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March 23, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
45:52
Pandemic Preparedness FREE Online How-To Course: Episode 13
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Welcome to episode 13 of pandemic preparedness here at biodefense.com.
I'm your host, Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
In so many cases, things that I've predicted that sounded crazy At first, have come true.
This is true in health.
I was talking about the cancer preventive effects of vitamin D years before the mainstream media would dare even talk about that.
I talked about the rise of superbugs years before they really became an acknowledged problem.
And even in this course, I predicted many of the things that have unfolded, such as Ebola arriving in America, even though it happened faster than I thought it would.
I predicted the quarantines, the medical martial law.
The food shortages in Sierra Leone and so many other elements of this that are unfolding almost exactly as I predicted and warned in this course.
Remember, most of the episodes here on Biodefense.com were posted before Ebola was ever diagnosed in patient zero in Dallas, Texas.
So you can go back and review some of that to see that, wow, we saw this coming.
But this chapter is about the economic consequences of this pandemic and I've got an interesting track record I'll share with you briefly about making financial predictions.
Not all the predictions I make come true, but the big ones have all come true.
For example, in 1998 and 99 I began really warning people to sell their stocks in the dot-com bubble which burst in 2001 and hurt a lot of people most Americans who have retirement funds today got hurt in the dot-com crash but I was warning people And I remember when I was warning people in 1999 that I was told,
you're crazy, the laws of economics have changed, the stock market will never come down, it will keep going up, up, up forever, and of course I knew that wasn't going to be the case, there was going to be a correction.
So I warned people, everybody said, you're crazy, and then of course the crash happened and then nobody wanted to admit That they lost anything for a while.
No, it wasn't me.
I sold before the crash, right?
Yeah.
And then, of course, I warned about the housing bubble, which crashed in roughly 2006, 2007 timeframe.
Very publicly warned about that.
I also, I'm the guy who publicly predicted the crash of Bitcoin in 2013.
I was on the radio show talking about how Bitcoin was overpriced, and it crashed within 24 hours, losing over 50% of its value, which was about $2 billion at the time.
And by the way, I'm an advocate of Bitcoin now.
It was just overpriced at the time, so I'm not anti-Bitcoin.
I actually really like the concept of a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that is not controlled by a central bank.
So I think it's a cool concept.
But what I'm here to warn you about today is the economic consequences of Ebola spreading throughout the United States.
Very few people have thought ahead this far.
And what you're about to hear is quite shocking because it is my belief, and I'll lay out why, That Ebola, if it spreads in America, it would catalyze the global economic collapse that has long been coming.
It's been imminent for a long time because of the currency manipulations, the global debt pyramid schemes, the derivatives held by banks, all the heavily leveraged banking fiascos and even criminal conduct.
And we saw a hint of that in late 2008 when we almost had a global banking collapse.
It was saved Only by a last minute bailout.
We had the long-term capital management bailout before that, LTCM. We've got the Fed pumping billions of dollars into the banking system every month just to keep it afloat.
But Ebola could end all of that and cause a financial crash very easily.
And I'm going to explain to you why that is.
And to start, it's useful to look at what is happening in Liberia and Sierra Leone right now, today, because obviously that is a microcosm of what could be unleashed in a much larger nation like the United States.
And in Liberia, for example, they had a mandated three-day lockdown of the entire country.
They completely shut down the economy and told everyone to stay home, don't go to work.
Now this, of course, shut down all the trade, the commerce, the banking, People couldn't buy food, people couldn't sell food, so people who made money selling food couldn't make money, so they couldn't buy their meals.
And so this caused a massive shutdown in the economy for three days, from which Liberians are still not fully recovered.
But the bigger lesson is happening over in Sierra Leone.
We're about two million people are now under quarantine because the government has isolated entire regions with literally two million people inside.
And they've said, well, this is an isolation zone now and no one is going to be allowed in or out until, in their own words, the, quote, chain of transmission is halted.
I think that's what they said.
I think that was the top government official of Sierra Leone who said that.
And so what you have then in a quarantine zone, you immediately halt the importation of groceries and food supplies for a couple of reasons.
