Slashdot Mirror
WHO To Investigate Handling of Swine Flu Information, Vaccine Orders
krou writes "With swine flu fading in the UK (projected winter deaths of 65,000 have been downgraded to 1,000, and new cases are decreasing) the UK government has been left with millions of unused vaccines, and (unlike its contract with Baxter) no clear break-clause to get out of its contract with GlaxoSmithKlein. Although the amount paid for vaccines has not been disclosed, it likely cost the UK government several hundred million pounds. Other governments are also in a similar position: the US ordered 251 million doses of the vaccine, and France and Germany are aiming to cut back on their orders considerably. To say that the case for the pandemic has been over-estimated appears to be an understatement. Now, the WHO has announced that it is to investigate whether or not it bowed to pressure from drugs companies to overplay the threat." (Continues, below.)
"The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly has also announced an investigation into the matter after a resolution [pdf] from Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Health, was adopted. Dr. Wodarg labelled swine flu as a "false pandemic", and claims in the resolution that '"in order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies, and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently-tested vaccines."' By some estimates, GSK was expected to net over £1 billion from vaccine sales."
You know, I really love Iron Maiden... but I guess the WHO gets my vote now... I didnt know they were that active in saving the world!!!
;-)
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Even if it blew a lot of government money. We were hit and hit hard by astroturfing and government fear mongering. Now that this information is becoming public this will become an annual event because government can never admit it was wrong.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
..once again rears its ugly snout.
So regular people weren't the only ones caught up in the sensationalism that is/was swine flu. Governments were hooked by it too...
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Lol. I never could understand why people bought into the swine flu hysteria nonsense. If you looked at the numbers for how many people actually got sick and how many died from it, IT'S JUST THE FREAKING FLU! Jeesh. I wonder what the next fear-fad will be? I'm rooting for alien invasions.
And don't you know they will do it again.
it was always fear mongering. and the government shouldn't get to pass the buck either - they made the call to make the order, i'm sure they could have gotten independant advice.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
WHO's on first?
Great way of shifting the blame. I mean it's pretty obvious that companies like GSK have an incentive for overplaying the threat. BUT institutions like the WHO must also justify their existence all the time thus having a similiar incentive, too. It is not just big pharma that is guilty in this case. Since the WHO (IMHO) overplayed the avian flu I've been taking their announcements with a grain of salt.
When I read a rumor that mostly fat people were dying from swine flu, it gave me the motivation to lose weight. I went from obese to normal weight in nine months. Now I feel stronger because I am not carrying around 50 pounds of ballast.
That's the only good thing that has come of the media scare about swine flu.
Well at least they prove they're well prepared for the zombie virus. The second a person starts biting others they'll be issuing guns and telling everyone to aim for the head.
This case did not only occur in the UK. Sweden bought 18 million doses, to a population of 9 million at price of about 140,000,000 USD. However, not all have been used as some refused to get it and others cannot. It is quite likely that Glax-Smith-Klein used the situation, but... What if the governments hadn't done it? And people had died as flies... Hindsights...
the problem is when we have a real serious threat, people won't take it seriously, and why should we, we are becoming desensitized to this stuff, they should see who is behind this, if its vaccine manufacturs, they need to go after them.
The biggest fear mongering came for news organizations, of course, since that's what they do. However right behind them was the WHO. When Swine Flu started man they went to town with panic type announcements. You read their stuff and you could see where the news organizations were getting the crap they were blowing out of proportion.
To me it seems like the WHO overreacted, people and governments bought in to it, and now they are looking for a scape goat. While I'm sure the drug companies were more than happy to sell as much vaccine as anyone wanted to buy, I've seen no evidence they were causing the panic. Seems to have stated with poor, sensationalistic stories from the WHO which were then inevitably turned in to mass doomsday stories by the media.
Sounds like somebody fed them their own snake oil,
doesn't it sound exactly like going after (known to be) unexisting weapons of mass destruction ?
..who will investigate the handling of swine flu information?
