Hmmmmm.....
What, no news stories? No Wikipedia link? No 'sponsored links'?
Why is Google granting the first search result of *swine flu* to fearmongering Stalinists?
Here's the reality:
In Australia and New Zealand, flu season has ended and almost all cases were swine flu. Yet even without a vaccine, those countries have reported significantly fewer flu deaths than normal.
Worldwide in seven months swine flu has claimed almost 5,000 people according to the World Health Organization, at the low end of the range the agency estimates die from seasonal flu every seven days.
What we’re seeing is "pandemic panic." FluView reports that only 29 percent of samples from surveillance laboratories are testing positive for swine flu. That means that fewer than a third of the samples that even doctors (much less scared patients) suspect may show swine flu actually show influenza of any type.
This is a pandemic in name only. When the WHO declared it one in June it was 11 weeks into the outbreak and swine flu had killed only 144 people worldwide. Yet the mildest pandemics of the 20th century killed at least a million people worldwide. How could the agency do it? Simple. It redefined "pandemic" in April, just days before announcing the swine flu outbreak, so that severity is no longer even a consideration.
Why issue it, then? Maybe because government, H.L Mencken has observed, ever seeks "to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
I love it! A pandemic need not consider *severity*!
Next, the Big Government will probably allow banks to ignore *market values* on their accounting.... Oh let's not go there.
Those excerpts are from Michael Fumento.
It is pretty darn easy to whip up a hysteria with Morons who have no memory:
What'll be next in 2013?
Goat flu?
3 comments:
You wouldn't beleve how stupid the government was about it here in New Zealand. For three weeks or so they freaked out, quarantined everyone who tested positive, passed new laws allowing people violating quarantine to face heavy fines and be jailed, and they shut down schools as soon as a single case appeared.
Then overnight they reversed their position and basically said screw it everyone's going to get it anyway and dropped all the quarantine orders. Schools stopped closing and they stopped giving daily reports of numbers of cases. The problem was New Zealand is a very small country and lacks the hyped-up, keep 'em panicked all the time, media that you have in the US. Everyone could see it was a no pandemic so the government gave up the scare tactics.
Pretty bad.
The exhaustive historical list of competent *government* regimes is a short one.
Pandemic does not denote mean severity of illness... it refers to how widespread a disease is..
before it is over 1/3 of the world's population will probably have gotten it
and the vast majority will be fine...
this so far has been a less virulent strain than it could've been....
deaths may be less so far but it is a much higher percentage of younger people being killed (as opposed to the elderly and very weak)
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