Number one, because of course there's a quarantine and the military won't let those trucks in or out.
But secondly, you also have truck drivers making rational decisions asking themselves, do I want to even attempt to deliver food to the quarantine zone?
And the answer is usually no, unless they're just desperate for a paycheck.
Maybe they should get combat pay or something for going into these zones.
So the truck drivers are obviously going to say no as well, and that would be the same decision in the United States.
Let's say if there were a city under quarantine, let's just pick a city.
I always pick a random city for this, but let's say Denver.
Let's say Denver's under quarantine, and no one is allowed in or out.
Do you think a truck driver is going to drive into Denver voluntarily just for the normal everyday pay that truck drivers get, which is not that great to begin with?
No, the only drivers that are going to drive into there are those ordered to do so by their military commanders.
So it's going to be, you know, Army and National Guard or State Guard or something like that.
Those are the only people who are going to do it because they have no choice.
So in Sierra Leone, then, we start to see immediately food shortages, massive food shortages taking place.
And Liberia, meanwhile, has descended into what the Washington Post called, quote, economic hell.
The economy has just absolutely collapsed in Liberia.
And now in Sierra Leone, it's on the way toward collapse.
And what else is happening in Sierra Leone is that farmers are staying home.
They're refusing to harvest the crops that are growing in the fields because they don't want to be out and about and exposed to Ebola, so they're staying home.
And so food is not getting harvested, which means obviously it's not getting delivered to the people.
It's not getting into the marketplaces.
It's not getting into the grocery stores.
And of course with the collapse of the food, the farming economy, This has a massive ripple effect.
The people who work on the farms, maybe they owe money to somebody else or they were going to spend money with somebody else.
You know, there's what's called a velocity of money in the money supply.
It has to do with how rapidly any given unit of money is turned over and re-spent on something else.
So in a typical economy that is a third world developing economy, Money velocity is very rapid because savings rates are extremely low.
So people earn money today that they spend tonight or they earn money today that they spend tomorrow.
So money velocity is very, very high, which has a multiplication effect rippling through the economy, creating the financial sustainability for many, many people throughout that whole chain of transactions to be able to live and sustain themselves economically.
In other words, in order to be able to put a roof over their heads, buy food, pay whatever bills they have to pay, purchase basic clothing and things like that.
So when you stop one sector of that economy, which is farming in this case, you stop the velocity of that money moving through the entire economy and rippling through the hands and the transactions of so many people down the line.
You don't just lose the economic productivity of the farm, you lose the economic output of that entire chain.
Where the velocity of money is reflected and even amplified throughout the economy.
That's why economies that are more complex and that are more interdependent economically are far more subject to collapse than economies which are very, very, let's say, simple, basic, agrarian, low money velocity, low economic transactions.
Countries like that would be Papua New Guinea would be a classic example of that.
Papua New Guinea is very resilient economically because it doesn't have a very highly complex economy.
It's an agrarian society, so it can collapse back to a state where most people grow their own food because that's what they do all the time anyway.
So now consider the United States of America.
How would you describe this economy?
The United States is obviously a first world nation, very highly developed economy, but also highly specialized.
In other words, most people don't grow their own food.
I think only about one or two percent of the population are farmers, for example.
Most people get their food from somewhere else and they engage in a specialized skill set Maybe they're an electrical engineer.
Maybe they work on cars.
They're a mechanic.
Maybe they're a brain surgeon in a hospital.
Maybe they're a lawyer.
They have specialized skills.
And their ability to survive depends on them being able to acquire, make transactions and acquire funds in exchange for their skills so that they then use those funds to trade for the other things that they need to biologically survive, which include food, water, heat, medicine perhaps, clothing, shelter, all those other things.
The more specialized the society, in other words, the more you have very highly educated people doing very, very type of niche operations, research, manufacturing, academia, administration, all these types of activities, the more subject that society is to a systemic collapse from the loss of one sector because you have a systemic fragility.
To that economy.
High specialization, by definition, means low redundancy.
So the more specialized your population is in terms of their expertise, the less redundant they are.