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
I am astounded that the UK Gov spent hundreds of millions on vaccine. Normally most of the cash spent on the NHS goes to layers of managers, travel and hotels for meetings and conferences, management consultants, rebranding etc.
On the front line, all redundancy has been taken out of the NHS, it operates (ha ha) at full capacity on a 'normal' day with hardly any reserve equipment (I am not talking cat scanners here, I am talking about basic kit that costs a couple of hundred quid), so if there is a bombing or an air crash you will find that the wounded are dispersed to whatever hospitals that can find room.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I have to thank Canada's National Post newspaper. Throughout this 'non-crisis' it kept on telling people that the numbers did not add up. Maybe I would have felt differently if I had not gotten it myself before this hysteria reached its apex. The "normal" flu I got 3 months later was actually worse for me.
As usual, the biggest winners are the drug companies. (someone should write an article about stock company values before and after) The biggest losers are the people who were affected and died of H1N1, and in the end - us.
Next time a pandemic hits, we will be more ignorant. If it's another SARS then far more people will die before people get the message that it's not just another H1N1.
The 'swine flu' ad that appears on top of this page while I'm writing this is hilarious (considering the topic).
Thank you Ads by Google for making me laugh.
Do you guys in GB see it?
I have no problem with this. There was a reasonable likelihood of a megadeath sized pandemic. Appropriate steps were taken to prevent it. Some of those steps may have been unnecessary, but it didn't hurt and wasn't outrageously expensive.
The swine flue vaccination campaign in the US probably has already saved more lives than the entire Department of Homeland Security.
There is similar turmoil in many countries. I find it a bit... opportunistic. At the time the governments ordered the vaccines, the threat wasn't well assessed. Even now, we will probably not know the big picture until the medical data is carefully analyzed. Imagine the kind of reactions we would see if the situation was the opposite, a pandemic still going strong with not enough vaccines.
There was a reasonable likelihood of a megadeath sized pandemic.
Actually no. There was a small percentage of people that might have died, and a larger pool of people that would have been pretty sick for a few days. And even at the height of the thing, they were never sure if the percentage of people dying was all that high, because there was such a small sample rate to work from...
That was it.
There was never a call to get as worked up as everyone did, where they practically were driving down the streets with bullhorns demanding citizens get flu shots.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are ~309 million people in the US. Did they really think they were going to get ~80% of the entire US population to get the swine flu vaccine? Somebody definitely got kickbacks.
100% of people who caught the Swine Flu and post on Slashdot now did not die from it. Obviously it is nothing to fear.
Has anyone done a comparison to deaths via peanut allergies?
The question now is... do they re-sell this overpriced, fairly untested product that their 1st world neighbors no longer need to buy, or will they just give it away as humanitarian aid to countries that never got a chance to get inoculated? It will eventually go bad, and looking good by giving things away is better than losing both "face" and losing their aging stock.
I'm all for criticizing the pharmaceutical companies, and their mishandling of the epidemic... but the major governments of the world were eager partners in spreading fear and mis-information. Now they're trying to deflect blame.
The hysterical press is the third entity that should share in the guilt.
WHO to investigate WHAT!?
Sounds like all the recriminations on Mon Jan 3rd - 2000. "The world didn't end, so obviously we didn't need to do anything".
Think about this a little. Assume you're the person in charge of handling this crisis. There are two main variables, each with two outcomes: "do something now?" and "is H1N1 a big deal?". For the purposes of this conversation, while there may be magnitudes of "is H1N1 a big deal?", any value other than "no, not at all" is about the same as "yes, very". But this leads us to four cases:
Now look at these scenarios. First off, it should be obvious that not spending the money only "wins" in one out of four cases, and if you look at it politically, you were still gambling with peoples' lives. Second, and perhaps less obvious at first, is that it may actually be hard to tell the difference between 1 and 3. Without seeing both "do" and "do not" played out, can we tell if the vaccine was useful? Sure we may have lots left over, but ... maybe even what was used played a significant role. Compare this to Y2K; lots of money was spent, lots of work was done, and lots of systems didn't break. Was it wasted effort? Was Y2K not a credible issue?
