The Epidemic of Fear - Swine Flu

Governments and the media used to be far more responsible and conservative than they have been in this past decade of insanity. When faced with potential pandemics and epidemics, they preferred to avoid alarming people unduly.

Nowadays, governments and the mainstream media seek to whip public fear up to fever pitch and beyond.

Why do they do this?

Let's take a look at who the winners of this hype-fest are:

Governments stock-piled anti-virals and flu vaccines to the tune of billions of pounds, courtesy of taxpayers. Saviours of the world.

Pharmacies vaccinated their staff, gaining massive publicity to enable them to sell face masks (despite the limited protection they offer), vaccines and anti-virals.

Corporate pharma and biotech corporations (such as GlaxoSmithKline, Gilead Sciences, Roche, Biocryst, 3M) which produce Tamiflu, Relenza, face masks and related paraphernalia, saw their share prices rocket.

Media empires sold more newspapers and advertising, boosting their ratings and earnings.

Governments collected sales tax on all these items and will doubtless collect extra taxes on ensuing profits.

The losers were the Mexicans, pork product manufacturers and taxpayers around the world. The peso fell, the Mexican iShares market dropped by 8%, its airports and transport systems were hammered, food manufacturers’ share prices plunged by 10% and the Mexican economy has lost millions of dollars for each day of this ‘epidemic of fear’. Some forecasters put the total cost of this scare in the trillions of dollars, taking all its inevitable ripple effects into account.

According to Dr. Brian Currie, Vice President and Medical Director at Montefiore Medical Center (New York), seasonal flu kills around 36,000 people per year in America alone. Worldwide, regular flu kills between 2,500,000 and 5,000,000 people each year. The rate of infection of swine flu is nowhere near that of regular flu; it has killed a fraction of that number and not all its casualties were brimming with health before they caught the virus.

The only credible cause for concern is that the swine flu strain found in Mexico was far stronger than that found in America, the American variant being remarkably weaker than normal flu strains. According to early reports, the Mexicans might have suffered greater impact due to genetic qualities specific to Mexicans, since the victims were relatively young and healthy.

If the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were concerned about a more virulent strain migrating to America, why did it expressly choose not to close national borders on the grounds that it was “already too late”? Why did it then suggest that people might have to be quarantined to stop the virus spreading further? These two stances are contradictory. Was it too late to stop the contagion, or wasn’t it?

After a week of media and government frenzy, we now discover that the contagion rate has been nothing like the potential rate originally mooted by the DHS.

So we come full circle. Here we are, mired in a worldwide depression which could rival that of the 1930s, commodity sales, stocks, pension funds and tax receipts all horribly depressed. Miraculously, along comes this almighty scare which boosts the sorry coffers of corporations and governments alike.

Call me cynical, but when we are faced with a serious pandemic in the future, who will take heed of those who cry “wolf!”?

Further reading: Christopher Booker puts it all into perspective in the Mail.