“Swine flu has killed 540 kids, sickened 22 million Americans,” screamed USA Today’s page 1 headline, sub-headed “CDC: Cases, Deaths are Unprecedented.” “Swine flu cases in the U.S. are rising at the fastest pace for influenza in four decades,” breathlessly declares a Bloomberg News article lede. Another article’s title referred to a “national swine flu spike.”

Scary stuff! Phony stuff! And a desperate effort to distract from an alarmist media’s greatest nightmare: That the epidemic has peaked, as I write in National…

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Well, what swine flu isn’t doing this week is apparently less than what it wasn’t doing last week. In other words, it appears to have peaked.

How do we know?

Here we see it’s going down the right side of the bell curve both in terms of deaths and hospitalizations.

And there’s both a massive decline in samples submitted to CDC surveillance labs and a small decline in those testing positive.

College infections have essentially gone flat.

And finally we see from the Australian swine flu data in…

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It’s Halloween, and the monster at the door is swine flu. Or so we’re told. Yet again. And people respond accordingly. “I’ve never seen it like this,” an administrator at Dunwoody Pediatrics in suburban Atlanta told USA Today. “That name, H1N1, sends parents into a panic. We’ve had a lot of verbal abuse.” And yet there’s evidence the epidemic may have peaked!

The CDC reports that hospitalizations for the week ending October 24 barely increased while deaths are actually down from the…

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Emulating the Obama Administration, New York Gov. David Paterson has “declared a state of emergency, saying a recent rise in swine flu cases has created a ‘disaster,’” according to the Associated Press.

The executive order suspends state law and allows more health care professionals to administer vaccines.

The emergency? AP says at least 75 residents have died of swine flu in the last seven months. By comparison, given its population size we’d expect over 2,200 New York residents to die annually of seasonal…

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I bent G. Gordon Liddy’s ears back today on his radio show (easy to find them, given his lack of hair) on my current crusade to get people to understand that it’s not just that the risk of swine flu has been exaggerated but that it’s being exaggerated for political reasons. Even battle-hardened veterans like Liddy are surprised to hear that the World Health Organization didn’t create a pre-fab pandemic just to gather more power and increase its budget but rather…

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Total deaths since Aug. 30 from “Influenza and Pneumonia-Associated” illness are 2,029 reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Web site FluView. But only 292 of those have been laboratory-confirmed as flu of any type. (And yes, people die of pneumonia from many causes other than flu.) By comparison, the CDC estimates about 260 Americans die each day from “regular” flu during each season.

And the Swine Flu Count Website shows about as many swine flu deaths worldwide in the last six months…

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As evidence continues to mount that swine flu is more of a piglet than a raging razorback, why isn’t curiosity mounting as to why the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic? And definitions aside, why does the agency continue to insist we’re going to get hammered?

As I write in my new article, it just might be related to a speech the WHO chief gave last months in which she said “ministers of health” should take advantage of the “devastating…

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See instead my article “Swine Flu: the Real Threat Is Panic,” from the New York Post

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Sorta depends on who you ask.

The read about the flu in the mainstream media, you would think men are going through the streets with carts calling “Bring out your dead.” But to look at the statistics, there’s not even an epidemic yet. Read my article in the New York Post. “Swine Flu: the Real Threat Is Panic.”

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Six months into the swine flu outbreak China, with a population of over 1.3 billion or a fifth of the word’s population, has just reported its first swine flu death.

According to the WHO, 250,000 - 500,000 people worldwide die of seasonal flu each year.

Do the math for yourself on this one.

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Welcome to the second edition of “Weekly Flu Watch,” which relies on data, rather than the apparent media dictum that “One anecdote is worth a thousand statistics.”

As I’ve noted previously, every Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishes a new edition of FluView, which tracks all types of flu but currently only swine flu since that’s all that’s out there now. Most figures are from the previous week, though some are newer.

And every week the hysteria-minded media…

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“Twenty-one thousand college students are sick,” begins a Fox online news report titled: “H1N1 Picks Up Steam One Week Before Vaccine Becomes Available.” Wow! That’s a lot of sick kids! Tell us more!

But there is nothing more on those 21,000. Lots of talk about people swamping emergency rooms and school closings, yet not a single number regarding actual flu cases in a 765-word article.

What if it began “Flying saucers land on the White House lawn” and no flying saucers were mentioned…

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Time magazine informs us

Pandemic diseases have a way of revealing our vulnerabilities in quick order. Already we have been humbled by the virus’s exploitation of our fragmented health-care system, as families without insurance overwhelm emergency rooms, schools flounder without nurses, and people without a sick-leave option choose between going to work with a raging fever or getting fired. At the University of Washington, some 2,000 students have reported having H1N1 symptoms. At Emory University in Atlanta, sick kids are relocated…

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Every Friday the CDC website publishes a situation update on swine flu with figures updated through the previous week, though some of the data is newer. And every week the hysteria-minded media ignore it. Statistics get in the way of articles filled with doom and gloom, of body bags and cemetery land set asides.

Anyway, why consult the data when you can offer plenty of anecdotes about people suffering from a “flu-like illness?”

But for those who do care about how our alleged…

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