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God's will be done and may He have mercy upon us all.

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A Catholic who follows Rome & the Magisterium. I'm against gay "marriage", abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, human cloning. Altar girls, Communion in the hand, Eucharistic Ministers and "Protestant" music in the Church doesn't bother me at all. A proud American retired submarine sailor. Our borders should be secured with a 10 ft. high fence topped by concertina wire with minefields out to 20 yards on both sides and an additional 10 yards filled with warning signs outside of that Let's get energy independent NOW! Back Israel to the max, stop appeasing followers of the Pedophile Prophet. Pro 2nd Amendment, pro death penalty, Repeal all hate crime legislation. Back the police unless you'd rather call a hippie when everything hits the fan. Get government out of dealing with education, childhood obesity and the enviornment. Stop using the military for sociological experiments and if we're in a war don't micromanage their every move. Kill your television, limit time on the computer and pick up a book. God's will be done and may He have mercy upon us all.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

We haven't seen a panic quite like this one since the last one.

Found this at The Washington Times via Lucianne.com. It pretty well echoes my thoughts.

PRUDEN: A pandemic of panic -- are we dead yet?
Wesley Pruden

We were all supposed to be in the graveyard by now, done in by AIDS, SARS, bird flu, poisoned peanut butter, Hong Kong flu, killer tomatoes, global warming and strangulation by kudzu. But here we are, proof that there really is life after death.

Now we learn that we might freeze before the pigs get us. (The chickens failed.) NASA scientists have observed that the solar wind is the weakest since we began keeping such records, that the magnetic axis of the sun is tilted to an unusual degree, and Ol' Sol is the quietest he has been in a century. A chill, say the solar scientists, may be on the way. (Or not.) Worse, says one of them, this could compel reappraisal of the science of global warning. Try as he might, poor old Al Gore just can't keep the cosmos in line.

But this week Ol' Sol has been put in the shade by a new panic du jour. The cable-TV networks and the Internet are bubbling with sunspots, even if the sun isn't. Sample these latest headlines from the Drudge Report: "Two flu cases confirmed in Scotland. Has globalization made us more catastrophe-prone? Swine flu sweeps the globe. Swine flu closes football stadiums. The world must work together against this threat."

We haven't seen a panic quite like this one since the last one. SARS was once thought to be the ultimate panic, though the longest running panic was the AIDS scare, when big media set out to convince us that "now we are all at risk." SARS was never a threat in the United States, and worth the P-word only in China and even there a risk confined mostly to people who sleep with their chickens. You can step in all manner of unpleasant things in a chicken house. AIDS continues to be a succession of personal tragedies, but it has lost its power to terrorize continents. Worse, it lost its media cachet. Besides, nobody at the New York Times or at CNN wants to credit George W. Bush with anything good, or even acknowledge how he has become a hero in Africa for the American campaign against AIDS in Africa that has saved millions of lives.

But here we go again. The World Health Organization is heroically feeding the hysteria with the warning on front pages across the globe and trumpeted by hundreds of television talking heads: "The World Health Organization has warned that the [swine flu] virus has the potential to become a pandemic." The words "flu" and "pandemic" are such powerful scare words that almost nobody notices the accompanying weasel words "may," "could," "might," "potentially" and "possibly" that would stand out in bright red and green neon to the skeptical eye of a wizened old city editor. Alas, most of the wizened old city editors really are in the graveyard, having succumbed more to world-weariness than to fashionable diseases. The director of the World Influenza Center in London says of the outbreak, such as it is so far: "It's difficult to look on the bright side."

No, it's actually not difficult. About 2,000 persons in Mexico are down with flu, and about 150 have died. That's a mortality rate of about 7 percent. Sad, even tragic, but not exactly the most lethal flu virus we've ever seen. There's no mortality rate in the United States because no one has died. Only a few, very few, cases have been reported, and nearly all are described as "mild." You have to give the medical bureaucrats and the media credit for chutzpah to think they can keep such thin soup on the panic menu.

There are no firm estimates or even hopeful guesses of how many Americans are likely to contract flu this spring, but fortunately the ratio of panic to reality is not governed by facts. In the early hours of counting, barely 50 cases had been reported in the United States, and only two in Britain - that's 2, not 2,000 or even 200. About 300,000 to 500,000 cases of flu are reported every year in the United States, where 10 percent to 20 percent of the population comes down with the sore throat, coughing and achy bones of flu. Of those, 30,000 to 40,000 die. What we have so far in the United States is a 50-case panic, caused by a remarkably mild variant of the flu.

The medical researchers say it might mutate. Or it might not. If it does, it might, possibly, maybe, potentially be the worst killer since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Or it might not. Researchers are working on the vaccine, and the media is working on the panic. We may not get a vaccine, but soon there won't be a dry pair of pants on six continents.

• Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

4 comments:

Mother Darla said...

The Father of Lies vs the Hierarchy of Fear - sort of like Jason vs Freddie.

I've looked and looked and I have not found one single piece of information that articulates why this flu is so much worse than any of the others, which people have been surviving (well, MOST people) like, forever. Why, suddenly, swine?

Sadly, I subscribe to the my own "smoke screen" theory, which is that why we (the Public) are obsessing about swine flu, etc. what are we NOT seeing? What's going on behind the scenes?

Oh, and to further "out" myself as a conspiracy theorist, I am never comfortable with a government who encourages its citizens to have injections for ANY reason - I think it's too easy then for us to get into allowing the government to do whatever they want...)

Subvet said...

Mother Darla, your "conspiracy thinking" is forwarded by quite a few folks. Since this is the administration that believe you should never let a crisis go to waste I'm finding myself more in agreement than not.

I'm now shopping for tinfoil hats.

Subvet said...

Rev. Gregori, only two shots?

MightyMom said...

hear! hear! good article cutiepie.

zealots in public health have been turned loose on the public...

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