“These are the people [the usual hysteria mongers] whose terrifying forecasts you last heard during the avian flu panic of 2005 (deaths to date: 257, according to the World Health Organization) and the SARS panic of 2002-2003 (774 deaths). By contrast, garden-variety flus typically kill upwards of 30,000 Americans a year.
You might also have a vague memory of the ‘mad cow’ panic that gripped the world in the 1990s. In his 1997 book ‘Deadly Feasts,’ Richard Rhodes warned that the human variant of mad cow, known as vCJD, might kill as many as 500,000 people a year in Britain alone. So far, total confirmed cases world-wide run to around 150…
Today's touchstone for panic is the 1918-20 Spanish Flu, mention of which seems to be included in nearly every news account of the swine flu outbreak… as science writer Wendy Orent has pointed out in the New Republic, ‘only the precise conditions of World War I's Western Front -- a true disease factory -- could have created a flu as virulent as the one responsible for the 1918 pandemic’ ”
All this hysteria reminds me of Rahm Emanuel’s most famous quote:
“You never want a serious crisis [real, imagined or government created] to go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”Count on the Obama administration to use this hysteria for yet another utterly counter-productive Socialist power grab.
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