Originally published November 5 2009
H1N1 vaccine shortage fabricated to create hysteria, boost demand?
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) There's a fascinating book by author Robert Cialdini called Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion. As someone who frequently writes about Big Pharma's social engineering tactics, I've read and studied many of these tactics, noting carefully how governments and Big Business use them to wage disinformation campaigns against the People.
I was recently chatting with friends on my Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/NaturalNews) when a friend named Jennifer pointed out that she thought the vaccine shortage had been intentionally engineered to create greater demand once the vaccines were available. This immediately got me thinking about a chapter in the Cialdini book that writes about something I call the "disappearing cookies in the cookie jar" experiment.
This experiment reveals an extremely powerful strategy for influence. And as it turns out, the pharmaceutical industry is using precisely this strategy for fabricating huge demand for their vaccines in an effort to make sure all the vaccines sell out.
The experiment goes something like this:
A volunteer subject sits at a desk in a room, thinking he's there to answer some survey questions, but in reality, this is an experiment on human behavior and covert influence. A researcher sits on the other side of the desk, facing the subject. There is a glass jar on the desk, filled with cookies.
The researcher casually asks the subject, "Would you like a cookie?" And some percentage of subjects say yes, but it's a small number, perhaps something like 15% - 20% (I don't remember the exact numbers, but that's not important to the bigger point here). This same scenario unfolds across several hundred subjects in order to get a baseline measurement on how many people will take a cookie when one is offered to them.
To continue the experiment, the researchers then remove most of the cookies from the cookie jar and bring in another few hundred subjects to see how many of them will take a cookie when the visible supply of cookies is smaller. Some percentage of students take a cookie, but it's still not substantially different from the first part of this experiment when the cookie jar was full. So even though a larger number of people take a cookie when the available supply is smaller, it's still not a huge number.
The real magic happens when the experiment is repeated a third time, and during the experiment, before the subject is asked for a cookie, another unidentified person walks into the room and takes a cookie themselves! This is done in full view of the study subject who now sees a dwindling supply of cookies in the cookie jar. Subsequently, when now asked if they want a cookie, virtually everyone takes a cookie!
What this study caused researchers to realize is the influence power of a recently-reduced supply of a given item. Or, put another way, people want what other people are taking, and the more other people are reducing the available supply, the more people want it!
Big Pharma is using this same brain hack to fabricate hysteria over vaccines
This phenomenon is a sort of "brain hack" that's hard-wired into human neurology. It works almost hypnotically to create a surge of demand where none would rationally exist.
This is what's at work at frenzied retail store sales where a half-mad crowd of crazed shoppers trample each other to buy shoes at 70% off. The reason why these people are so strongly motivated to buy the products is because they are witnessing a rapidly-dwindling supply being depleted by everybody else. The witnessing of that act causes an almost hypnotic (and entirely irrational) increase in personal desire to have those same products, even if they don't need them!
Are you following this so far? It's a powerful social engineering influence hack that works automatically on the human brain. People can't help themselves. They irrationally desire the vaccine for no reason other than the fact that the available supply is disappearing quickly and other people are taking it. By engineering this situation, the pharmaceutical industry has created the perfect influence gimmick for selling more vaccines. The current vaccine shortage, in fact, looks to have been deliberately created for the sole purpose of exploiting this planned shortage to take advantage of the "disappearing cookies in the cookie jar" principle of human psychology.
You can already see it at work with the ridiculously long vaccination lines outside clinics in some cities. A few shots are made available and then the rest of the people are told, "We ran out. Sorry, go home."
Even better, with high demand but limited supply, drug companies and vaccine distributors can engage in profiteering price fixing schemes to maximize their income from the vaccine shortage hysteria. Swine flu manufacturers and distributors are already under investigation for precisely this sort of fraudulent price fixing (http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNews/i...).
How to engineer a shortage to create hysteria
Of course, the drug companies aren't the first corporations to figure out that planned product shortages combined with lots of media hype can create a windfall of profits. You may recall that the very same influence strategy was used against parents during the great Cabbage Patch Kids shortage of 1984, in which shoppers experienced total hysteria in their rush to acquire the dolls for their children.
At the time, psychologists were baffled by the behavior, but now, after understanding the disappearing cookies in the cookie jar experiment, it all makes sense. Whether you're talking about Cabbage Patch Kids or the H1N1 swine flu vaccine, every engineered product shortage follows basically the same recipe:
Step 1) Create huge demand for your product through mainstream media FEAR campaigns. (Make parents afraid of the flu, or afraid they won't get the right toy for their child, etc.)
Step 2) Limit your SUPPLY of the product, allowing only a trickle to be delivered to the population.
Step 3) Wait for the people to panic. Keep holding back supplies in order to foment more fear (which creates more demand). Meanwhile, tell the press you're trying to provide more products, but you're suffering from "production failures."
Step 4) When the panic reaches its apex, unleash the full supply of product to desperate people who will line up like sheeple to buy your product. But keep prices high, since the demand already exists to support high prices.
Step 5) Watch the magic of influence work profit miracles as your product sells out at premium prices!
Other places you'll see this at work
This fascinating principle of human psychology, by the way, explains why online auctions work so well. When bidding against other buyers for a unique item with a supply of only one, a buyer can often engage in irrational purchasing behavior, bidding up an item they don't even need merely because they can't stand to see the other person "win" the bid. It becomes highly competitive, and Ebay is structured precisely to invoke this irrational purchasing behavior response on the part of participants.
Of course, just because a "dwindling supply" of something is being communicated to consumers doesn't always mean it's fabricated. On Ebay, for example, there really is often just one of a certain product available. Even on NaturalNews, we've published "dwindling supply numbers" on giveaway offers where a certain nutritional supplement company has promised only a limited number of free samples to NaturalNews readers.
But no one has played this influence game more masterfully than the drug companies who have fabricated and promoted a global hysteria over a vaccine product that no one even needs in the first place. In fact, by the time this vaccine makes it into widespread distribution, most people will have already been exposed to H1N1 on their own, meaning they are naturally immune to the virus and don't need a vaccine at all.
In effect, then, drug companies will have managed to push virtually the entire population into a state of hysteria over a product that doesn't even work. By any measure, that's a masterful (and downright evil) manipulation of the public mind.
Remember those old Batman shows where the villain operated a mind control machine that broadcast hypnotic messages to the entire city? As it turns out, that isn't fiction. It's being done today by Big Pharma, right through your television set. It's quite possible that the mass hysteria over swine flu vaccines was a fabricated, planned event specifically designed to make people desperately want something they normally wouldn't even pay attention to.
Stage hypnotists take note: If you're looking for easy subjects for your shows, just recruit the people standing in line desperately hoping to receive a swine flu vaccine injection...
Sources for this story include:
Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-P...
LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-me...
Project on Government Oversight:
http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2009/11/tim...
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