In the end, it comes down to this: do you value money or the lives of people? You're not a doctor, but lots of credible people tell you this might be a significant problem. Do you cheap out and possibly save a few bucks, risking the lives of millions? Or do you spend a few million bucks possibly unnecessarily, to possibly save millions in the face of a credible threat?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
True. The previous H1N1 epidemic barely made a dent.
50-100m deaths, when the global population was a quarter of what it is now, is hardly anything.
You're quite right, "a small percentage of people that might have died" - 5% is, indeed, a small percentage. That'd only be a quarter of a billion deaths these days.
The orders were put in at a time when no one knew whether it going to stay relatively harmless or mutate to something as potent as the 1918-1920 version of the same virus. Even then, it took them well over six months to create enough to just cover the high risk groups. They could've waited, to be sure... But, had we not got lucky and it had mutated, that'd have been a fun six to nine months of knowing we needed a vaccine but had wasted our chance to get started. Given the choice, I'd rather err on the side of caution than save a few dollars.
I do not know for other countries, but the level of vaccination in France has not been high enough to explain the foreseen catastrophe did not occur.
We are just lucky that it did not.
If this catastrophe did occur, the failure of the French health policy would be the issue : vaccines arriving too late and too many people reluctant to be vaccinated.
For me, the French government, despite all the money spent, has completely failed. Is it the same in your countries ? I have heard that the vaccination campaign in us was better. Is it correct ? What percentage of population get vaccinated ?
This will leave many large populations ripe for the picking. The next real threat will not be planned for. Sting a politician once like this and see how they react the next time, especially if the population and media starts bitching about wasteful spending. If I were an evil organization who has a stated goal of population control, and I had a virus I would be releasing it now. The real problem is the stupidity of the deals cut. If you buy xxx amount of vaccine (that isn't yet produced ) there should be a clause to cancel the order, or at the very least cancel the production and shift the balance of the payment to a future vaccines production.
That is poor logic. It is possible for any virus to mutate and become extremely dangerous. It is also possible for the mutation to cause existing vaccines to not work. The 1918 had a mortality rate of about 10%, and it was obvious to everyone that the current version wasn't anywhere near as dangerous. So spending a ton of money on vaccines for a single virus that isn't that dangerous, and might not even work if it became dangerous, when many other viruses have the same risks is poor judgment at best.
Now, if a highly virulent strain of human infectious airborne Ebola begins spreading through the US, then I'd be worried.
the global warming scare.
Guys, if you prepare for a disaster and it does not actually happen, that is a good thing.
Firefighters are generally not disappointed when there's no fire.
Just because somehow you missed getting sideswiped by a big bus doesn't mean you stop wearing your seatbelt.
Simply because a ounce of prevention actually worked somehow an investigation needs to be done? It will be this type of complacence that will work against everyone during the next novel flu type.
Sorry to bring another element into this but the United States and the coalition of the willing spent billions of dollars to topple Afghanistan and Iraq, mess up Pakistan even further and now work over Yemen, because 3000 people died in 9/11, and risk the lives of countless soldiers in the name of security. And is inflicting ongoing misery to everyone in the region.
This flu has killed 10,000 Americans in a single season and somehow an investigation needs to be done, and somehow the 'panic' was hyped and 'overstated'.
Look you blathering fool, in May last year the medical companies made WHO change the definition of "pandemic", to just include how much it spreads globally, instead of how serious the disease is. Of course, a flu will become a "pandemic", when you change the definition of a few months before the "outbreak"! That is what this case is about, how many on WHO was getting pay from the medical companies (enough to get enough votes it seems!)
Also the medical companies recommended double dose, just to be sure to cash in double. No scientific reports explains why the double doses were recommended.. It seems WHO just accepted whatever the medical companies said, for some reason..
Expect alot of corruption rollups in the coming months/years in medical industry and WHO. This is corruption in epical scale, and I dont think people like it when other people steal, in the middle of a financial crisis.