For example, if the power grid went down in America today, how many people could farm tomorrow and start growing their own food?
The answer is very, very few.
So unlike Papua New Guinea, which most people could just go out and start farming again, in the United States of America, most people would have no idea where to even start for farming.
Many people have no soil to even farm with in the first place.
So...
Keep this in mind.
High specialization means low redundancy, which means high systemic risk of collapse during any kind of a large insult or threat to the interconnectedness of a first world society.
Now then, with that explained, let's turn the page to understanding the response of the business community in the United States to the current outbreak.
Now this response is perhaps best exemplified by the words of, I think it's United Airlines, but it's one of the commercial airlines, on which Eric Duncan, or Thomas Eric Duncan is his name, Patient Zero, on which he flew.
So he flew out of Liberia, I believe it was, to Brussels and then to the Washington D.C. airport and then to the Dallas airport.
And he obviously took commercial airlines to do this.
So the commercial airline company responded to inquiries from the media about this.
Their answer was there is, quote, zero risk of transmission to other passengers on the airplane.
Zero.
Zero.
Zero is a really astonishing number.
There's a fascinating mathematical history of zero.
It was a concept that actually early humans couldn't really quite grasp.
And even to this day, it is somewhat of a mystery.
For example, what is two divided by zero?
The answer is a concept that the human mind cannot grasp.
But the airline says there's zero risk of transmission.
That is astonishing because That airplane carried a person who was infected with Ebola, and Ebola is transmissible through aerosols.
If this person had been symptomatic and sneezed or coughed or bled a little bit, throwing up in the airplane bathroom, for example, who knows what, then obviously he could have transmitted that disease to someone else.
So clearly the risk was not zero.
It was something greater than zero.
Granted, it might have been very, very small.
The risk might be one in a thousand.
Not small enough, but still pretty small.
Maybe it was as big as one in a hundred.
Or maybe as small as one in a million.
But it wasn't zero.
So why did the airlines say zero?
Here's the answer.
The airline industry must now embrace a public relations philosophy of denial for the simple reason that if people become afraid to fly on airplanes, the airline industry will collapse virtually overnight.
The commercial airline industry is, on any given day, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy anyway.
It's very difficult to make money as an airline.
You've got the pilot unions to deal with, the flight attendant unions, the baggage handler unions.
You've got the incredible cost of fuel, which is I think the number one cost of commercial air transportation.
And then obviously you have to buy and maintain the airplanes as well.
And there are a lot of other regulations and things to go through.
It's a very costly, high overhead type of business.
If you have a loss of as little as 10% of commercial airline traffic, some of these airlines begin to really go into bankruptcy.
And if you had a pandemic scare where, let's say, it was confirmed that somebody caught Ebola on a commercial flight, you would probably see commercial flights reduced by a lot more than 10% just because people would decide for themselves not to fly on commercial airlines.
So the airlines must maintain a state of denial, saying essentially it's impossible to catch Ebola on an airplane, which is a ludicrous idea because of course it's possible.
In fact, it's probably more likely there than most other places because everybody's sharing the same air.
That air is recirculated throughout the cabin.
You're in an enclosed space.
You're locked in a giant aluminum cylinder for the duration of the flight.
And you can't get out.
If somebody starts convulsing and vomiting in the seat behind you, there is no option to exit the airplane immediately.
You have to obviously wait for it to land and then deplane at that time.
By that time, you may have taken a thousand breaths and you may already be infected.
So of course it's possible for Ebola to spread on an airplane.
I'm not saying that it has happened, we don't have any evidence of that yet, but it is theoretically, of course, quite possible.
It may be one of the primary vectors of transmission if this thing goes, spreads across the country.
But every business, including the airline business, has to first think about its own self-preservation.
Businesses want to survive.
And so they have to put out information that attempts to protect their interests.
And if that means denying the reality of Ebola transmission, then that's what they're going to do.
So of course this is a great disservice to humanity because what happens if people being misinformed actually board a commercial flight where someone is sick with Ebola and symptomatic and then a whole lot of people get infected And then they all connect to their flights at some major airport such as Dallas-Fort Worth.
