Panic-demic

I was hoping this whole "swine flu" thing would fade away when it was obvious that hardly anyone was dying from it, but no such luck as yet.

The WHO is claiming 90K cases reported so far, but I'm sure there are a lot more. There have been at least one and possibly two cases in my immediate family, and we didn't panic or report it. There are the vague reports of "flu parties" where parents try to generate some herd immunity amongst their offspring. Were this another Spanish Flu this would be grounds for criminal child endangerment charges, but with the almost negligible death rate I personally think it could be useful, or at least not harmful.

If one remembers the hoof-and-mouth livestock epidemic in the UK a few years back you can see one way of treating an epidemic. Burning everyone who contracts H1N1 would cause an armed revolution in most places, and should in the rest, so the comparisons are not meant to be direct. I have heard that a certain level of herd immunity can be generated if things are allowed to run their course. I don't know if that is in fact the case, but it sounds plausible; that said, economic factors in the agricultural business would never permit that to happen.

So what is driving the WHO and various agencies in keeping this "pandemic" bandwagon rolling? The media "helps" this along of course, but the whole thing smacks of bureaucratic momentum to me. Whole staffs have been expanded at the UN and elsewhere as new empires are carved out of any current crisis.

That could lead to various screeds about ever-expanding bureaucracies and governments, but not right now. No, I was just noting the persistence of this swine flu thing despite the fact that the regular garden-variety flu is still killing at least ten times as many people with (almost) no one remarking upon it. Good old media and special-interest scare mongering.

It's a bit like like passing a crippling carbon tax bill in the US with absolutely no actual evidence that it needs to be done, let alone that the 1500 pages of the Waxman-Markey bill will do anything other than hasten the decent of the USA into de-industrialization and thence to bankruptcy and irrelevancy. Happy July 4th, by the way...