focus on after its reorganization in the spring.

One vaccine will protect nursing-home residents who may be susceptible to certain strains of colitis or diarrhea, and work continues on the vaccine to prevent peptic ulcers.

Meanwhile, OraVax will be taking another big step with HNK20, an experimental drug created to ward off a respiratory virus in infants.

The drug didn't fare too well in tests conducted last winter in Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, where it failed to reduce hospitalization much better than a placebo.

With cold and flu season on the way, OraVax wants to conduct a second Phase III trial on younger patients this winter, this time focusing on infants four months of age and under, where the drug proved to be most effective.

But OraVax still hasn't found a corporate partner to pay for the study.

Spokeswoman Kelly Conlon said the company needs to settle on a partner within the next three weeks.

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