Jobs Numbers Jimmied by Bush Admin

Last week the Bush Labor Dept released unemployment numbers nearly double what was expected. Now, this week, the NY Post’s John Crudele writes that the real number is – hang onto your hats – 147,000. The difference is pure smoke.

[T]he total loss was 147,000 when you include revisions that were made to previous months.

Not scared yet?

Well, the government kept last Friday’s reported loss at just 80,000 by adding 142,000 make-believe jobs to the count.

Those are positions that the Labor Department believes but can’t prove were created by newly formed companies that are beyond the surveying abilities of the government.

That little bit of razzle-dazzle is called the Current Employment Statistics Birth/Death Model, and you can look up that 142,000 number if you don’t believe me.

Previously the government added 135,000 jobs to the February job count, which lessened the loss in that month.

(emphasis added)

Ooooooh. So that’s how it’s done. Is there any reality at all in those…um…projections? Well, probably not.

A closer look shows why these birth/death assumptions are so preposterous.

According to the government, 28,000 jobs were quietly created – but couldn’t be officially counted – last month in the construction industry.

Construction! And that’s despite the fact that the homebuilding industry nationwide is flat on the seat of its Levis.

And through birth/death modeling the Labor Department would also like you to believe that 6,000 new jobs were created in “financial activities.”

Unless the government is talking about the hiring of a new crop of bankruptcy attorneys that’s absolutely crazy.

And then there’s the addition of 23,000 jobs in what the government calls “professional and business services” – in short, consultants.

People lose their corporate positions and go out on their own – and the Labor Department thinks this is actually a new job.

So the numbers – which we already knew were cooked because they don’t include people whose unemployment has run out, people who have taken part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time work, people who gave up looking for a job altogether, and people who had to take menial labor far beneath their training and previous pay-rate – are actually hopelessly skewed by the inclusion of tens of thoousands of fantasy jobs?

Well, um…yeah. So this is the Bush Administration. So what’d you expect? Honesty?

Job Losses This Year Far Worse Than Expected

It’s not my intention to load up my blogs with bad news but it just keeps coming, hand over fist, faster than I can write it down. This week the Labor Dept released employment figures that were far worse than anyone expected.

Joblessness soared and employers cut back in March, the deepest job losses in five years and strong evidence that the housing and financial market distress has spooked employers.

The Labor Department numbers released yesterday were far worse than economists had forecast. The unemployment rate rose to 5.1 percent from 4.8 percent in February and 4.4 percent in March 2007. Employers reduced their payrolls by 80,000 jobs in March, the third straight month of decline. And the department revised the previous two months’ employment levels down by 67,000 positions.

“We’re in recession,” said David Wyss, chief economist of Standard & Poor’s. “It’s hard to conclude anything else.”

Yes, well, when it gets to the point that professional Bush cheerleader and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke is forced to admit in front of Congress that the R-word is indeed in force, you know it’s beyond bad and heading for really really awful.

Mind you, the 80,000 jobs lost in March (don’t you just love that “reduced their payrolls” dodge? It’s like firing people and telling them they’re not really fired, they’ve been “involuntarily leisured”. That’s right-wing PC.) were on top of the 63,000 lost in February, making the grand total for just the last 2 months some 143,000 jobs down the Bush spout.

All of which makes the Admin’s prediction that job losses for the entire year will top out at 2-300,000 kind of, you know, rosy.

300,000 jobs lost is the upbeat projection??  Only in Bush’s America.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if new jobs were being created alongside the lost ones only in different fields, but that isn’t what’s happening. The economy is so bad right now (the Dow went in the tank again Friday) that businesses are reluctant to expand and no new industries have appeared (possibly because govt R&D, which corporate America generally feeds off of like sharks on minnows, has been cut to the bone for nearly a decade) to take their place.

Among the latest to cut jobs: GE Healthcare Information Technologies in Tampa notified the state this week that it was laying off 72 workers that helped design patient monitoring systems used in hospitals. Mercury Insurance Group in Clearwater said it is laying off 58 workers in its call center and billing departments.

In the meantime, few new jobs are being created, Brown said. “The problem here is a lack of new hiring, rather than job losses.”

The WaPo’s Neil Irwin & Michael Fletcher for a change do a pretty neat job of laying out the chain of effect.

The report shows how the problems in the housing and financial markets are rippling through other sectors, reflecting the deep connections between seemingly separate parts of the economy.

The number of construction jobs, which has declined steadily for 18 months, continued to fall. That sector shed 51,000 positions, as fewer homes are being built.

Fewer houses mean less construction and building materials; the number of manufacturing jobs fell 48,000, with some of the steepest losses among makers of lumber, drywall, and other materials. Automakers also cut jobs.

With their homes less valuable, U.S. consumers seem to be spending less, which means stores need fewer workers. The number of retail jobs fell 12,400, with the steepest losses in sellers of building materials and appliances, which are strongly tied to the housing business.

Financial firms cut 5,000 jobs, with the biggest losses in “credit intermediation” companies, which includes banks and mortgage brokers.

This has caused businesses that have little to do with housing to become less confident about the future. Professional and business services, a sector that had been keeping the economy afloat, trimmed 35,000 jobs.

Yup, that’s pretty much how she blows. Which is, no doubt, why Sen Chris Dodd – the guy we didn’t want to be president – is trying to pass a bill to do what the DLC/BD Alliance has so far refused to do: help the homeowners instead of the bankers.

The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, reacting to criticism that a bipartisan housing bill would do little for homeowners facing foreclosure, vowed yesterday to move quickly on broader legislation to help troubled borrowers get cheaper mortgages backed by public funds.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) said he will hold hearings next week on the measure, which is aimed at assisting distressed borrowers, particularly those who owe banks more than their homes are worth because of plummeting prices — an issue at the heart of the nation’s housing crisis. Under the proposal, the Federal Housing Administration would encourage lenders to forgive a portion of the loans and issue new, more affordable mortgages in exchange for the federal government’s financial backing.

Barney Frank is working on a similar bill in the House. The GOP/DLC/BD/Corporate Alliance is gearing up to torpedo both of them.

Hang onto your hat, everybody. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Conservatives & Their Economic Fairy Tales

It can’t get much plainer than this just how detached from reality conservatives are in their economic thinking: supply side economics is, through John McCain’s campaign, coming back despite its total failure.

[A]dvocates see broader economic benefits from lowering tax rates, which is one of the reasons the concept has reappeared as a point of contention in this year’s election campaign, in an amended form.

“What really happens is that the economy grows more vigorously when you lower tax rates,” said Kevin Hassett, an adviser to the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, and the director for economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “It is beyond the reach of economic science to explain precisely why that happens, but it does.”

Except, of course, that it does no such thing and never has.

In the 1980s, though, during the initial era of supply-side tax cuts, per capita revenue from personal income taxes, adjusted for inflation, rose an average of just 0.7 percent annually throughout the Reagan presidency, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

That was far below what turned out to be an average annual increase of 6.5 percent in the eight years of the Clinton administration, when tax rates at the high end of the income ladder were raised.

Since 2001, the annual per capita revenue from income taxes fell 1 percent under President Bush even though tax collections picked up sharply starting in 2005. The budget surplus Mr. Bush inherited turned into a deficit.

The Stockman-born conviction of the Reagan years that tax revenues would magically grow after you cut taxes has never been seriously questioned by any conservative economist despite the acres of evidence over the past 3 decades proving that it’s all poppycock. We have been led into an economic dystopia by people who, like supporters of the Iraq war, have never been right about anything.

Why did we ever listen to these people? More importantly, why are we still listening to them when they’ve been so far off-base? We knew – people made jokes about it at the time – that Reagan’s contradictory formulation made no sense, that raising taxes by cutting taxes was a bonehead idea. Yet we voted for this peabrain twice, voted once for Peabrain II, got burned, and then came back to vote twice more for Peabrain the Third even though the guy wno came between P2 & P3 had pretty much proved that supply-side was applesauce.

“If you are cutting taxes without offsetting the cuts through reductions in spending, then all you are doing is increasing the debt and postponing the taxes,” said Jason Furman, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, and also a policy adviser to the Democratic presidential candidates.

Well, duh.

What in gawd’s name is wrong with us? Why don’t we – can’t we – learn?

It’s a puzzlement.

Inflation for the Poor, Stagnant Prices for the Rich

Beneath the mortgage crisis brought about by the deliberate systematic scamming of the poor by greedy lendersis the story of the disparity between the kinds of goods with steep mark-ups. The sector that has suffered the greatest inflation, it turns out, is the sector where low and middle class consumers spend most of their money. At the same time, wages have barely risen for the people hit hardest by inflation while luxury sectors have stabilized and incomes risen dramatically.

We all knew that but a new study of govt data by WaPo reporters (doing some actual investigative journalism for a change) proves it.

Inflation is walloping Americans with low and moderate incomes as the prices of staples have soared far faster than those of luxuries.

The goods and services Americans consumed in February were 4 percent more expensive than they were a year earlier. But there is a big divide in how much prices are climbing between the basic items people need to live and get to work, and those on which they can easily cut back when times are tight.

An analysis of government data by The Washington Post found that prices have risen 9.2 percent since 2006 for the groceries, gasoline, health care and other basics that a middle-income American family has little choice but to consume. That would cost such a family, which made $45,000 on average in 2006, an extra $972 per year, assuming it did not buy less of such items because of higher prices. For a broad range of goods on which it is easier to scrimp — such as restaurant meals, alcoholic beverages, new cars, furniture, and clothing — prices have risen 2.4 percent.

Wages for typical workers, meanwhile, have been rising slowly. In that same time span, average earnings for a non-managerial worker rose about 5 percent. This contradiction — high inflation for staples, low inflation for luxuries and in wages — helps explain why American workers felt squeezed even before the recent economic distress began.

(emphasis added)

So, once again, if you’re rich, the expensive trinkets you buy cost little more than they did a few years ago. If you’re poor, a much bigger part of your budget goes for basics like food, transportation, and heat. The reporters – Neil Irwin and Alejandro Lazo – claim that the culprit is foreign market pressure.

Inflation is not occurring because labor markets are tight or because the U.S. economy has been overstimulated; if that were the case, wages would be driving inflation up, leaving ordinary households in decent shape and doing more damage to those who lent money at fixed interest rates.

Instead, this inflation is driven by global commodity markets. China, India and other developing countries’ thirst for oil has been growing faster than producers can quench it, sending the price of oil up about 60 percent since 2006. Prices for oil and other commodities fell yesterday though they remain very expensive by any historical standard.

Expensive crude oil has translated into higher costs to heat a house or drive to work. The average middle-income household must spend $378 more per year on gasoline than it did in 2006 if it consumes the same amount, and an extra $38 on fuel oil.

Apparently the pro-war WaPo decided to skip over the pressure on oil prices caused by the second Gulf War and the obscene profits netted by oil companies the last few years. “It’s all China’s fault.” But at least they didn’t gloss over the difficulties caused by a Two Americas economy.

The rise in the basic cost of living means that inflation disproportionately affects those with modest incomes. For example, in 2006, the top 20 percent of households by income spent about twice as much on staples as households in the lower-middle bracket. But the top-earning families had almost six times as much income.

***

The pinch of inflation from energy, food and health care is a significant factor in softening consumer spending, which in turn is the reason economic growth is slowing sharply this year. It is not the only reason consumers are pulling back, however. Lower home prices, less credit availability and dropping stock market values are other likely factors.