And then you've now spread Ebola all over the country or maybe all over the world yet again.
And that could be traced directly back to the airlines giving passengers bad information when in fact maybe they would have been more responsible to tell the truth.
But you can't rely on corporations to tell the truth.
They're going to lie whenever they can to protect their own interests.
But this is not about airlines.
That was just one example.
What I'd like you to do right now is to think about all of the businesses in your community or across the country that depend on the public perception of safety in crowds.
I'm going to repeat that.
Think about all the businesses, all the industries that depend on the public perception of safety in crowds.
Airlines are just one of them.
But let's look at some other sectors.
What about restaurants?
Who's going to go out to eat in the middle of an Ebola pandemic?
Right?
Big question.
So you have the restaurant industry, which is, of course, going to say, it's safe to come to the Olive Garden, let's say, and eat with us.
We're Ebola-free.
Maybe they'll put a little logo on the door.
Ebola-free dining.
Yeah.
Right next to the Wi-Fi sticker.
Free Wi-Fi and Ebola free.
What about gyms?
You go to your favorite Gold's Gym to work out.
What do you have there at Gold's Gym?
Well you have people sweating, which can carry Ebola by the way, sweating all over the gym equipment.
You've got sweat flinging on the floor.
You've got people coughing, people sneezing.
A gym is a highly infectious environment, potentially, and many, many common illnesses, such as the winter flu and so on, spread through gymnasiums.
So what about the gym industry?
They're going to, of course, insist also, well, it's safe to come to our gym.
There's no evidence of Ebola in our gym.
They'll say things like that.
Well, we have no evidence that anyone has ever been infected.
Yeah, because they're not looking.
They're not screening people.
So how could they ever have any evidence?
How could they know?
It's like covering your eyes and saying, we have no evidence of anything.
We're not looking.
Of course you're not going to find evidence.
What about movie theaters?
Granted, they're not as big a part of the economy as they used to be thanks to Netflix, but people still do go to movies occasionally, and movie theaters obviously would be a place for these kinds of things to spread.
Think about sporting events, things that people do to go out for entertainment.
A football stadium, a baseball stadium, a soccer stadium, an ice hockey rink.
Any of these kinds of things, concerts, theater, symphony events.
When people go out, they go out in crowds, typically.
And crowds is where Ebola spreads.
So if Ebola begins to really take hold in a city, it's going to shut down these types of events because people are going to make rational decisions to stay home.
Now, what else is going to happen?
Tourism.
Tourism is going to be a big part of this, especially if Ebola is found in, let's say, one specific part of the country or one specific city, but not another.
Right now, Ebola is in Dallas, Texas.
And of course, the Texas tourism authorities are probably having a meeting right this very hour and talking about strategies to make sure that they say tourism is safe in Texas, which as of this moment, it most certainly is.
Unless your tour guide takes you to the apartment of the Duncan family in North Dallas, where obviously there's Ebola.
So unless you're swinging by there or going by the hospital, you're probably safe to do your touring in Texas.
You want to come in and visit Austin, Texas?
It's perfectly safe for now.
But if Ebola begins to really spread through Dallas, because, you know, they're monitoring 100 people in Dallas to see if they're going to be symptomatic.
And you've got Duncan's family that's obviously been exposed.
You've got paramedics.
You've got those dudes that were cleaning the vomit off the sidewalk with pressure washers and wearing no protective gear whatsoever.
Better keep an eye on those guys, too.
So you may have other infections in Dallas, and if that begins to spread, you're going to have people saying, well, maybe I don't want to go to Dallas.
And if it spreads from Dallas to another city like Houston...
Or El Paso or San Antonio or whatever, then you're going to get the whole state being flagged as Ebola Central, and of course tourism is going to just shut down at that point, which is horrible for the tourism economy.
And Texas, like many states, depends a lot on tourism dollars to come in.
Heck, you've got the whole South by Southwest thing happening in Austin.
I think that happens every spring, if I'm not mistaken.
That's not my thing.
I don't go there, but a lot of people do from all over the world.
Well, what if there's, I don't know, 50 cases of Ebola in Austin a month before South by Southwest?
