By Sherwood Ross
The tax-eating Pentagon war machine may have something to do with America’s mediocre showing on the list of the world’s healthiest nations.
Not only are billions in U.S. taxes going down the drain to finance wars the public doesn’t care about, (such as in Libya, for example,) but when the Pentagon gets 54 cents out of every discretionary tax dollar to make wars, the public is being cheated out of research money that could be invested in medical research to extend human life.
According to the CIA’s own “Factbook,” the U.S. ranks 43rd in life expectancy on the list of nations at 78.74 years. That’s just behind No. 42 Turks and Cairos Islands, at 79.69 years. FYI, Monaco ranks first at 89.52 years, followed by No. 2, Japan, at 84.74, and No. 3, Singapore, at 84.68.
Also ahead of America are No. 13, Australia, 82; No. 14, Italy, 82; No. 15, Sweden, 81; No. 18, Canada, 81; No. 19, France, 81; No. 20, Norway, 81; No. 30, Finland, 80; No. 32, Germany, 80; and No. 33, UK, 80.
A perennial killer of Americans is influenza, which claims about 36,000 lives annually. To combat this, the U.S. spends $250-300 million a year on research.
Much more important to President Obama, apparently, are deaths from biological warfare on which the U.S. spends about 10 times as much as it does on influenza. As germ warfare kills zero Americans each year, it raises the suspicions these dollars are going to advance the illegal, aggressive, germ warfare research the Pentagon is not advertising.
According to PBS, “Today…American scientists continue to conduct ongoing research on biological agents. Since 2001 the U.S. government has spent or allocated more than $50 billion to address the threat of biological weapons, including an effort to develop an even deadlier strain of the anthrax virus to test against current vaccines. Scientists are also working on vaccines against the smallpox virus, which has been eradicated worldwide since 1980.”
PBS makes it sound as though Pentagon research is defensive by nature. If so, why is USG, (incredibly!) working to bring back vanished smallpox if not for offensive use? As for anthrax, the last known user of this virus was someone inside the Pentagon’s own Fort Detrick, Md., research center who mailed it out (Amerithrax) and killed five persons and infected 17 others to intensify the panic following 9/11.
Looking at the 2012 U.S. budget, Research!America concluded, “As federal funding for medical and health R&D remains effectively stagnant, other countries are rapidly and doggedly increasing their capacity. China, Japan, Singapore, Sweden, Mexico, the U.K. and Germany are among those accelerating investment in medical and health R&D.”
In his best-selling book, “Chasing Life,” (2007) Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent for CNN, writes how Dr. Anthony Atala at Wake Forest University in Winston- Salem, N.C., made history “growing a new bladder using a patient’s own cells” and became “the first scientist to grow a human organ in a laboratory and transplant it into a human.” However, Dr. Gupta adds, “There is plenty of research still to be done before organs more complicated than the bladder are grown in the lab.”
The promise is that “Growing a new heart or kidney or liver from stem cells would result in a new organ free of any risk of rejection,” Dr. Gupta writes. He also writes of a coming time when “microscopic nanobots will navigate through our bloodstreams, combating pathogens, correcting DNA mutations, and reversing the aging process.”
For now, though, President Obama is giving the Pentagon virtually everything it needs to launch wars of aggression, including funding for an estimated 800 military bases abroad at a cost of about $150-billion a year. By contrast, all the other nations of the world combined have just 30. America’s overseas military empire, of course, is in addition to about 1,000 bases on our own soil. Mr. Obama has also authorized a $1 trillion outlay to make USA’s nuclear arsenal deadlier, even though when initially campaigning for the White House he called for a nuclear-free world. Maybe if the U.S. closed down its foreign bases and started to audit the Pentagon’s operations, there would be more tax dollars devoted to extending life.
International legal authority Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, Champaign, says, since 9/11/2001 the so-called National Institutes for Health (NIH) have been up to their eyeballs in death science work and could, as a tribute to George Orwell, appropriately be renamed the National Institutes of Death. “You cannot factually accept anything NIH/NID or the World Health Organization are telling you about Zika, Ebola, MERS, SARS, Anthrax, Smallpox, etc.,” Boyle says, adding, “Caveat lector!” (Let the reader beware.)
Boyle, America’s foremost legal authority on germ warfare, says, “Overall I have read a figure that there about 13,000 death scientists in America today doing dirty biowarfare work who perversely call themselves “life scientists.” Doctor Mengele would be proud of them all! (Dr. Josef Mengele was a Nazi physician who performed inhuman medical experiments on concentration camp victims during the Hitler era.) “Seventy years after World War II ended the Nazis have won,” Boyle says.
Sherwood Ross, who formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News and several wire services, is a Miami-based public relations consultant for worthy causes. Reach him at sherwoodross@gmail.com. Boyle is author of “The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence” (Clarity Press Inc.)
Sherwood Ross is an award-winning reporter. He served in the U.S Air Force where he contributed to his base newspaper. He later worked for The Miami Herald and Chicago Daily News. He contributed a weekly column on working for a major wire service. He is also an editorial and book publicist. He currently resides in Florida.
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