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.
Good line! I am sick of the Swine Flu coverage, too! That will put one in bed for a week.
This may be another hyped-up faux-crisis generated to make Obama look like a tough and decisive leader. News orgs are needing something to hype their press conference coverage this evening as well. CNN should send Susan Roesgen to Mexico City to talk with healthy people about why they don’t have the virus.
If you need another laugh over flu coverage, take a look at the Obamaflu epidemic. Read more at:
http://firstconservative.com/blog/top-ten/obamaflu-the-new-and-potent-virus
Are you serious? If funding wasn’t requested, you’d be squawking that the government was taking the threat seriously enough, wasn’t taking the lead, wasn’t doing it’s job, etc.
Realize that on some level this is a no-win for political leadership. How do they get this one just right? This is a valid medical threat, and it makes complete sense that people are informed. Is this going to result in some excesses in the information stream? Probably. But, that’s better than the alternative of an uninformed public.
Also, The CDC is not “pushing panic” (an awkward turn of phrase) and is merely maintaining an updated central source of information. They are reporting lab confirmed instances of the virus and providing reasonable information to the public. What on earth is wrong with that?
Treating medical issues as political fodder is just silly. If you’re going to be yet another parroting partisan, focus on issues with real political traction.
i always advice my kids to wear face masks when going into crowded areas. swine flu is really scary and i dont want my kids getting infected by it.
While we are more likely to pick up swine flu from another person than from a pig, we still have to remember that the risk is still there. Everyone needs to be careful – particularly people who work with pigs.
We read this post and thought it was hillarious! Thank you.
C-Biz,
Thanks for commenting. We don’t object to providing information about public health concerns, but we think it’s legitimate to question whether interested agencies are misinforming the public in order to justify budgets. It might be our subjective view, but the coordinated regular press releases, press conferences, b-rolls, and the government “experts” made available for interview everywhere look more like an agency hype-machine then the passive information stream you suggest. Our post was about the value of historical examples of this kind of hype in placing the current situation in perspective, yet we noticed you chose to ignore both our historical examples and our call for perspective in preparing your comment.
In terms of your charge of “parroting partisan,” you might want to consider that the historical examples we cited were of responses to threats during President Ford (R) and President Bush’s (R) administrations. In other words, we didn’t merely criticize the Obama administration’s huge requests and our argument isn’t about party politics, at all.
More independent scientists who are now characterizing this as a mild flu seem to agree. Let’s hope they are correct.