Jews and birds

On Colbert Report last night, there was an interview with Laurie Garrett, a woman who seems to know a fair bit about swine flu. (It was fairly amusing, and you can watch it here.)

One of the things she said, though, I didn't recall hearing before. It was that Indonesia, which has strains of the very worrisome bird flu, does not share information with the WHO because its Health minister believes that there is a US/Western/Jewish conspiracy to find new flus, make vaccines and force poor countries to buy them. (Colbert's response to this was pretty funny.)

This situation is perhaps even worse than that summary, as noted here:

Falling short of elaboration, Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said on Tuesday that the deadly swine flu virus could have been genetically engineered. She had earlier accused Western governments of making and spreading viruses in developing countries to boost pharmaceutical companies' profits.

Since 2006, Indonesia has refused to share all of its bird flu virus samples with WHO researchers, citing fears that the system is being abused by rich countries to produce profitable vaccines, which impoverished nations have to buy.

A more detailed account of the Health Minister's views can be found here. It does not mention Jewish conspiracy as a possible part of her reasoning, as did Colbert's guest, but it does say that "she is a member of the moderate Islamic mass movement Muhammadiyah, but has also reportedly cosied up to radicals such as the Islamist Hizbut Tahrir group, which believes in replacing Indonesia's secular government with a Muslim caliphate."

I see that in the Middle East, back in 2006, the Jewish - bird flu conspiracy appeared there:

... the Syrian state-controlled paper al-Tawhra asserted that Israel was responsible for the expanding bird flu phenomenon. It said Israel had spread the virus in the Far East to mislead the world while aiming to attack the Arabs.[2]

Damn those Jews are clever.

But seriously, it would be a disaster if belief in Jewish conspiracy contributes to the death of millions of people (including Muslims) due to delays in getting out a vaccine to combat a future mutated bird flu.

Maybe this needs covert operations: blacked up CIA agents who roam Indonesian farms at night, taking blood from chickens and ducks.