Those different sources of weakness are affecting different groups of consumers. Poor and middle-income people are suffering the worst from inflation, middle- to upper-middle-income families are bearing the brunt of the softer real estate market, and the affluent are pinched the most by problems in financial markets.

Poor babies. But don’t worry. The Fed just promised them another $$$30BIL$$$ to help stabilize the market and it worked. For a couple of days.

Of course, that’s the fourth time $$$20-30Bil$$$ has been thrown at the investor class in an attempt to chivvy them into some semblance of sanity (the Bush Admin tossed them almost $$$200BIL$$$ just a couple of months ago) and each injection of cash calmed nervous investors for, like, a week before the next batch of bad economic news sent them into a tizzy of fret and foreboding, and Wall Street took another nose dive. It isn’t news that the effect of this latest give-away had just as temporary an effect.

Meanwhile, absolutely NO ONE is suggesting that maybe wages should be raised past the level of inflation or that maybe prices on staples should be frozen for a while, and the price of oil fixed. Or all three. None of those would chill weak investor nerves or put money in their pockets. So, even though such moves would be far more likely to stimulate a recessed economy than pouring more money down the financial sector rat hole, they won’t be coming our way any time soon.

The people who caused this disaster with their greed and unscrupulous, predatory practices are focused on saving their own asses at our expense.

And as usual, the Bush Administration is happy to oblige.

Bush Lies…Again

Another NYT editorial does a much better job of catching Bush in the act: in a speech about the economy, virtually everything he said was a lie.

(Via Kevin Hayden at The American Street)

Fear-Mongering Over Gardasil

In what could almost pass for a Merck ad, an NYT editorial today takes up the drug maker’s propaganda and glosses over all the evidence countering it.

Teenage girls and their parents need to read the latest government study of sexually transmitted diseases. The infections are so prevalent they are hard to avoid once a girl becomes sexually active. One in four girls ages 14 to 19 is infected with at least one of four common diseases. Among African-American girls in the study, almost half were infected.

***

By far the most common of the four S.T.D.’s was the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which infected 18 percent of the girls. Chlamydia infected 4 percent, trichomoniasis — a common parasite — 2.5 percent, and genital herpes 2 percent.

The study did not look at such feared diseases as H.I.V./AIDS, syphilis or gonorrhea, but the four it did look at are worrisome enough. Although most HPV infections cause no symptoms and clear the body in less than a year, persistent HPV can cause cervical cancer and genital warts. S.T.D.’s can cause infertility, pelvic inflammatory disease and other painful symptoms.

***

The new findings strengthen the case for providing HPV vaccine to young girls and for regular screening of sexually active girls to detect infection. There is also a clear need to strengthen programs in sex education. Exhortations to practice abstinence go only so far.

Teenage girls who are sexually active need access to contraceptives and counseling. They need to understand that the numbers are against them and that a serious infection is but a careless sexual encounter away.

Look at the bolded part and remember what we’ve just learned: HPV does NOT cause cancer and the CDC knows it. Has known it for several years. Yet it’s still barkering for Merck and fear-mongering around girls having sex.

The agenda of the Bush Administration couldn’t be clearer: it’s terrified of sexual females and determined to promote Big Pharma profits no matter who gets hurt. The HPV Scam is a neat way to accomplish both objectives with a single initiative.

But we knew that. What a lot of us don’t yet realize is how far the Bushies have taken their hatred of science, how far they’ve gone to turn science into a political tool. The CDC used to be an independent, more or less trustworthy agency that by and large did good work. It has now morphed into just another propaganda outfit for the ideologies and biases of conservatives and the religious right. Since we know they know they’re lying about the connection between HPV and cervical cancer, there’s no other rational explanation.

The SCOTUS: Fascism Defined

In another bit of “news analysis” that will surprise no one other than a FoxNews viewer (who won’t believe it anyway), the NYT’s almost-resident legal expert, Jeffrey Rosen, Prof of Law at Georgetown Univ, writes that – hold onto your hat – the Bush Supreme Court is very friendly to business interests.

Lately, however, the affinities between the court and the chamber, a lavishly financed business-advocacy organization, seem to be more than just architectural. The Supreme Court term that ended last June was, by all measures, exceptionally good for American business. The chamber’s litigation center filed briefs in 15 cases and its side won in 13 of them — the highest percentage of victories in the center’s 30-year history. The current term, which ends this summer, has also been shaping up nicely for business interests.

***

Though the current Supreme Court has a well-earned reputation for divisiveness, it has been surprisingly united in cases affecting business interests. Of the 30 business cases last term, 22 were decided unanimously, or with only one or two dissenting votes.

Now there’s a shocker.

One of the key definitions of a fascist govt is one in which the corporate agenda is conflated with the national political and judicial agendas until it’s all but impossible to separate them. We seem to have reached that point, don’t we?

Gardasil Update

Someone responded by email to the Jack’s email on the Gardasil story. PeterT wants to point out that vaccinations in general are far more dangerous than we think and that no long term studies have been done on the Gardasil vaccination despite the fact that there’s at least one case of Gardasil (made by – who else – the infamous Merck) having caused partial paralysis in a patient.

When it comes to vaccines, it’s important to note also that skewed science and even malevolence are not limited to this one.

To the contrary, then: This is not best “saved” (although we’re getting plenty of rain), but given reading priority. Otherwise, a “rainy day” of a different kind may be in store for someone’s daughter (and they’ve even tried to push this on boys). It might be wise to get on the horse and protect our kids (and everyone) from the PetroPharma cartel–which, often enough, has demonstrated little interest in health, but much in profits. This mindset has much to do with having instilled the public notion that vaccines are the best way to prevent illness, or to “keep you healthy,” which, unbiased history and even science show, couldn’t be further from the truth.

