Swine Flu: History Should Provide Perspective
ByNews coverage and the blogosphere is saturated with reports of the Swine Flu and its status as a serious national threat. We’ve been exposed to enough Swine Flu coverage to make us sick. We dissent.
For those in the mainstream media who still seek to interest and inform readers and viewers, we recommend placing the story of the Swine Flu within the historical context of government warnings about global or national pandemics that turned out to have much less of an impact on people’s lives than the common cold. Even without research, a trio of recent over-hyped would-be-mass-killers should come to mind to: SARS, Bird Flu, West Nile Virus.
A historical precedent eerily on point is the case of Gerald Ford’s decision to order a mass inoculation against something called the “Swine Flu’” in 1976. A number of people became sick from Swine Flu that year, but records indicate only one person died from it. Records also show that twenty people died of side effects from Ford’s inoculation and hundreds more suffered neurological damage. The inoculation was cut short after the government finally determined that the cure was worse than the disease and that “Swine Flu” did not threaten to become a dangerous epidemic.
President Obama, who has requested a huge amount of money to combat Swine Flu, should learn from history. If the Swine Flu is not a genuine pandemic threat, he should show genuine leadership and stop his CDC and other federal agencies from pushing panic about potential outbreaks to justify federal expenditures. Any effort to showboat with this “crisis,” if it is not a crisis, only further desensitizes people to warnings of genuine pandemic threats that may arise in the future.