And that's going to be South by South gone because no one's going to show up and party in Ebola Central.
You see what I'm saying?
Now, there's one other sector of the economy that I really need to mention here, and that is public transportation.
So, everywhere that you have public transportation, you have the opportunity for a pandemic virus to spread.
This is especially true in subways.
And that's because subways, well, they tend to be mostly underground.
And of course, when they're underground, they don't have ultraviolet light from the sun.
Ultraviolet light is Mother Nature's natural antiviral medicine in the sense that when the virus comes into contact with ultraviolet light, it destroys the viability of the protein chains that make up the virus.
I'm not saying that if you just expose yourself to sunlight, you're going to be cured, but if the virus is on a surface outside and sunlight hits it, it kills that virus very, very quickly.
And I use the term kills in a vague way.
Obviously, viruses are not actually alive.
They're not fully functioning cellular organisms like amoeba or bacteria.
They're not alive at all.
They're actually just fragments of genetic code.
So, I'd like you to think ahead now with me and project all of this into a possible future, because that's what we're exploring here is what happens if the pandemic begins to really, really spread across America.
And it's going to get into places like New York City, probably, if it spreads, because New York City, obviously, is a hub of travel and traffic, and New York City has a subway.
And a subway is a place where this virus would be very, very successful in transmitting itself or replicating itself, which is what it does.
That's its only purpose here, I guess, is to replicate.
It's almost like a computer virus, right?
Obviously, that's where the term computer virus came from, was biological viruses, but it just wants to self-replicate.
It'll do that very well in a subway system in a city like New York.
So what would happen then?
Well, of course, before long, authorities would shut down the public transportation systems, right?
Or the people would just decide for themselves, hey, I'm not taking the subway.
And are they going to get into a taxi cab?
Well, no, because taxi cabs, that's how Ebola spread in Sierra Leone.
Are they going to get on a city bus?
Well, not really.
It's the same risk as the subway, for the most part.
A lot of people in close proximity sharing...
Sharing perhaps sneezes and coughs and being in close proximity to each other.
Obviously it's a very good environment for a virus to spread.
So if you think of any form of public transportation, all of them have in common the potential to spread a viral pandemic, which means all of them will be suspect.
All of them will come to be completely untrusted by the public if there are confirmed cases of the virus spreading through public transportation.
So remember, we talked about airlines and that's commercial transportation and it spreads or has the potential to spread in airplanes.
But it also, of course, has the potential to spread throughout all forms of public transportation.
Taxi cabs, buses, subways, airplanes, trains, you know, trains in New York.
So whatever the case may be, isn't it BART in San Francisco?
Isn't that a, that's a transportation system.
Can you get Ebola on BART? Yeah, sure you can.
Alright, so now take this one step further.
What happens if...
Well, let's back up a little bit.
Public transportation serves what purpose?
Primarily, it allows all the workers to get to work and put in their 8, 9, 10, 12, 15 hours and then go back home.
So it is the system that provides the labor force for the economy.
What economy?
Well, virtually the entire economy.
So you've got banking operations, all the logistics planning, corporate offices of everything imaginable, you know, from real estate to legal services to import-export companies, food production, you know, food processing, distribution, trucking, and transportation.
Everything that you can imagine Requires, currently, requires people to come to work and show up and actually do the work.
That's why people have jobs, right?
Well, if people stay home because public transportation isn't working, then I ask you, what happens to all of these businesses?
Well, they crater.
They shut down.
They shut down.
The jobs don't get done.
People aren't there at work because you can't trust public transportation.
And so the businesses begin to collapse, and this is exactly what is happening in Liberia and in Sierra Leone right now, which is why we're going to be facing mass starvation in those countries in the winter and springtime.
So expect to see headlines.
The United Nations saying, well, we now have a starvation crisis.
We have a food crisis in these countries, and we're going to have to start donating lots and lots of food.
When you see those headlines, just remember, you heard it here first.
I told you that's coming.
That is inevitable.
I can already see that on the radar.
Not difficult to make that prediction.
But in America then, what happens when you have companies where no workers are able to show up?
The companies shut down.