Maurice Hilleman, at one time the world’s foremost vaccine expert and one of Merck’s (maker of Gardasil) most famous and prolific vaccine researchers and inventors (now deceased) said, “I think that vaccines have to be considered the bargain basement technology for the 20th century.”

The Gardasil Scam: HPV Does NOT Cause Cancer

Some time ago at Matewan I expressed doubts about Gardasil, the vaccination that was being forced on teenage girls supposedly because it acted to prevent cervical cancer. I suggested then that there was something fishy about all the political wheeling and dealing behind the scenes that had resulted in various governors – Texas’ Rick Perry for one – making Gardasil vaccinations mandatory.

It all sounded cooked. To begin with, Perry had very heavy connections with the pharmaceutical industry, including the companies that manufacture and distribute Gardasil. Secondly, studies show that some 94% of sexually active women have some form of HPV and in almost all those cases, it goes away by itself. Why, I wondered, would we be making the injections mandatory for a disease that cures itself without troubling the patient for the sake of maybe protecting the small slice of the population that might develop cervical cancer from HPV?

It sounded like another Bog Pharma scam but it may be far worse. Turns out that studies actually show that not only does HPV NOT cause cervical cancer, the Gardasil itself does.

This revelation should be quite shocking to anyone who has been following the debate over Gardasil and mandatory vaccinations of teenage girls. First, it reveals that Gardasil appears to increase disease by 44.6 percent in certain people — namely, those who were already carriers of the same HPV strains used in the vaccine.

In other words, it appears that if the vaccine is given to a young woman who already carries HPV in a “harmless” state, it may “activate” the infection and directly cause precancerous lesions to appear. The vaccine, in other words, may accelerate the development of precancerous lesions in women.

This was sent to me via email from a friend and comes from a websight called NaturalNews. Below is the entire text, with links. Read it and make up your own mind. It’s long but if you have or know a teenage girl or her family, it’s crucial information worth taking the time to read.

NaturalNews) For the last several years, HPV vaccines have been marketed to the public and mandated in compulsory injections for young girls in several states based on the idea that they prevent cervical cancer. Now, NaturalNews has obtained documents from the FDA and other sources (see below) which reveal that the FDA has been well aware for several years that Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) has no direct link to cervical cancer.

NaturalNews has also learned that HPV vaccines have been proven to be flatly worthless in clearing the HPV virus from women who have already been exposed to HPV (which includes most sexually active women), calling into question the scientific justification of mandatory “vaccinate everyone” policies.

Furthermore, this story reveals evidence that the vaccine currently being administered for HPV — Gardasil — may increase the risk of precancerous cervical lesions by an alarming 44.6 percent in some women. The vaccine, it turns out, may be far more dangerous to the health of women than doing nothing at all.

If true, this information reveals details of an enormous public health fraud being perpetrated on the American people, involving FDA officials, Big Pharma promoters, and even the governors of states like Texas. The health and safety of tens of millions of young girls is at stake here, and what this NaturalNews investigative report reveals is that HPV vaccinations may not only be medically useless; they may also be harmful to the health of the young girls receiving them.

This report reveals startling facts about the HPV vaccine that most people will find shocking:

• How it may actually increase the risk of precancerous lesions by 44.6 percent.

• The FDA has, for four years, known that HPV was not the cause of cervical cancer.

• Why mandatory HPV vaccination policies may cause great harm to young girls.

• Why HPV infections are self-limiting and pose no real danger in healthy women

• Little-known FDA documents that reveal astounding facts about Gardasil

• How Big Pharma promoted its Gardasil vaccine using disease mongering and fear mongering

Click the NEXT button below to continue reading…

The Trail of Evidence

This story begins at a company called HiFi DNA Tech, LLC (http://www.hifidna.com) a company involved in the manufacture of portable HPV testing devices based on DNA sequencing analysis. HiFi DNA Tech has been pushing to get the FDA to classify its HPV detection technology as a “Class II” virology testing device. To understand why this is a big deal, you have to understand the differences between “Class II” and “Class III” virology testing devices.

Based on FDA rules, a Class III virology testing device is one that is considered by the FDA to have “premarket approval,” meaning that it cannot yet be sold to the public. In order for such a device to be marketed to the public, it must be downgraded to Class II status, which is considered a “special controls” status. Class II devices are, “…those devices for which the general controls by themselves are insufficient to provide reasonable assurance of safety and effectiveness, but for which there is sufficient information to establish special controls to provide such assurance, including performance standards, postmarket surveillance, patient registries, development and dissemination of guidelines, recommendations, and any other appropriate actions the agency deems necessary.”

In other words, a Class II device may or may not actually be safe, but the FDA considers is safe enough to release to the public.

HiFi DNA Tech has been trying to get its HPV detection device downgraded to a Class II device based on the following arguments:

• For more than 20 years, the FDA had regulated the HPV test as a “test for cervical cancer.”

• But since at least 2003, the FDA has changed its position on the relationship between Human Papilloma Virus and cervical cancer, stating that the HPV strain is “not associated with cervical cancer.”

• Accordingly, HiFi DNA Tech is arguing that the HPV test it has developed is no longer a test for cervical cancer, but is merely a test for the presence of Human Papilloma Viruses — a shift that makes the test far more reliable in its primary purpose. In other words, the test is merely detecting the presence of a virus, not making a diagnosis of a disease (which would be a much higher standard to meet).

On October 12, 2007, HiFi DNA Tech sued the Food and Drug Administration in an attempt to force it to downgrade its HPV detection technology to Class II (see http://www.news-medical.net/?id=31180 ). Earlier in the year — on March 7, 2007, HiFi DNA Tech filed the HPV PCR test reclassification petition with the FDA. It is the information in this petition document that led us to the FDA’s knowledge that HPV is not linked to cervical cancer.

