It was hardly a coincidence that at the same time the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, created a webpage dedicated to avian flu and subsequently ran exercises in preparation for the possible use of U.S. military forces in a continental domestic emergency involving avian flu or pandemic influenza.Dr. David Nabarro, WHO executive director of sustainable development and health environments, was appointed the first U.N. system influenza coordinator. In 2005, Nabarro said during a press conference that his number one priority was to prepare for the H5N1 virus, known as the avian flu. Nabarro played into the global fear that an epidemic was inevitable.
“I’m not, at the moment at liberty to give you a prediction on numbers, but I just want to stress, that, let’s say, the range of deaths could be anything from 5 to 150 million,” said Nabarro. On March 8, 2006, during a U.N. press conference Nabarro predicted an outbreak of the H5N1 virus would “reach the Americas within the next six to 12 months.”
On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stoked the fear of a global flu pandemic. He said the Mexican flu outbreak is the “first test” of the “pandemic preparedness work undertaken by the international community over the past three years.” Ban Ki-moon said if “we are indeed facing a pandemic, we need to demonstrate global solidarity. In our interconnected world, no nation can deal with threats of such dimension on its own.”
For Ki-moon and the global elite, “global solidarity” in “our interconnected world” translates into yet another push for world government. Ki-moon’s dire warning falls on the heels of the G20 summit where plans were announced for implementing the creation of a new global currency to replace the U.S. dollar’s role as the world reserve currency. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others repeatedly called for “global governance” and a “New World Order.”
The current flu pandemic hype serves as punctuation mark between the G20 held in London and the upcoming one to be held in Italy in June. “The G20 summit has agreed to try to kick start stalled Doha trade liberalization talks at the next G8 meeting,” Reuters reported on April 2. So-called “trade liberalization” is code for the neoliberal plan to “privatize” public and private industries around the world, impose “flexibilisation” of labour markets (create massive unemployment), “deregulate” consumer and financial markets, and foster foreign buyouts, layoffs, wage cuts, transient employment, higher prices, and potentially destabilizing capital flows.