So what is a "pandemic" now, idiot?
So regular people weren't the only ones caught up in the sensationalism that is/was swine flu. Governments were hooked by it too...
The Dutch government ordered 34 million vaccines for 17 million people. They spent about 200 million Euro on this. Maybe half of that is used, the rest will or will not be sold to other countries. I don't mind that they spend this money. It's like an insurance, and 200 million Euro is nothing compared to the cost of having a hundreds of thousands people ill with the flu.
A flu that will kill millions of people is going to happen sooner or later. Now nothing serious has happened people are mad, but...
Shouldn't we be happy instead???
you gotta link
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090505174547.htm
this was also a slashdot story, But if you don't read the flaming summaries, you'd never know.
I can vouch that it is/was a pretty serious kind of flu, since it constricts the upper airways. That is the mechanism by which people die of it - they suffocate. I felt like suffocating a few times. However, instead of spending tons of money on vaccines, the health organizations could have spent a fraction of the amount on good old anti-histamine (pseudo-ephedrine hydrocloride). With this flu, treating the symptoms is very effective and all i did, was pop a few Benadrils.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"There was a small percentage of people that might have died"
But have a look at the BBC HYS when the NHS doesn't supply $LATEST_AND_GREATEST_MEDICAL_DRUG to anyone in the UK.
HYSTERIA.
Lots of people screaming "if it saves ONE life, then we should supply it".
And so this influenza vaccine probably saved more than one life.
Yet either these people who screamed "if it saves one life..." are silent (why?) or they've changed their tune (why?).
Possibly because if they can blame the government, the drug companies won't be investigated (like they should have been with the herceptin treatment court case: brought by a woman with the wrong sort of cancer, paid for by the company that produces the drug...).
Now, the WHO has announced that it is to investigate whether or not it bowed to pressure from drugs companies to overplay the threat." - Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend? ...I know, I know...I must be new here...
Now seriously: the summary doesnt explain who is the WHO. That could be improved.
If you check the reports, the people who died of swine flu were not saved by suppression of symptoms.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I had influenza in 1976. The 1976 strain was a variant of the current swine flu. It nearly killed me, an active person in his twenties of correct body weight who was running up to 6 miles a day. It took nearly 2 years before I was fully recovered. Based on personal experience, I do not think the reaction was alarmist. Influenza can be a major killer, and we simply do not know which strain will be the next one.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
fearmongering is when you pretty much know something is not a big deal, but you hype it up anyways. but we're talking about a brand new disease here. no one knows what it could have done. no one could say that there was overreacting or underreacting going on, because no one knew what swine flu had in store for us. you are not operating on fear when you consider the worst possible scenarios and the worst possible scenarios are certainly possible. and since the worst possible scenarios are so harsh, you cover all your bases and get a lot of vaccines. there's only logic and reason there, no fear in play
furthermore, who's to say the government's thorough and overpowering countermeasures all summer didn't make a difference? its like saying it was silly to waste all the money making all the buildings earthquake proof... because the earthquake came and no buildings fell down... well no shit! the quake proofing saw to that! maybe h1n1 was no big deal precisely because we reacted so swiftly and heavily
i don't know where fearmongering comes into the equation anywhere
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As much as I would like to blame a single party or group of parties, I just can't. I don't see enough direct play by any one source to justify any conclusion. (Perhaps the investigation will uncover something?) I rather saw it from the beginning as more flu/disease hysteria. It happens every year, but this last one was a little overboard. I chalk it up to being a "slow news day" running amok.
We are going to investigate ourselves. You can trust us to produce a balanced report... oh wait
Dr Who wouldn't budge his phonebooth for such small thing ..
After all .. Vaccines aren't alien .. isn't?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
With swine flu fad fading in the UK
Seriously, how was the whole thing not a giant FUD machine to make money?
projected winter deaths of 65,000 have been downgraded to 1,000, and new cases are decreasing
Oh boy... Why not from 20 million to... about five! ;)
Way to over-hype.