Got all that? This is a somewhat complex story to follow, so here it is again in summary:

• A company that manufacturers a DNA testing device that can detect the presence of HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) is petitioning the FDA (and suing the FDA) to get it to reclassify its medical device as a “Class II” device based on the revelation that the FDA has already adopted the position that HPV infections do not directly cause cervical cancer.

• This would mean that the FDA has been aware for years that HPV does not cause cervical cancer, which means that the FDA’s approval of the Gardasil vaccine — as well as the national push for Gardasil vaccinations — is based on a grand medical hoax that, not surprisingly, appears to be designed to exploit the fear of cancer to sell vaccines. The victims in all this, of course, are the young girls who are apparently being subjected to a medically useless (and potentially dangerous) vaccine.

• None of this information was apparently known during the more recent debates over the safety and efficacy of Gardasil, the HPV vaccine now in use. This means that the public debate over mandatory HPV vaccinations lacked key elements that now seem essential to reaching rational, evidence-based conclusions over the safety and efficacy of such vaccines.

Next, we reveal the FDA’s statement that HPV is “not associated with cervical cancer.”

The Text of the Petition

The Reclassification Petition, dated March 7, 2007, is still posted on the FDA’s website: http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/dockets/07p0210/07p-0210-ccp0001-01-vol1.pdf

In case the FDA removes this document (as it has been known to do), we’ve posted a backup copy of the document on our own servers: http://www.NaturalNews.com/downloads/FDA-HPV.pdf

This document reveals the following text:

The FDA news release of March 31, 2003 acknowledges that “most infections (by HPV) are short-lived and not associated with cervical cancer”, in recognition of the advances in medical science and technology since 1988. In other words, since 2003 the scientific staff of the FDA no longer considers HPV infection to be a high-risk disease when writing educational materials for the general public whereas the regulatory arm of the agency is still bound by the old classification scheme that had placed HPV test as a test to stratify risk for cervical cancer in regulating the industry.

NaturalNews sought to verify the existence of the FDA news release referenced by this petition reclassification document and found that, indeed, the FDA news release exists. In fact, it’s still posted on the FDA website at http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2003/NEW00890.html

In it, the FDA says, “The HPV DNA test is not intended to substitute for regular Pap screening. Nor is it intended to screen women under 30 who have normal Pap tests. Although the rate of HPV infection in this group is high, most infections are short-lived and not associated with cervical cancer.” (Emphasis added.)

In other words, the FDA knew in 2003 that HPV infections are not associated with cervical cancer.

Furthermore, the FDA states, in the same press release, “Most women who become infected with HPV are able to eradicate the virus and suffer no apparent long-term consequences to their health.”

In other words, HPV infections do not cause cervical cancer! Remember, the entire push for mandatory HPV vaccinations of young girls across the country has been the urgent call to “save” these young girls from cervical cancer. The vaccine push has been about “savings lives.” But as these documents clearly reveal, HPV is no threat to the lives of young girls. In fact, as you will see below, HPV infections are naturally self-limiting!

HPV Infections Resolve Themselves, Without Vaccines

As the reclassification petition reveals, HPV infections are naturally self-limiting — meaning that they are controlled naturally, without requiring intervention with drugs or vaccines. It is not the HPV virus itself that causes cervical cancer but rather a persistent state of ill-health on the part of the patient that makes her vulnerable to persistent infections.

As the petition states:

“Based on new scientific information published in the past 15 years, it is now generally agreed that identifying and typing HPV infection does not bear a direct relationship to stratification of the risk for cervical cancer . Most acute infections caused by HPV are self-limiting [1, 4-7]. …Repeated sequential transient HPV infections, even when caused by “high-risk” HPVs, are characteristically not associated with high risk of developing squamous intraepithelial lesions, a precursor of cervical cancer.

A woman found to be positive for the same strain (genotype) of HPV on repeated testing is highly likely suffering from a persistent HPV infection and is considered to be at high risk of developing precancerous intraepithelial lesions in the cervix . It is the persistent infection, not the virus, that determines the cancer risk.”

The FDA agrees with this assessment of the relationship between HPV and cervical cancer, as evidenced by its 2003 news release quoted above.

Next, we reveal evidence that HPV vaccines actually cause precancerous lesions in women.

Do HPV Vaccines Increase the Risk of Precancerous Lesions?

The reclassification petition cited above also reveals that Gardasil vaccines may increase the risk of developing precancerous lesions by 44.6 percent in some groups of women. This is found in a quote referencing a document mentioned in the petition, which states:

“PCR-based HPV detection device with provision for accurate HPV genotyping is more urgently needed now because vaccination with Gardasil of the women who are already sero-positive and PCR-positive for vaccine-relevant genotypes of HPV has been found to increase the risk of developing high-grade precancerous lesions by 44.6%, according to an FDA VRBPAC Background Document : Gardasil HPV Quadrivalent Vaccine. May 18, 2006 VRBPAC Meeting. www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/06/briefing/2006-4222B3.pdf”

NaturalNews tracked down the correct URL of the document referenced above and found it in the FDA docket archives. We have placed a safe backup copy at: http://www.NaturalNews.com/downloads/FDA-Gardasil.pdf

Sure enough, this document reveals startling information about the extreme dangers apparently posed by Gardasil vaccinations. On page 13, this document states:

“Concerns Regarding Primary Endpoint Analyses among Subgroups

There were two important concerns that were identified during the course of the efficacy review of this BLA. One was the potential for Gardasil to enhance disease among a subgroup of subjects who had evidence of persistent infection with vaccine-relevant HPV types at baseline. The other concern was the observations of CIN 2/3 or worse cases due to HPV types not contained in the vaccine. These cases of disease due to other HPV types have the potential to counter the efficacy results of Gardasil for the HPV types contained in the vaccine.

