The Sky is Falling"Again
Considering the WHO and CDC's abysmal track record foreseeing the severity of flu outbreaks, it's surprising so many doctors bought their story.
For example, nail-biting projections about SARS, the 2002-2003 respiratory disease, led the world to spend $80 billion to stop an emergence that ultimately killed just 800 people made 8,000 sick. In 2005, avian, or bird flu, cost the US government a billion dollars in vaccines and billions more in preparation for future outbreaks. The WHO warned it could kill 150 million people, yet the Hitchcock-esque ailment felled just 250 people worldwide.
But swine flu was different, right? Well, early on at least, it was natural to suspect a nightmare scenario: a repeat of the Spanish flu.
Swine flu looks a lot like Spanish flu, which began in pigs and killed between 40 and 100 million people from 1918 to 1919. H1N1 shows three of the key traits which made the Spanish flu so dangerous: our immune systems aren't used to the virus, which is a new mutation; the flu can be passed from human to human; and, it has triggered immune responses in young people, not just the vulnerable elderly, according to Dr. Dawn Motyka, a vaccination expert in Santa Cruz, California.
Despite apparent similarities between the two flu's, a cursory look at history should have made the medical community more skeptical.
Characteristics akin to Spanish flu also sparked vaccination campaigns during the last two flu pandemics in 1957 and 1968, but neither of these outbreaks turned out to be major killers. The 1976 US swine flu epidemic, which refers to a domestic disease that kills a relatively high number of people, killed just one person. The hurried vaccine rollout however, killed 30 and cost the government $500 million in today's money. It also led hundreds more people to contract the crippling Guillian-Barre syndrome.
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