SWINE FLOP

"But all these experts can't be wrong, the experts bleat."

Remember the Swine Flu? Or, N1H1 as pig farmers would have us use, since it was hurting their business. We were told it was going to be a massively crippling pandemic, that the world would suffer with millions dead; it was to be the plague of the new century. We all were doomed, doomed!

Yeah, it didn't turn out like that. There were some pockets of heavy infection and even deaths in areas of great poverty, poor medical care, and unsanitary conditions such as Mexico City, but that's hardly surprising. When you are sickly, weak, and uncared for, even a slight infection is dangerous. Yet we were told this was going to be true worldwide and the panic spread so far that some Muslim countries slaughtered all their pigs, leading to some unfortunate side effects.

Now, the World Health Organization is admitting that they overstated things to a ridiculous degree and many are concerned this hurt their credibility. Sarah Bosely reports at The Guardian:

The World Health Organisation and other public health bodies have "gambled away" public confidence by overstating the dangers of the flu pandemic, according to a draft report to the Council of Europe.

The report, by the Labour MP Paul Flynn, vice chair of the council's health committee, says that a loss of credibility could endanger lives.

"This decline in confidence could be risky in the future," says the report, seen by the Guardian. "When the next pandemic arises many persons may not give full credibility to recommendations put forward by WHO and other bodies. They may refuse to be vaccinated and may put their own health and lives at risk."

At EU Referendum, Richard points out it wasn't just the WHO that was overblowing the dangers:

In the United Kingdom, the Department of Health initially announced that around 65,000 deaths were to be expected.

By the start of 2010, this estimate was downgraded to only 1,000 fatalities. By January 2010, fewer than 5,000 persons had been registered as having caught the disease and about 360 deaths had been noted.

Richard draws parallels between this and climate change hysteria, and I can't help but have similar thoughts. My concern, though, is more along the lines of what I said in my essay on Mad Scientists: it damages science and credibility of experts for them to say outrageous, illogical, and unscientific things repeatedly, like a child crying wolf.

There is some good reason to be careful with reports, and while I understand the desire to err on the side of caution, it shouldn't come at the cost of common sense, logic, and science. Places with miserable medical care and health conditions obviously ought not be extrapolated across the entire world equally. That's just logic, even if you don't do some sort of scientific study.

Then there are the hard facts. As I pointed out almost a year ago:

However, in a nation of 300 million people, the Centers of Disease Control note that quite a few people die each year from the flu, pandemic or not:

By comparison, the CDC estimates that 36,000 people in the United States die each year of influenza-related illnesses. And in spite of this, we in the medical community still have a hard time convincing people to get their flu shots.

The fact is that Swine Flu is not new, it is not unknown to transfer to humans from pigs, and it's not particularly lethal as viruses go.

The experts are doing a poor job of giving us the information we need, and are a bit too willing to exaggerate and cry havoc in the name of warning - and more likely, the name of sweet, sweet crisis funding, to be of proper service to us all. At this point its hard to trust anything we're told by any of these people, and that's the real problem.

This isn't new of course, the earliest example I can think of is the DDT scare in which a well-written book almost devoid of scientific support decided world policy and led to hundreds of millions of malaria cases and even deaths. The pendulum needs to swing back a bit; it used to be that health scares were utterly ignored by the people in power, now the slightest murmur from the proper areas and panic sets in with radical policy propositions hurled out in front of cameras to show they care. That needs to be dialed back before the population simply stops listening to experts and scientists entirely.