–How austerity could kill you and your family: Bird flu

Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.
●To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
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Several posts in this blog (“You never will know what you have lost” I, II, III and IV) have described the many invisible costs to you and your loved ones of deficit reduction (aka “austerity).

An article in the May 6, 2013 issue of NewScientist Magazine, tells how one bit of deficit reduction could kill you. Here are a few excerpts:

Why we are sitting ducks for China’s bird flu
by Debora MacKenzie

The Strategic Health Operations Centre (SHOC) at the World Health Organization in Geneva is like a war room for diseases. On a screen I could see a count of flu cases, now topping 100 – more in two months than the long-feared H5N1 bird flu racks up in two years.

Last week WHO flu chief Keiji Fukuda described H7N9 as “an unusually dangerous virus for humans” and “definitely one of the most lethal influenza viruses we have seen so far“.

H7N9 is a blend of bird flu viruses that has acquired a few mutations adapting it to infect people. The worry now is that as H7N9 sporadically infects people, it might be acquiring the mutations it needs to go on the rampage.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and find that H7N9 can’t acquire those mutations and cut loose in mammals. But if it can, killing and vaccinating poultry and preventing human infections won’t stop a pandemic strain emerging. It will only slow it down.

When that happens, we will need vaccine.

Oh dear. In the 2009 pandemic, vaccine arrived too late in the US to reach many people in the second wave – and many countries got none at all. Luckily, that flu was relatively mild.

Most vaccine is still made by growing flu virus laboriously in chicken eggs, which takes six months – if you’re lucky. A few new factories that grow virus in cell cultures instead can expand production more readily, but are no quicker.

And commercial factories won’t switch from ordinary flu vaccine to H7N9 until a pandemic is imminent. By then it will be too late.

As for antiviral drugs, normal supply doesn’t meet pandemic demand and cannot be ramped up quickly. The US ran short this year just from worse-than-usual winter flu.

What does this have to do with deficit reduction? Read on:

There are several promising new technologies able to churn out vast quantities of pandemic vaccine quickly. But R&D funding has been limited. Only one is licensed, and for ordinary flu, not pandemic. It has one small manufacturing plant. None of the rest has even had a large-scale trial of its vaccines in people.

The U.S. government, which has the unlimited ability to create its sovereign currency, the dollar, instead intentionally and for no good reason, has cut back on dollar production. One of the first things to go: Research and development that your save your life and the lives of your loved ones.

It could have been so different. After H5N1 appeared in 2004, or after the 2009 pandemic, we could have launched a major global programme to develop and test those technologies, modelled on the government-private sector partnerships that develop treatments for other unprofitable diseases such as TB. We didn’t.

Why didn’t we? I’ll give you the answer in one word: Money — or the lack thereof.

Maybe if we start now, and slow the virus down, we will have enough time. Chances are low, but if we don’t even try they are zero.

As it stands, the WHO’s top brass will watch any H7N9 pandemic unfold from the SHOC. Information will flood in; body counts will mount. Governments will be told that their demands for vaccines and drugs cannot be met. The SHOC will issue declarations, hold briefings, organise research, tell people to wash their hands and stay home. Mostly, though, it will just watch helplessly.

Buy the magazine and read the article in full. These few excerpts do not convey the full horror of what we face.

You may die. Your parents may die. Your brothers and sisters may die. Your children may die. The world’s economies may die. All you know may wither and die. Unnecessarily die.

So, remind me again: Why exactly are you more afraid of deficits than of you and your loved ones dying?

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%

No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia.
Two key equations in economics:
1. Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
2. Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption – Net Imports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY