|
|
This has caused some alarm. And it is being used in the propaganda to convince more people to have themselves "protected" by the newly produced - but yet untested - H1N1 vaccine.
But what do these numbers really mean? Are more people really dying from the flu?
On the surface, it does seem so. But if we were to consider more carefully the true cause of death, we may discover that practically all of them are not directly due to the H1N1 flu. They are not "H1N1 deaths".
In Singapore where I live, for example, only 16 people are reported to have died from the H1N1 flu. Yet all (or nearly all) of them had other medical conditons, including a weakened immune sytem.
Just as I started writing this article, I did a Google seach for "H1N1 deaths" and the top news story was about a big increase in such deaths in South Korea, with the numbers rising by 12 during the past week, to 64. This works out to a 23 percent increase in one week (from 52 to 64), which seems high.
Interestingly, the Korean report says that one of the latest victims, a 6-year-old boy, died one day after he started taking the flu drug, Tamiflu. So did he die because of the flu virus, or because of the flu drug? These are the sort of questions that we need to ask.
As discussed in another article on flu deaths, most government statistics lump flu deaths together with deaths from pneumonia. And claims that "tens of thousands of people" die from the flu each year are simply not true. More than 90 percent of these people actually died from pneumonia, not from the flu.
The true cause of death
In an excellent article about H1N1 deaths and the H1N1 vaccine, Dr Ben Kim points out that determining the true cause of death is not always an easy thing to do.
If a person is shot by a gun and a bullet rips through his heart, or breaks an artery, causing him to bleed to death in one or two minutes, then there is no question that the gunshot wound is the cause of death. But in the case of people dying from disease, determining the cause of death becomes less straight forward. He illustrates:
|
An obvious example is death by cancer. How many of the millions of people who have been classified as having died from cancer actually died from one or more of the following:
My educated guess is that the percentage is quite high. That is, a large number of people who "died from cancer" actually died from one or more of the causes listed above. |
To Dr Kim, the cause of death is often a "blurry issue". About H1N1 deaths, he writes:
|
When I hear people make statements like "thousands of deaths due to the flu each year," or "one thousand deaths due to H1N1 in the U.S. so far," my mind says hold up now, let's think about that.
And as I think about it, the question that comes up is this: How does a virus that meets a large group of people cause a relatively quick death in a minute percentage of that population, a temporary respiratory infection in a portion of that population, and no symptoms to speak of in the rest of that population? I keep wondering: Does anyone really know for sure what those "thousands of people who died from the flu" really died from? Did health officials carefully consider health status before demise, medical history, and underlying immune system strength for each of these people? And quite importantly, did any of these people who "died from the flu" receive a flu vaccine before they died? |
This is excellent food for thought. Dr Kim himself admits: I don't have answers to these questions and I'm pretty sure that no one else does either.
Yet this line of thinking is actually very commonly adopted and not at all unusual. Every time a person dies, or is seriously harmed, following medical treatment, the immediate reaction of the medical community - and, if a drug or vaccine is involved, of the particular phamaceutical company -- will be that there is "no link".
This happened in November 2009 when Jordon McFarland, a 14-year-old teenager in Virginia, USA, developed Guillain-Barre syndrome within hours of receiving a H1N1 vaccine. The immediate reaction of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was that there was "no link" since about 100 to 200 people develop Guillain Barre syndrome each year anyway.
In South Korea, a report in mid-October 2009 said five people died shortly after they received H1N1 vaccines. One 80-year-old woman died within hours of receiving the H1N1 vaccine, but health officials were quick to point out that she had diabetes. Another 51-year-old man who died after receiving the flu shot was said to have died from hardening of the arteries, even though he was not previously diagnosed / treated for heart disease. For the other three cases, the government said it was "investigating the possibility of a link between the vaccine and the dealth".
In such cases, investigations are deemed necessary. For "regular" H1N1 deaths, however, health authorities don't need to be as careful. They simply attribute the deaths to the H1N1 virus and few people would ask questions.
In any case, even if we accept the statistics for H1N1 deaths at face value, there is no reason for alarm. As of mid-November 2009, about 6,700 people are said to have died from the H1N1 swine flu. Without trivialising deaths, it has to be pointed out that such numbers are tiny compared with:
Well, maybe that's because the current H1N1 flu is still in its early stages and the number of H1N1 deaths might increase later? But then again, the sudden sharp increase in H1N1 deaths during October and November 2009 occurred mainly in Europe and North America. They coincided with the introduction of H1N1 vaccines.
Could some of them, in fact, be H1N1 vaccine deaths? More food for thought...