You shut down everything.
In that case, everything from defense contractors who are making the guided missiles to airplane parts manufacturers, auto parts manufacturers, import-export companies already mentioned.
So suddenly you have a national economy, which is, remember, highly specialized and less redundant?
now you have a systemic a systemic insult to that economy which is the lack of workers you can't run a national economy today without workers believe me that's the only reason that businesses value workers at all they need you to keep themselves going if they could replace you with a robot they would have done it long ago and that day may be coming actually in a few decades
but it's not here yet so they need you today when you're not there or when another 100 million workers across the economy are not there things shut down Things start to crater.
How much redundancy or cushion is there in the business community in America?
How many businesses could survive 30 days, 60 days, 90 days with no workers, no income, no revenues, no profits, but they still have all their overhead?
Right?
They're still supposed to be making debt payments.
They're supposed to be paying back the bank.
They're supposed to be paying their suppliers.
They're supposed to be paying the local electric bill.
So they've got all these bills they're supposed to be paying, which gets back to what we talked about before, the velocity of money moving through multiple layers of transactions throughout the economy.
But now you've got a company that can't make any of those payments because it's got no revenues.
So what happens?
The company stops making payments, perhaps declares bankruptcy or perhaps just does nothing because there might be so many companies declaring bankruptcy all at once that bankruptcy courts couldn't even possibly handle it.
Maybe there'll be a giant national financial amnesty declared.
All debts are now gone.
It might come down to some radical solution like that by the end of this if it really gets out of control.
But you're going to have this ripple effect of losses throughout the economy.
So the company, no workers show up.
The company can't pay its bills.
The supplier that was supplying us then doesn't get the revenue that it was depending on to be able to pay its bills.
And plus, its workers aren't showing up either.
So it can't pay its bills.
And actually what happens is the reverse of abundance.
What you have is an unraveling Kind of a negative motion collapse of abundance that ripples its way backwards through the velocity of money, causing a ripple effect, a domino effect of bankruptcies to just wash out.
Any businesses that were on the edge, which are most, frankly.
And that's just the commercial side of this.
Think about the personal slash family side of this.
If 100 million people can't go to work, then they're not going to get paid.
And they're especially not going to get paid because their employer is probably bankrupt within 30 days anyway, for the reasons I just mentioned.
So people who had good jobs, they were paying their bills, Well, for the most part, if they're American, they were barely paying their bills.
They were just barely getting by.
They owe money to the bank.
They owe money to the car company.
They owe money on personal credit cards and other types of loans, personal loans.
Now they've got no income coming in because they're not allowed to go to work.
Maybe there's a quarantine, maybe there's isolation order in place, or they just don't want to go on public transportation for obvious reasons.
So now they're not earning money.
They can't make their payments.
So then what happens?
Well, the banks that loan the money to all these people, the banks then suddenly also go into bankruptcy.
What happens if five million home loans fail?
In the same three-month period across the U.S. economy, you get a banking collapse is what you get.
We saw a preview of that back in 2006 and 2007 based on the housing bubble collapse.
But that was small compared to what would be coming in an Ebola pandemic.
You also get credit card companies suddenly taking on massive amounts of losses.
You get a massive tidal wave of personal bankruptcies which again would overwhelm the courts, overwhelm the financial system.
The personal expenditures also, of course, drive this economy.
It's people going out to restaurants and buying food and buying gasoline, fuel, energy.
It's people buying clothes.
It's people buying all of these things.
Cars.
Whatever people buy, they won't be able to purchase anymore because they're not making an income, because they're not going to work.
And the number of people in America who have enough savings To be able to keep spending the way they normally have, even though they're making zero income, that's a very, very small number.
Most people are living paycheck to paycheck.
It's not quite as bad as in the third world nations where they're living day to day, and sometimes you've got to pay people every day.
But in America, people are normally living paycheck to paycheck, and they're just barely getting by.
And if they miss one paycheck, it is an absolute crisis, and they can't make their payments from that point forward.
And now I save the most important example here for last, and that is the medical system.
First of all, the medical system, hospitals, clinics, this is, of course, where Ebola spreads first.
