Infections are down, hospitalizations are down and deaths are the same. But given the reporting time lag it should prove that these were all about the same as last week. Last week one state reported widespread flu, this week none do. As I’ve written, we’re now at an endemic stage where cases pretty much trot along at the same pace. Again, it might pick up some in February because that’s when it gets coldest and flu, unlike your humble blogger, loves cold weather.
Only 1.4% of infections reported were clearly not swine flu, indicating that so far, as I’ve reported has been the case in Australia and New Zealand, swine flu is muscling aside the deadlier seasonal flu strains – and hence will make for a light flu season.
The CDC has also released a new estimate of infections and deaths, namely 55 million and 11,161 respectively since last April. That keeps the death rate about about 1 per 5,000 or a third to a tenth that of seasonal flu. Meanwhile the World Health Organization is defending itself against charges that it created a phony pandemic, including using the predictable line that one reason the flu has proved so mild is because the WHO did such a splendid job! I address that lunacy elsewhere.
It’s getting kind of dull in here, folks. So I’m discontinuing the weekly watch but I will keep blogging and otherwise writing on the faux pandemic.
Remember avian flu?
Until swine flu came along, that’s what was going to wipe out mankind. My last unprinted letter to the Washington Post scored the paper’s opinions page for declaring “panic is good . . . panic is what we want,” for claiming swine flu could kill 207,000 Americans and nine to 10 million worldwide, and for refusing to print anything to the contrary. Well, with the swine flu hysteria dying down in light of very few humans,dying the Post in desperation is switching back to the bird variety. And, true to form
rejecting sane letters such as this one of mine.
To the editor:
The review of Alan Sipress’s book “The
Fatal Strain: On the Trail of Avian Flu and the Coming Pandemic” (December
6, 2009) is misleading in one important respect and terribly wrong in another.
While writer David Oshinsky states humans have been
contracting avian flu H5N1 for a decade without it becoming readily
transmissible between humans, according to the World Health Organization it was
first detected in Scottish poultry in 1959. Hence it’s been making contact with
humans for at least half a century. Oshinky says “a sort of mutation, common to
influenza viruses” could “produce an H5N1 variant that is transmissible.” But an
exhaustive 2007 lab study in the Oct. 2007 issue of Virology showed,
in the words of the researcher leader, “We think [H5N1] will need to get to 13
[mutations] to be truly dangerous.”
Oshinsky also wrongly parrots Sipress’s assertion that for H5N1
“the mortality rate has been a staggering 60 percent.” That’s based solely on
those who come into contact with the medical system, thereby excluding those
with milder symptoms. Consider that the recent CDC estimate of swine flu includes
4,000 deaths, 98,000 hospitalizations, and 22 million infections. So the ratio
of deaths to hospitalizations was one in 24 but to overall infections was
merely one in 5,500.
Indeed, a January 2006 Archives of Internal Medicine study
found extremely high rates of apparent bird flu illness among Vietnamese living
and working in close proximity to infected poultry, yet by definition none of
these people had died.
There, now! Nothing in that letter that could possibly be of interest to Post readers!
I’m a hit in the Czech Republic, a land renowned for beautiful architecture and even more beautiful women. Well, at least I got mentioned in a Czech language publication, CDN.CZ, which roughly states:
Other data collected by Michael Fumento from the Washington Times, reveal that people are panicked in the U.S. to seven percent of all visitors to clinics! Most of those who not been affected by H1N1 virus. And they have struck again with such weak signs that do not require hospitalization. By going to the crowded hospital, may greatly help the spread of disease.
Actually, it never occurred to me that mildly ill people going to emergency rooms were spreading the disease to the worried well. But obviously that must be the case. It’s a false attribution I embrace! God bless the Czech Republic!
And those beautiful women.
From a letter to the editor of the Washington Post:
It is ridiculous that The Post has dedicated so much of the A section the past several weeks to the swine flu outbreak. Being a young “survivor” of the swine flu, I have to say that it was the most anticlimactic experience I have ever had. No deathbed, no fever.
The way the media continue to portray the virus is creating unnecessary panic around the world. Many people infected with the virus don’t even know they have it. The public should be outraged at news outlets that have caused mass hysteria and a mad rush for vaccines, medication and hand sanitizer.
Unfortunately, right now they’re too busy being outraged at the lack of the promised vaccine. But hopefully the day will come. Until then, you can read my bevy of swine flu anti-hype articles.
As I note in my Investor’s Business Daily article, swine flu cases in the last seven months, according to the CDC, equal about four days‘ worth of seasonal flu deaths during the season. There’s no medical emergency except that emergency facilities are swamped with the worried well and the mildly ill. Why? Because of the Obama administration’s first swine flu emergency declaration and the report from the President’s Council of Science and Technology Advisors predicting up to 90,000 deaths.
And guess what reaction this latest proclamation is provoking?
So why did he do it?
You might ask H.L. Mencken, who told observed that government, ever seeks “to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
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 is using it to promote social engineering and redistribution of wealth between nations, as I noted in Forbes Online.
Yes, it really is that bad.
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