And the best thing is, that it’s less bad than normal flu. I may have even had it, and not notice that it was the swine variant. ;)
In that case I now vaccinated myself for free. With my hyper-advanced protection system, called... the immune system.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Why not try to live in symbiosis with virii and bacteria more? This way no over reaction from our immune system, no illness.
Think about it dudes, its the way of the future!
We have to evolve!
How much more of this rubbish of the known unknowns and unknown unknowns do we have to hear? There was no factual data, many people in the scientific community supported this view yet our business controlled governments handed over billions for vaccines we don't need. Vaccine's that woudn't have worked anyway for which we, the people, will be suffering the side effects of for the next 2 generations.
Now, if a highly virulent strain of human infectious airborne Ebola begins spreading through the US, then I'd be worried.
I don't think you'd have much time to get worried if a particularly infectious strain of Ebola was spreading.
---
The Flu Feed @ Feed Distiller
The hysteria bandwagon was overwhelming ! There was no chance for those with a little more than 2 neurons in their head to get panicked - in this subset you can surely include politicians.
..I live in a South America tropical country where every year hundreds of thousands of people get infected with mosquito transmited diseases which result in hundreds of deaths. Last year there was almost no mention whatsoever of these "regular" cases, since the television air time was already filled with news related to the swine flu. News like " Today a man in China passed away because of the swine flu.."
Just as an example
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
They could always send some of the vaccine to poorer and less prepared countries that might need it more.
If there were 1000 ( or 1,000,000) vaccines for reasonably deadly things, would youget them all?
What if I promised you'd live forever , if you just lined up everyday at 8am, and got shots until 8pm?
Shots all day everyday, forever....but nothing else. Great life, huh?
It's more like:
May - WHO changed definition of "Pandemic" to cover all kinds of contagious diseases, as long as they spread globally. Of course "flu" now becomes a "pandemic".
Come a few months - Outbreak of H1N1 in Mexico.
Come a few months - H1N1 declared Pandemic.
Come a few months - Vaccine in ready. WHO countries are bound to buy them because of "pandemic" status.
Come a few months - Medical companies tells WHO to buy double doses, WHO complies without question.
2009 = record year for those medical companies
2010 = scandals as many on WHO-board are paid by the same medical companies, the large scam is rolled out to the public
With this kind of reasoning you can prove anything you want.
There is one problem here: when the virus mutates and becomes more lethal, your vaccin most likely won't give you protection.
But the "it's a load of rubbish" sensationalism - which no doubt we will now get, which of course is terribly easy to "predict" after the fact - is just as bad as the original sensationalism.
Here's an interesting read from Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column: http://www.badscience.net/2009/04/parmageddon/
People were queuing up to ask him to dismiss the concerns as sensationalism, which is what he often does so well, and you know what? He doesn't. Just because some media sources might have made ludicrous claims doesn't mean the risks didn't exist. Just because it turned out not to be as bad as we feared doesn't mean the risks didn't exist.
"They were risks, risks that didn't materialise, but they were still risks. That's what a risk is."
Jumping on the bandwagon to claim that these risks never existed, and that we should never do anything to protect ourselves from such risks, is as sensalist and dangerous as making false sensationalist claims in the first place.
I'm glad you spoke up. I can't belive the number of supposedly educated people who automatically jump onto the conspiracy/scam conclusion mat. I'm sure that the drug companies rub their hands at this sort of thing but that does not change the risk/benifit analysis. I would much rather the government spent millions on vaccines that are not used than ignore credible warnings and end up spending millions on body bags.
Yes the WHO were wrong about the number of dead but it IS a very nasty strain that causes severe lung infections. Here in Australia swine flu put an unusually heavy load on ICU beds last winter.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
they even changed the fucking pandemic definition they had for decades, just to be able to call this a pandemic. what's there to investigate. its like nixon saying 'im not a crook' after the tapes have been discovered.
Read radical news here
Seems to me that if we have all this vaccine, maybe they should be .... I dunno ... using it?
