“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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Richard Morrison throws in with Jeremy Lott and William Yeatman to bring you Episode 69 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start by pigging out on swine flu statistics, putting off action on global warming and wagging our finger at a corrupt judge. We proceed with the fight between Intel and AMD and wrap up with an interview with CEI Senior Fellow Gregory Conko on how to end world hunger.

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At a glance, though, the estimates look okay it’s the spin and the lack of perspective that I have trouble with. And while the media have missed it, they also show an extremely low case-fatality ratio compared to seasonal flu.

According to the CDC, seasonal flu causes 15 to 60 million infections yearly with 36,000 resulting deaths, for a fatality rate ranging from 0.06% to 0.24%. It now estimates that since the swine flu outbreak began there have been 22 million…

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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…

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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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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…

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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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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…

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It’s a bunch of hog droppings. Watch for my upcoming article. In the meantime, read here on why we should not panic.

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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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“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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In Jersey City, New Jersey, the school district is requiring students to “sanitize their hands when they walk into the class in the morning, before and after lunch, and after each restroom visit.” That’s a requirement. As in, not optional. The district will be providing hand sanitizers at a cost of about $100,000.

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Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist team up with special guest co-host Jeremy Lott to bring you Episode 41. We begin with a farewell to famed quarterback, Republican Congressman and former CEI Distinguished Fellow Jack Kemp. We then move on to China’s flu-related roundup of Mexican nationals, the race to replace Justice Souter and the new opportunity to SuperPoke the President of the United States. We round out the show with Andrew Cuomo’s allegations of scandal and a modest helping of Olympic News.

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