CPB Is Intentionally Putting Lives at Risk by Withholding Flu Shots

By Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

In the earliest days of 1918 a virulent form of influenza (flu) developed and quickly spread around the globe where it killed between twenty-one million and one hundred million people. That great flu pandemic was given the misnomer of being the “Spanish Flu,”  but most people who have studied the health disaster now believe that it started in the central United States, most likely on a pig farm in Haskell County, Kansas.

The deadly virus soon found its way to the Army’s training center at Camp Funston, Kansas (a part of Ft. Riley), where more than 50,000 young men were being trained to fight in Europe.  Many became ill at Funston, while others eventually boarded ships for France not realizing that they were carrying the virus and laying the foundation for an international health disaster.  

The close proximity of the men at Camp Funston and on the ships proved to be ideal for incubating and spreading the flu virus.

Fast-forward a century:

Thousands of immigrants are being detained in crowded – and often unsanitary – holding cells and literal cages along the U.S. southern border.  Recent news stories have told about a lack of sanitary products such as soap and toothpaste at these facilities, and aid groups have been forced to go to court in order to secure these necessities.  Over the past year, three children have died from the flu in these family concentration camps.

Crowded conditions and unsanitary living conditions made the situation is ripe for an outbreak of the flu.  One thing the government could do to thwart the threat of a large-scale flu outbreak in these facilities would be to provide all of the detainees with flu shots. The Center for Disease Control (CDC), in fact, has recommended that everyone over the age of six-months receive a flu shot.

But another government agency is fighting that recommendation, at least with regard to detained immigrants.  Despite the fact that three children in its “care” have already died, the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) is refusing to allow the detained immigrants to receive flu shots.

Here is the problem: If there is an outbreak of flu at one of these facilities and the virus gets passed around through the dirty and crowded conditions, more deaths will occur and the unchecked virus is likely to mutate and strengthen before it is confronted by  modern medicine.  Detainees, even before they show signs of the flu, could be sent back to Mexico or Central America to spread the disease there as well, or they could be released into the United States and carry the virus with them to their new homes.  Also, workers at these detention centers will have been exposed to the virus and could be carriers as well.

The current issue of Popular Science (August 22, 2019) looks at this situation in an article by Nicole Wetsman entitled “Border detention centers won’t give vaccines, despite flu deaths and potential U.S. outbreaks.”  In it, she quotes Sandra Quinn, the chair of the Department of Family Science at the University of Maryland in discussing the vulnerability to the flu of children in the camps:

“There children are under enormous stress.  Their immune systems may not be able to fight in the way they would fight if they were getting good food and care and decent sleep."

Ms. Wetsman’s article also quotes Paul Spiegel, the director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University, who stressed the need for basic health precautions among the detained population at the border:

“Facilities should be provided with the same preventative health care that is standard in the country that the facilities are in.  In the United States, that would mean providing flu vaccinations per CDC recommendations, and taking additional care to offer the shots to people who might be at additional risk of complications, like children, the elderly, or people with other health conditions  Not offering vaccinations could lead to more outbreaks and more flu deahts, which usually only occur rarely.”

Spiegel added this ominous note:

“If we’re not taking the simple, fundamental steps (like flu shots), you have to wonder how well we’re doing on larger health issues.”

We are standing on the precipice of a  health disaster, a calamity that both history and science acknowledge, and yet the Customs and Border Patrol stands by smugly and refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation – nor take any actions to avert it.

It almost feels like somebody up the chain-of-command wants to see this vulnerable population decimated.  But a raging virus is no respecter of skin color or barbed wire, and if it takes hold, it will spread.

If fetuses are part of God's plan, then dirty little brown children probably are as well.