That's where it spread in Liberia and Sierra Leone and Guinea.
And that's where it still may threaten to spread in Nigeria.
So hospitals are hubs of viral transmission.
We know this because they are the places where superbugs like MRSA already spread, completely uncontrolled, showing you, proving to you that hospital staff are incapable of stopping the spread of pandemic disease in hospitals.
We already know they can't control it.
We also know there are only a very small number of biohazard isolation rooms in hospitals across the United States.
Hospitals, it's hard for them to stay in business as well because they're not getting paid.
Yeah, they provide a lot of services, but they rarely get paid.
Some people have no insurance.
Other people have government insurance, which is really, really bad, and may only pay a hospital 30% of the amount they actually bill to, let's say, Medicare, for example.
Even more so, hospitals of course depend on staff to be able to function.
What is a hospital without nurses and doctors and physicians assistants and administrators?
It's nothing but a giant tomb, right?
Because you need those people to keep it up and running.
So now what happens again if you've got public transportation is either shut down or avoided, you can't get people to the hospital to work there Plus, the patients aren't paying because they're all broke, because they're not able to go to their jobs, and at the same time, you've got a pandemic spreading like crazy, so you have a massive influx of urgent need patients showing up at the emergency room who are symptomatic and spreading Ebola.
This, my friends, this is a worst-case scenario, and I hope and pray that this never happens.
But if it does, you can expect hospitals will be almost immediately bankrupt out of business, completely incapable of helping anybody else.
They will simply have signs at the parking lot that say, turn around and go home.
We can't help you.
We're all 100% full.
There's nothing that we can do.
That's going to be the end result of a pandemic in America if it gets out of control and really starts to spread in a major city.
Hospitals will have no way to function.
Now, right now about 20% of the U.S. economy is based on health care.
Yeah, I know it's a huge number, but there's so much money spent on disease management and sickness care, I can't even really call it health care, that it drives a significant portion of the economy.
And this is money that's driven through hospitals, clinics, and of course pharmacies.
And in a pandemic outbreak, it's difficult to see how any of these continue to function for all the reasons I just mentioned.
You know, who's going to go out and get their pharmaceuticals?
How are you even going to import the drugs?
Most drugs sold in America by U.S. companies are actually manufactured somewhere else like India or Puerto Rico is a very, very common place to have drugs manufactured.
How are you going to get them in?
These are questions that not many people have considered.
So, the bottom line solution to all of this in terms of personal preparedness, and that's why I mention all of this, is, number one, if this pandemic begins to spread, you may need to very seriously reconsider your financial savings and investment plans.
If you are invested in the stock market, for example, Well, you could lose a lot of money because corporate profits could be really wiped out across the board in a nationwide pandemic for all the reasons I mentioned.
How are these companies going to make money?
Who's going to stay profitable?
You may want to have some of your personal savings in other more resilient forms.
For example, farmland is always going to have some kind of value.
Real estate may not be a great investment because if you lose half the population, then you obviously lose half the demand for real estate.
So real estate may actually get really, really cheap if there is a large number of fatalities in a pandemic.
Things that people need during a pandemic would be great stores of wealth.
Those would tend to be things like medical supplies, obviously, but they're big and bulky.
But also, typically self-defense items like firearms and ammunition, believe it or not, would probably be extremely valuable for barter or for sale in these types of scenarios.
Just depending on how good of a job the local law enforcement can do in keeping the peace or how well behaved the citizens decide to be, which may vary from region to region.
I don't think East L.A. is going to have the same result as Austin, Texas.
You know, Austin folks are pretty orderly, except on Saturday night on 6th Street.
Different story.
You may also want to consider investments in companies that might actually do well in a pandemic situation.
For example, Who manufactures all these latex gloves or imports them?
Who makes these medical supplies, isolation gowns?
DuPont makes the Tyvek bodysuits.
DuPont is probably going to do very well in this.
Personally, I don't invest in DuPont because they grow a lot of GMOs or they sell GMOs, so they violate the ethics that I adhere to.
I wouldn't invest in them, but some other people may want to.
My point is, you may want to reconsider your investments.
