Obama's H1N1 national emergency declaration could invoke FEMA response to pandemic (opinion)
President Obama's declaration of a national pandemic emergency is "no cause for alarm," reported the mainstream media throughout the weekend. The declaration is nothing more than a "precaution," they say. "It's really more a continuation of our preparedness steps," said Anne Schuchat, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, in a USA Today story.

In other words, there's not really any emergency at all. So why declare a national emergency in the first place? The media reports this was done to allow hospitals to bypass federal regulations concerning the setting up of large-scale triage sites -- emergency medical camps quickly constructed to deal with large numbers of sick people.

But at the same time, H1N1 isn't causing large-scale sickness. As USA Today reported, an expert on infectious disease, P.J. Brennan (the chief medical officer for the Penn Health System at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia) said, "The public ought to take some solace, some relief in this. It's not a suggestion that things have deteriorated in any way. In no way is the virus more severe or more difficult to manage."

So let me get this straight. The H1N1 virus remains mild. The CDC reports that swine flu infections already peaked out in mid-October. There have been no new developments in swine flu that would be cause for alarm and no reason to suspect huge numbers of sick people flooding into the hospitals. And yet, for some reason, the Obama administration has declared a national pandemic emergency specifically for the purpose of speeding the ability of hospitals to process large masses of sick people through emergency medical triage tents?

What are these people not telling us?

Something doesn't add up here. Why would the U.S. government need to declare a national emergency to enable hospitals to handle a flood of sick people when there is no flood of sick people (and the pandemic seems to be fizzling out)?

This is more like the kind of preparation you might expect in advance of a biological terrorism attack, not for a flu that appears no more dangerous than the seasonal sniffles.

The National Emergencies Act and FEMA

Meanwhile, the media ignores the rest of the story about what dangerous powers a declaration of a national emergency puts into play. As reported here on NaturalNews, this declaration effectively ends many civil liberties in America and, at least on paper, puts the U.S. government in the position of having the legal authority to force vaccinations on the entire population at gunpoint (if they wanted to).

The National Emergencies Act passed in 1976 has some peculiar realities attached to it. In particular, as Wikipedia reports:

A federal emergency declaration allows the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to exercise its power to deal with emergency situations ... Typically, a state of emergency empowers the executive to name coordinating officials to deal with the emergency and to override normal administrative processes regarding the passage of administrative rules.

Got that yet? By declaring a national emergency, Obama invokes a set of laws that not only override important sections of the U.S. Constitution, but that also activate FEMA to take charge of "responding" to the emergency.

Now we know why they need all those emergency medical tent camps near the hospitals. FEMA's in charge! And if FEMA handles the swine flu pandemic in the same way the agency handled the Hurricane Katrina disaster, we may indeed need all those emergency triage tents after all.

Those of you who have been following the ongoing march to destroy the freedoms of the American People already know about FEMA camps. These aren't Boy Scout field trip camps; they're detention centers designed to hold large numbers of people for "emergency" purposes. Many theories abound on what these FEMA camps might be used for (www.campFEMA.com) (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index....).

They could conceivably be used to quarantine people who are infected with a dangerous pandemic virus. On the other hand, they might also be used to isolated and detain people who refuse to be vaccinated against any declared pandemic. Under the National Emergencies Act and related U.S. law, FEMA would have two years of near-total control over the civilian population, during which people could be subjected to forced vaccinations, mandatory searches of their homes, gunpoint detainment and "involuntary transportation" to a FEMA detainment facility, and so on.

I'm not saying they're going to do all this, but they could if they wanted to!

And that's not freedom. Real freedom means you have the guaranteed right to be safe from being detained, or arrested without cause, or injected with a government-mandated chemical. Under a declaration of a national emergency, your "freedom" is at the whim of those who maintain police state powers over you. You're only "free" if they decide to refrain from exercising the power they have over you. It's the same kind of freedom you might get as a peasant in some Medieval kingdom where the king says, "You're free to go."

Now, some of these freedom-restricting actions might conceivably be justifiable if a truly dangerous pandemic virus were sweeping through the population killing millions, causing huge disruptions in the national infrastructure and threatening the nation with a partial or total shutdown of essential services. But that is not happening here. H1N1 is a mild virus that rates astonishingly low on the severity scale. If H1N1 were a hurricane, it would be little more than a "tropical depression." It is not a category five hurricane, nor a phase six pandemic. Virtually everyone who is exposed to H1N1 generates their own antibodies and cures themselves naturally. According to hospital reports, those who have died from the H1N1 virus are almost exclusively people who were already suffering from preexisting conditions that compromised their health such as asthma or extreme obesity.

By any measure, H1N1 as currently configured appears to present no extraordinary threat to the health of the population. So once again, we must ask: Why declare a national emergency and initiate a FEMA response to something that's not really an emergency?

Why I'm concerned

For the first time in this whole pandemic situation, I'm concerned. Not due to the virus itself, because that's a mild virus that presents no real threat to the population at large. I'm concerned about what we don't know might be going on behind the scenes here.

These preparations for large-scale medical triage tents and the emergency activation of FEMA have me worried that the American people aren't being told the whole story. Perhaps a terrorist organization is planning on releasing a wildly dangerous mutation of H1N1 in some major U.S. city. Or perhaps some vaccine maker is, in fact, that terrorist organization. (The best way to sell more vaccines would be to release a mutated form of H1N1 into the population and scare up some more sales...)

Or maybe, as some creative thinkers have suggested, the vaccine itself IS a bioweapon, and the U.S. government is preparation for large-scale fatalities it expects to see soon.

Or maybe these are just fleeting, dark visions from crazy people, and the U.S. government is a benevolent organization with all our best interests in mind, and they're jumping through these bureaucratic hoops to make sure there are plenty of hospital beds to go 'round just in case more people get really sick.

But even that explanation doesn't hold water. A "national emergency declaration" isn't necessary to waive hospital tent rules. Obama could have easily accomplished the same thing with an Executive Order, without having to invoke the National Emergencies Act or put FEMA in charge at all.

He chose the emergency declaration for a specific reason. I guess we'll all have to wait and see what that real reason turns out to be.


Sources for this story include:

USA Today:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health...

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation...