CDC Laboratories Revealed as Incapable of Accurate Count of H1N1 Influenza Infections, Deaths

Friday, May 01, 2009 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: H1N1, CDC, health news

(NaturalNews) Much to the annoyance of some critics, NaturalNews has been publicly questioning the "official" statistics reporting infections and deaths from H1N1 influenza. In stories published this week, we noted that the CDC's official numbers are suspiciously low -- the agency claimed only 7 deaths from H1N1 even while Mexico had officially announced 161 deaths.

Today, NaturalNews has learned why the CDC numbers are so low. It turns out that CDC labs are inadequate testing facilities that are utterly overwhelmed with too many influenza samples to test. Thus, the reason why official CDC "confirmed" H1N1 death numbers are so low is simply because the CDC laboratories can't test very many flu samples in the first place.

And remember this: The CDC doesn't count any death unless its own lab confirms the infection. But its own lab can only test 100 flu samples a day, we've learned!

CDC labs are "swamped," reports the Associated Press. "The specimens are coming in faster than they can possibly be tested," reports epidemiologist Dr. Jeffrey P. Davis, according to AP.

Other astonishing facts worth noting:

• New York has had to limit its testing of influenza because too many samples are coming in. "Sure, we'd want to diagnose every case, but we don't have that resource," said Dr. Don Weiss.

• U.S. states have no way to test for H1N1 on their own. They must send samples to the CDC, and the CDC lab can only test about 100 samples a day. (Source: Michael Shaw, associate director for laboratory science at the CDC.)

• "Many labs are overrun," says AP, to the point where they are only testing samples that come from people who traveled to Mexico. Other samples are simply ignored or thrown out.

• AP also reports this quote: "The capacity of the state laboratories to test all the swabs is being exceeded..." - Dr. Paul Jarris of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

• The acting director of the CDC has admitted it may stop testing influenza samples altogether! Why? They say it's more important to focus on detection of community outbreaks than to get an exact count of H1N1 deaths. Thus, the "death count" becomes an abandoned number that loses any scientific credibility at all.

Why the CDC cannot produce accurate numbers

From all this, it should be abundantly clear that not only was NaturalNews correct in stating that the CDC's numbers are artificially low, but also that the CDC is incapable of determining accurate numbers due to the severe limitations of its laboratories. In fact, the CDC openly admits this fact.

Thus, all those people and reporters who downplay H1N1 influenza by saying, "It's only killed 7 people" are delusional. The real truth of the matter is that the number of people killed by H1N1 greatly exceeds these "official" numbers, and yet we'll never know by how much because no one apparently has the laboratory bandwidth to make this determination.

From a scientific standpoint, then, the only truly accurate statement that can be made about this is that H1N1 deaths are greater than six. How much greater? No one knows.

Why does any of this matter? Because people are under the great misimpression that H1N1 has killed "only" 7 people (or 10 as of today, as the CDC has added 3 deaths to its "confirmed" list). Therefore, people say, it's no big deal.

But the number of "confirmed" deaths is merely the product of an overwhelmed, under-staffed CDC laboratory system that is backlogged beyond all hope and can't even get to most of the samples it's being sent. Those who claim that websites, states or individuals are "overreacting to a virus that has only killed 7 people" are kidding themselves. The number of dead is much, much higher than what the CDC has been able to confirm.

Deception for a political purpose

Essentially, what we're seeing here is a grand numbers game that reminds me a lot of how the U.S. military reports the deaths of soldiers in Iraq. If you ask the Pentagon, the number of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq seems quite small -- only a few thousand. How is this number so small? It's easy: When soldiers are seriously wounded and about to die, they're air-lifted out of Iraq to military hospitals in Europe, where they soon expire. Technically, then, they didn't die "in Iraq" and they're not counted on the official Pentagon death statistics.

These same shenanigans are happening now with the CDC and H1N1. Deaths don't count until the CDC confirms them, but the CDC is incapable of testing all the incoming samples. Therefore, death numbers can never be accurate.

I find it amazing that in America today, the government can materialize literally trillions of dollars out of thin air to bail out bankers, Wall Street honchos and even auto manufacturers. And yet somehow it cannot find the money to buy a few more microscopes and PCR machines for the CDC to test influenza samples. It seems that if the U.S. government really wanted the CDC to test all these samples, the money would be made available. But the government doesn't really want the CDC to test all the samples because if the death count rises too high, people start to panic.

And thus, through this clever limiting of influenza testing, the U.S. is guilty of the same infectious disease deceptions it accused China of conducting with SARS.

Every nation, it turns out, finds some clever way to deceive the public when an outbreak emerges. No nation wants to be seen as a breeding ground for infectious disease and risk having its borders closed off from its neighbors. The best way to protect tourism and keep imports and exports flowing is to keep the statistics artificially low using whatever means necessary.

This isn't some conspiracy theory. These laboratory testing limitations are readily admitted fact by the CDC officials themselves. There is no scientist, epidemiologist or virologist in his right mind who would dare say the CDC's official numbers represent an accurate count of H1N1 influenza infections or deaths in the real world.

The first casualty of war, it's often said, is the truth. It turns out that truth is also the first casualty of a pandemic. The numbers that are contrived for public consumption are designed to achieve a political aim, not an accurate scientific assessment of reality. Anyone who believes the official numbers from the CDC or WHO is the victim of a disinformation campaign designed to keep the official swine flu numbers artificially low.

Sources for this story:

Associated Press: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090430/D97...

ABC News: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFlu/story?...

Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/middleeastCri...