1. Evaluation of the potential of Gardasil™ to enhance cervical disease in subjects who had evidence of persistent infection with vaccine-relevant HPV types prior to vaccination. The results of exploratory subgroup analyses for study 013 suggested a concern that subjects who were seropositive and PCR-positive for the vaccine-relevant HPV types had a greater number of CIN 2/3 or worse cases as demonstrated in the following table:

Observed Efficacy
– 44.6%

It appeared that subjects in this subgroup of study 013 who received Gardasil™ might have had enhanced risk factors for development of CIN 2/3 or worse compared to placebo recipients.”

Revealing the Dangers of Gardasil

This revelation should be quite shocking to anyone who has been following the debate over Gardasil and mandatory vaccinations of teenage girls. First, it reveals that Gardasil appears to increase disease by 44.6 percent in certain people — namely, those who were already carriers of the same HPV strains used in the vaccine.

In other words, it appears that if the vaccine is given to a young woman who already carries HPV in a “harmless” state, it may “activate” the infection and directly cause precancerous lesions to appear. The vaccine, in other words, may accelerate the development of precancerous lesions in women.

This is information that has simply not been made available in the debate over Gardasil vaccination policies. The pro-vaccination rhetoric has always been about “saving lives” and it carried the implied statement that Gardasil is perfectly safe for all women, posing absolutely no increased risk of cancer. What these documents reveal, however, is that Gardasil may, in fact, pose a serious increase in the risk of cervical cancer in some recipients of the vaccine.

Next: Will health authorities “interrogate” young virgins over their sexual activity (or lack thereof)? What are the bioethical ramifications of this vaccine being mandated to all teenage girls?

Interrogating Young Virgins

The FDA directly admits the vaccine is utterly useless in these women, stating in the same document, “Finally, there is compelling evidence that the vaccine lacks therapeutic efficacy among women who have had prior exposure to HPV and have not cleared previous infection (PCR positive and seropositive).”

What this essentially means is that the “safe” administering of the Gardasil vaccine requires that it be administered only to virgins (because virtually all women who are sexually active carry HPV strains). That, of course, would require the direct questioning of the sexual habits of all young girls before administering the vaccine.

Is this what the Governor of Texas really had in mind when he mandated such vaccinations for all young girls in Texas? … a male doctor with a vaccination needle in his hand and a thirteen-year-old girl sitting in a private clinic room behind closed doors, with the male doctor asking her, “Have you ever had sex?”

Clearly, this kind of patient questioning crosses all kinds of ethical barriers when such vaccinations are made mandatory (as they have been made in Texas). It puts the State in the positioning of ascertaining the sexual habits of very young teenage girls and then potentially causing them harm. It’s not hard to suppose that most sexually active teenage girls would claim to still be virgins (especially if their parents were present), creating a situation where vaccines would be routinely administered to precisely the HPV carrier subgroups for which it has been demonstrated to greatly increase the risk of precancerous lesions.

In other words, under a mandatory Gardasil vaccination scenario like what exists in Texas today, a sexually-active young teenage girl has to make a tough choice:

1) She can lie to her doctor, claim to be a virgin, receive the vaccine and thereby potentially increase her risk of cervical cancer.

2) She can tell her doctor she’s sexually active, thereby surrendering her privacy and possibly subjecting herself to various consequences from her sexual status being learned by her parents or guardians. (One would hope, of course, that such sexual habits were not secrets, but alas, we live in the real world where many teenage girls do indeed have sex at a very early age…)

Furthermore, the young girl is unlikely to be given accurate information about the health risks associated with the vaccine, since virtually all health authorities are heavily involved in promoting pro-vaccination propaganda, routinely ignoring scientific evidence that might give reasonable people pause.

Naturally, the better scenario here is that the young girl is not sexually active to begin with, but in a society where 8th and 9th graders are already routinely engaged in sexual activities — almost always unbeknownst to their parents — it seems naive to expect that such girls would suddenly honor pledges of celibacy in order to protect themselves from possible future dangers posed by a present-day vaccine (especially when doctors blindly claim the vaccine is harmless).

There are also serious questions about the safety of the vaccine for non-sexually-active young women. Yet even if the vaccine poses no increased risk of cervical cancer for non-sexually-active young girls, there’s still the more serious question of: Does the vaccine work? Does it really prevent cervical cancer in the first place? And that question has already been clearly answered by the FDA’s own admission that HPV infections are not the cause of cervical cancer in the first place.

Next: Do HPV vaccinations help anyone? We reveal a four-quadrant comparison that shows the vaccine to be more harmful than helpful.

The Four Quadrants of Garsadil Vaccinations

When considering the safety and effectiveness of Gardasil vaccinations on young teens, there are essentially four quadrants to consider, as shown in the table below:

Quadrant I: Non-Sexually Active No Gardasil Vaccine	Quadrant II: Non-Sexually Active Receives Gardasil Vaccine
Quadrant III: Sexually Active No Gardasil Vaccine	Quadrant IV: Sexually Active Receives Gardasil Vaccine

Based on what we’ve learned from the FDA’s own documents, here are the likely outcomes of each of the four quadrants:

Quadrant I: Non-Sexually Active, No Gardasil Vaccine
Outcome: No risk of cervical cancer.

Quadrant II: Non-Sexually Active, Receives Gardasil Vaccine
Outcome: No medical benefit from vaccine.

Quadrant III: Sexually Active, No Gardasil Vaccine
Outcome: HPV presence is self-limiting and does not lead to cervical cancer.

Quadrant IV: Sexually Active, Receives Gardasil Vaccine
Outcome: 44.6% Increased risk of precancerous lesions. No reduction in cancer risk.

