- Is the death of NBC News correspondent David Bloom during
Operation Iraqi Freedom the result of a vaccination he received before
the war?
-
- That question is being raised in connection with a CBS
News report which says the federal government is doing a sudden about-face
and will let states stop administering the high-risk smallpox shot.
-
- The 39-year-old Bloom, who was embedded with the U.S.
Army's 3rd Infantry Division outside Baghdad and co-anchor of the ''Today''
show weekend editions, died of an apparent blood clot several weeks after
getting both the smallpox and anthrax vaccines.
-
- In the days before the fighting began, the U.S. government
was rushing to inoculate a half-million health care workers to help in
the event of any bio-terror attack. So far, only 35,000 of the targeted
workers have been vaccinated.
-
- As WorldNetDaily reported, just after President Bush
outlined his plan to take a pre-emptive strike against the possibility
that terrorists would use smallpox as their next weapon of choice against
Americans, many emergency medical providers refused to participate amid
the risk of side effects and the threat of liability issues.
-
- "This is a toxic vaccine. We should only use it
in people who need it," Dr. Brian Strom of the University of Pennsylvania
School of Medicine told CBS. "And we need a few weeks or months to
just step back and say let's replan the plans to see how many people need
to get the vaccine before we continue on with it."
-
- Smallpox is a deadly but preventable disease. Most Americans
who are 34 or older had a smallpox vaccination when they were children.
By 1972, the risk of smallpox was so remote that routine vaccinations were
discontinued in the United States.
-
- The smallpox plan for troops came as the government weathered
controversy over its anthrax inoculation. As previously reported by WND,
hundreds of military personnel refused that mandatory vaccine. This after
some 100,000 Persian Gulf War veterans got sick with a still-unexplained
syndrome many suspect has to do with vaccines they were given and the possible
exposure to chemical or biological agents.
-
- According to the CBS report, an aggressive surveillance
program designed to detect dangerous trends recently uncovered one: 11
cases of unusual heart inflammation among military troops who got the smallpox
vaccine; three civilian deaths are also under investigation.
-
- But Bloom's death was not counted among the vaccine-related
fatalities, though it should have been, says Strom, since the reporter
had the smallpox shot and died within a period of weeks. It's possible
Bloom's case went mistakenly uncounted since private citizens are monitored
by a civilian system, while troops are tracked by the military. It remains
unclear who if anyone is monitoring the hundreds of civilian journalists
who embedded with U.S. forces.
-
- Bloom's case would make four deaths under investigation
for a possible link to the smallpox vaccine.
-
- http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=32460
-
-
-
-
- Comment
-
- From Brasscheck
5-9-3
-
- Death By Vaccine
-
- When embedded news reporters were dying at a rate higher
than journalists in any war, I wondered what was going on.
-
- I thought that 39 year old David Bloom's death from a
'blood clot' in his leg was particularly noteworthy.
-
- Turns out Bloom died shortly after being a recipient
of both the anthrax and smallpox vaccine.
-
- According Dr. Brian Strom of the University of Pennsylvania
School of Medicine Bloom's should have been counted as a potential vaccine-related
fatality.
-
- But the US military keeps the score for embedded journalists...
-
- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/31/eveningnews/main547073.shtml
-
- CBS ends its report with this statement:
-
- "Already considered the riskiest of its kind, the
smallpox vaccine may be even more dangerous than anyone thought."
-
- Which is, of course, total nonsense since the danger
of this vaccine - and the complete pointlessness and recklessness in administering
it - has been pointed out by one commentator after another.
|