As far as I can tell, even if this particular strain of H1N1 isn't taking over the world, getting the inoculation exposes your immune system to a variant that you probably don't have a lot of natural immunity to.
I didn't fall in for this whole "zomg, swine flu is gonna kill us all... PANIC!" mentality, but if I were offered the H1N1 vaccine right now (for free or for a reasonable cost), I'd still take it... Maybe it will help my immune system be a bit better prepared the next time an H1N1 type flu comes around.
Obviously, I'm not one of the folks who worries overly about whether vaccines are going to kill me.
The Digital Sorceress
You really can't make this stuff up - some people seriously believe the vaccine saved lives? How so?
1) The virus was already declining long before the first vaccine was injected.
2) Hardly anybody in the UK got the vaccine, yet less people died there (per capita) than Canada, where ~ half the population panicked, bought into the fraud, and got their vaccine.
More people have frozen to death since the "pandemic" started than have died due to swine flu infection.
SOme facts you should know:
1) In the uK vaccines use is down accross the boards thanks to the anti vaxxers. And oh yeah, measles and other deadly childhood diseases are making a come back.
2) Pandemic has a very specific meaning, a definition H1N1 clearly fell into.
3) It's ahrd to balance getting informaiton out there and temporing the medias responce. The media wants on or off.
4) The Vaccines save many lives.
5) It was a new strain, no one know anything about and ti started by killing people. Based on what was known last april, tWHo's response was appropriate.
6) It's not over. the 1918 flu bounced around the globe for 3 years before it started killing people in large numbers.
7)The H1N1 will very likely become part of the regular flu shot. If this happens (and it should) it will temper any future pandemic out breaks.
8) I can not stress this enough: It's about risk. based on evidence and experience. Had WHO said nothing there would ahve been, statistically speaking, 10,000 more deaths, at a min. Also, ig they ignore the evidence and take a sit and wait attitude that means when a big one hits, it will kill far more.
9) Don't underestimate the vaccinations, and the increase in general hygiene effect on dampening the disease.
10) there is a large movement of people trying to stop all vaccines. These people are fucking idiots, but they have a lot of money. They have a long and documented history of lying and abusing the court system.
go ehre and read up:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/
There was excellent coverage by Mark Crislip, in fact go get his pod cat 'quackcast'
It's funny how few of you people on /. actually understand the numbers, and ruisk medigation. Goes to show, when thinking on a emotional level no one can understand statistics.
SOoner or later a pandemic that kuills many millions will happen. You have to act immediatly to stop that risk.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"8 January 2010 -- As of 3 January 2010, worldwide more than 208 countries and overseas territories or communities have reported laboratory confirmed cases of pandemic influenza (H1N1) 2009, including at least 12799 deaths. "
Fortunatly, it was far less then it could ahve been.
It's a pandemic, so global deaths are the umber you need to use.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2010_01_08/en/index.html
People in the west seem to think because there hasn't been a big impact that it means nothing happened and that it's over.
In fact, it is still very active in Europe. This is because people aren't getting vaccinated. Some clamping down on people lying about vaccines needs to be done. Also stop calling it 'the Jab'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
it's a novel strain, whose closest relative that last appeared was the spanish flu of 1918, which killed millions
where you point to false alarmism, i point to false complacency on your part. it very easy to judge from hindsight, but last year it made a lot of simple common sense to take the very new critter very seriously
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I agree that the media does this all the time and it was not different for the H1N1
That said... Maybe in the US we did not see a difference in the death numbers, but my dad and step mom are doctors in Brazil and it was a lot different there.
We do not really have a flu season. We do not even get vaccines for it. It would make no sense (and we do have a pretty comprehensive vaccine program, all free, btw). Not that we don not have flu, it is just not as dramatic as it it here. And you never hear of people dying from it, unless they are very debilitated already.
The H1N1 killed people there that nobody expected to be a victim of the flu. Young people, pregnant women. That was the difference. Plus, many of my friends here in the US got it, and although it was not fatal for any of them, it was so painful that I would not have wanted to go through that myself or worse, have my 3 year old in horrible pain for a week. I got him vaccinated with the mist (individual doses do not have as may preservatives) and now that it is widely available I got one for myself.
Some strains are way more likely to mutate into something lethal than others. Also, that strain was killing more than 7% of the infected victims when it was fist spoted.
Anyway, do somebody know why it stoped killing that much when it spread out of Mexico? Was it a sampling error?
Rethinking email
You do know that swine flu and spanish flu are different don't you? H1N1 is a broad classification that has included fairly nasty strains and fairly mild strains.
where you can't tell the difference between FUD and prudent action, if it doesn't fit your sensibilities
furthermore, immunity for those over 60, AND NOT YOUNGER, for a strain that killed millions, suggests that the swine flu should be taken seriously. do you see the LOGIC in that statement. no emotion. no hysteria. no panic. but simple logical linear thought. right?
so not because of fear. not because of uncertainty. not because of denial. because of logical, level-headed, prudent thought and analysis, the swine flu was taken very seriously in 2009
is that possible in your mind?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
it is the same disease, genius
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFluNews/story?id=7647943&page=1
so now that you've taken a brave stand against uneducated hysteria, will you be leveling any kind of disapproval at your brand of (just demonstrated) uneducated complacency?
small hint for you to think about: underreacting is more dangerous than overreacting with something like the possibility of lethal epidemics. because you can waste a lot of money if you overreact, yes. but you can waste a lot of LIVES if you underreact. get it?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I haven't seen the 7% number before (which is really high). Where did you get it from?
Divinding number of infected by the number of deaths on the WHO site, while the infection was still in Mexico. I don't know if they publish numbers by date, but you can get snapshots on earlier /. discussion.
Rethinking email
Ah, then the problem is obvious. Diagnosing H1N1 as such is a pain and expensive. Most middle class Americans to bother with an official diagnosis when they get the flu, why would a poor Mexican? When someone dies, cause is usually determined, especially when it involves a new disease.
Comparing deaths to confirmed cases is a terrible and inaccurate way to describe mortality rates, especially in a third world area.
1. Pick a disease ...
2. Call it a pandemic
3. Claim credit when nothing bad happens
4.
5. Profit!
It's time to ask whence the many predictions and fears of Doom, and why they are met with such widespread credulity. In other words, why is there so much Doom around? I don't have a definitive answer, but offer some hypotheses:
I'm sure this is not an exhaustive list of the causes of the Quasidoom Cycle...but you get the idea.
Several observations must be made in this context. First, it is possible—and I hereby take credit for announcing it—that the Quasidoom Cycle will result in an actual Doom, wherein we exhaust all our resources (not to mention sanity and patience) in meeting entirely hypothetical events of low probability. Second, it is possible that someone, at some time in the future, will notice the approach of an actual wolf...I mean Doom, but be ignored amid the clamor of competing announcements.
Lastly, it cannot be ignored that the universe is inherently perverse, and that this perversity causes things to never work out like we expect them to. Ergo, expecting a bad thing to happen virtually guarantees that it will not happen. That would mean all the false predictions of the past actually have had preventive power (we could call this phenomenon preventive neurosis). The downside, should this last observation be true, is that the number of possible Dooms is probably close to infinite. Therefore, it is nearly certain that we will be doomed by something nobody expects.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Uh huh. A patent for a method of making less infectious viral strains that can compete with virulent strains. Nothing here about releasing a virus, nor any mention of Mexico.
You fail, liar.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
If Baxter did not intentionally do this, they are incompetent and should not even be dealing with manufacturing vaccines.
Yes, their incompetence led to killing some Austrian ferrets. That's a long way from proving that they, or anyone else, “actually released the virus in the wilds of Mexico.” In fact, the lack of the deadly pandemic demonstrates that the contaminated vaccine was not released into the wild, in Mexico or Austria or anywhere else.
Thank you. I didn't think it was possible, but you have provided evidence disproving your thesis.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.