In other words, Gardasil adds no benefits to any quadrant! There is no subgroup that actually benefits from a Gardasil vaccination. But there is at least one quadrant in which Gardasil achieves an increased risk of disease. Put another way, Gardasil helps no one, but it harms some.

This is hardly a position from which to mandate the vaccine for everyone, especially since the vaccine has been widely prescribed as “completely safe” for everyone. It is widely claimed by medical authorities that the vaccine has no downside: No health risks, no increased risk of disease and no potential to cause harm in women. Clearly, these assumptions have no basis in scientific fact.

Keep in mind, too, that Merck, the manufacturer of Gardasil, has publicly suggested that young boys should receive Gardasil vaccinations! Why? Because they might engage in oral sex with girls who carry the virus. Therefore, the story goes, young boys should be vaccinated against this virus that they claim causes cervical cancer! (Never mind the fact that boys don’t have a cervix…) There is no end, it seems, to the pseudoscientific nonsense that will be spouted in an effort to sell more Garsasil vaccines to people who don’t need them.

Next: New clinical study shows Gardasil to be medically useless.

Research Shows Gardasil to be Useless

To further investigate this conclusion, NaturalNews took a closer look at research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (August, 2007), entitled, “Effect of Human Papillomavirus 16/18 L1 Viruslike Particle Vaccine Among Young Women With Preexisting Infection”

This research sought to determine the usefulness of the HPV vaccine among women who already carry HPV (which includes virtually all women who are sexually active, regardless of their age).

This document can currently be found at a University of Louisville document archive reprinted from JAMA. Click here to read the PDF yourself.

Just in case that copy disappears, we’ve also hosted the PDF here: http://www.NaturalNews.com/downloads/HPV-Vaccine-Effects.pdf

This document reveals startling information about the ineffectiveness of the Gardasil vaccine. It reveals that the HPV vaccine often caused an increase in the presence of HPV strains while utterly failing to clear the viruses in most women.

These shocking results caused the study authors to publish this sobering conclusion, printed in JAMA:

“No significant evidence of a vaccine therapeutic effect was observed in analyses restricted to women who received all doses of vaccine or those with evidence of single HPV infections at entry (Table2). We observed no evidence of vaccine effects when we stratified the analysis on selected study entry characteristics reflective of [various parameters] (TABLE3). Similarly, no evidence of vaccine effects was observed in analyses stratified by other study entry parameters thought to potentially influence clearance rates and efficacy of the vaccine, including time since sexual initiation, oral contraceptive use, cigarette smoking, and concomitant infection with C trachomatis or N gonorrhoeae (Table 3).”

In other words, the authors found no evidence that the vaccine worked at all. This observation led the authors to offer this damning conclusion that appears to render Gardasil nothing more than a grand medical hoax:

“… rates of viral clearance over a 12-month period are not influenced by vaccination.”

The study goes on to state words that should cause every doctor, Governor and health authority across the United States (and around the world) to rethink Gardasil vaccination policies:

“…given that viral clearance rates did not differ by treatment group and that persistent viral infection is the best established predictor of risk of progression, it is unlikely that vaccination could have a significant beneficial impact on rate of lesion progression.1,17

Results from our community-based study provide strong evidence that there is little, if any, therapeutic benefit from the vaccine in the population we studied. Furthermore, we see no reason to believe that there is therapeutic benefit of the vaccine elsewhere because the biological effect of vaccination among already infected women is not expected to vary by population.

In other words, the vaccines didn’t work on the population studied, and there is no reason to believe that those same vaccines would magically work on other populations, since the biology of women and HPV is so similar across various populations.

Next: Is Gardasil a grand medical hoax?

The Conclusion: HPV Vaccinations a Medical Hoax

It is difficult to take an honest look at this scientific evidence and the statements made by the FDA and not come to the conclusion that mandatory Gardasil vaccination policies being pushed across U.S. states right now are based on something other than science.

There are many theories exploring the motivation for such vaccination policies. Possible theories include:

Financial benefit: Big Pharma is pushing mandatory Gardasil vaccination policies so that it can profit from selling more vaccines to the states. This idea is at least partially supported by the fact that the first state Governor to mandate such vaccines (Texas Gov. Rick Perry) had undisclosed ties to Big Pharma. (A top official in Perry’s administration worked directly for Merck, the manufacturer of Gardasil.)

Conspiracy to poison the people: This theory, which may stretch the bounds of belief in some readers, proposes that such mandatory vaccines are put in place in order to create future disease by poisoning the people with dangerous chemicals and DNA fragments that are knowingly added to vaccines. The poisoning of the people, it is said, will pay off in future profits for Big Pharma when those people develop other serious diseases requiring “treatment” with medications. Many people who support this theory currently believe, for example, that AIDS was engineered by human scientists and then administered to the gay population in New York in the late 1980’s through vaccines.

Control the sheeple: This theory supposes that the main purpose of mandatory vaccines is to train the American public to get used to submitting to compulsory medicines. Once a certain segment of the population is targeted and effectively injected with mandatory medicines, these policies can be extended to other groups and, eventually, can encompass the entire population.

The first theory — Financial Benefit — is the simplest and easiest theory to believe. It requires nothing more than simple greed on the part of Big Pharma, along with the usual level of corruption at the FDA. NaturalNews believes this is the most likely explanation for events surrounding Gardasil vaccination policies, but we do not rule out other possible explanations, either.

Profits at Any Cost

What’s clear in all this is that mandatory HPV vaccination programs are not based on anything resembling good science. They seem to be based on a carefully planted meme — an idea that, coincidentally, spreads from one person’s mind to the next much like a virus, gaining momentum as the mainstream media (MSM), health authorities, FDA and drug company reps repeat the meme on a regular basis. And what is that meme? That HPV causes cervical cancer, and, therefore, HPV vaccinations could halt cervical cancer and save lives.