I'm not a financial advisor, obviously, and you need to think about this for yourself and what your goals are.
But if you're thinking that you're just going to put money in the stock market and the stock market is just going to keep going up forever and ever and ever, that delusion may be completely shattered in an Ebola outbreak.
Because you've got to ask yourself, how are these corporations supposed to make money if they've got no workers?
And one of the last points on the financial preparedness side of this is that it would be a great idea to have some cash on hand.
Because if the banks aren't really functioning correctly, you probably can't go into your bank and get a cash withdrawal.
You probably can't cash a check.
You probably can't get money out of the ATM for very long because everybody else is going to be there getting money out of the ATM. It's probably Ebola all over the keypad or touchscreen anyway.
Maybe you better bring a little hand sanitizer with you.
Spray that sucker down with some bleach before you start typing away on your pin there.
Wouldn't that be a funny image?
People driving up and spraying it.
There's probably people who do that already, and you know what?
They're smart to do so.
So these are the kinds of things that you really need to think about.
Do you have cash on hand?
Are your investments immune to a massive loss of productivity and profitability across the economy?
Are you invested in some industry that is extremely vulnerable To a loss of the public trust in the safety of gathering in crowds.
For example, if your money is in restaurants, if your money is in airlines, if your money is in transportation companies, or any of those other examples I mentioned, sporting events, for example, then you may want to really seriously rethink that if this pandemic begins to spread.
Now, I realize that at the time I'm recording this, there's only one confirmed case in Dallas, Texas, and that's it in the country.
But chances are there are going to be more and more cases in other cities.
So what I'm trying to do is help you really, really think ahead.
And again, my intention and my hope is that these scenarios that we're exploring here never come to pass.
We don't want, obviously, we don't want massive death and massive suffering.
But if it does happen, then we want you to be as protected as possible.
And that means you need to consider the financial aspects of this.
How can you be safe financially?
How can you prepare your investments or savings?
For a pandemic, and how can you make sure you have enough cash on hand in order to be able to barter and trade with people?
Now, of course, gold is always a great option.
Gold and silver, precious metals always have inherent value, and if you know someone who can get you some gold at a good fair price, It might be worth considering that as well.
But I do think that cash will continue to be effective.
This is not, at first at least, it's not a crash of the faith in the money system.
This is a crash of the faith in the safety of crowds, which has an economic impact.
But this is not the complete downfall of the money system.
Although, interestingly, one could lead to another.
The collapse of the economy could lead to the collapse of the money supply.
But that is a more long-term type of possibility, and it's very unclear the dynamics of that.
In the meantime, cash will very likely remain completely viable because most people's trust in green money will continue to be in place.
And remember, cash has value solely because people have faith in those green pieces of paper with holograms and tracking strips that are called dollars.
And as long as people do, you can go ahead and trade those dollars for goods and services.
So get yourself squared away on all these areas.
Have savings.
Have cash.
Re-evaluate your investment portfolios and your savings portfolios if you've got them.
Think about where you're putting investments from this moment forward.
Think about which industries are potentially made less profitable by a loss of faith in the safety of crowds.
And think about which industries might become more valuable in a pandemic outbreak.
And so there is a downside and an upside to this depending on which companies you choose to go with.
So I hope you found this to be valuable.
There are more episodes coming here.
I still have the episode scheduled to record on how to take care of yourself or a family member in your own home.
If you are turned away from the hospital during an Ebola pandemic, that section, that chapter is coming up, but it keeps getting interrupted with these other more urgent conversations.
But I hope you find value in this.
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I'm not sure how many chapters we're going to end up with here.
It's anybody's guess.
Could be from 14 to 20.
Not sure.
But sooner or later I will wrap this up and I'm going to be launching another website called PrepperMistakes.com.
And there we're going to be covering all the common mistakes that preppers make while giving people solutions to those common mistakes.
That should be a very interesting, very informative website as well.
In the meantime, I thank you for your attention.
And my name is Mike Adams.
I'm the Health Ranger.
And keep checking back here on Biodefense.com for more free audio chapters.
I'll talk to you then.
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