This meme appears to have no real scientific basis. It is more of an urban legend than anything resembling scientific fact. Furthermore, it appears to have been conjured by those in a position to financially benefit from the adoption of that meme (the drug companies who manufacture, sell, and profit from the sale of HPV vaccines). In this case, that drug company is Merck, a powerful corporation with a dubious history rife with charges of price fixing, large-scale tax avoidance (it set up offshore accounts to avoid billions in U.S. taxes), widespread biopiracy, conspiring with the FDA to discredit its critics, burying negative evidence about its drugs (see the history of Vioxx at www.NaturalNews.com/vioxx.html ) and numerous other actions that many consider to be criminal in nature.

There is no question that Merck has the lack of ethics, the willingness and the means to commit medical fraud on an unprecedented scale. Based on the information revealed in this report, the mandatory vaccination of young girls with Gardasil appears to be the boldest medical hoax yet perpetrated by the company. You can read the true history about Merck and its crimes at: http://www.NaturalNews.com/Merck.html

NaturalNews believes Merck is currently engaged in a massive medical fraud, and that it has influenced, corrupted or otherwise recruited FDA officials and state health authorities in a grand scheme to sell vaccines that are at best medically worthless, and at worst medically dangerous. Halting cervical cancer seems to have nothing to do with the marketing and prescribing of Gardasil. The entire campaign push for mandatory HPV vaccinations seems to be based entirely in the realm of sales and marketing.

The “marketing” of HPV vaccines involves classic disease mongering — spreading fear about a disease as a way of corralling patients into begging for the “solution” that just happens to be readily available from the same pharmaceutical company that promoted the disease in the first place. The hype over cervical cancer and Gardasil seems to be nothing more than a classic case of fear-based marketing designed to create such consumer fear over cervical cancer that a massive public outcry would result in legislation mandating the vaccines.

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Sources Cited

HiFi DNA Tech files lawsuit against FDA
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=31180

Reclassification Petition – Human Papillomavirus (HPV) DNA Nested Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) Detection Device (K063649 )
http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/dockets/07p0210/07p-0210-ccp0001-01-vol1.pdf

FDA Approves Expanded Use of HPV Test
http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2003/NEW00890.html

VRBPAC Background Document, Gardasil™ HPV Quadrivalent Vaccine, May 18, 2006 VRBPAC Meeting
http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/06/briefing/2006-4222B3.pdf

Effect of Human Papillomavirus 16/18 L1 Viruslike Particle Vaccine Among Young Women With Preexisting Infection
Journal of the American Medical Association, August, 2007

…and Who They’ve Decided to Help (2)

El Presidente‘s new “stimulus package” and the Democratic roll-over version of same is theoretically meant to stimulate the economy by giving money to people who really need it and will spend it on basic necessities to keep the economy humming. These are the people who haven’t seen a raise in 25 years or have been out of work, yes? Well, no, not exactly.

On Jan. 24, House leaders and the White House announced a preliminary deal that included stipends for all workers and breaks for business, but no money for extended unemployment or food-stamp assistance and no mention of permanent tax changes.

So who’s getting this bail out besides the banks? Guess what George W Bush’s idea of a “needy” consumer who deserves aid might be. Yup, you guessed it: the near-rich.

Elizabeth and Ben Kilgore are back in the real estate market. All it took was a little-publicized section of the economic stimulus package President Bush signed into law last week that lowered the borrowing cost of buying a more expensive home.

***

[I]f the limit on loans backed by a government-backed housing finance entity like Fannie Mae is raised from $417,000 to the full $729,750 she has been hearing about, Ms. Kilgore said, “we will be able to get a 30-year fixed mortgage for less than what we’re paying now plus our homeowner’s dues.”

Mr George “Silver-Spoon” Bush is less concerned with the people about to lose their homes (he’s offered virtually nothing to help them) than he is with making sure the well-off don’t have to scrimp and that they get a good deal on that Big New McMansion they’ve got their eye on. God forbid they should get stuck with a (yecch!) condo. *shudder*

Three years ago, when they bought their first home, they resigned themselves to buying a condominium because it meant taking out a mortgage they knew they could manage.

“This will push us into a price range that’s now financially possible,” said Ms. Kilgore, a real estate agent in Marin County.

Yay! The Kilgores are now Republican for life. Screw the rest of the country. THEY GOT THEIRS! Eyes on the prize, people.

The temporary change in the loan limits is not about to revive the housing market on its own. But in some of the higher-priced regions of the country that have been hit hardest by the flagging real estate market, it could make a big difference. For if anything is going to breathe new life into the local housing economy in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, Washington and Boston, it is home buyers emboldened by the prospect of larger loans at lower interest rates.

(emphasis added)

There you go. Things are so bad the upscale markets are starting to weaken, and what does Silver Spoon key on? Hint: NOT the people on marginal incomes who got royally reamed by real estate scam artists and the banks who expected to make fortunes on their predatory practices. No sir. No relief for them. And no relief for housing markets in areas where they’re imploding because wages are low (the South, for instance). No no. We’re only concerned about the “flagging real estate market” in “higher-priced regions”.

Priorities, people. Priorities.

Daniel Billett, a mortgage broker in Seattle, where homes in the downtown area sell for a median price of around $400,000, said that he, like dozens of people he knows, is poised to refinance an existing jumbo loan at a lower interest rate.

“As soon as the loan limits are implemented and lenders are accepting applications. I’ll be the first in line,” said Mr. Billett, whose company, Response Mortgage Services, has been receiving a steady stream of inquiries from clients in recent weeks. “I’m going to save hundreds, and I mean hundreds, of dollars every month on my current jumbo loan, by switching to a conventional loan.”

That’s who Silver Spoon cares about. Not you. Are we clear?